Event-Cities 5: Poetics

An essential resource on the work of Bernard Tschumi Architects, with a focus on how concept, context, and program intersect with intuition in singular and unexpected ways.

Event-Cities 5 is the fifth and final volume in the MIT Press series documenting recent built and unbuilt projects by renowned architect Bernard Tschumi. This volume expands on the theoretical preoccupations that have shaped Tschumi’s work in practice and pedagogy. In this volume, Tschumi embarks on what he calls a “poetics” that addresses both the rational elaboration of work and the irrational eruption of inexplicable elements in architectural projects. How do chance, intuition, and analogy, among other elements, intersect with the logical play of concept, context, and program to generate innovative and informed design?

Highlights of this volume include circular building projects, works with suspended gardens and floating rectangular masses, superposed structures created via surrealist tactics, an immense educational research complex in France that hovers between building and urban design, a museum in China made from intersecting conic shapes, and a project for a cultural center in Italy that is structured as an investigation into courtyards and facades. The book features nearly 30 projects developed over the last fifteen years and highlights Tschumi’s longstanding interest not only in producing conceptual clarity, but in questioning architecture itself.