immonen illustrations

Swiss-born Bernard Tschumi is by trade an architect, but his dirty secret is that he’s a comic book creator. Like many of his contemporaries, Lebbeus Woods and Rem Koolhaas among them, when the energy crisis of the 1970s dried up commissions, he turned to academics and theoretical building.

Granted, he’s done quite a bit in the real world, too, but many of those projects exhibit a sequential flair; for example, his “cinematic trusses” from the arts centre in Tourcoing.

Tschumi’s own philosophies extend beyond the building project– he believes in a dynamic relationship between architecture and event that continues after a structure is brought into being; In other words, a temporal or sequential relationship. Walter Prigg & Hans-Peter Schwarz write, “Tschumi’s primary interest is not in the statics of architectural forms, but in the dynamics of action in space and time.” In fact, his theoretical works often have little to do with physical structures at all. Consider his 1992 deconstruction of a fireworks display at Parc de la Villette. From top to bottom, we are presented with abstractions of: a perspective view, a plan, an elevation, colour, and a sonogram. All of this is broken into some 700 columns, intended to be “read” in a specific order.

This is clearly a “picture story”, a pictographic representation of an event, as well as a more literal series of sequence-images. There isn’t much going on in the way of plot or character, but when has that ever stopped anyone from making comics? Consider McCloud’s ubiquitous, if ungainly definition: “juxtaposed pictoral and other images in deliberate sequence.” By any definition, this is the genuine article, kids. Sadly, you won’t find any mention of comics in conjunction with Tschumi’s name. You may find references to movies or film strips, or prose literature, but it’s almost as if people go out of their way to not mention comics. No matter how many times Frank Miller gets on TV.

I think it’s a mistake. Consider for a moment a few sequences from “The Manhattan Transcripts”, originally published in 1981. Hardly even a work of architectural theory, it’s a picture-sequence which attempts “in a manner analagous to the investigation of an everyday crime, [to] reconstruct the structure of relationships, which… has long since become a “world beyond”, virtually indistinguishable from the space of quantum mechanics.” (Prigge/ Schwarz) It may not be as esoteric as all that, however. After the title, the first panel reads in part:

“… And that’s when the second accident occured - the accident of murder…. They had to get out of the Park - quick. But one was tracked, by enemies he didn’t know - and didn’t even see - until it was too late. THE PARK.”

Sounds like he could give Ed Brubaker a run for his money.

Posted by Stuart on Friday, January 19th, 2007 and is filed under technique. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.