Responding to the violent events of November 13, 2015, the Architecture and Landscape Architecture students who took part in PennDesign’s 2016 Paris Summer Program produced a series of videos on the problematized public space of the sidewalk (in French, the terrasse or trottoir). Their work was presented in a public event and online by PennDesign’s partner on the project, the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC) in the city of Orléans, considered to have the most prestigious collection of visionary architectural models and drawings dating from the mid 20th-century in the world. The project was directed by PennDesign’s Annette Fierro, Associate Professor of Architecture, and Andrew Lucia (MArch’08), Cass Gilbert Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture, College of Design, University of Minnesota. Here Fierro describes the assignment.
“Rhythmanalysis of the Terrace [Je suis en]”*
Emerging as emblem of the rights of citizens to inhabit the city without intimidation, the concept of sidewalk as public space emanates from writings of a very different era—Lefebvre, de Certeau—in which the most of leisurely of activities: a casual dinner, a meeting with friends, a simple walk, are constituted as a “right,” an anthropological need.
On the terrasse, the trottoir, one observes the rhythms of the city which characterize its everyday transience, one experiences episodes of time that mark the daily ebb and flow of the work and leisure of its inhabitants, one becomes grounded in the habits of the city. While this has never been a benign space, as the “Je Suis en Terrasse” movement has emphasized, in a Paris now under a vague cloud of threat, this is also now a space in which “latent intersubjectivities between inhabitants and the space of the city are manifested” (Jeremy Foster, “There Will Always Be Paris”). Using Georges Perec’s models of empirical observation, political realities of the city are reconstituted, resisting easy conclusions, and with a peculiar accuracy and non-judgmental framing. What did we expect to see and observe? Most likely nothing, and in this nothingness, everything.
The video workshop introduced formal techniques utilized in particular 20th-century musical compositions and their role in the novel production of aural effects, specifically compositional methodologies employed in the works of Morton Feldman, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Alvin Lucier. These composers worked through various formal methods involving the uses of pattern translation, phasing and repetition in the pursuit of amplifying or diminishing particular rhythms that were pre-existent in the sound sources they drew upon, allowing natural patterns to constructively or de-constructively emerge, ultimately generating an entirely new aural/visual field.
Participating students: Mary Swysgood, Isabella Mayorga, Farré Nixon, Julie Pepitone; Ryan Barnette, Robert Bruce, Leetee Wang, Zhoufei Zhou; Anni Lei, Jennifer Rokoff, Hae-Yun Kwon, Irena Wright; Alyssa Arpel, Jieru He, Matt Price.
*We are indebted to Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmnanalysis.
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