Jacques Derrida - Point de folie - maintenant l'architecture

In 1985, the architect Bernard Tschumi invited the french philosopher Jacques Derrida for a collaboration on the design of a section of the parc de la villette in Paris.
Thus architecture called philosophy here for a project which was a conceptual structure rather than a single material form.
Derrida accepted the invitation and wrote an essay about the project calling it Point de folie-Maintenant l'architecture which is questionning about the uneasy relationship between a certain kind of thinking (philosophy) and a certain kind of space (architecture). That was the first appearance of architecture in derrida's writing (he then turned to architecture, twenty years after). The essay was first published in 1986 with a collection of drawings and then in 1987 in his collection of essays. He also collaborated with the architect Peter Eisenman in the detailed design of a particular section of the La Villette project.
With this negociation between Derrida and Tschumi, the limits of both architecture and philosophy were truly disturbed and both entered in a new way of thinking each of their own domain.
This reflection developed a new question about deconstruction and architecture.
The essay consist on a serie of notations from the folies of Bernard Tschumi from point to point.
(1-8) At the very first beginning of the essay Derrida first speak about the state of architecture today. He makes a critic of the term ''post'' which distinguish before and after moments or movements in art and specially architecture, but actually Derrida put the essential point on the now, using the french word maintenant considering that this just now isn't a fashion, a special period or era.
We can see here, that Jacques Derrida isn't opening a discourse on big questions such as whats is architecture? Or what are the major movements and periods of architecture ? Cause for him:

architecture no longer defines a domain

, architecture seems to define ourselves but only in a way that the space wich reaveals us is still marked by architecture.
Here we can notice that what gave Derrida his first ideas on the project was his personal re reading of Plato Timeus. The main philosopher's source was indeed the section in Temeus where Plato is talking about Chora (which means place in greek). According to plato, the architect-demiurge gives birth to our visible world and the forms of the world, which are eternals, were thus the origin of our sensible view. So, according to him we have two kinds of being: the eidos, eternal and unchanging and the becoming world as the sensible. And there is something else, the third element: the titron-genios which is the place in all those types are inscribed, the Chora. It is the spacing which is the condition for everything to take place.
That's were derrida wanted to place the just now of architecture. A virgin place which receives everything or gives place to everything. And he had to link it with tschumi's work on La villette.
But first of all, Derrida remains us that there is an architecture of architecture, it has a story, we take it for nature but this is an artifact and a construction, that's not natural and its heritage determines our economy, law, religion, all the places of death and birth, our education, etc. It's an evolution itself and throught all its mutations certain invariables are remaining. So derrida sees four points of invariables: the law of oikos (house habitation) as the symptom of modernity;
the architectural organization and the seating of the foundation: architecture will materialize the hierarchy in stone or wood; the fact that it is always a question of put architecture in service and at service; and this order depends on fine arts throught big values such as beauty, harmony and totality.
These four points seems to represent the coherent continuity of all the system and they finally construct all the theory and criticism of architecture. At least, it regulates all of what is called Western culture.
'' There is no work of architecture without interpretation, or even economic, religious, political, aesthetic, or philosophical decree. ''

(9)But the folies of Tschumi are destabilizing the meaning, they put in question the system, deconstruct the edifice of this configuration and as this configuration presides what we call architecture, the folies could get rid of it and lead back to the desert of anarchitecture. But they do not doing that, the folies rather enter into the ''maintenant'',it renew and reinscribe architecture, reviving it and return to what it should have be.
We have to bear in mind that the folies don't destroy, tschumi always talks about deconstruction and reconstruction but not destruction. Without proposing a new order, the folies locate the architectural work somewhere else where it won't obey the external aesthetics imperatives. Indeed, Tschumi was worried about constructing a place made for pleasure where each folie will have its own cultural, pedagogical, scientific and philosophy finality.
(10-11) In these folies, the event takes place in a serie of experiences constructing a road from point to point counting experiences and new experiments. Thus this structure leaves opportunities for chance, questionning, transformations, … These points are saw by Derrida as cubes forming a structure of the grid.
And even it the folies are inscribed in seriality, it does not stop. The serie of experiments called sketches, essays, photographs, models, etc. belongs to the folies at work, they haven't the value of mere documents but fully take part of a language on itself, an another meaning thant classical aesthetism.
Whilst Derrida was working on la vilette project, he had to bring is idea to the language of deconstruction. Beginning in the late 1980s, deconstruction is based on ideas of fragmentation, manipulation ideas of a structure's face or skin, non-rectiliniar shapes which serve to dislocate some of the elements of architecture such as structure or envelop. And the folies urges us towards in the route of deconstruction. Not a deconstruction which have first to measure itself against institutions (politic structures, civil society, bureaucracy, capital, science, technology...).
(14)Tschumi, in his work, speaks a lot about descontruction, destabilization, disjunction, or even difference, but Derrida points the fact that no work results from only a deplacement or a dislocation therefore invention is needed. According to him, we must trace another writing and the ''maintenant'' of architecture would be this writing which joins the differences all together creating a singular assembling.
In this specific part of the essay, Derrida's made a reference to Heidegger's thougths in which he is saying that architectonics represents only one epoch in the history, a specific possibility in the assembling.
'' at La Villette, it is a matter of forming dissociation. Putting dissociation into form necessites that the support structure be structured as a rassembling system'' Tschmi, madness and the combinative, 1984.
(15)The dis joint itself in now architecture arrests thus the madness in its dislocation. It's not only a point of joining the dis joint, it's ''an open multiplicity of red points'' with force of magnetic attraction. And, in each point of folie the experiences of the parc will find their places. Here the now or maintenant in which each point converged, stopping the madness, makes the link with architecture which it in turn deconstructs.
Derrida insists here in the fact that, as Tschumi said too, whilst each point is a breaking point, interrupting the continuity of the grid, the interruptor do maintains the whole together. This clearly embodies a mad relationship between the socius and dissociation. This red point space thus maintains architecture in the dissociation of architecture. But, there is something different, this maintenant does not maintain a past or a tradition.
(17)This architecture is an other architecture, somethin g stranger from classical and historical architecture. And as its an architecture of the other, it is nothing that exists. As Derrida's first reference, the Chora cannot be represented, it's a challenge to anything solid or something built. This architecture of the other is not the present or the memory of past, and it presents neither theory, ethics or politics. Indeed, it does not present it but it does give a place to all of it.

it anticipates architecture to come. It runs the risk and give us the chance

.