Fragments of architecture (bits of walls, of rooms, of streets, of ideas) are all one actually sees. These fragments are like beginnings without ends. There is always a split between fragments which are real and fragments which are virtual, between experience and concept, memory and fantasy. These splits have no existence other then being passage from one fragments to another. They are relays rather then signs. They are traces. They are “in-between’.
It is not the clash between these contradictory fragments that counts, but the movement between them. And this invisible movement is neither a part of language nor of structure (‘language’ or ‘structure’ are words specific to a mode of reading architecture which does not fully apply in the context of pleasure); it is nothing but a constant and mobile relationship inside language itself.
How such fragments are organized matters little: volume; height, surface, degree of enclosure or whatever. These fragments are like sentences between quotation marks. Yet they are not quotations. They simply melt into the work.
- Bernard Tschumi, Questions of Space