Le Fresnoy is a complex for international arts that includes a school, a film studio, two cinemas, and research and production laboratories for sound, image, video, and film. The project was built on a site with derelict buildings. Rather than demolish them or embark on an extensive renovation process, Tschumi chose to leave the existing structures intact, protecting them with an enormous steel roof canopy that incorporates environmental and stage controls for the complex. The area between the tiled roofs of the existing buildings and the new roof is a zone for spectacle and experiment, in which a superimposition of spaces and functions forms an architectural collage. Tschumi is fascinated by cinematic montage, which he sees as linked to the relationship between architectural space, movement, and the "architecture-event," or action within space. This drawing shows a montage of filmstrip "beams" in which events generate form and continue to unfold as life takes shape in the complex.
Gallery label from 75 Years of Architecture at MoMA, 2007.
