He believes that, when used as a theoretical tool for making architecture, disjunction, and its bedfellow ‘disruption’, are entirely relevant to the current and fragmented breakdown of a Western post-modern culture.

Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, Paris, France (Exterior perspectives, sketch) 1983

Disjunction questions the traditional architectural search for accentuation of unity, harmony and synthesis in favour of a ‘post-humanist’ stance that disrupts coherent architectural form and challenges the principles of its composition.

Therefore, disjunction is the attempt to deconstruct the traditional components of architecture for their painstaking reassembly into a new kind of architecture. Demonstrated in Tschumi’s theoretical and built projects, strategies of disjunction are achieved by a systematic exploration of one or more themes, such as ‘superimposition’ and ‘repetition’ —themes that underpin his complex layered design for the Parc de la Villette in Paris.

Bernard Tschumi Parc de la Villette, Paris, France

However, while being exercised within the discipline of architecture, his themes are developed at the margins of the discipline, i.e. where the limits of architecture meet the boundaries of other fields of study. Consequently, they are steeped in an awareness of other fields, such as literature, philosophy and film theory, from which techniques, such as deconstruction and montage, are adapted as architectural design tools.