Odd.

So man has need to express the wonders of his soul, to ask his questions about the order of things, to visualize the vast system in which he is part. (These thoughts articulated by Kahn in beautiful ways.) Peter Wilson opens a reading on the competition for the Parc de la Villette suggesting two types of architectural responses to the lodged sensation, both borne of this age of the ‘cult of the new.’ The opposition he bears to mind is engendered in the alternate approaches of the crowd of a “Euro- intellect” (Tschumi, OMA, and from Schneider’s article, Eisenman), and the work of those propelled with a more direct “designers intuition” (Hadid chief on this side). Though offering no moral leaning towards one mode or the other, Wilson provides a background platform for the criticisms Schneider carries into his work on perspective and axonometry, and the House El Even Odd.
The now, proposed by Wilson as a time characterized by disjunction, elicits the trope of layering for expressive and multi lateral means towards spatial formation. With this strategy, clarity in the individual layers prior to their montage stands more essential, so too articulation. (Grids, points, lines, surfaces, recognition of the separate systems of objects, movements, and spaces, linear forests...) Towards the precise need, the Parc de la Villette reading witnesses a breaking down, or logical maneuvering within the schemes of both OMA and Bernard Tschumi’s work (similar to the operational “logics” of Eisenmans El Even Odd- the name itself a play with words). These works of design are proposed and carefully and exactly navigated with a linguistic approach, by the frame of “linguistic imperialism,” while they more than likely would stand ambiguous systems in reality.