Up on the Roof at New Film School

The architect Bernard Tschumi has long been obsessed with film. As a student in Paris during the rebellions of ‘68, he took pictures rather than throw cobblestones at the police. His 1978 theoretical project, Manhattan Transcripts, was designed to read like a film strip. Tschumi, one senses, is an architect who has always envied the ability of pictures to capture events--not just frame them.

At Le Fresnoy, an experimental postgraduate school for film and the visual arts, Tschumi found his fantasy client. Set to open next month in this working-class town on the outskirts of Lille, the school was conceived a decade ago as a workshop for the contemporary arts--film, video and photography--where teaching, production and distribution are all collapsed into one. The idea was to show student work to the public right where it was made. The school’s founder, Alain Fleischer, wanted a building that would embody that vision. What he got was a structure that playfully evokes a nostalgia for the naive radicalism of Godard, student rebellions and ‘60s Paris.

Tschumi’s design is striking. For 50 years, Le Fresnoy was the site of a “fun palace” for local workers and their families--a place where they came to let off steam and watch the latest Hollywood picture. Tschumi, who is dean of Columbia University’s school of architecture and keeps an architectural office in Paris, chose to preserve the complex’s four old concrete halls and cover them under an enormous corrugated-metal roof. The old structure’s tile roofs became a surreal, high-tech landscape where students can sneak off to relax or have lunch.

It is a witty gesture and neatly symbolizes Tschumi’s desire to invent an architecture of subversion--places where radical events can happen at any moment. Of course, these spaces won’t hold meetings of the Workers International. They will be packed with lofty art students. But even if Tschumi is trying to trick us into believing that a radical pose is the same as a revolutionary act, so what? Sometimes a seductive pose can have value too.

Tourcoing--along with nearby Roubaix--was once the center of France’s textile industry, and Le Fresnoy was the epicenter of its social and cultural life. Once a rickety local cinema, by the ‘20s it had become an enormous complex of buildings whose cavernous halls included a dance floor, roller skating rink, wrestling ring and a bar. This is where the downtrodden proletariat came to play. Exhausted workers drank and danced after hours. Parents took children on pony rides. Couples embraced in the dark cinema. But by the early ‘70s, after a decade of factory closings and layoffs, Le Fresnoy was boarded up.

Its current incarnation as elite film school began in Paris, not here. Le Fresnoy is the last of the grands travaux that were the architectural legacy of Francois Mitterrand’s presidency. The nationally funded program used glamorous cultural landmarks as anchors for the redevelopment of destitute urban areas. In Paris, these projects were remarkable for the government’s willingness to tap world-class talent, even if the results were often uneven. Mitterrand’s Ministry of Culture chose to place the new school in Tourcoing because the city’s failed economy needed a jolt, as well as because of its proximity to two European capitals--Brussels and Paris.

Tschumi clearly loved the structure’s working-class aura. He repainted the buildings in their original pale yellow. Inside, old signs that direct visitors to the toilettes and bar have been touched up. Wrought-iron walkways overlook the former arena. Even the basic organization of the plan remains intact. A long internal street divides the complex: exhibition and performance spaces on one side, classrooms and high-tech sound, film and video studios on the other. The cinema and the bar are at the end of this main axis. In a nod to radical chic, the bar’s walls are painted flat black. The cinema lobby is lipstick red.

But the roof is the point--it looms over the old buildings like a giant metal claw. The building’s grand entry, in fact, is an enormous steel stair that leads up to the old roofs from the building’s forecourt. The entrance to the exhibition spaces is more discreetly tucked underneath.

Once you reach the top, the roof-scape is open on three sides. Service ducts and maintenance stairs are left exposed. Bright blue suspended walkways snake between the old tile roofs. Along the side of one pitched roof--its worn tiles curled and chipped--several rows of bleacher-like seats are suspended. The cafeteria--a simple glass-enclosed box--opens up onto a large terrace.

There are other themes here that are meant to suggest an attack against convention. The enormous, amoeba-shaped skylights that are carved out of the roof structure beautifully evoke high-tech clouds. But they also refer to a cutting away of structure, an undermining of traditional order.

Tschumi’s deeper goal, however, was to radicalize the architectural program--the various functions that make up the building. He is interested in the friction created when you juxtapose different groups and events. Here, the cinemas and exhibition spaces are used to draw the public in, in a sort of reverse occupation. Students and neighbors will mingle in the bar. On the rooftop plaza, the school will hold occasional jazz sessions. The image is of a giant art-producing machine, spewing out its message into screening rooms and exhibit halls.

But there is one serious flaw. Most of that mechanism is actually below, in the building’s most mundane spaces. Many of the rooftop spaces have no function at all. Tschumi wanted a screen set up opposite the bleachers, but the school so far has decided it isn’t in the budget. Most of the walkways lead nowhere in particular.

These spaces are radical not because of their ability to bridge the gap between intellectuals and the masses, but because they will be places for students to loiter. From here, you can act out your voyeuristic fantasies, staring down on neighboring gardens, or you can hide from the watchful eye of teachers and classmates. This is where you come to be naughty.

Of course, being naughty and being a revolutionary are not the same thing. Tschumi is a student of the Soviet avant-garde--during his tenure at London’s Architectural Assn. in the ‘70s, the work of the early Soviet avant-garde was the rage. Tschumi now faces the same problems they did: Can architecture actively change the structure of society? Can it affect how we relate to each other? Vladimir Ilyich Lenin didn’t buy it. Tschumi is content to turn those struggles into playful images.

What the building does do is neatly sum up the tension that exists between art and architecture and the public at large. To be truly radical, architecture and art must somehow reengage the public. Tschumi’s building confronts that rift aggressively. It seems to want to draw the public in, and then eat it up. Will gestures such as these inspire radical filmmaking? No. But it may remind young film artists that the public is at their doorstep, ready to be engaged.