May 9, 2015
Bernard Tschumi: “When I did the Parc de la Villette with the red follies, everybody kept asking “Why red?” I never answered this question, saying instead “You can say anything you want.” Eventually, I said, “Red is not a color”, which just added more mystery to the project.
As I developed my work over the years, I became more and more conscious that red was to emphasize the concept, namely, the overriding idea of the project. The fact that it was red was almost like a diagram, like a way of saying “Look, this is what structures the whole project”. The application of the color red was irrelevant; it was just to show how these series of buildings belonged to one another. It was a diagrammatic operation.”