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Jacques Derrida's Design Proposal: Chora L

As part of his collaboration with the architect, Peter Eisenman, on a design for one of the folies, to be included in the Park for Creativity, Parc de la Villette, in Paris, Derrida produced a drawing and a descriptive concept for an impossible project: to build Chora. "I propose therefore the following 'materialisation': in one or three exemplars (with different scalings) a gilded metallic object will be planted obliquely in the ground. Neither vertical nor horizontal, a most solid frame will resemble at once a mesh, sieve, or grid and a stringed musical instrument. An interpretive and selective filter which willhave permitted a reading and sifting of the three sites [at the Park] and the three embeddings."

Chora-L Project (Unbuilt)

Model of the Chora Folie

(We commute already with the "bus" that I have just named, in translation and, according to the principles of transmutation, between Ubertragung and Ubersetzung, metaphorikos still designating today, in what one calls "modern" Greek, that which concerns means of transportation). We are in a certain way -- metaphorically of course, and as concerns the mode of habitation -- the content and the tenor of this vehicle: passengers, comprehended and displaced by metaphor.
Jacques Derrida, "The Retrait of Metaphor." 









 


 




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