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It is also impossible to live our day to day life without having to deal with some social rule. These are not specifically dictated or enforced by one person, but by society itself. In this way, we the people are our own rule makers. Although you may think that most rules come in the form of laws, and are policed from the outside, limits to our actions are more likely individual responses to moral constraints that stem from within us and the people who we interact with. It must be noted that rules only give us a guidance and what classifies as transgression, is always prone to being subjective. Therefore, the most extreme but most effective way to make limits dynamic, is to transgress these rules.
Bondage As stated before, architecture works primarily within a set of paradigms that are both taught at schools and established within architectural laws. During a lecture in my bachelors we were told that architecture was similar ‘bondage’. After years I have come to realise that, transgression lies at the core of this of this unlikely metaphor. Tschumi talks about how knots in bondage are similar to the rules in architecture. “These rules, like so many knots that cannot be united, are generally a paralysing constraint. When manipulated, however,
they
significance
have of
the
bondage…
erotic What
matters is that there is no simple bondage technique; the more numerous and sophisticated the restraints, the greater the 24 pleasure” . Transgression does not have as its aim to break the rules of architecture and society but use them until their limits. It is in these limits that we can find pleasure. 24
(Tschumi, 1996, p. 88)
DEEPER INTO TRANSGRESSION
Figure 13 Part of the Advertisements for Architecture series by Bernard Tchumi