Lefebvre says his “Critique of Everyday Life was written to create an architecture that would itself instigate the creation of new situations.”
K.R.: Did the Situationist theory of constructing situations have a direct relationship with your theory of “moments”?
H.L.: Yes, that was the basis of our understanding. They more or less said to me during discussions — discussions that lasted whole nights — “What you call ‘moments,’ we call ‘situations,’ but we’re taking it farther than you. You accept as ‘moments’ everything that has occurred in the course of history (love, poetry, thought). We want to create new moments.”
K.R.: How did they propose to make the transition from a “moment” to a conscious construction?
H.L.: The idea of a new moment, of a new situation, was already there in Constant’s text from 1953. Because the architecture of situation is a Utopian architecture that supposes a new society, Constant’s idea was that society must be transformed not in order to continue a boring, uneventful life, but in order to create something absolutely new: situations.