WARNING: THIS JOURNAL IS NOT ACTUALLY INTENDED FOR READING! IT IS PEDANTIC...AND ABOUT ARCHITECTURE.
Peter Eisenman, probably my least favorite architect, lectured at Columbia this evening.
I hate his guts, but the man can speak. I was expecting the wave of the diversionary archispeak that comprises his writings. What I got was something of a fireside chat about his son's media absorption, the fallout of an ethical, (or utopian or at the very least RESPONSIBLE) base of goals in design education, and, finally, his choice to essentially sluph all that off on posterity to focus on his silly fun-house/ Miesian acid trip thing. Essentially, he acknowledges openly almost everything I feel to be dangerous and terrible about his approach and work. I don't know whether I hate him more or less now.
What I feel is this: he waves his hands helplessly at mass culture and spectacle, suggesting that he simply CANNOT give clients projects that embody the progressive ideals that he seems to believe in. But he is PETER EISENMAN! In short, he is not an innocent bystander, but part of the problem. He has a whole wake of departments and firms after his example. It is young, unestablished architects who have to capitulate to clients more so than old ones. (If you don't like the boards for big civic projects, then don't BUILD them. Glenn Murcutt doesn't.) Architecture has truly followed in his footsteps for several decades now, and his talk this evening nearly seemed to be a quick turning-around, asking us all why we were behind him in the first place.
Peter Eisenman, probably my least favorite architect, lectured at Columbia this evening.
I hate his guts, but the man can speak. I was expecting the wave of the diversionary archispeak that comprises his writings. What I got was something of a fireside chat about his son's media absorption, the fallout of an ethical, (or utopian or at the very least RESPONSIBLE) base of goals in design education, and, finally, his choice to essentially sluph all that off on posterity to focus on his silly fun-house/ Miesian acid trip thing. Essentially, he acknowledges openly almost everything I feel to be dangerous and terrible about his approach and work. I don't know whether I hate him more or less now.
What I feel is this: he waves his hands helplessly at mass culture and spectacle, suggesting that he simply CANNOT give clients projects that embody the progressive ideals that he seems to believe in. But he is PETER EISENMAN! In short, he is not an innocent bystander, but part of the problem. He has a whole wake of departments and firms after his example. It is young, unestablished architects who have to capitulate to clients more so than old ones. (If you don't like the boards for big civic projects, then don't BUILD them. Glenn Murcutt doesn't.) Architecture has truly followed in his footsteps for several decades now, and his talk this evening nearly seemed to be a quick turning-around, asking us all why we were behind him in the first place.
kurtz:
a bone to pick?