Peter Eisenman set out his thoughts on architecture at RIAS 2008
Architecture in a media culture
Students have become passive
Computers make design standards poorer
Today’s buildings lack meaning or reference
We are in a period of late style
To be an architect is a social act
BDonline
Point one: Architecture in a media culture
Media has invaded every aspect of our lives. It is difficult to walk out on the street or stand in a crowded elevator without encountering people speaking into cellular phones at the top of their voices as if no one else was around. People leave their homes and workplaces and within seconds are checking their Blackberries. Their iPhones provide instant messaging email, news, telephone and music—it’s as if they were attached to a computer.
Less and less people are able to be in the real physical world without the support of the virtual world. This has brought about a situation in which people have lost the capacity to focus on something for any length of time. This is partly because media configures time in discrete segments.
Focus is conditioned by how long one can watch something before there is an advertisement. In newspapers stories keep getting shorter, the condensed version is available on the internet. This leads today to a corruption of what we think of as communication, with a lessening of the capacity to read or write correct sentences. While irrelevant information multiplies, communication diminishes. If architecture is a form of media it is a weak one. To combat the hegemony of the media, architecture has had to resort to more and more spectacular imaging. Shapes generated through digital processes become both built icons that have no meaning but also only refer to their own internal processes. Just think of any architectural magazine today devoted, supposedly, to the environment, and instead one finds media.
Point two: Students have become passive
The corollary to the prevalent media culture is that the viewing subject has become increasingly passive. In this state of passivity people demand more and more images, more visual and aural information and in a state of passivity people demand things that are easily consumed.
The more passive people become the more they are presented by the media with supposed opportunities to exercise choice. Vote for this, vote for whatever stories you want to hear, vote for what popular song you want to hear, vote for what commercial you want to see. This voting gives the appearance of active participation, but it is merely another form of sedation because the voting is irrelevant It is part of the attempt to make people believe they are participating when in fact they are becoming more and more passive.
Students also have become passive. More passive than students in the past. This is not a condemnation but a fact. To move students to act or to protest for or against anything today is impossible. Rather they have a sense of entitlement. The generations that remember 1968 feel that those kinds of student protests are almost impossible today. For the last seven years we have had in the US one of the most problematic governments in our history. Probably the most problematic since the mid-19th century and president Millard Fillmore. Our reputation in Europe, our dollar, our economy, the spirit of our people, has been weakened. In such a state of ennui people feel they can do little to bring about change. With the war in Iraq draining our economy there is still the possibility that the political party responsible for today’s conditions will be re-elected.
Will this have consequences for architecture?
Point three: Computers make design standards poorer
This passivity is related to architecture. Architecture today relies on one of passivity’s most insidious forms—the computer.
Architects used to draw volumes, using shading and selecting a perspective. In learning how to draw one began to understand not only what it was like to draw like Palladio or Le Corbusier but also the extent of the differences in their work. A wall section of Palladio felt different to the hand than one of Le Corbusier’s. It is important to understand such differences because they convey ideas. One learned to make a plan. Now, with a computer, one does not have to draw. By clicking a mouse from point to point, one can connect dots that make plans, one can change colours, materials and light. Photoshop is a fantastic tool for those who do not have to think.
The problem is as follows. “So what?” my students say, “Why draw Palladio? How will it help me get a job?” The implication is this: “If it’s not going to help me get a job, I don’t want to do it.” In this sense, architecture does not matter. In a liberal capital society, getting a job matters, and my students are in school precisely for this reason.
Yet education does not help you get a job. In fact, the better you are at Photoshop the more attractive you are to an office, the better you will work in that office.
If I ask a student to make a diagram or a plan that shows the ideas of a building, they cannot do it. They are so used to connecting dots on a computer that they cannot produce an idea of a building in a plan or a diagram. This is certain to affect not only their future, but the future of our profession.
Point four: Today’s buildings lack meaning or reference
The computer is able to produce the most incredible imagery which become the iconic images of magazines and competitions. To win a competition today one has to produce shapes and icons by computer.
But these are icons with little meaning or relationship to things in the real world. According to the American pragmatist philosopher C S Peirce there were three categories of signs: icons, symbols, and indices. The icon had a visual likeness to an object.
Robert Venturi’s famous dictum categorised buildings as either “a duck or a decorated shed”; the difference between an icon and symbol in architectural terms.
A “duck” is a building that looks like its object—a hotdog stand in the form of a giant hotdog or, in Venturi’s terms, a place that sells ducks taking the very same shape as a duck. This visual similitude produces what Peirce calls an icon which can be understood at first glance.
Venturi’s other term, the “decorated shed”, describes a public facade for what amounts to a generic box like building. The decorated shed is more a symbol, in Peirce’s terms, which has an agreed upon, or conventional meaning. A classical facade symbolises a public building, whether it is a bank a library or school.
Today the shape of buildings become icons which have none of these external references. They may not necessarily look like anything or they may only resemble the processes that made them. In this case they do not relate outwardly but refer inwardly. These are icons that have little cultural meaning or reference. There is no reason to ask our more famous architects: “Why does it look like this?”
There is no answer to this question because “Why?” is the wrong question.
Why? Because the computer can produce it. One could ask these architects: “Why is this one better than that one?” Or “Which one of the crumpled paper buildings is better?” Or “Which one is the best and why?”
There is no answer again to these questions. Why? Because there is no value system in place for judging, and there is no relationship to be able to judge between the image produced and its meaning as an icon.
These icons are made from algorithmic processes that have nothing to do with architectural thinking.
Point five: We are in a period of late style
Edward Said in his book On Late Style describes lateness as a moment in time when there are no new paradigms or ideological, cultural, political conditions that cause significant change. Lateness can be understood as a historical moment which may contain the possibilities of a new future paradigm.
For example there were reasons in the late 19th century for architecture to change. These included changes in psychology introduced by Freud; in physics by Einstein; in mathematics with Heisenberg; and in flight with the Wright brothers. These changes caused a reaction against the Victorian and imperial styles of the period and articulated a new paradigm: modernism.
With each new paradigm, whether it is the French revolution or the Renaissance, there is an early phase, which in modernism was from 1914-1939; a high phase, which in modernism occurred 1954-1968 when it was consumed by liberal capital after the war; and a period of opposition. The year 1968 saw an internal, implosive revolution, one that reacted against institutions representing the cultural past of many of the western societies. This was followed by post modernism’s eclectic return to a language that seemed to have meaning. The Deconstructivist exhibition at the MoMA in 1988 put an end to this cliché and kitsch style.
Today I say we are in a period of late style. A period in which there is no new paradigm. Computation and the visual may produce a shift from the notational but this in itself is not a new paradigm. It is merely a tool. The question remains: What happens when one reaches the end of a historical cycle? On Late Style by Edward Said describes such a moment in culture before a shift to a new paradigm. A moment not of fate or hopelessness but one that contains a possibility of looking at a great style for the possibility of the new and the transformative. He uses as an example Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, written at the end of Beethoven’s career. This was the composer’s response to the seeming impossibility of innovation. Instead Beethoven wrote a piece that was difficult, even anarchic, that could not be easily understood and was outside of his characteristic and known style. Beethoven’s later work is an example of the complexity ambivalence, and the “undecidability” that characterises a late style.
Point six: To be an architect is a social act
This last point deals with architecture and its unique autonomy. Since the Renaissance in Italy when Brunelleschi, Alberti and Bramanti established what can be called the persistencies of architecture—subject-object relationships—these persistencies have remained operative to this day. Alberti’s dictum that “a house is a small city and a city is a large house”, remains with us in all works that we see. In other words the relationship between the part and the whole: the figure and the ground, the house to its site, the site to the street, the street to its neighbourhood and the neighbourhood to the city.
These issues constitute the basis of what would be called the dialectical synthesis as an aspect of the ongoing metaphysical project. Thus one of the things that must be investigated is the problematic part-to-whole relationship—which is part of a Hegelian dialectical idea of thesis and anti-thesis forming a new whole or synthesis—and the relationship of building to ground.
Architecture has traditionally been concerned with these dialectical categories, whether it is inside/outside, figure/ground, subject/object. For me today, it is necessary to look within architecture to see if it is possible to break up this synthetic project from within. This attempt is what post-structuralism would consider the displacement of the metaphysics of presence.
If we continue to think that what is presented is necessarily truthful or what we see is truthful and also beautiful then we will continue to subscribe to the myth that architecture is the wonder of the metaphysics of presence. It may become possible with such an awareness to move away from what I call the hegemony of the image.
People always say formalism is the project of architecture’s autonomists. For me it is precisely this autonomy which is architecture’s delay of engaging with society. If it is architecture’s activity and its own discourse which in fact impacts society, then to be an architect is a social act.
This does not mean social in the form of making people feel better or happy. Or building houses for the poor or shopping malls for the rich or garages for Mercedes. I am talking about understanding those conditions of autonomy that are architectural, that make for an engagement with society in the sense of operating against the existing hegemonic social and political structures of our time. That is what architecture has always been.
51 Comments
Maybe these would make sense with more context, but it's like, huh?
Does he think rock music is just a bunch of noise, too? These kids today, I tell ya.
peter needs a reality check. maybe HIS students abide by what he is criticizing, but instructors that have a predilection for innovation and intelligence in no way promote the things that peter is criticizing. he's five years behind in his criticism! if he is talking about the work that comes from students of kivi, hernan, mark gage, and ali rahim, i'll buy his argument... but those are all of his children. he should branch out a little more and understand what others (directly opposed to his teachings and his lineage) are doing. speaks would have a field day with this article. peter is dying. the new paradigm he is omitting is innovation. architecture is not as important as he thinks. architects are not that important in the grand scheme of things. the most important thing in my mind is generating practical knowledge and innovative products (building systems or assemblies, or materials). the market does not care about the diagram... and we can no longer ignore the market as many "avant garde" architects were able to do 15-25 years ago. time to get of the high horse and do something useful. let other people do the talking. you may get paid for your monologue on heidegger and your love for metaphysics of architecture, but no one else will... sorry, thats my (optimistic) rant for the day.
useful? here is the biggest dilemma of our time--what is useful?
as we approach the situation at hand isn't the urge for overproduction the problem? constant innovation to create the new mode of pleasurable (over(t)) consumption... you can put lipstick on the pig and its still a pig. this to me seems critical to understanding where we are now and why we make the things we make. as the biggest building boom in history cools what will happen to the boom euphoria that made critical architects into starchitects? that euphoria is what drives the discourse today but can you have a chicken without the egg?
i am not directly linking innovation to "pleasurable consumption" or aesthetics or ideology, but more so to the translation between design, drawing, fabrication, and construction. BIM is pushing us in the right direction in that regard. i value simultaneous rigor and expediency. learning how to innovation the process of making complex architecture is my goal. while i recognize the historical significance of the french philosophy and political events of the late 60's to architecture, i value them as merely that... historical. criticality is good, but not just for the sake of being critical and polemic. at the same time, i do understand the need for the architects i mentioned above that i, in no way would ever be like they are or (pretend to) practice like they do... but they have their place and they've helped me to clarify what kind of architect i want to be.
of course if this is your image of innovation than you can have a chicken without the egg.
we certainly don't need anymore of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPDcZN8aq0k
or this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaCc0X6yP-w&feature=related
that is what peter gave us!
I think he's just getting old.
the funny thing about eisenman and company is that they existed in a time without projects and then (some of them) boomed in the boom. do we understand what the historical dimension of that is. without projects? without work? to me that will separate the architects from the rabble--its those times where there is no living in something that you know its Real.
i agree. only time will tell how peter's children will fare.... without REAL projects, without work. unfortunately some of them can afford to keep dicking around and only scratch the surface of their interests rather than rigorously work through them with sincerity because they need to put food on the table. i wish my daddy was rich.
okay i'm with you there.
Personally, i think this is spot on. Perhaps he is out of touch, but he is right in at least two points.
Architecture is a social act and in his albeit not new critique of media culture and it's effects on representation.
I do however, agree with you 43....in that BIM and computers (as a tool, not as an end in themselves, purely for form) and even other tech like rapid proto-typing etc do offer or rather hint at some new possibilities.
i must be getting old too, because i think he's spot on with a lot of what he's saying.
i just think he is generalizing too much and making it sound like everyone is doing what he is saying. he's neglected to address the others who have already moved beyond his major points of criticism onto something more pertinent.
whoa, what act isn't a social act?
i think petey e. lost his bearings...
that article was pretty hard to swallow, not because the indictments are disturbing - they are actually quite expected - his level of complicity in the problems that he underlines i find disturbing
why does one have to have been alive during paris 1968 to understand what it means to be critical or resistive? i think it's an overly-romantic notion
darn generation gap
agreed. should have been titled "eisenman's ancient point plan." rubbish. why operate on the stage of nostalgia when we have changed from yesterday (as hinted at in point 1)? get away from the east coast elitist babble.
bim is no more a revolution than standardised lumber. its important but in itself without meaning.
i agree with him.
we are at point where something actually new is waiting in wings. if its bim then fuck me i quit. production by bim is just efficiency and buildability. i would much prefer if architects started dreaming about the unbuildable again.
i have a dream...
I can't listen to or read P.E. anymore ...
would this be a good time to post a picture?
Jump.
Absolutely agree....
jump must be the one with a rich daddy... no?
architecture is about building buildings with beautiful, inhabitable space... not something that exists in a magazine or in text that insecure intellectuals can wax each others poles to.
I see 6 points, but what is the plan?
I see 6 points, but what is the plan?
no plan, just more useless ideology.
Ill have to follow surfaces down the irony train and ask why couldn't P.E. put together a wonderful argument instead of "just connecting (6) points"?
I think he is a reactionary, egocentric, media whore whose "master piece" (the berlin memorial{ actually just stolen from his students }) provides the best counter point to his own theories and his six points.....its become nothing more than a 50 lane highway leading from Tiergarten to the Dunkin Dounghts that moved in two days after the memorial was finished....
i'll posit that the new visualizing and production tools that computers have made possible are an equivalent of solitary gaming: powerful distractions that make architects less social, less tied to the culture at large. with these tools we will learn to do more but will lose track of what the larger society finds valuable/useful. we will, as a profession, become more marginal and (even) more beholden to the construction industry.
eisenman is acknowledging that architecture will change. while eisenman makes that sound scary and gets nostalgic for old ways, as a younger generation, we should look for the opportunity in it. if we don't want to be marginalized, if we want architecture to be more than a construction consultation, what do we WANT it to be?
I wish this was in the forum. Anyway...
I'll take a stab and guess the reason Smokety Mc Smoke Smoke "can't listen or read P. E. anymore" is because SMSS has a background in law. Eisenman's points/arguments here are either flawed in logic, sentimental, academic, or self-serving. For example, "students are passive", yet the students described here actually protesting. In terms of practice, deconstruction is one of architecture's most obscure styles and 'post-modernism' is still what the vast majority of architects do. Part of what's historically playing out now is Le Corbusier's late style and Kahn's early 'planning' style.
Anyone else love watching Boston Legal. Now there's a style architecture would do well to emulate.
Great to see a news post get so many comments.
But I believe that all of this is Peter E trying to prove he's still relevant - and he is doing it by aligning himself with the pencil few. Remember he invented the spin diagram and uses it where he sees fit.
Some interesting points, some nonsense as well. Definitely tries to wear a few suits at once in this piece. I think the idea of architecture in a "late" style is nonsense, its fun to quote a postcolonial text, and its edgy. There are new paradigms, but they are technological rather than theoretical, a lot of the great architects he mentions also new that architecture isn't jsut representation and they grappled with the real stuff as well. Sorry PE hasn't figured that one out. Social change will come through architecture in the background, presencing itself in ways only architects realize. Move right of form and do work
hah, yeah there is definitely something to that, architechnophilia and lauf. poor peter. but he ain't a total moron.
43N88W, in fact i grew up poorer than the trailerpark boys. so when i dream i mean it. i know what a practical life looks like and it ain't pretty. ;-)
Who is this Peter Eiserman guy that keeps popping up in threads?
Point 7:
Those kids need to get off of my lawn.
i'll 2nd Lauf's point about Boston Legal.
Eisie just sounds like the grumpy old man down the street yelling at the kids to "get off my lawn." The reason for the rise of 19th century architecture had nothing to do with the industrialization of the construction industry, changing of trade union roles and methods, the massive migration of old world craftsman to the new world and the ability to move massive amounts of raw and finished material almost anywhere with the growing transportation networks? Really? Its all due to Freud and Einstein? Citing Freud then is like citing "Gene Theory" now - interesting concept, but it doesn't change the way concrete is poured into formwork.
Really, this sounds like pandering to the old guard, even in areas where his and my concerns overlap (designing on computers has a tendency to make sucky actual architecture) its for different reasons - To me, the biggest reasons that you need to involve sketching by hand is:
1. that the computer is different than paper, which people will eventually use to build it, so that's really what needs to be clean and understandable
- and -
2. You are accepting the limitations and constraints of tools which have no relation to how the physical world (computer code versus physics). That's not to say that hand drafting prevents it, but it is more intuitive.
and little to do with making anything blobby "look cool without substance"
Two final points:
It should also be mentioned that its really easy to stay edgy and financially solvent when you're not paying your interns.
If your students don't get it, its not their fault, its your fault. Physician heal thyself.
bottom line... the guy likes to hear himself talk...regardless of the subject
I wasn't trying to be ironic (just wondering if whomever wrote this up originally has mis-titled it?) Since there isn't a plan specified in there anywhere.
I liked him as a professor. He is a good lecturer. He is funny in real life, and the curmudgeonliess is adorable. :) The delivery comes across so differently here. It seems like people on this thread are mostly provoked by the perceived grumpyness of the 6 points... but if that is bothersome, it doesn't make sense to respond with vitriolic personal attacks too. People are how they are for a reason.
Let's make it all for one, and all for love.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XszQSfn18m4
Regarding student passivity and entitlement: Passive resistance is a form of resistance too. One that really aggravates Power, because (at least in the us) they are legally forbidden from raising a hand against you if you aren't causing violence or actively resisting :) So, I didn't fight anything I disagreed with, but would just smile/do what I want anyway. This approach certainly manifests a sense of entitlement, but so does protesting. Protesting is demanding someone to listen to you, to change the thing you are protesting into something that the protester considers acceptable. That's totally entitled.
There have always been poorly designed buildings that don't embody meaning. That isn't exactly a contemporary phenomenon, right?
I think we should listen to him and riot until there is a new paradigm!
Anyone who's with me go punch a teacher!
A mangiar questa minestra o saltar questa fincestra.
rotture di allegator
i just ate lunch, so i'll jump out the window and hope i land on something soft.... or count on the rest who have (thankfully) already jumped to catch me.
i meant allegator tears
geesh - if your students don't know how to draw a diagram, TEACH THEM.
O,, Remember after our SCI-Arc lecture series when Eisenman said he really needed a drink and at the bar was asked to explain his 'therories' to John Knight and the group. And then Michael Asher showed his little cassete recorder and E said its going to take alot more than one puny cassete tape for me to elaborate all the points etc... and Asher took out more than a half-dozen tapes from his bag and recorded the entire eve mostly pe monolog, with Frank Gehry, Daniel Buren, and I think ben bucholh. And his conversations kept getting more and more drunker interupted by Asher's constant he-haw laughing at him throughout the evening. Buren published the best of it in some French mag. Have you seen the interview?
no, but i'd love to get a hold of it... can you ask buren when you see him? i also remember gehry screaming that he'll never design a museum to buren's tape recorder after losing moca to isozaki...
unrelated but i've found this, talking about alligator tears;
"Eisenman, P. (2005). The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. This recently completed project (inaugurated May 2005) offers an interesting case in our exploration: Initially, the American sculptor Richard Serra collaborated with architect Peter Eisenman. However, Serra could not accept any required changes to the winning proposal and therefore walked-out from the partnership. Eisenman accepted the changing requirements from the user groups and government bodies, kept adapting the scheme over three years and finally completed the memorial himself. Refer to the interview between Eisenman and Serra, where Serra argues that 'one reason architects consume and use traditional sculpture is to control and domesticate art'; in: Serra, R. (1994). Writings and Interviews, University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London, 142.
is serra any better now than he was 40 years ago, i wonder.
via; http://www.slab.com.au/papartar.php
chavkin huh?.;.)))
"Greatest generation, my ass! Tom Brokaw is a punk" - Walker.
I agrea many points more or less, but the issue of architecture being a social act is right ob spot.
Today's pictures of architecture ,the forgotten structure --- how lazy students rather want to deal with how one would emagine the thing to look like, more than what make it . How nothing basicly will be changed and modern architecture stay as an image of what you want modern architecture to look like, that is what hold back the real revolution in arhitecture.
---- When that will come ; it will come the day we realise, that today computers are used to mimic the projecting as done before the computers. When we realise that what made the crumpled paper buildings, was lack of knowleage and respect for the basics -- the structure. And when we realise that the computer was made to serve us, by calculating the buliding core, for what our visions call, not our emagination about how we would think it's surface covers would look like.
Yes architecture became a social act.
I love the photograph accompanying this feature; nice work.
53 comments to this thread. Agree, or disagree, he is the catalyst for this discourse with readers thinking, and commenting...albeit passively.
I agree with Peter, you are all fools.
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.