Reinier de Graaf: "The western architectural ivory tower has become a theatre of the absurd"

2015-11-05T18:02:00-05:00

As the evening progresses, the event turns into a painful X-ray of the current state of American academia: a strangely insular world with its own autonomous codes, dominated by some antiquated pecking order with an estranged value system and no hope of a correction from within. The often grandiose character of the debate stands in stark contrast to the marginal nature of that which is being debated.

Reinier de Graaf, partner at OMA, delivers a scathing takedown of the current state of architecture academia as represented by the participants of the ArchAgenda Debates, a panel in which he was also a participant. Alongside Jeff Kipnis, Patrik Schumacher, Peter Eisenman, and Theodore Spyropoulos, de Graaf was meant to discuss "a potential agenda for 21st-century architecture." The panel was a periphery event of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

But for de Graaf, the all-male panel of architects "from a part of the world to which – unless all current indicators are completely misgiven – the 21st century will not belong" failed to deliver an agenda or achieve relevance. Check out the op-ed on Dezeen.

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Reinier de Graaf: "The western architectural ivory tower has become a theatre of the absurd"