^ Not really, Orhan posted this under Politics.

So let's attack vacuous thought processes. Oh wait, we are. Sorry, Peter. There is a reason I tune out when he speaks. Does he even know what the word dialectical means?

"Then, EKE, you should agree with the following statement as well"

No.

Marc, I think that it is a mistake to put hand tools and computer programs in the same category. To say that AutoCAD is basically the same as a pencil is naive - computer programs create immersive environments that aren't conducive to the free exercise of thought, where the operator is constrained by the programmer's assumptions about how the software will be used. Hand tools have much more limited capacities - you use a pencil for one operation, an eraser for another, and compass for a third, but one is freer to choose the palette of tools, and how they are employed. I'm not saying that we should start drafting by hand again. Absolutely not. But we need to recognize that software is something fundamentally different, and not a tool as that term has been defined historically.

"doesn't have to be empty of meaning.  that, again, is due to the user of the tool rather than the tool.

also depends on how you define 'meaning,' and more specifically what meaning there is in the work we do.  i'm sure there is plenty of 'meaning' in eisenman's work.  still isn't any good.  (an architect's end product is the building, not the drawing, by the way.  imho)"

I didn't say it has to be empty of meaning.  I agree completely with what you said here, Curt.  As I said, I think Eisenman's philosophy of architecture is a toxic one.

My point isn't that the digital technology prevents, or erases meaning.  It's that for many architects, digital form-making is such a seductive "sugar high" that it has replaced the communication of values as a goal.

I'm not blaming the tool.  The blame lies squarely on the architect, but the tool enables this pathology.

"EKE, what's the difference then?"

One is parametric 3-D CAD software, and the other is a pattern book.

I'm not able to watch the video right now (no audio on my machine), so this may not be what Eisenman meant with the phrase, but the discussion so far makes me wonder if perhaps there's an angle to this that isn't being directly addressed. 

Something that's frustrated me for a while about the way a lot of design schools (not all, but a lot) have embraced technology is that they're embracing the tool before establishing the method. That is, students are learning the programs without first gaining a general, abstract foundational sense of space and design. A lot of young designers' early academic work suffers as a result, because they gravitate towards finding either the easiest prescribed solution given the interface environment of the software, or the outer fringes of what the software is capable of, while lacking the detached sense of judgment that would allow them to evaluate the design quality of their technical experiments. 

So maybe what Eisenman is getting at is this disconnect and the negative effect it's had on young architects design-brains. 

I had a great discussion about this a year or two ago with an old professor / mentor that I may paraphrase + copy into this thread if I can find it. 

EKE

what examples from the present convey "values?"  that's a really loaded word and i'm wondering if you think a building such as the Phaeno science center by ZHA is meaningless.  or another example would be nouvel's philharmonie de paris.  

Anon,

I'm not trying to suggest that "the" autocad, rhino, or sketchup are the same as the berol or rapidograph and I'm very aware that different hand forms (fine skill  vs. gross skill) excite different parts of the brain. A pencil is not a hammer, is not a mouse (but what of the stylus).

But I'm also cautious to not think that instruments have always been same since, and they too have not evolved. Designers have long tinkered with their design instruments in search of better and more expedient solutions and conventions. Drawing convention has long been part of that discussion as well (from the beginning). 

But the point I'm trying to make is that technology is not to blame (yet), it's a people problem. If it's an important part of design, it's an important skill to teach- how to circumvent the speed by which digitized process can produce over-saturation. 

I'm not really familiar with Durand. 

But if this is really how he believed his method should be used to create architecture:

“We have given a formula, in our discussion of the parts of the building, that will make it unnecessary even to look at the sections that we give of each ensemble. The elevations … must be nothing but the natural and necessary consequences of the plan and the section …”

...then yes, I would have the same concern that I have with digital parametric techniques.

"what examples from the present convey "values?"  that's a really loaded word and i'm wondering if you think a building such as the Phaeno science center by ZHA is meaningless.  or another example would be nouvel's philharmonie de paris."

I think that all architecture communicates to us.  The question is whether the message its sending has been intentionally crafted by the designer...or not.

What do you think is the meaning of the Nouvel Philharmonie?

EKE: I like that statement. It fits nicely into my feelings on how too much tech too early in the learning process can hinder good design.

did PE draw his projects himself? For those who believe handcraft has an impact on design, how does working vicariously through someone else's hands affect the work?

It was Socrates who first warned that literacy and the written word were an impediment to thought. Why do so many thinkers doubt the ingenuity of the mind to adapt in order to control our tools?

tduds your point has more to do with the students capacity as a designer and visualizer.......... lets say the person only imagines drawings as architecture (like Eisenman) then anything that makes drawings faster than they can imagine is a problem, since they are enamoured by shit they didnt imagine. .... on the other hand there are students who can imagine the architecture before pen hits paper or computers gets churning - they chase the vision until its correct. a computer that spits out 100 versions in a second is ideal for this individual since they are essentially waiting on proper representation.

"Tools provide possibilities, from these possibilities we discover advantages, advantages become a convenience, and convenience can too easily become a convention. There are alternatives: rather than supporting just the more efficient execution of conventional tasks, tools can encourage new ways of thinking. The creative use of a tool should include opportunities for the designer to embed his own logic with that tool. Such customization should be recognized as a key aspect of design creativity."

Robert Aish

I agree 100% with his polemic on technology.  At the more creative stage of architecture when your generating solutions it has a tendance to funnel one's creative thinking.  There's nothing more intimate than the immediacy of the had/mind connection, assuming you've had the opportunity and patience to train that connection. 

On the other hand, the rest of his speech is the same b.s. he's always peddled.  Especially  ..."Humanism (like making people happy) has never led to anything radical"...

I don't know if he's come across this in his study of human nature, but people like being happy.  If radical architecture does it for you, great, but I can count the times on one hand a client has asked for the radical over what pleases them.

And asking that people need to stop and concentrate on his buildings to properly understand them is straight from his old modernist playbook.  Of course it wouldn't hurt, but who has the time.  Should we label all the buildings with placards telling people to concentrate on this and that building if their architect thinks it would help? 

Glad to hear he is thinking a little more about others as he mellows with age, but unfortunately I think he feels his brand of radicalism is being left behind.  The avant guard is like Hollywood.  When your 15 minutes are over, they're over.  If it's always been about you, what is there to show for it after the candy coating wears off?  Cruel indeed.

I agree Thayer.

Great architecture needs to be able to operate on multiple levels at once.  If I stop in a building and concentrate on a particular configuration, and I see and learn something new, and it gives me another reason to want the building to be the way it is, that's great.  But if the building can't simultaneously reach out and have appeal for people who are simply "being there", letting the experience wash over them, then I don't think the design is fully successful.  

Olaf, I agree with what you are saying but find that the 100 iterations are more often produced by someone who doesn't know what they are looking for a priori than someone who does. 

Was reading Lebbeus Woods last night... Interesting to think of how technology fits in to architecture as commodity vs. architecture as body of research and knowledge. In the former technology exists just for efficiency and ease of operation (see Aish quote above) but in the latter it can become part of a feedback loop that creates new (and new forms of) human knowledge.

For me, this is the way forward for socially aware architecture - we cannot regress to the point that we are all building simple housing (as important as it is) a la Aravena, but should instead strive to create new forms of architecture and assemblies that address these issues through less direct but more intellectually durable methods.

Technology is only cruel when you don't know it and everybody else does - tah being said, Peter does have a point - with hand drawing you internalize and thus know the design - whereas with tech like BIM, you only memorize commands like WA for wall and everytime someone askes you about your project " well got to load the Revit model and see" - on my current project, I am hand sketching the drawings and lo and behold I know the design better - "hand is connected to the mind" - Maybe Peter is right after all and all too many of us are architechs instead of architects

I use my mind, hand, AND computer. And tablet. And camera, and the internet, and a printer, my phone, a big stack of old books, and...

Olaf: I guess the question then becomes, is that ability to imagine ingrained or trained? Or, maybe, does that imagination need to be harnessed and tempered by critical thought and judgment (which I believe is what design school should be teaching)?

You say "a computer that spits out 100 versions in a second is ideal for this individual since they are essentially waiting on proper representation."  But, I think, in the early stages, speeding up the time to get to 'proper representation' deprives the student of the discovery process of each iteration and the development of a sense of not just whether or not an iteration works but the opportunity to evaluate why that particular case does or doesn't work, and then an adaptation of the parameters to produce the next iteration.

This article has a particularly relevant paragraph: 

Contrast designing by hand with designing in the computer with a parametric model. A parametric approach works when the problem is well understood. The relationship between form and parameters increases in complexity as the model develops. Rebuilding a model to account for newly discovered relationships takes time. At early stages of design, however, the problem you’re solving is often loosely formed and not always understood. You learn what you’re trying to solve while you’re solving it. As such, you need to move fast and iterate quickly. You need to work abstractly. The precision demanded by the computer isn’t always conducive to this type of work.

http://www.archdaily.com/618422/are-computers-bad-for-architecture/

The type of rapid fire parametricism and auto-iteration that you're describing is great for seasoned designers who are able to evaluate critically based on their experience. But I think giving this power to an untrained novice can lead to an over-celebration of the tool to the detriment of the product.

Can the role of the educator be to actually teach students how to slow down and think while using these rapid fire procedures? 

Can it? How much of "learning" design is active instruction vs. self-discovery? 

I think that it varies based on the resources available at each program and their respective pedagogical approaches to technology. But I also think that throwing a wrench in the iteration machine is always important. In the "old days" it was how you used trace to build up and idea through by making a palimpsest keeping the trace to record significant moments, which has given way to versioning. But even with that, value/meaning can and should be part of the discussion.

Reflection and discovery need to are also pedagogical meaning the prompt itself needs to be something that challenges program from more than one angle. 

archanon and tduds.....my fews years of teaching were strictly the technical for achieving representation, so I was always essentially a consultant to a student who had an idea or needed to see if it worked. hand or computer is irrelevant - if you grew up on computers its the same arguement the pen people are making.........today i had a client meeting after spending hours modeling and rendering, after the client showed me images of the final slab for the walls and floors of the master bath- immediately in my mind I saw how great their selection was - the vision was great. i doubt pencil sketches can achieve that understanding of materiality. furthermore, rendering and modeling is not something a peon should be doing anymore, no better way to understand the details than to build it - sketch all you want, but until you build it virtually its estimation.........I would agree if you are not defining the parameters as every architect does at any stage of a project then whatever crap you are running in the computer is pointless and meaningless unless you were hoping for something great - which wouldnt be any different than a Frank Gehry Sketch or surrealism..............so with all that said I think Midlander brings up the most important crti of PE - did he really "draw" all that himself? did he really draw out every massive project he has worked on?

he said this eight years ago.

http://archinect.com/news/article/75371/vado-up-gears-again

"What exactly is the evidence that the "possibility of value judgment" has been taken away? And how exactly is such evidence manifest?

For Eisenman's damning statement to be true, you'd think there would at least be a load of evidence to back it up."

The evidence is that much of the architecture of the current avant garde is dominated by an empty formalism, nearly devoid of meaning.  Eisenman is offering a possible explanation for why this is so.

- The students are being taught by the current avant garde, and are using the same tools. Also...Eisenman has been around for quite a while... the current avant garde may in fact be the students he is referring to.

- An architecture employing a non-empty formalism would be able to convey understandable meaning beyond an abstract sculptural expressionism. 

so, again:

"What exactly is the evidence that the "possibility of value judgment" has been taken away? And how exactly is such evidence manifest?

For Eisenman's damning statement to be true, you'd think there would at least be a load of evidence to back it up."

The evidence is that much of the architecture of the current avant garde (and by extension, their students) is dominated by an empty formalism, nearly devoid of meaning.  Eisenman is offering a possible explanation for why this is so.

It seems to me that's exactly what he is saying.  I could be wrong, but it seems that he's pretty very clear about it:

"What are the values inherent in the production of these alternatives? It has no value in producing what I consider to be, let's say, "an architecture of resistance".  There is no algorithm for "resistance".

Since you clearly have some sort of extra-sensory insight into his mind, what, pray tell, is the meaning of Eisenman's statement, then?

...which is pretty much what I said. 

How does it feel to always be the smartest person in the room?  Awesome, I bet!
 

'easy to use technology' doesn't take away the possibility of value judgement.

sometimes we like to pull a single word out of a statement and focus on the choice of using that word to convey an idea.  in this case, i'm going to pull out the word "possibility."

i'm not afraid to admit that i am not the center of existence.  existentialism taught me that.  quondam and eke and et. al. are also not the center of existence, and i can't help but think that deep down, we all know that.

so when we talk about "possibility," i think we have to accept that there are things we don't know about.  also, there are things we do know about, but we don't understand. this happens to all of us, with no exception.

in that context, surely we can start to understand why it's unwise to make absolute statements such as "take away the possibility' when "possibility" is nearly limitless.

eiseneman is a fool if he really thinks possibility has been taken from any person due to the tool they chose.  as a fool, it's only fair that he's treated as a fool and thought of as a fool.

man are these preview renderings taking forever, kind of sad i depend on the computer to tell me about lighting, but then again its better than being esoteric about lighting where prof Lou Michel would ramble on qouting T.S. Eliots Prufrock - that was his traditionally best lecture - bring your parents he said!

women come and go talking of Michangelo

ye old men are old.

value is as we have it, the living , the active, the young, and quite often the new Avante-Garde

Curtkram-

I agree with your post, and I do think Eisenman is being pompous when he makes proclamations like that.  

I agree that the technology doesn't "take away the possibility of value judgement".

I'd change that statement to "the technology makes it easier for architects to avoid dealing with value judgements".

"the technology makes it easier for architects to avoid dealing with value judgements".

this is an accurate statement.

so when PE says resistance, what is it? (playing Devil's advocate to a degree, i could easily argue for technology on this)

"EKE what do you think about kwinter's who's afraid of formalism?"

I'm not afraid of formalism.  My work always includes a very carefully considered formal rationale.  But it is always in service human-based values. I believe that formalism should not be the exclusive, or even the most important goal of a thoughtful architecture.  

I grow old

I grow old

I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled

EKE hipsters do that.

And Prufrock.

That's me.  Hipster all the way. :)

i agree with eke and olaf and most all ninjas in that:

"the technology makes it easier for architects to avoid dealing with value judgements".

my reaction is, and of course always has been, that the brain is the most important tool we have.  to develop the brain to communicate through pencil is what us old folks are familiar with, because that's what existed back when we wore a younger person's clothes.  the times they are a' changin, and that's not a bad thing. 

#IChing

So again, it's the responsibility of the individual, or the educator to find ways to slow down the though process while using that devilish thing "the technology."

But when did it become such a bad thing? To use a historical term when was the period of significance? Was it when the fist photo collages were made? What is when reproduction was made more accessible with photostats? Or was it that when Ivan Sutherland first introduced Sketchpad to the world (and similar projects), or Roger Tomlinson's CGIS? Personally I would say that if it's the ease by which we can analyze  conditions based the use of a computer, I'll go with WWII.

Also, given that humans are still not original and always look back to figure out what to make for the future (how can I do that one better), could it be that PE's influence was so widespread it was the grounds for this search for nurbs surfaces and complex mesh patterning- so that he is his unravelling- and that perhaps now it would indeed be humanism that would be the radical gesture? Heresy, I know.

Prufrock, if you ever have the opportunity to be interviewed use the cruelty free tool known as a lint roller on your black sweater before your video session begins.

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

________marc yes

"...so that he is his unravelling- and that perhaps now it would indeed be humanism that would be the radical gesture? Heresy, I know."

 some old men go to church more towards the end.

I think by resistance perhaps he means you need resistance to not short circuit, so to speak?

Eslewhere, I responded in this way:

"Neither is his point to fetishize sketching in itself as a tool to sell architecture or to simplify it (this is coming from Eisenman after all). Some comments here interpret him positivistically (selling a project through a sketch). Whether you like what he does with his sketches, they are not meant to resolve and simplify but on the contrary, to mediate problematically and to distance the architecture from ...well, something that could be so much more direct. Again, this is Eisenman within a particular tradition. Personally, I don't see all the 'crises' pointed out by one famous architect or the other (peter, rem in another post) as being scientific. I mean, until there is a scientific study correlates sketching with architectural quality (and how does one deine that scientifically), none of these opinions are applicable across the board and are to be viewed more as crises of particular worldviews than crises of the world (of diverse architectures)."

"1. One of the points was that people were choosing to interpret positivistically, and im my opinion erroneously, the role of sketching according to Eisenman."

"2. I could care less about the platitudes of holding different opinions; my point here is that every now and then a famous architect pontificates on a certain crisis of Architecture (with a capital) where the crisis only exists within her or his worldview. Its not about difference of opinion although, of course, that in itself is evident as a given. Rather, it is to underline the need to announce a crisis or a great problem (again, koolhaas, eisenman, gehry), a fashionable trend in making a myth out of a singular problem and a singular practice of architecture (whether globally or locally). This need to mark imagined crises and problems is quite ...pathologically self absorbed in a way. To add, there are more important things than these imagined crises construed within intangible aesthetic(or aesthetizing) ideologies: afordable housing, healthy and sustainable living environments and so on. "
 

why mention gehry, koolhaas and now eisenman.

 middle age architectural crises? (given that architects are still young in their thirties and fourties).

On a different plane, and in a funny way, for the conservatives who laud out loud architecture as craftsmanship, good old fashioned marriage between 'logos' and 'techne', Revit makes for a great tool.

I think talking old vs new tools (analogical vs digital) is now...old. There is, however, a much more novel space for talking about the difference between conservative tools and exploratory tools (on either side of the looking glass) . And there is nothing wrong, inherently, with either tendencies I think. The extreme of one can turn into the other - like in architecture itself, ex minimalism (really which is conservative, literally) driven by an acute and compulsive desire to hide or make disappear.

chatter of clouds, most architects got the material librarian's version of minimalism. I always had a problem with that compulsive material minimalism of decorative interiors and exteriors. However, minimalism is a reductivist object, a manifestation of a maximum idea. Maybe you meant this, “clarity is maximal; the means used are minimal.”

I like, "I think talking old vs new tools (analogical vs digital) is now...old" and if I may add, "boring and not generative."

Orhan, that is not what I meant. For my part, I did not generalize on what minimalism is or is not but rather chose a particular direction/way of seeing that may well be opposed to the view  you say most architects have of minimalism (which is not a position I can support or criticize).That is of course another topic and it was just an example by association only.

some thougts:

perhaps then the issue is what sort of value judgements and who's dismissing whose values? i can see where Eisenman is being dismissive. And, if i recall correctly, I recall someone on the other side ,Schumacher, being quite dismissive.

is it right to say that the plethora of choices - specifically within the parametric (algorithmic) architecture- presents us with the functional variations of the very same from an architectonic point of view (structures being stretched to match points/lines/surfaces and vice versa)?

and from the above, this reminds me of something Alejandro Zaera-Polo once said : We should practice the art of modulating,maneuvering within a very restricted field; understand the effect on the swarm that small changes of direction may have, rather than embracing vision and originality as our operative mode.

 Of course, the context is architectural academia rather than the profession but still I think it bears pertinence here.