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Eisenman Lecture

chaptertwo

if anyone is in the area, eisenman will be speaking at U. of Cincinnati on the 11th as part of a three-day long symposium celebrating, or at least contemplating the 10 year anniversary of the Aronoff Center for Art and Design which he designed. The topic of his lecture is not definite, but the main event will be the Q and A session where you might see a signature architect squirm a good deal as he handles questions on the building around him.

there are also several panel discussions with notable guests.

http://daap.uc.edu/symposium/

 
Oct 9, 06 2:57 pm
vado retro

I LOVED POTEMKIN THAT WAS A GREAT MOVIE!

Oct 9, 06 3:04 pm  · 
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WonderK

I'm super excited about this. I'm hoping someone asks him why it looks like somebody peed on the parapets.

Oct 9, 06 3:42 pm  · 
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Chili Davis

Damn. I have class Wed. night and Cinci is like a 4 hour drive from Detroit.

Oct 9, 06 3:44 pm  · 
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chaptertwo

seems like the type of thing to take off class to do. I just did that a week ago to go to Cranbrook incidently. Its is officially a day trip.

Oct 9, 06 3:55 pm  · 
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AP

cool. there was an episode of Charlie Rose (previously linked on the Channel Archinect thread) that was held in the Aranoff on the occassion of its opening. Eisenmen invited all kinds of people to a panel discussion - Greg Lynn, Michael Graves, Ralph Lerner, Henry Cobb, Sarah Whiting, Donna Robertson, Sanford Kwinter, David Childs, Bernard Tschumi, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, Stanley Tigerman...it would be interesting to watch that video before going to the re-union party. You may be able to cull some info from the video and craft some pointed questions/criticisms...

Oct 9, 06 4:07 pm  · 
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chaptertwo

sweet thanks

Oct 9, 06 4:19 pm  · 
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mdler

i hope he gets some strange resperatory disease from all of the mold that is growing in his building as a result of him being a shitty architect

Oct 9, 06 4:25 pm  · 
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mdler

i hope he gets some strange resperatory disease from all of the mold that is growing in his building as a result of him being a shitty architect

Oct 9, 06 4:26 pm  · 
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5burro

Eisenmann is notorius for underpaying his employees

Oct 9, 06 8:15 pm  · 
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Queen of England

Doesn't he design armchairs, not buildings?

He is the architect equivalent of foot fungus, Libeskind got it in Berlin, now Zaha has it in Naples.

Oct 9, 06 8:39 pm  · 
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vado retro

somebody save me a seat so i can not show up!

Oct 9, 06 9:30 pm  · 
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treekiller

is it a celebrity death match? who is pete wrassling?

Oct 9, 06 9:34 pm  · 
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notone-co

looking at the video, doesn't the new symphosium seem a little lack-luster?

Oct 9, 06 10:00 pm  · 
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notone-co

to clarify, video of the first symphosium

Oct 9, 06 10:01 pm  · 
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chaptertwo

yeah thats what i was thinking.

Oct 9, 06 10:09 pm  · 
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archtopus

The organizers of the event considered re-convening the Charlie Rose panel, but realized they didn't have the budget for that. You can thank the State of Ohio's yearly budget for higher education for that.

Oct 9, 06 10:51 pm  · 
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chaptertwo

maybe next year

Oct 9, 06 11:25 pm  · 
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WonderK

so what did you guys think? I used to like his methods but this lecture made me realize that he is an architectural theorist, not an architect, and he just hires architects to finish his fancy work for him. Not to sound spiteful or anything, I think he's just obsessed with this idea of overlapping grids and he's a bit like a mad scientist.....like it's a problem he keeps trying to work out over and over again and it's consumed him. Perhaps that's a bit dramatic, but he's a bit like a broken record.

Oct 11, 06 10:31 pm  · 
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vado retro

i heard he has a bunch of batteries in his basement running his computers and toasters and his automatic bowtie necktiers. he is totally off the grid, or so i heard...

Oct 11, 06 10:42 pm  · 
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chaptertwo

well he didnt have on a bowtie.. but i was disappointed in that he didnt seem to have anything new to say. although he did manage to yell at the crowd for the few computers that were out right when he started speaking.

Yeah he presented his project for pompei's train stations and it was about connecting grids just like his old work. I could be premature in saying that he was repetitious and far from revolutionary. i expected more. the q and a was 2 questions and never touched on the building he was speaking in. He broke the ice by saying that he was surprised the building was still standing after 10 years as several of his buildings arent.

Oct 12, 06 2:45 am  · 
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WonderK

I missed that comment. That's just wrong.

Oct 12, 06 8:47 am  · 
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word!

he did not sell me on his new process... as chaptertwo mentioned it seemed like it was just the same way of working from his previous projects.
His process also seems very arbitrary, for example when they start playing with raised and lowered pieces of the grid, and which pieces become building, which become paved over spaces, it all seems haphazard. He never struck me as a good architect in the (design sense) but as a theorist.

My favorite part was in the middle of his lecture when a cell phone rang...
I was just waiting for him to explode into a fit of rage, unfortunately it was David Niland's cellphone (his old friend from yesteryear...)

Oct 12, 06 11:03 am  · 
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notone-co

I thought his rant about laptops was great. Proved his level of “prick” but also he seriousness about the lecture at hand.

Most of the people that have those out are doing other random bullshit anyway. They should be paying attention to the hour lecture. Go beyond anyone’s opinions on Peter Eisenman, but he is a smart guy and I feel is a interesting teacher and lecturer.

UC, even though it is a public school, still has had an interesting group of speakers over the past five years. Most of these lectures are pitifully attended, with most of the people being forced to go by there professors.

I was in Boston when Ando spoke at Harvard, and they had a ton of extra lecture halls open to watch and they were all pretty much full.

B.V. Dosi came to speak, who worked with Louis Kahn on most if not all of his Indian projects. This is an extra rare lecture, he happened to be in the area and was of his former workers is one of my old classmates here at UC. There were maybe 45-50 people there, and that could be high estimate.

That is super disappointing.

Put your laptop away!

Charles Jencks, Friday at 4:00 pm, hope to see everyone in town tomorrow.

Oct 12, 06 9:07 pm  · 
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5

Pissing and moaning about the building is a habit of the those privileged enough to study in it. Go and have a walk through the halls of any brickitecture collegiate-style building on any campus and you'lll immediately appreciate the aronoff building. According to Gehry, (re: the Aronoff)"The best thing about Peter's buildings is the insane spaces he ends up with. All that other stuff, the philosophy and all, is just bullshit as far as I'm concerned."

Of course it would have been better if it had really been done in italian tile (the plan before the budget suprise), but you have to appreciate the risk the administration took and the abmition of those involved in plotting that outrageous 3d grid on GPS in the early 90s. EIFS, so what. What's worse is the jackass students that thought it was fund to play golf with the ballast from the roof and punctured all of the surfaces. The BFA freshmen are like elephants in a china shop.

Anyway, I went to Cincinnati and I though the building was very good. Despite its shortcomings, it's miles ahead of just about every other building out there. It really wasn't upstaged on campus, either, until the Morphosis building opened.

Also, I'm no longer in Cincy, but my men on the ground tell me he apologised for using notes, and blamed it on his alzheimers?!. Was that a joke?

Oct 12, 06 9:28 pm  · 
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chaptertwo

no one laughed... because no one knew if it was a joke or not. I think it was serious. he said it was like early stages or something and that if he didnt use the notes he would forget what he was going to say.. who knows.

Oct 12, 06 11:07 pm  · 
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archtopus

Fortunately, I had to do some Solar Decathalizing, so I left right after he said that architecture can't solve any problems. I'd seen him a couple years ago at Harvard while on co-op, and I gather he didn't say anything tantalizingly different from my previous encounter with his piffle. Frankly, while in his own theoretical world he's brilliant, he's (more importantly) entirely self-referential and irrelevant. And according to my thesis chair, Elizabeth Riorden (who's heavily involved with archaeology) he got the history of Pompeii completely wrong.

Sheila Kennedy today was great as always, though . . .

Oct 13, 06 12:07 am  · 
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5

indexing the arbitrary

Oct 13, 06 7:50 am  · 
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207moak

I made "Eisen-goggles" in undergrad - really helped my design sensibilities.
To make your own just take some grid troffer diffusers

Cut 2 10" x 4" sections
Cut 2 6" sticks of Basswood
Overlay grid sections and rotate indexically.
Insert basswood sticks.
Put them on your face and your ready to create.
(Remove your regular glasses if applicable)

Oct 13, 06 4:22 pm  · 
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dml955i

I had the pleasure of attending an Eisenman lecture years ago in a Charles Moore building. Now that was high-comedy... He was noticeably uncomfortable.

Oct 13, 06 5:40 pm  · 
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