i wish i'd said that

Searle wasn't criticizing Derrida's work as philosophy, he was criticizing it as thinking.

And the only way I was conflating Derrida and Lacan is in the sense that the work of both is obscurantist, promoting false profundities. There was a time when I cared about figuring out what they were saying, before I concluded (for myself) that it was empty word-play that had no value in the real world.

I agree, Cowerd, that we can like what we like. Hey, Derrida's thinking never hurt anyone, right? Except maybe in the sense that a certain architect was under its sway for a time, and produced some fairly horrendous buildings that continue to clutter potentially nice cities like Columbus and Cincinnati.

This is where theory met the pavement, so to speak.

"...anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."

I actually like to read this stuff as prose, it's not necessarily supposed to make sense in way that Searle seems to want it to. Nobody's building an argument like Plato, it's more about the style and texture and the way it makes shapes in your mind. You don't have to agree with the implied conclusions or even any of the base arguments to get something out of it by just going along for the ride.

the nonexistence of god doesn't mean man is free.

Hi Vado!

my beingness salutes your realness

Yeah, I agree sevensixfive. Some of it makes for interesting literature, and it can be quite beautiful in that sense. It generates images and ideas that can be compelling...

But Eisenman advanced it as a manifesto, and specifically a manifesto about architecture. That's more what I'm critical of -- that for a time, deconstructive thinking became a system, a kind of grand narrative. Which is strange because it was railing against grand narratives and totalities itself.

i still think for the purposes of a compare/contrast paper a benchmark of some sort needs to be established. the fact that e and z are approaching their work from different viewpoints isn't really enough. you need something to draw them together and to separate them. maybe you ought to write your paper about bernini and borromini instead...afterall eisenman mentions borromini (and the bourgeoisie) in that video with wolfman prix...

"Response to "Fabrizio's: Criticism and Response", a review of Fabrizio's Villa Nova Restaurant on Second Avenue.

To the Editors:

What Mr. Plotnick fails to take into account in discussing Mario Spinelli's fettuccine is, of course, the size of the portions, or, to put it more directly, the quantity of the noodles. There are obviously as many odd-numbered noodles as all the odd­ and even-numbered noodles combined. (Clearly a paradox.) The logic breaks down linguistically, and consequently Mr. Plotnick cannot use the word "fettuccine" with any accuracy. Fettuccine "becomes a symbol; that is to say, let the fettuccinee = x. Then a = x/b (b standing for a con­stant equal to half of any entree). By this logic, one would have to say: the fettuccine is the lin­guine! How ridiculous. The sentence clearly can't be stated as "The fettuccine was delicious." It must be stated as "The fettuccine and the linguine are not the rigatoni." As Godel declared over and over, "Everything must be translated into logical calculus before being eaten."

Prof. Word Babcocke
Massachusetts Institute of Technology"

the ‘Dutch have a very open-minded culture which you find now in their architecture. It is the opposite of what I do, going into the earth and embracing it, craftsmanship and all this bullshit… These are the two extremes. Maybe time will tell, but the appreciation of looking at a quality thing will always come back… Not everything will be Dutch!'

Zumthor goes to the essence of things

I think the most interesting paper would look at the ways Eisenman and Zumthor are similar. Compare Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe to something by Zumthor that reveals a representation to something beyond itself. Zumthor praises "a building that is being itself, being a building, not representing anything, just being." But then he also says:

"When I concentrate on a specific site or place for which I am going to design a building, when I try to plumb its depths, its form, its history, and its sensuous qualities, images of other places start to invade this process of precise observation: images of places I know and that once impressed me, images of ordinary or special places places that I carry with me as inner visions of specific moods and qualities; images of architectural situations, which emanate from the world of art, or films, theater or literature."

So Zumthor's imagery is at least influenced by imagery from other cultural sources. At what point is the imagery representative of something beyond itself? I can't find a good example, but there are probably instances where the power of Zumthor's images comes from their association with or representation of something else. The Holocaust Memorial definitely is powerful because we know what it is representing.

Then again, wasn't the point of Eisenman's houses that they were self-referential? Are Zumthor's houses self-referential or really not referential at all? Now I'm getting confused...

A couple of thoughts about Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial:

It strikes me as very similar to another work in Berlin, just around the corner, the ETA Hoffman Garden that Libeskind designed at the back of the Jewish Museum. In fact, Eisenman's project seems almost plaigarized from it. Has this issue come up at all?

Also, in the early designs, I know Richard Serra was involved. Later, however, it was Eisenman who was getting all the press. The elementality of it seems directly out of Serra. Any sense of what role he played, vis a vis Eisenman?

Another interesting paper could be about Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial and Zumthor's Gestapo Museum, both controversial, both in Berlin.

the hoffman garden was designed by Müller and Knippschild, landscape architects in Berlin, and is conceptually different than the Serra/Eisenman piece.

The Serra/Eisenman piece is much closer to an installation that Serra did at the old Tate in the early 90s, when he represented the volume of a wing of the Tate as a condensed mass of steel.

careful with that axe eugene

nice find brooklynboy.

though i've heard or read the "i refused the dublin client" story at least 6 times now. i think it's as much about building myth/hype than anything. zumthor is very good at hyping himself, or finding ways to have others hype him. for instance, limiting a book release so that fans have to visit the works themselves (or pay inflated prices for copies zumthor sells on ebay)

in that respect, there may be some similarities to eisenman.

a theory of not-representation is still a theory of representation. perhaps there is a relationship to the way zumthor's non-self-promotion is actually a very canny form of self-promotion?

Libeskind gave me and a few others a tour of the Jewish Museum in Berlin a few years back. He seemed extremely proud of the Hoffman Garden, and even explained his narrative about how it represented the way the buildings of Manhattan rocked on the horizon when he first visited America, how one of the columns had soil from Jerusalem in it, etc. Because of how much it seemed to mean to him, I had assumed he designed it.

Was the whole garden designed by Muller and Knippschild, then inserted into the Libeskind project? Or did he come up with the idea, and they were just the landscape architect on the job?

It may be conceptually different from the Serra/Eisenman piece, but it's FORMALLY very similar.

Come to think of it, at an installation at Yale in 2000, Libeskind built a full-size wood version of the Hoffman Garden in the gallery of the A+A. I doubt he would have done that if another architect had designed it.

From what I understand the garden was originally an open competition. Libeskind didn't like any of the entries, and so designed it himself

I don’t know much about John Searle, but, as far as I know, he stands on a totally different philosophical ground from Derrida. Both of them have different viewpoint about the world that cannot be compatible each other and both of them are not the truth. Thus, it is not relevant to criticize Derrida with Searle’s quote. It’s like criticizing French with English. Each philosophy should be criticized on its own logic. De-constructist Architecture has been failed because it has been turned out representative. They said the world doesn’t work in a representative way, but their architecture represented Derrida’s texts. It’s kinds of stupid.

There are, in phenomenology, some different positions from de-constructivism about representations. In phenomenology, unlike Being, things are just inert. At best, things are practico-inert. Thus, thing cannot represents something else.

Of course, in phenomenology, there are thresholds they cannot explain. However, architects don’t need to explain the thresholds with words, but we can show through architecture. This is the reason that Zumthor’s architecture can be better than Eisenman’s words.

here i'll give you a free paper idea no charge.... compare and contrast frank gehry's work of the 70's early 80's with op artists such as ken noland. you may be surprised at what you find...

subject meet/meat object

re: Berlin Museum (jewish museum) by Libeskind.

the 'ETA Hoffman garden' was not designed by Mueller and Knippschild. rather they 'implemented' the concept design from Libeskind.

the garden idea comes from Libeskind's project for the Venice Biennale of 1985, for the "writing machine" project. effectively the columns of the writing machine became the vertical columns of the garden.

it is the ETA Hoffman garden because Hoffman worked in the building next door which is the original Berlin Museum. previously it was a government building for the Prussian government - Hoffman was a bureaucrat working there.

this was all included in the competition submission of 1989, and there were no landscape architects on he competition. the landscape architects came in after long after the project was awarded and provided the documentation and realisation of the concept by Libeskind.


i agree with SYP - why would one choose Searle as the relevant critic of Derrida? this would be like assuming that Dick Cheney is the most relevant authority to assess the politics of Barack Obama.

and just because one doesn't like to read or has trouble reading Derrica does not make his work "obscurantism" - no matter how many times you use the words as a term of accusation.

And yet we live in a world that isn't completely relativistic, and in which intelligent individuals have a right to criticize each other. Barack Obama certainly has criticisms of Dick Cheney, and probably vice versa.

John Searle, as a person who thinks about ideas for a living, has every right to criticize Derrida. I, as an individual with a perspective different than Searle's, nonetheless agree with his logic on Derrida.

Should only Nazis have been allowed to criticize Nazism, since they were "the most relevant authority"? Should none of us be allowed to criticize Dow Chemical's environmental policies, since we don't have degrees in chemistry? No.

Things that people do and say and write have impacts in the real world, on people who might know nothing of their thinking. Therefore, we all have a right to criticize Derrida. We're all "relevant authorities," in a sense.

"Each philosophy should be criticized on its own logic."

Movements in philosophy or architecture or anywhere else happen explicitly because one person rejects the logic of another.

Peter Zumthor happened, to some extent, because of a series of rejections of what had gone before. Including a rejection somewhere along the line of the shallow, cheaply detailed, obscurantist, Derrida-influenced work of Peter Eisenman.

there's a nice bit in adam shaw's heidegger for architects that talks about the big MHs adoption and influence amongst various architects, zumthor being one of them, although who would have figured that martin had a soft spot for scandi (proto ikean if you want to be nasty) modernism??? get in there alvar! sadly heidegger did not have similar hots for zumthor, the love was avowedly one way. man, heidegger in ikea via alvar aalto and wembley park, that's an essay i'd like to read.

are you writing this essay because you feel a certain obligation to understand the general history and theory or because you feel there's a link or conflict in need of investigation? i ask because i just finished my dissertation and i started out 80% of the former, 20% of the latter and ended up the other way around by submission. in this way i managed to feel increasingly deranged and depressed about the prospect of writing anything coherent. doing it the other way around, ie start with something concrete, will save you lots of despiar....spare squares and the squires that loved them?

crap, *adam sharr*

You really are fixated on that word "obscurantist" aren't you.

it is always possible to find someone who opposes someone or something and use them as your "authority". that doesn't really make them as an authority.

if you really think Derrida is an "obscurantist", prove it. show us an example of something he has written that is not intelligible to a little serious examination.

First page of "The Post Card", and not even one of his more difficult sentences:

"I had then advanced the proposition of another logic. Or so the malignant might say or translate it, it being no longer a question of "logic," and even less a "proposition" here, for the reasons I will give. The issue rather is to rebind [relier] but precisely by means of the analysis of binding, nexum, desmos or stricture, the question of life death to the question of the position (Setzung), the question of positionality in general, of positional (oppositional or juxtapositional logic, of the theme or thesis."

I'm not questioning whether anyone can understand this stuff, I'm questioning whether at its core it's meaningful, or just pablum. If one sentence takes so much effort to understand, and the payoff is trite or uninteresting, is it really worth it to read?

Wouldn't you rather be designing buildings, or writing something that can touch the masses? People who read and understand Derrida make a career out of it, and like to tell people about how they understand Derrida. Once, I was attracted to Derrida because it made me feel smart to read his stuff.

But what if, at the core, after all that work reading him, what he has to say isn't that interesting? You have to at least entertain the possibility that his theory is meaningless.

What you mean is that his theory (treating it all as one homogenous block for the moment) is wrong. That's quite different from saying it's meaningless. Saying someone's argument is meaningless is an old and violent strategy for refusing even to concede that your opponent is a reasonable interlocutor. Derrida might be wrong about all kinds of things, but I don't accept that his work is meaningless.

Good point, agfa8x.

But I don't even necessarily think it's wrong—I just think it has pretensions to being more important than it actually is. I can agree with the whole "positionality" argument, etc, but at it's core (stripped of all the confusing language) what he's saying isn't that original. Similar positions were advanced perhaps more clearly by Nietzsche or even Foucault. Derrida smeared his thinking with a layer of greasy verbiage and twisted locutions that rendered it...not meaningless maybe...but incomprehensible?

And thus meaningless to the commonplace reader.

Since when did Derrida (or Heidegger,or Nietzsche) ever profess to writing for the 'commonplace' reader?

it is interesting in this topic that there is an inherent placing of positive value on Zumthor - (real, material-based, experience, craft, details, building) versus a negation of Eisenman - (abstract, theoretical, non-experience, lack of craft, writing and drawings not building).

that Zumthor is aligned with Heidegger and Eisenman is aligned with Derrida.

what then to make of the fact that Derrida comes right out of Heidegger? that both owe a great deal to Nietzsche? in what way is Heidegger easier to read (and therefore more easily comprehensible) than Derrida?

or perhaps the fact that Tschumi (and a few others we could name) is also deeply indebted to Derrida? is the work invalid because of this relationship or is it really just a question of what is good or bad about their work? Tschumi, also 'theoretical, abstract, and not based on the materiality of building' has had none of the problems in building that Eisenman had in his early projects. surely the question lies elsewhere.

in other words, there seems to be this very strange causal relationship being implied between particular philosophical positions that architects align themselves with and their ability to produce architecture. it is neither that direct nor that causal.

tschumi is swiss, went to the eth.

i would imagine that means he can put togethor a building.

libeskind and zaha seem to be able to put togethor buildings, though the merits of them can be debated...

You yourself said it:

"it is interesting in this topic that there is an inherent placing of positive value on Zumthor - (real, material-based, experience, craft, details, building) versus a negation of Eisenman - (abstract, theoretical, non-experience, lack of craft, writing and drawings not building)."

For me, architecture is about putting buildings together in a meaningful way. It's about the experience of those buildings when you're in them. How a person talks about the building is secondary to the building itself: the building is its own proof.

Eisenman's career was largely built on his ability to talk about and canoodle with certain continental thinkers, mainly Derrida. His buildings were somehow supposed to be expressions of a "decentered" kind of thinking, almost as an afterthought. Colliding spaces, shifty grids, weird pastels.

With Zumthor, the buildings and their experience are fundamental and come first. If he cites Heidegger, it is because Heidegger's philosophy reinforces his sense of dwelling and engagement with the world. Zumthor uses Heidegger to reinforce what he already believes and the sense of dwelling that his architecture already represents.

With Eisenman, when he isn't there to explain his buildings himself using strong doses of French quasiphilosophy, they fall apart. Quite literally.

But maybe the problem isn't so much Derrida's thinking or writing, which perhaps has its place in the literary theory departments of the world. Maybe it's that architects tried to force-inject it into their own discipline, as form.

By the way, Tschumi has produced some pretty clunky buildings too.

write up on zumthor v. h&dem by irina davidovici

It occurs to me this is the most interesting iteration of the discussion that crops up every other thread -

In its other forms:
Starchitecture vs. other styles of firms
Which grad school should I, or my dog, go to?
Is it worth it to go into Architecture?


All essentially the same question - to what extent do we value Delight in relation to Firmness & Commodity? What worth is the grandest aim of Architecture if it is built and does not function properly or worse yet if it never gets built?

thanks for that link holz. good reading.

i thought so, also. i'm always up for finding interesting and relevant articles.

god i hope i'm never associated w/ accademia...

the essay by Davidovici is nicely informative and useful. thanks for that.

if you speak to any philosopher with a serious engagement with Heidegger, you will find that they would characterize the "use" of Heidegger by architects like Zumthor and Frampton as being just as superficial, just as reductive and clichéd as the charge being leveled against Eisenman and his "use" of Derrida.

there is considerable opposition in continental philosophy to the idea that Heidegger has somehow proposed an 'essentialist' return to truth and pure authenticity. as with most philosophy and literature, it is almost always possible to construct a position based on a few texts, and to ignore those texts that would propose an alternative reading. this is what makes Derrida so interesting in relation to his own understanding and close reading of Heidegger - that Derrida's scepticism to notions of 'universal' truths (such as material truth) or to timeless authenticity is not a repudiation of Heidegger's thought, but rather an extension of it.

Eisenman uses theory/philosophy to provoke or to project work before the act. Zumthor uses philosophy to confirm or justify work after the act.

this conversation needs booze. its 8:49 am by the way.

I'm already drinking.....

But one could argue that Zumthor's work would still exist without Heidegger, or without any reference to an outside thinker.

Whereas Eisenman's architecture couldn't have existed without Derrida. And, incidentally, Eisenman's use of Derrida is also extremely superficial.

I think it's invariably superficial when architects start using philosophy to justify what are ultimately purely formal moves. For a time, everyone in every school was talking about the Deleuzian fold -- and designing buildings that were all about...what?....folds! Deleuze didn't mean "the fold" as a purely formal concept, but it was trendy to talk about him.

It meant you were in with the architecturo-linguistic High Priesthood. Sort of like a passcode: throw a couple of Derridean or Deleuzian phrases in there and win a wink and nod from Kipnis and Kwinter.

there is a great article in "Praxis #8"

http://www.praxisjournal.net/

- 10 questions about Program posed to Tschumi and Koolhaas - where Tschumi refers to an article by Eisenman called "postfunctionalism."

Essentially Eisenman rejects program as a generator of form. IMO, you have to expend more energy justifying a purely formalist design - and I think this is what Eisenman spent years trying to do.

well u could have referred to leibniz rather than deleuze and really shown your chops for bs'ing...

Yes, you are right, farwest1.
We can criticize someone’s opinion with others’.

However, if you want to criticize Derrida with Searle,
you need to show how logically perfect Searle is because there is no guarantee for that Searle is the truth.
And then, you can criticize Derrida with the proven Searle.

Isn’t it much easier to criticize just Derrida on his own logic than to criticize both of Searle and Derrida?


And, I agree with your opinion about "deleuze's fold". It's funny than any other comedies.

By the way,
vado retro, I am sure that farwest1 already knows connections between deleuze and leibniz because he knows deleuze's fold.

Anyway, it was a nice talk from which many opinions were coming.

i think eisenman's work could have been exactly the same without any of the variety of text-based influences he spouts. he started out by learning from terragni, then learned to manipulate the 'rational' in a particularly mannered way. i'd almost say that he had a predisposition to attempt this kind of messing with stuff and that the texts he cited to support the work were JUST support for something he wanted to do anyway. eisenman's work comes from a very intentional, analytical, and particular method of composition that has very little to do with what he reads, imo.

goddamn, this is a great thread...

by the way i am SURE we've had this conversation BeFoRe

look at his house series and at the columbus oh convention center and the uc daap, and then reflect: did eisenman learn more from derrida or picasso?

thats duchamp

yes i am SURE we HaVe!