i have always thought that the columbus (oh) convention center is a brilliant solution to the seemingly intractable problem of a huge convention center sited on a pedestrian-scaled street. and it's built pretty well, too, as far as i can tell.

...and i mention it because, while zumthor may have been willing to take on a design school or a holocaust memorial, i don't think he would have even bothered to attempt to solve this.

how bout a design school memorial? now theres a project for ya.

Maybe this all comes down to taste. I find the convention center pretty tacky, with it's meaningless adornments and weird pastels and blank walls.

I'm not saying it's worse than the everyday big box development, but I don't know that it's much better either.

sorry FW1. i should have twigged.

i like brooklynboys take; that Eisenman and Zumthor are not so different on several levels. it always seems beneficial to start off looking at an oppositional proposition by inverting it to look that in fact the oppositions actually have a lot of similarities. it helps to stop the "arms race" of oppositional postures.

yes, the convention center is tacky. i guess i was trying NOT to talk taste, but solutions and what arises from a certain theoretical/attitudinal approach.

until columba, i wasn't yet convinced that zumthor could pull off a truly urban project. up until then what we'd seen had been object buildings in the classic modern tradition. and they weren't necessarily solutions to contemporary issues so much as material and spatial studies for which zumthor got to invent the criteria. tabula rasa. finally at columba he had to grapple with a city, with existing stuff, and with some level of programmatic complexity. and he did it beautifully.

what eisenman has been doing for years, on the other hand, is cultivating attempts (perhaps therapy-driven, as his lectures indicate) to make his projects hug the landscape or be absorbed into a streetscape or take otherwise ambivalent - as opposed to heroic - roles in their environments. colors aside (and i agree that his 90s palette was pretty horrible).

he started with this back in the late 80s/early 90s during the time of the wexner (absorb adjacent building, rebuild missing building, bridge between them with a sort of non-building that's sort of above and sort of below ground) and his 'weak form' lectures. before koolhaas started proposing non-phallic skyscrapers, eisenman was already on the case, proposing to break down the authority of the straight tall monument through introduction of wobbly twisted soft loops.

i'd rather this NOT become a discussion of taste because what's great about this conversation is the way we can begin to verbalize/analyze how design intention and personal preoccupations with these guys inevitably informs their built stuff.

hey guys its springtime and i think the colors of those buildings are very appropriate to the season. maybe those colors come from the preppy wardrobe that peter sports. perhaps that is a paper topic...compare and contrast the architects choice of wardrobe with their design philosophies...

what ideas actually trickle down into the offices where we (and by we you know who you are) work???

i quite like steven's approach to the topic. there is a choice that can be made in architecture, if you are practicing it in a certain rarified atmosphere. you get to decide if the architecture you produce will be part of the current society or if it will be detached and above it all.

when palladio and other great rennaiscence architects were working that was not a question. of course architecture was not for the masses. it might be used by them, but it was not designed for them. heaven forbid.

then something happened on the way to the market. and that is where the wee little piggies...um, wee little peters come in. the first littel peter decided he would make art. and fuck the world for a bugger. the second littel peter decided he would make art too, but that the fucked world was maybe sorta an interesting place to start...

which peter is which? well, sometimes they can be interchanged, but really the big Z is not interested in reality or context or place except when it is a stage for the perfect things he will set down on it. which is great i would say, really great. but in some ways i wonder, is that it? all this perfection and the people be damned? what does peter number two have to say?

i think he is saying that something happened between borromini and sam walton, and that was democritisation of space...and that means all bets are off about what is real what is true and that semantics is now a nice metaphor for everything because it is a field in which meaning can be honed and parsed and split so finely no one knows what is truth anymore...and that sounds like how we live, most of us. in an endless grey.

some politicans try to be certain. some religious leaders certainly act as though they are, and then pay the consequences later for acting on their belief. to me the real progress is in the grey zones, where uncertainty is the rule. i for one like it there and am glad that the world is one in which i get to have an opinion at all. cuz worlds of certainty are ones where dissent is not allowed, and where my place would be at the bottom. that is why universal truth, real solid grounds for judgement of anything at all, is frightening. also appealling.

i understand that, and to be truthful, i like peter Z's work. it is beautiful. it is also hermetic and in the end frankly irrelevant. Peter E's work, though equally pretensious, is unexpectedly accessable. he takes on the messy world, even wallows in it. perhaps in a bad way, but we are living in a world where wallowing might lead to new solutions to the new problems. the old solutions of peter Z can't do that. he is in an eddy of his own making, swirling in circles adjacent to the main event, but not really of it. which is cool. but if all architects did that we would be utterly and absurdly useless. so i prefer peter E. even if i do think his architecture looks complete rubbish. engagement is important and for me is a valid starting point for critiquing architecture, well ahead of durability and style...

i can of course only think about this stuff over a drink...which is why my screen seems to be slightly blurry at the moment...

Thanks again for all the thoughts & contributions here, I have learned more in this post than I could have ever hoped. There is much to explore here.
Steven's approach - the building that can be plunked down anywhere vs. the building that is of it's site, culture, etc. is kind of where I was coming from when I was considering this topic for my paper. I was initially looking to go deep into the approach of two architects and using them as foils to explore the theory or reasoning behind these approaches.
It just now occurs to me that perhaps a broader, more universal take on these two camps - expanding the number of players - would be both easier and more approachable from both a reading & researching perspective.
It certainly doesn't change the core notion that it's a subjective value judgment, or that in a case to case basis, one is just as valid as the other. I'm not afraid to just use the paper to point out these disparate view points, argue for some positive and negative aspects of each and let the reader go from there. Not anything ground-breaking here, but it doesn't need to be either.
I can say that I do have a better understanding of Eisenman and maybe don't dislike his work quite as much as I had before, (I still haven't reached that point with Gehry) which was a part of this exercise for me.
I would appreciate any suggestions on some primo examples of characters that fit squarely into these camps or perhaps even more importantly, have jumped ship and changed camps in a profound way in their career or have shown the ability to slide between the two on an regular basis.
Apologies in advance for switching horses in mid-stream discussion wise, but it seems things have mushroomed a bit on their own anyway.

I think that for many architects, perhaps more in Europe than here, Peter Zumthor's work is far more relevant than Eisenman's. I don't know that many American architects are still actively learning from Peter Eisenman, except those who are exposed to his tyrannies in studios at Princeton and Yale.

I also don't think Zumthor's work is hermetic in any way. He's done beautiful social housing, housing for the elderly, a support building for the Bregenz museum that's fairly urban with cafe seating and awnings on a plaza, Kolumba (as SW mentioned), the Thermal Baths which engage people sensorily and fundamentally, and a number of other projects that aren't extensively photographed. Yes, the Bregenz museum specifically is austere and yet somehow elevates its rather drab and unexceptional surroundings.

We have to remember that each of these architects is responding to a particular context. In Zumthor's case, it's mostly a beautiful series of valleys in Switzerland, and the old pedestrian fabric of European cities. In Eisenman's it's a sprawling car culture.

I don't know which is the more difficult context to work in, but it does seem to me that Eisenman's work fits right in with the welter of showy forms all trying to grab our attention as we speed along freeways. Zumthor's work consistently elevates and makes more noble its surroundings.

Looking at the Columbus Center, it doesn't seem to innovate to me, except on the level of shifty forms. It's really no different in its urban approach than convention centers in other American cities. In fact, one could argue that urbanistically it doesn't present a very inviting face to the city. From my vantage now, the Columbus Center is really indistinguishable from a not very good shopping mall.

Jump, you yourself said that Eisenman's work looks like complete rubbish. I don't believe it engages its particular context any better than Zumthor's, and it's ugly to boot!

isn't taste the big elephant in the room that everyone is trying to ignore? whether it's the client's, public, professional, student, academic etc. etc.

vox pops legitimation will be largely taste driven, ditto any individual's preference for zumthor's mute sublime, eisenman's shifty white/pastels or oma's bombastic modernism.

it's like multi culti liberals who notice racism, but never race, "They are most comfortable talking about racism, not race. To notice race, in their way of thinking, is to be racist. Yet they notice when groups or photos are all white, again, noticing racism but not race." (paraphrased). are we pluralists replaying the same blindness viz a viz taste and class? readily admonishing discrimination, blind to the basis of its formation? we notice when something is out of whack, inappropriate - too tacky (convention centre) or too classy (vals) - but fail to recognise the class contexts in which the respective situations operate - the context which allows us to make those taste judgements in the first place (the basis of tschumi's disjunctions, murder in the cathedral, pastel convention centres, monolithic loos, sandals and socks...).

ignoring the context whilst formulating the solution becomes grist to each ideologue's mill - eisenman advocates accuse zumthor of preciousness and nostalgia, zumthor advocates accuse eisenman of dilletantenism and obscurity - whilst failing to recognise how architectural autonomy is inherent in both, in fact in modernism more generally.

--

i'm surprised no one has mentioned irina davidovici's actual argument yet, i think the bit on zumthor that is useful for this discussion is:

"His quest for localisation of meanings in the architectural object arises from the fear of a deeper cultural disorientation. When, however, it is deemed possible to offer salvation from meaninglessness through perfecting the architectural artefact, we are in a domain similar to the romantic concept of the monument: a perfect, self sufficient entity removed from the flow of history and the life the city...it preserves the view that nothing can be taken for granted, therefore implying there is no context other than that which can be articulated conceptually."

cultural disorientation and the risk of meaninglessness seems to be the common point of departure in both eisenman's and zumthor's work; the former seems resigned to it whilst the latter resists, but both respond with private references that assume architecture has an internal autonomy allowing it to 'create' meaning - what i take irina to mean by 'romantic monument'. for eisenman this self sufficiency results in a formal lattitude where the architecture has all the capacity for meaning but none of the responsibility (is discharged to each individual's experience), for zumthor it means assuming a material and situational primacy through self evidence that occludes casual use, getting things dirty, broken.

which could be to say that architects' are the makers of their own embolisms - overblown, arrogrant, self appointed stewards of culture trying to tackle a problem no one asked them to look at in the first place - a familiar argument, which gets air time in various guises from vado's and old fogey's "what's in it it for practice?" to cameron sinclair's "real necessities" and koolhaas's "culture surfing". it seems then that cultural disorientation has forced us into radical arrogance - genius monument makers like E and Z - or radical humility as we give up any pretension to meaningful response, settling for biological and professional necessities - or cutting edge nihilism ala koolhaas.

against 'pretension', either individually as someone looking for a career or in disciplinary terms as a group looking to respond to society meaningfully, i would argue that the stakes are not at fault. architecture has the capacity for cultural orientation, has done so for millenia either as conscious creations of designated importance (cathedral) and accumulations of marginal configurations (bazaar, the rest of the city), but ever since the enlightenment we have over estimated the individual's role in creating it and under estimated how much orientation and order is already given in typical human situations, as concrete life, the civic order of the city or in tradition - those moments which persist whatever the theoretical concerns of the architecture and give it a wider relevance (like the issue of a civic elevation meeting a busy thoroughfare in the convention centre above).

As far as elephants go...

The judgement of taste requires the agreement of everyone and he who describes aything as beautiful claims that everyone ought to give his approval to the object in question and also describe it as beautiful. the "ought" in the aesthetical judgment is therefore pronounced in accordance with all the data which are required for judging and yet is only conditioned. we ask for the agreement of every one else, because we have for it a ground that is common to all; and we could count on this agreement, provided we were always sure that the case was correctly subsumend under that ground as rule of assent...
If judgement of taste had a definite objective principle, thenb the person who lays them down in accordance with this latter would claim an unconditioned necessity for his judgment. If they were devoid of all principle, like those of the mere taste of sense, we would not allow them in though any necessity whatever. Hence they must have a subjective principle which determines what pleases or displeases only by feeling and not by concepts, but yet with universal validity. But such a principle could only be regarded as a common sense, which is essentially different from common Understandin which people sometimes call common Sense; for the latter does not judge by feeling but always by concepts, although ordinarily only as by obscurley represented preinciples.
Hence it is only under the presupposition that there is a common sense (by which we dont understand an external sense, but the effect resulting from the free play of our cognitive powers) it is only under this presupposition, I say, that the judgemtn of taste can be laid down...I. Kant philospher and inventor of the Kant Strip

nice, fist. cayne1 could just cut and paste and be done...

fw1, i can dislike eisenman's middle years work (i like his newer and older stuff) cuz it is just style/taste. i still admire his attempt to try something new regardless of actual result... our world desperately needs something new. zumthor mostly just confirms the old, including the old hierarchies and relationships. but the world is changing and fast, so whether eisenman gets it right, or totally screws up we have at least learned some new tricks about how to build and make things in the modern city...and if not, well, learning how not to do things is just as impt...cuz the city and society is a moving target we always have to try new solutions ..without knowing if outcome will work.

"something happened between borromini and sam walton"

excellent point, jump.

typical baroque big box ceiling...

the comic vs the tragic.