I'll take a stab and guess the reason Smokety Mc Smoke Smoke "can't listen or read P. E. anymore" is because SMSS has a background in law. Eisenman's points/arguments here are either flawed in logic, sentimental, academic, or self-serving. For example, "students are passive", yet the students described here are actually protesting. In terms of practice, deconstruction is one of architecture's most obscure styles and 'post-modernism' is still what the vast majority of architects do. Part of what's historically playing out now is Le Corbusier's late style and Kahn's early 'planning' style.
Anyone else love watching Boston Legal. Now there's a style architecture would do well to emulate.
For the record:
"The duck is the special building that is a symbol; the decorated shed is the conventional shelter that applies symbols. We maintain that both types of architecture are valid--Chartres is a duck (although it is a decorated shed as well), and the Palazzo Farnese is a decorated shed--but we think that the duck is seldom relevant today, although it pervades Modern architecture."
--Learning from Las Vegas, four years after 1968.
Perhaps the case today is that the duck has become (via media) more relevant (to society), and the decorated shed has become more (true to form) ephemeral. I maintain that both these types of architecture are valid.
I skimmed the other thread while drinking my coffee this morning - what stuck in my brain is jump's comment about BIM: it's revolutionary like dimensional lumber was; it changes the industry but not the discipline.
Although, as not-per pointed out, the discipline could easily be first sidelined then swallowed up by the industry, unless those of us pushing forward the discipline keep innovating and keep ourselves relevant.
As to Eisenman's comments: I think most of it is spot on, though I wonder, like surfaces, does he have a plan, or at least some recommendations for how these young passive students can formulate a plan themselves? The tradition of mentorship is not only a condition in architecture; grownups (myself included) have a responsibility to try to use our experience to help young people figure the world out - even if this, perhaps, means teaching them how to make us irrelevant.
May 15, 08 8:52 am ·
·
Give some examples of what is "spot on" because I see a lot of misleading mish-mash.
Yeah, his rant is pretty presumptively blind and very generalizing, and it also lacks self criticism. It reads as someone who has been part of making all the changes he is criticizing and then he goes on to criticize those who are now walking into their own relationship with now...and he doesn't like it.
He is as much of the problem as anyone else and far more than any student.
get over yourself Peter, but I highly doubt you will.
Lastly, he just had to reference Beethoven (gotta reference a master from another field to ingrain oneself with the master) in such a way to further obfuscate any point that may have been made.
Much a do about nothing and the world keeps spinning.
Does Eisenmann make boards without imagery these days? Yeah, I thought not...
I had a roommate who wanted to live in interesting times. He lamented not being around in early modernism 1914-1939. Maybe there is the next new paradigm already out there.
However, like a recession, we will not know when it started until after is it over.
What could a new manifesto for architecture be?
What would be the new shift? Modernism was a reaction to concepts developed in the industrial revolution. I don’t think that the new green revolution will have as great an impact. Sustainability, is just an application to our discipline – like dimensional lumber.
Eisie just sounds like the grumpy old man down the street yelling at the kids to "get off my lawn." The reason for the rise of 19th century architecture had nothing to do with the industrialization of the construction industry, changing of trade union roles and methods, the massive migration of old world craftsman to the new world and the ability to move massive amounts of raw and finished material almost anywhere with the growing transportation networks. Citing Freud then is like citing "Gene Theory" now - interesting concept, but it doesn't change the way concrete is poured into formwork.
Really, this sounds like pandering to the old guard, even in areas where his and my concerns overlap (designing on computers has a tendency to make sucky actual architecture) its for different reasons - To me, the biggest reasons that you need to involve sketching by hand is:
1. that the computer is different than paper, which people will eventually use to build it, so that's really what needs to be clean and understandable
- and -
2. You are accepting the limitations and constraints of tools which have no relation to how the physical world (computer code versus physics). That's not to say that hand drafting prevents it, but it is more intuitive.
and little to do with making anything blobby "look cool without substance"
Two final points:
It should also be mentioned that its really easy to stay edgy and financially solvent when you're not paying your interns.
If your students don't get it, its not their fault, its your fault. Physician heal thyself.
Eiseman is an ass when he says students today are passive compared to the students of 1968. First off the students of 1968 are the assholes in charge now, second Im glad we dont have campuses filled with self absorbed drug riddled smelly upper middle class hippies.
Maybe Eiseman has failed to realize the world has changed, as is evidenat by his first paragrapgh where he almost seems dumbfounded by Blackberries and cell phones, as if aliens brought down this space age technology. Whats comming next will make him shit his adult diaper.
"This passivity is related to architecture. Architecture today relies on one of passivity’s most insidious forms—the computer."
This is the most ignorant statement maybe ever uttered by an architect. IBM, DELL, Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, Apple didnt become multi billion dollar companies because they peddle passivity but rather they enable production possibilities unimaginable 40 years ago.
Shock Me, I'm not ignoring your question, just don't have time to respond decently to it now. Perhaps I should have said "spot on, but ineffectual" because as I said above I wonder how he thinks any these points can be used to further the discipline - it *does* tend to come off as a bit of old man grumpiness, too.
Agreed. Where would he be without the computer?...how would you manage all the jobs worldwide without all this new technology?
Sorry, Peter is not in the office...you can call back next week...yeah...right...all this technology has allowed these starchitects to become jet setters hoping from school to school to lecture to lecture...it would be very hard to manage it all at the scale it exists today without it...actually, it would be impossible.
He also confuses things like media with communication...bet I am sure he is pretty much a luddite and just running with over generalizations so as to paint a black and white picture of things...which doesn't exist.
His generation is an idealist generation and therefore "idealisms" are important to their collective understanding of the world. Its why postmodern thought, deconstruction and general social psychobabble predominate their period of authority in western culture.
The next generations are reactionary in nature and understand the world through physical understanding. Its much less about introspective thoughts and more about sensory stimulations and basic if then cause and effect relationships. This might explaine the rise of the cult of the nerd - the elevation of the software or biogenetic moguls and finacial modeling whiz kids to poular icons
(to use petespeak). Ultimately it will be the thankless task of streamlining the new production methods and design procedures that this generation excels at and finds it's identity by.
But these are icons with little meaning or relationship to things in the real world. According to the American pragmatist philosopher C S Peirce there were three categories of signs: icons, symbols, and indices. The icon had a visual likeness to an object.
i don't buy the first sentence. who the hell is peirce? and why are there 3 categories? what's real world? how many worlds are there?
Oh, and I would also like to point out that his criticism of the Republican party is ironic, as peter has been a staunch rightest and proponent of that party for a very long time.
May 15, 08 1:52 pm ·
·
"In learning how to draw one began to understand not only what it was like to draw like Palladio ot Le Corbusier but also the extent of the differences in their work." Imagine that, learning via reenactment.
It was only after having my own CAD system that I began (in 1987) to redraw Piranesi's Campo Marzio, and I was doing it to indeed learn via reenactment. Ultimately, nine years ago yesterday, I discovered that there are indeed two different versions of the Campo Marzio plan. Imagine that, making a significant architectural discovery because of drawing with the aid of a computer.
May 15, 08 9:00 pm ·
·
Point one begins with "Media has invaded every aspect of our lives." and ends with "Just think of any architectural magazine today devoted, supposedly, to the environment, and instead one finds media."
More to the point: Advertising has invaded every aspect of our lives, and just think of any architectural magazine today devoted, supposedly, to the environment, and instead one finds advertising.
"In the future, everything will be an advertisement."
--Rita Novel
The Guggenheim has very successfully, via architecture, become an advertisement of itself [via free press even]. The Guggenheim's architecture as advertisement has even become an aspect of the Guggenheim's sustainability. The image of Guggemheim buildings are trademarked even.
Perhaps...
Architecture as delivery of content = architecture as delivery of "advertising space" = lucrative sustainability. (We already know this is how a lot of virtual architecture works.)
Point one in the middle reads, "This leads today to a corruption of what we think of as communication, with a lessening of the capacity to read or write correct sentences." Ikea began their 1985 campaign in the United States with many billboards all over Philadelphia simply communicating--
(eye pic) + (key pic) + AH!
--months before the one store even opened.
[I've lately come to wonder whether Ikea picked Philadelphia first because it is the largest city in what in the mid-seventeenth century was indeed New Sweden. Post-colonialism Swedish style I suppose.]
"...why does an idea always have to fit in a diagram or plan?"
It doesn't. Unless you're an architect.
May 16, 08 10:14 am ·
·
"The late period of artists is often under-rated. Picasso's Late Period was mostly disliked while he was alive--seen as repetitious and unimportant. Yet with Picasso dead, the late works were not so unimportant anymore, in fact they manifest one of Picasso's most creative periods.
Frank Gehry may be in a wonderful position if he continues to do architecture for another decade or so, because, when he isn't around anymore, his late works might just manifest his most creative period.
I like to look at and study the late periods of artists because of all the facile-ness and confidence and even (if you're lucky) the "I don't give a fuck" found there.
Philip Johnson produced an interesting late period, and he did change 'styles' with every new project, yet his overall style has always been reenactionary architecturism."
--Rita Novel, 2005.08.23
If lateness does contain the possibilities of a new future paradigm, then I certainly hope the new paradigm is facile, confident and without giving a fuck. [Personally, I'm already moving from my early don't-give-a-fuck style to my high don't-give-a-fuck style, and God only knows what my late don't-give-a-fuck style is going to be like.
"Frankly, Stella, I don't give a damn."
I see a lot of late Le Corbusier meets universal Mies van der Rohe meets early planning Louis I. Kahn in the work of OMA, etc. Just one recent example: look at Kahn's Midtown [Philadelphia] Development (1956-57) and OMA's Quartier des Halles Urban Development Study (2003-04). And every time I now see Kahn's AFL-CIO Medical Services Center, I immediately also think of Herzog & de Meuron. There's a lot of mostly untapped inspiration within the unbuilt and lesser known architectural designs of the 20th century.
Does the science of recombinant genetics and even cloning harbor a new paradigm for architecture? Like the science, I think it's already happening within architecture, but, also like the with the science, it's a paradigm that many would rather deny.
May 16, 08 10:29 am ·
·
When it comes to making "a diagram or a plan that shows the ideas of a building, I like to think at least big.
It said so on the box:
Bjarke Ingels Group – BIG - is a Copenhagen based group of 85 architects, designers, builders and thinkers operating within the fields of architecture, urbanism, research and development.
Historically the field of architecture has been dominated by 2 opposing extremes. On one side an avant-garde full of crazy ideas. Originating from philosophy, mysticism or a fascination of the formal potential of computer visualizations they are often so detached from reality that they fail to become something other than eccentric curiosities. On the other side there are well organized corporate consultants that build predictable and boring boxes of high standard. Architecture seems to be entrenched in two equally unfertile fronts: Either naively utopian or petrifying pragmatic. We believe that there is a third way wedged in the no mans land between the diametrical opposites. Or in the small but very fertile overlap between the two. A pragmatic utopian architecture that takes on the creation of socially, economically and environmentally perfect places as a practical objective. In our projects we test the effects of scale and the balance of programmatic mixtures on the social, economical and ecological outcome. Like a form of programmatic alchemy we create architecture by mixing conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, parking and shopping. Each building site is a testbed for its own pragmatic utopian experiment. At BIG we are devoted to investing in the overlap between radical and reality. Choosing between them you condemn yourself to frustrated martyrdom or apathic affirmation. By hitting the fertile overlap, we architects once again find the freedom to change the surface of our planet, to better fit the way we want to live. In all our actions we try to move the focus from the little details to the BIG picture.
That six point plan is indeed, as SMIB has point out, a mish-mash. The one aspect I always laugh at is Eisenman's corraling of Renaissance or humanist attitudes to berate the state of things...kind of like the wolf crying wolf.
"Since the Renaissance in Italy when Brunelleschi, Alberti and Bramanti established what can be called the persistencies of architecture—subject-object relationships—these persistencies have remained operative to this day. Alberti’s dictum that “a house is a small city and a city is a large house”, remains with us in all works that we see. In other words the relationship between the part and the whole: the figure and the ground, the house to its site, the site to the street, the street to its neighbourhood and the neighbourhood to the city."
How does his cold and cerebral architecture in ANY way follow the above dictum? What does his work have to do with people and neighborhoods, exactly? (and he had the balls to berate a student in a jury, in a video posted on Youtube, for not looking at the humanist works of Renaissance masters).
At the end he tries to smash the two attitudes (intellectual autonomy and isolation and social conttct) together with a large mallet:
"For me it is precisely this autonomy which is architecture’s delay of engaging with society. If it is architecture’s activity and its own discourse which in fact impacts society, then to be an architect is a social act."
Yea, engaging in an isolated, ivory tower discourse is the most social act architecture can enact...have your cake and eat it too.
May 16, 08 4:09 pm ·
·
Regarding Charles Sanders Peirce, see Anthony Vidler's "What is a Diagram anyway?" in Peter Eisenman: Feints.
e.g.:
"Perhaps the most penetrating examination of the nature and role of diagrams was undertaken by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), in context of his general theory of signs, his semiology. For Peirce, all thinking took place with signs, things which served "to convey knowledge of some other thing", which they were "said to stand for, or represent."
May 19, 08 6:28 pm ·
·
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Now try taking it to court.
I wish this was in the forum. Anyway...
I'll take a stab and guess the reason Smokety Mc Smoke Smoke "can't listen or read P. E. anymore" is because SMSS has a background in law. Eisenman's points/arguments here are either flawed in logic, sentimental, academic, or self-serving. For example, "students are passive", yet the students described here are actually protesting. In terms of practice, deconstruction is one of architecture's most obscure styles and 'post-modernism' is still what the vast majority of architects do. Part of what's historically playing out now is Le Corbusier's late style and Kahn's early 'planning' style.
Anyone else love watching Boston Legal. Now there's a style architecture would do well to emulate.
For the record:
"The duck is the special building that is a symbol; the decorated shed is the conventional shelter that applies symbols. We maintain that both types of architecture are valid--Chartres is a duck (although it is a decorated shed as well), and the Palazzo Farnese is a decorated shed--but we think that the duck is seldom relevant today, although it pervades Modern architecture."
--Learning from Las Vegas, four years after 1968.
Perhaps the case today is that the duck has become (via media) more relevant (to society), and the decorated shed has become more (true to form) ephemeral. I maintain that both these types of architecture are valid.
need coffee, head spinning.
I skimmed the other thread while drinking my coffee this morning - what stuck in my brain is jump's comment about BIM: it's revolutionary like dimensional lumber was; it changes the industry but not the discipline.
Although, as not-per pointed out, the discipline could easily be first sidelined then swallowed up by the industry, unless those of us pushing forward the discipline keep innovating and keep ourselves relevant.
As to Eisenman's comments: I think most of it is spot on, though I wonder, like surfaces, does he have a plan, or at least some recommendations for how these young passive students can formulate a plan themselves? The tradition of mentorship is not only a condition in architecture; grownups (myself included) have a responsibility to try to use our experience to help young people figure the world out - even if this, perhaps, means teaching them how to make us irrelevant.
Give some examples of what is "spot on" because I see a lot of misleading mish-mash.
Yeah, his rant is pretty presumptively blind and very generalizing, and it also lacks self criticism. It reads as someone who has been part of making all the changes he is criticizing and then he goes on to criticize those who are now walking into their own relationship with now...and he doesn't like it.
He is as much of the problem as anyone else and far more than any student.
get over yourself Peter, but I highly doubt you will.
Lastly, he just had to reference Beethoven (gotta reference a master from another field to ingrain oneself with the master) in such a way to further obfuscate any point that may have been made.
Much a do about nothing and the world keeps spinning.
Does Eisenmann make boards without imagery these days? Yeah, I thought not...
Coffee good…
I had a roommate who wanted to live in interesting times. He lamented not being around in early modernism 1914-1939. Maybe there is the next new paradigm already out there.
However, like a recession, we will not know when it started until after is it over.
What could a new manifesto for architecture be?
What would be the new shift? Modernism was a reaction to concepts developed in the industrial revolution. I don’t think that the new green revolution will have as great an impact. Sustainability, is just an application to our discipline – like dimensional lumber.
Eisie just sounds like the grumpy old man down the street yelling at the kids to "get off my lawn." The reason for the rise of 19th century architecture had nothing to do with the industrialization of the construction industry, changing of trade union roles and methods, the massive migration of old world craftsman to the new world and the ability to move massive amounts of raw and finished material almost anywhere with the growing transportation networks. Citing Freud then is like citing "Gene Theory" now - interesting concept, but it doesn't change the way concrete is poured into formwork.
Really, this sounds like pandering to the old guard, even in areas where his and my concerns overlap (designing on computers has a tendency to make sucky actual architecture) its for different reasons - To me, the biggest reasons that you need to involve sketching by hand is:
1. that the computer is different than paper, which people will eventually use to build it, so that's really what needs to be clean and understandable
- and -
2. You are accepting the limitations and constraints of tools which have no relation to how the physical world (computer code versus physics). That's not to say that hand drafting prevents it, but it is more intuitive.
and little to do with making anything blobby "look cool without substance"
Two final points:
It should also be mentioned that its really easy to stay edgy and financially solvent when you're not paying your interns.
If your students don't get it, its not their fault, its your fault. Physician heal thyself.
That run on second sentence was supposed to be a rhetorical question.
Eiseman is an ass when he says students today are passive compared to the students of 1968. First off the students of 1968 are the assholes in charge now, second Im glad we dont have campuses filled with self absorbed drug riddled smelly upper middle class hippies.
Maybe Eiseman has failed to realize the world has changed, as is evidenat by his first paragrapgh where he almost seems dumbfounded by Blackberries and cell phones, as if aliens brought down this space age technology. Whats comming next will make him shit his adult diaper.
Ok I forgot this - from P.E>
"This passivity is related to architecture. Architecture today relies on one of passivity’s most insidious forms—the computer."
This is the most ignorant statement maybe ever uttered by an architect. IBM, DELL, Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, Apple didnt become multi billion dollar companies because they peddle passivity but rather they enable production possibilities unimaginable 40 years ago.
God this guy makes me mad.
Shock Me, I'm not ignoring your question, just don't have time to respond decently to it now. Perhaps I should have said "spot on, but ineffectual" because as I said above I wonder how he thinks any these points can be used to further the discipline - it *does* tend to come off as a bit of old man grumpiness, too.
<totally off-topic>
evilp, scientists have finally worked out your genome.
<back to topic, please>
Agreed. Where would he be without the computer?...how would you manage all the jobs worldwide without all this new technology?
Sorry, Peter is not in the office...you can call back next week...yeah...right...all this technology has allowed these starchitects to become jet setters hoping from school to school to lecture to lecture...it would be very hard to manage it all at the scale it exists today without it...actually, it would be impossible.
He also confuses things like media with communication...bet I am sure he is pretty much a luddite and just running with over generalizations so as to paint a black and white picture of things...which doesn't exist.
doesn't he know 9/11 changed everything?
"Architects used to draw volumes, using shading and selecting a perspective."
oh really?
yet this project somehow didn't usher in what he now decrys???
"If I ask a student to make a diagram or a plan that shows the ideas of a building, they cannot do it...."
This applies not only to students.
why does an idea always have to fit in a diagram or plan?
I'm calling bullshit.
what's an idea?
His generation is an idealist generation and therefore "idealisms" are important to their collective understanding of the world. Its why postmodern thought, deconstruction and general social psychobabble predominate their period of authority in western culture.
The next generations are reactionary in nature and understand the world through physical understanding. Its much less about introspective thoughts and more about sensory stimulations and basic if then cause and effect relationships. This might explaine the rise of the cult of the nerd - the elevation of the software or biogenetic moguls and finacial modeling whiz kids to poular icons
(to use petespeak). Ultimately it will be the thankless task of streamlining the new production methods and design procedures that this generation excels at and finds it's identity by.
"I'm calling bullshit."
Cool. What's his number?
i don't buy the first sentence. who the hell is peirce? and why are there 3 categories? what's real world? how many worlds are there?
Peirce was a pretty influential linguist and philosopher.
The man's a dinosaur and thankfully not that many thinking people listen to him anymore.
Oh, and I would also like to point out that his criticism of the Republican party is ironic, as peter has been a staunch rightest and proponent of that party for a very long time.
"In learning how to draw one began to understand not only what it was like to draw like Palladio ot Le Corbusier but also the extent of the differences in their work." Imagine that, learning via reenactment.
It was only after having my own CAD system that I began (in 1987) to redraw Piranesi's Campo Marzio, and I was doing it to indeed learn via reenactment. Ultimately, nine years ago yesterday, I discovered that there are indeed two different versions of the Campo Marzio plan. Imagine that, making a significant architectural discovery because of drawing with the aid of a computer.
Point one begins with "Media has invaded every aspect of our lives." and ends with "Just think of any architectural magazine today devoted, supposedly, to the environment, and instead one finds media."
More to the point: Advertising has invaded every aspect of our lives, and just think of any architectural magazine today devoted, supposedly, to the environment, and instead one finds advertising.
"In the future, everything will be an advertisement."
--Rita Novel
The Guggenheim has very successfully, via architecture, become an advertisement of itself [via free press even]. The Guggenheim's architecture as advertisement has even become an aspect of the Guggenheim's sustainability. The image of Guggemheim buildings are trademarked even.
Perhaps...
Architecture as delivery of content = architecture as delivery of "advertising space" = lucrative sustainability. (We already know this is how a lot of virtual architecture works.)
Point one in the middle reads, "This leads today to a corruption of what we think of as communication, with a lessening of the capacity to read or write correct sentences." Ikea began their 1985 campaign in the United States with many billboards all over Philadelphia simply communicating--
(eye pic) + (key pic) + AH!
--months before the one store even opened.
[I've lately come to wonder whether Ikea picked Philadelphia first because it is the largest city in what in the mid-seventeenth century was indeed New Sweden. Post-colonialism Swedish style I suppose.]
Architecture in a media culture indeed!
"...why does an idea always have to fit in a diagram or plan?"
It doesn't. Unless you're an architect.
"The late period of artists is often under-rated. Picasso's Late Period was mostly disliked while he was alive--seen as repetitious and unimportant. Yet with Picasso dead, the late works were not so unimportant anymore, in fact they manifest one of Picasso's most creative periods.
Frank Gehry may be in a wonderful position if he continues to do architecture for another decade or so, because, when he isn't around anymore, his late works might just manifest his most creative period.
I like to look at and study the late periods of artists because of all the facile-ness and confidence and even (if you're lucky) the "I don't give a fuck" found there.
Philip Johnson produced an interesting late period, and he did change 'styles' with every new project, yet his overall style has always been reenactionary architecturism."
--Rita Novel, 2005.08.23
If lateness does contain the possibilities of a new future paradigm, then I certainly hope the new paradigm is facile, confident and without giving a fuck. [Personally, I'm already moving from my early don't-give-a-fuck style to my high don't-give-a-fuck style, and God only knows what my late don't-give-a-fuck style is going to be like.
"Frankly, Stella, I don't give a damn."
I see a lot of late Le Corbusier meets universal Mies van der Rohe meets early planning Louis I. Kahn in the work of OMA, etc. Just one recent example: look at Kahn's Midtown [Philadelphia] Development (1956-57) and OMA's Quartier des Halles Urban Development Study (2003-04). And every time I now see Kahn's AFL-CIO Medical Services Center, I immediately also think of Herzog & de Meuron. There's a lot of mostly untapped inspiration within the unbuilt and lesser known architectural designs of the 20th century.
Does the science of recombinant genetics and even cloning harbor a new paradigm for architecture? Like the science, I think it's already happening within architecture, but, also like the with the science, it's a paradigm that many would rather deny.
When it comes to making "a diagram or a plan that shows the ideas of a building, I like to think at least big.
It said so on the box:
Bjarke Ingels Group – BIG - is a Copenhagen based group of 85 architects, designers, builders and thinkers operating within the fields of architecture, urbanism, research and development.
Historically the field of architecture has been dominated by 2 opposing extremes. On one side an avant-garde full of crazy ideas. Originating from philosophy, mysticism or a fascination of the formal potential of computer visualizations they are often so detached from reality that they fail to become something other than eccentric curiosities. On the other side there are well organized corporate consultants that build predictable and boring boxes of high standard. Architecture seems to be entrenched in two equally unfertile fronts: Either naively utopian or petrifying pragmatic. We believe that there is a third way wedged in the no mans land between the diametrical opposites. Or in the small but very fertile overlap between the two. A pragmatic utopian architecture that takes on the creation of socially, economically and environmentally perfect places as a practical objective. In our projects we test the effects of scale and the balance of programmatic mixtures on the social, economical and ecological outcome. Like a form of programmatic alchemy we create architecture by mixing conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, parking and shopping. Each building site is a testbed for its own pragmatic utopian experiment. At BIG we are devoted to investing in the overlap between radical and reality. Choosing between them you condemn yourself to frustrated martyrdom or apathic affirmation. By hitting the fertile overlap, we architects once again find the freedom to change the surface of our planet, to better fit the way we want to live. In all our actions we try to move the focus from the little details to the BIG picture.
That six point plan is indeed, as SMIB has point out, a mish-mash. The one aspect I always laugh at is Eisenman's corraling of Renaissance or humanist attitudes to berate the state of things...kind of like the wolf crying wolf.
"Since the Renaissance in Italy when Brunelleschi, Alberti and Bramanti established what can be called the persistencies of architecture—subject-object relationships—these persistencies have remained operative to this day. Alberti’s dictum that “a house is a small city and a city is a large house”, remains with us in all works that we see. In other words the relationship between the part and the whole: the figure and the ground, the house to its site, the site to the street, the street to its neighbourhood and the neighbourhood to the city."
How does his cold and cerebral architecture in ANY way follow the above dictum? What does his work have to do with people and neighborhoods, exactly? (and he had the balls to berate a student in a jury, in a video posted on Youtube, for not looking at the humanist works of Renaissance masters).
At the end he tries to smash the two attitudes (intellectual autonomy and isolation and social conttct) together with a large mallet:
"For me it is precisely this autonomy which is architecture’s delay of engaging with society. If it is architecture’s activity and its own discourse which in fact impacts society, then to be an architect is a social act."
Yea, engaging in an isolated, ivory tower discourse is the most social act architecture can enact...have your cake and eat it too.
Regarding Charles Sanders Peirce, see Anthony Vidler's "What is a Diagram anyway?" in Peter Eisenman: Feints.
e.g.:
"Perhaps the most penetrating examination of the nature and role of diagrams was undertaken by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), in context of his general theory of signs, his semiology. For Peirce, all thinking took place with signs, things which served "to convey knowledge of some other thing", which they were "said to stand for, or represent."
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