I’m going to attempt a short essay, here… if you find this on google, just pass it on.

Comparing Eisenman

Peter Eisenman has always made it a point to place his own practice at the center of architectural discourse, contantly manouvering to stay relevant and avant the garde. As publicity and comissions increase for published, “celebrity” architects, this places him in a paradox: at the center, but constantly striving for the edge. This contradictary self-image is rich soil for intervention and discourse. In order to place Eisenman in a context (perhaps against his wishes), I am going to go ahead and compare him to two other stars of the community.

Eisenman / Gehry : Buildings

On the surface, these two practices could not be more different; Eisenman is unpredictable, contrary, at times even reactionary, and proclaims an interest in “deep structure,” constantly isolating architecture from any but an interior referentiality. Gehry is more interested in assimilation, starting from a desired image distilled from context, and distorting it so that most description is a lateral slide of weak metaphor and association. Eisenman’s buildings are often shrouded in obtuse theory, while Gehry’s are explained in a disarmingly literal manner (while most people compared referenced Italian sculpture when describing the pipe organ in his LA concert hall, Gehry himself referred to it as “french fries.)

However, there is a striking parallel in their approach to construction as seperate from design; the form is distanced as a sculptural or signifying element that might as well not be built (Gehry might argue against this point). Their disintrest in nonvisible parts of a building leads to a “radically conventional” method of building. The process of construction is hidden, ignored, conceptually nonexistent. Building as communicator has succeded building as structure.

Eisenman / Tafuri : Writings

The recent coauthoring by these two men of a monograph of sorts on Giuseppe Terragni reveals striking parallels as well. Their essays are completely divorced, both on the cover and within the pages, and an almost hostile feeling pervades– Eisenman writes the intro and first essay, Tafuri refutes and derides in a second, and Peter finishes it off with a framing essay in response. This leads to less of a dialectic than a simple binary or shotgun approach. You get it from both barrels.

However disparate the content, the essays do have one thing in common. They both supress the phenomenological in favor of the literary. For Eisenman, architecture is a series of traces in process that reveal a “textual reading” in the building’s final version. Architectural process is thus a form of writing, and buildings are themselves a critique, albeit a self-referential critique of pure form. Geometry, pattern, alignment and other devices are placed above context and utility, as is evidenced by photographs with the surroundings and people carefully ommitted.

For Tafuri, architecture is textual in an entirely different manner. Sociopolitical context and preceding images and ideas provide lateral associations (generally myth and marxism) that reveals the architect’s true or hidden (perhaps unknown) intentions. The production is essentially teatrical: this building is communication, revealing (or professing) value and ideology.

In both of these writings, the communicative aspect of the building is stressed and the operational and functional aspects are suppressed. This is more than a simply postmodern aim or emphasis. For both, the tests surrounding the building are more important than the building itself. Past versions, renderings, and texts by Terragni (often obstinately literal-functional) point to a true bias: this building is merely the afterlife, born out of a living process of thought that dies with completion. Every moment after the final drawings are submitted is just an echo.

Other than the obvious oversimplification of the design process that is suggested here (construction administration and finishes as part of process), what I find missing is the generation of meaning through use and production. Not just the weakly humanistic dimension of building operation, but the passive act of weathering, the shadows cast on the street, and the displacement of dirt by the basement. This is all important, and on equal footing with form in my opinion. Buildings are often more captivating in the midst of construction, their inner structure revealed and inhabited at odd hours by strange professionals, adorned by safety netting, makeshift fences, cables and impromptu lighting. It’s difficult to talk about meaning in relationship to structure and function without sounding like a staid, devout modernist, but remembering these aspects has to be important, right?

Living in a pedestrian city it’s easy to see how people use technology to insulate themselves. I’m talking about cellphones and ipods. The latter is a simple form of isolation– the apple commercials play it out perfectly, silhouettes on a single color. There is no context, only a generalized idea of one. Cellphones are slightly more complicated. I passed by a woman crying on a park bench last night. Had she been pretty enough I probably would have asked her what was wrong. This shallow presupposition was pre-empted, however, by the fact that she was crying on the phone. This is obviously a different way to shut out your surroundings and neighbors, by keeping in close emotional contact with someone else far away. It’s a displacement, not a shield. That being said, it’s hard to meet people in a city where everyone has a four-inch talkative friend on their shoulder.

When I went out last night I forgot my keys. By the time I got back John had fallen asleep. I had to pee. Bad. So I went to a bar around the corner, just lame enough that only two compulsively lonely people and a bored bartender were there. I struck up a conversation with two of them (the transvestite poet left when I sat down). After getting two life stories that started off maudlin and got progressively more so, I emerged with very contradictory emotions. First and foremost I felt alone. I felt more alone talking to those two than I do camping in the middle of the desert; I felt divorced from myself, from my future. That being said, I also felt very powerfully the fact that a person lives behind every window on every upper floor, and that they have selves and futures as well. Ghostlike, if I want to be dramatic about it. Anyway, I leaned on the buzzer and John let me in. I felt sick all day today.

In addition to stealing wireless internet from my neighbors, my new apartment comes fully equipped with mystically free basic cable. The caveat is that we only get fox, upn, pax, and every strange public-access channel known to man. The horse-racing channel. Korean TV. My favorite of the low-rent networks, however, is C-Span. For the past 48 hours, they have been showing Regan’s funeral. This is simply footage of people walking in front of a casket, continuously, with a break every two hours for the changing of the guard (which itself moves at a comic 2001-esque pace.) Watching this 15-minute, 3-salute ceremony was humorous, because C-Span chose to leave the sound on. There is no spoken command, music or even audible footstep in the entire ordeal. The ceremony takes place in a gigantic cavern of a room, in which every cough and cellphone ring is hystericaly amplified and echoed. A small child made the same high-pitched noise every 15 seconds for two minutes, with a wonderful counterpoint of aborted cellphone rings as the harmony. This is news in real-time, people. It’s restful. It’s dry comedy. It’s also reassuring that, despite the faster and faster editing in film and television, there is still the boredom of real life somewhere on the tube.

There. I tied that one up. I actually found Regan’s death and the subsequent hubbub to be thrilling, mostly because I was born on the day of his attempted assassination. This links me cosmically to a person I hate abjectly, which adds a theatrical quality to my life. I only wish it could have been someone else.

I’ve got more free time than working time (or maybe it’s the same on average.) I have no children and my girlfriend lives a few hundred miles away. I’m not involved in a charitable cause and my work is also my hobby. I’m going to turn into one of those professional appreciators, aren’t I? I’ll read and listen and watch and I’ll develop taste. How can I avoid this?

-Play video games or do other such mind-numbing things.

-Walk. A lot. Or perhaps exercise.

-Make friends and talk to them (this is highly unlikely).

-Sleep more.

-Write more.

-Learn to knit or build model trains.

Once school has finished, it’s rather daunting to realize that one is now completely responsible for how interesting one is. I can’t rely on classes and lectures to bring conversation to the fore. I was prepared to commit to work. Now I have to commit to play.

I am now in New York City. I dislike typing the same words in the “City” and “State” blanks in online forms.

Short List: Things at Work that Make Architecture Depressing

1. The phrase “p-lam.”

2. The phrase “furr-out”

3. Carpet swatches.

4. Flashing details.

5. Vinyl wall base.

6. Interior elevations.

7. Chair rails.

8. Aluminum mullions on sidelights.

9. Spandrel glass.

Seeing as how I’m moving to a city that I’ve spent a total collective maybe 36 hours in, it’s not surprising that I own maybe 6 or 7 maps of Manhattan right now. It’s amazing how many ineffective maps can be produced of the same area. You’d think they’d start cribbing off of each other or something, that people would realize marking all of the subway entrances the same color, regardless of which line they are is just a bad idea.

In any case, the one thing they all have in common is the small blank square with “World Trade Center Site” written inside of it in tiny script. How did this become the accepted terminology? Not “FORMER world trade center site” or “future memorial site” but simply the name of the former buildings with “site” afterwards, as if it was waiting for something. However, this does make a lot of sense:

*ahem*

1. The place where a structure or group of structures was, is, or is to be located: a good site for the school.

2. The place or setting of something: a historic site; a job site.

3. A website.

Definition 3 nonwithstanding, this usage of site makes some sense. Not an official memorial (which, if it ever goes up, with be almost certainly dissappointing and overwrought). Kind of like driving past where your old house used to be, and pointing to the K-mart that is now there. There’s the site of a crime, a gravesite, a historic site– all three apply easily. What is kind of disturbing, however, is the uncertain temporality of the word. Site implies past, present, and future conditions. The actual destruction was so traumatic that we’ve chosen to completely remove this square of land from the boundaries of time, like it’s the moon or stonehenge or the pyramids. It’s immense, too large to comprehend, so instead it’s a “site,” a detatched locale that is placed on a pedestal.

I think this area needs a de-siting. The new plans proposed now that they’ve figured out there’s not enough money to build everything look very promising in a de-siting sense. They show interesting, but non-monumental, pedestrian parks and plazas. I don’t think this city needs a pit going 100 feet into the earth, or a waterfall, or even a 1,776 foot tall skyscraper (symbolically bile-producing in my book). I didn’t mean for this bit to turn into a diatribe on antimonumentalism. However, I can’t wait until the hole in the skyline stops being a hole.