2009 Architecture Words 1_ Supercritical - Peter Eisenman & Rem Koolhaas

Architecture Words 1 Supercritical  Peter Eisenman & Rem Koolhaas

Architectural Association London

PREFACE This modest book documents a remarkable meeting of  two architectural minds that came together at the AA in early 2006 for an extended public conversation. More than 35 years after first encountering one another in Manhattan at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (which Peter Eisenman had founded five years  before, and which Rem Rem Koolhaas briefly briefly participated in while living in New York following his graduation), today these two architects remain at the forefront of  architectural culture. Eisenman and Koolhaas are also the two leading proponents (in ways that are at times openly opposed to each other) of a critical, conceptual form of  architectural practice – a topic this book traces through an examination of their many activities: design and building, writing and teaching, debate and provocation, exhibition and public promotion. A couple of evenings after the public conversation  between Eisenman Eisenman and Koolhaas, their claims were subject to further amplification, open interrogation and non-stop interpretation by two of the world's leading theorists of contemporary architecture, Jeffrey Kipnis and

Robert Somol. Focusing on the disciplinary and cultural connotations and consequences of the work, Kipnis and Somol offer a tour de force of interpretative architectural criticism and analysis through a debate moderated by the AA’s Mark Cousins. The result, Supercritical, also includes two rare transcriptions of talks given by Eisenman and Koolhaas at crucial points in their careers, when they were first articulating ideas and ambitions that would go on to shape and influence not only their own work but subsequently that of many others. As an afterword, a 10 x 10 matrix of self-contained sentences offers additional commentary, written in a form more like a spreadsheet than a text, reflecting on the central role of writing in each architect’s larger  experimental agenda. With this, we are pleased and deeply honoured to launch this new Architecture Words series by bringing together two architects and two commentators who are uniquely accomplished at and dedicated to architecture pursued as writing. A similar   belief in the capacity capacity of architectural words words and writing lies at the heart of this series as a whole, which will appear periodically in the form of small, self-contained  books offering a single, single, self-contained example example of the enduring power of architectural words, in printed and

digital form, to define, reflect, be architecture.Above all, the books are dedicated to deflecting the overwhelming and relentless circulation of images, links, chat and data that makes up architecture today – not out of a sense of  denial, but rather from the belief that architectural words, more than ever, retain a gravitational capacity to form, shape and bend architectural minds. My deepest thanks go out to everyone involved in this effort, for being able to communicate this project to you in the beautiful form that follows. Brett Steele Series Editor, Architecture Words October 2009

Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas with Brett Steele, 30 January 2006

PART I: THE EVENT 30 JANUARY 2006 Following weeks spent swapping text messages, emails and phone calls trying first to fix a date (not easy) and then an agenda that each was comfortable with as the framework for an hour-long discussion (even harder, I learned), Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas arrived to a  packed house at the AA in London in the evening of 30 January 2006 for a public discussion of their careers,  projects, writings and architectural beliefs. After a few minutes of warm-up – when each established their initial  positions – they launched into a fascinating, wandering exchange that illuminated their various projects and writing. The story of how they first encountered one another, at a Richard Meier lecture in 1973, led to the reflection, at the end of the talk, that the limitations of  their own success might just perhaps be explained by the kind of success that an architect like Meier has long enjoyed. – editor 

SUPERCRITICAL: REM KOOLHAAS MEETS PETER EISENMAN A CONVERSATION MODERATED BY BRETT STEELE AA LECTURE HALL, LONDON

BRETT STEELE  Peter

Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas are two architects who certainly need no introduction – either  to any of us here this evening or, most certainly, to one another. Each has been to the AA countless times before, going back to the 1970s – a time when Rem was a student and young teacher, and Peter a frequent and prominent isitor. From what I know, however, these two haven’t done before what they’re doing this evening – sharing a stage together. So I’m pleased that we’ve been able to arrange this event tonight, which I’ve titled with a madeup word, ‘Supercritical’, to give this public conversation the sense of urgency it deserves. The conversation should  be fun for many reasons, and not just for the opportunity it provides for us to begin to disentangle some of the remarkable strands, shared (and opposing) sensibilities and biographical anecdotes that connect these two

towering figures in contemporary architecture. On behalf  of the entire AA, it’s a great honour for me to welcome  both Peter and Rem back to the school this evening. Over  the past few weeks the three of us have been exchanging  phone calls, emails and text messages – we will see how far this bit of advance choreography takes us. Roughly speaking, there are four or five key topics we thought would be interesting to try and work into the evening’s discussion: 1. The idea of what might constitute a critical practice in architecture today, which of course both of our guests are acknowledged as having pursued for many years. 2. The relationship between what we might call the ‘discipline’ of architecture and the larger world in which the knowledge and practice of architecture is situated. 3. The question of form or figure today. 4. What might constitute the idea of an architectural subject (or subjectivity) today, which might relate to questions about what kind of audience each of these architects imagines that he and his architecture anticipates or works for. 5. How these interests might relate to the unique kinds of 

working methods, graphic and textual spaces each of you have been interested in throughout your careers. 6. And finally, a last topic, which is a fascinating one by which to begin to differentiate each of your practices – the relationship between architecture and the city. With that as an initial grab bag of topics, let’s begin.

Brett Steele

PETER EISENMAN  Thank

you Brett. The idea for this evening germinated in New York City when Rem and I were on a panel, I guess two years or so ago, with two other architects. At the time it was very frustrating,  because neither of us felt we could say anything regarding our own shared or differing interests in specific topics, out of deference to the other architects we were sharing a stage with. When we left the room we went to have a

coffee together and I remember saying, ‘Rem, we really have to do a conversation between just the two of us’, and he agreed this would be a good idea. And then I said, let’s do a series of three conversations: one in your hometown of Rotterdam, one in my hometown of New York, and one in a neutral site. I guess it was my anglophilia that made me think London would make a good third site. In any case, this is the first of our conversations and there’s a lot of energy and hope that if this one works out, we will still attempt another two. In any case, what is so interesting about Brett’s introduction is that as he was talking he listed six topics that don’t sound anything like the ones I thought we were going to talk about. [Laughter] So this is an example of how you can misread conversations, which we all do from differing points of  iew. In this case I think it’s useful and productive, and not a problem. I have our first topic of discussion as ‘architecture and ideology’, not ‘current problems’. I have ‘autonomy and engagement’ as the second topic, which is certainly different from the way Brett described it – as ‘disciplinary issues’. As a third, I have ‘content and form’, not ‘form and figure’, which is really interesting  because I think there is enormous variation between content and form, which I wanted to talk about, and form and figure. The fourth was ‘subjectivity’ and the different ways of viewing it. In my notes, the fifth one was certainly ‘diagram versus figure’. And as I understood it,

the sixth one was something to do with ‘modernism ersus urbanism’.

Peter Eisenman

In any case, there are not many ‘versus’ between Rem and me, but I would like to go through the issues as I see them, which I will do by first briefly showing some images. You have to understand, however, that there are two things that I want to put on the table for our  discussion tonight. First of all, as I recall, Rem and I  began talking to each other as early as the fall of 1973. We were at Columbia, attending a lecture by Richard

Meier. Richard gave one of his usual lectures at that time and Rem stood up afterwards and made a strong critical statement. I then stood up in order to defend my friend Richard, as was always my wont: I said, in effect, ‘you can’t attack Richard like that here in New York'. Afterwards Rem told me he thought I was acting as a referee, rather than as another participant in the audience.  Needless to say the discussion continued between Rem and me after that event, back at the Institute for  Architecture and Urban Studies in Manhattan. So this incident was our first real discussion where some of our differences could be seen. There was another  evening, and Rem loves to quote this episode, when I apparently walked into his office and said abruptly, ‘Rem, our problem is you don’t know anything about form’. (I say this trying to imitate Rem imitating me.) It sounds like something I might have said back in those days. I recently analysed Rem’s work in a seminar called ‘Ten Canonical Buildings of the 20th Century’. It is important to understand that architects, like philosophers and literate  people and artists (the kind of architects we all should be), should be absolutely familiar with their colleagues’ work. Right now I am working on an article on Rem for the Spanish magazine AV , titled ‘Rem Koolhaas, Strategies of  the Void: The Becoming Image of the Diagram’. It is an

important piece for me, in order to understand where I am in relation to the kind of thinking Rem is currently doing. It is difficult for any of us to get past the news-speak, ournalism and the media surrounding fellow architects today. Perhaps it is only possible through writing. Some  people are certainly afraid to write about fellow architects for fear of losing their friendship. But I think it is important for architects to say and write things, not only for and to each other, but to stand up critically and talk  about the issues. All of these thoughts I offer as the context for my comments tonight. So let me begin with a first topic, which I take to be that of ‘architecture and ideology’. I begin with an image of  our Holocaust Memorial project in Berlin. This project raises two of the most important problems in my current work. The first is the question of how architecture relates to the dominance of opticality in our time, that is, how it affects the way we view and think about architecture as opposed to what we might call the problem of the metaphysics of presence, the fact that all presence is not only presence but the representation or the sign of   presence. The second issue is ‘autonomy versus engagement’, which takes us to a library competition that  both Zaha and I took part in. The project shows how I see autonomy today and deals with what I call the question of  horizontal vectors. There is an existing church built on the

site of a former church, where there are two grids, one real and the other virtual. For our project we took this and used a series of the horizontal vectors that you can  produce on the computer to distort the structure of the relationship between the two. In other words, instead of  superposing them as I would have done in the past, as a kind of process project, we allowed the two grids to interact with one another and create an internal vortex of  space that is different from the vortex of space in Le Corbusier’s Strasbourg Congress Hall project. It is the kind of space Rem critiques in many of his projects involving voids, for example his Très Grande Bibliothèque and the project for the Jussieu libraries in Paris.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, by Eisenman Architects

The third topic that I imagined we would talk about tonight is ‘content and form’. Compare Rem’s Seattle Central Library with a model of our Hamburg library  proposal. I would argue that there is no question that Rem’s library is an architecture where ‘content’ is form. But I would also argue that our Hamburg project is ‘form as content’, and that there is an enormous difference  between the juxtapositions of these two words – ‘content as form’ or ‘form as content’. The next topic is the

difference between our ideas about the subject, or the subject as voyeur. I see the subject as no longer merely  passive, but as a participant in the space of the project. We have been working on something I call radical  passivity. You find this kind of subject – a non-passive  passive subject – in the films of Michael Haneke, for  example, especially in his Code Unknown and Caché.

Competition entry for the Très Grande Bibliothèque by OMA

In Rem’s Seattle Library and in our project for Santiago there are two types of diagrams, diagrams that Rem and I  both use. One is the diagram as icon index, or as visual similitude. I believe this kind of diagram exists in Seattle.

The other kind of diagram is an index of transformation. One of our diagrams for my project in Santiago is an example of this. The volumetric transformations, that deal with the superposition of a medieval grid, a Cartesian grid and a series of very different grids, produce a final indexical structure for the project, as opposed to a kind of  iconic structure. Comparing these two aspects of diagrams without making a value judgement as to which one might  be better, reveals what Charles Sanders Peirce calls a sign. There’s another comparison we could do. Here are two Moebius strips, relating to two very different intentions, two different projects by the two of us. One interesting thing for me about Rem’s Moebius, at CCTV, is that it turns the strong vector of a vertical building – a high-rise  building – into a horizontal vector at the top. I think the ector at both the base and the top of CCTV is important. That quality isn’t present in our Max Reinhardt Haus, where we also worked with a Moebius strip diagram. We are talking about a gap of almost 12 to 15 years between these two projects of course, so the comparison can’t be a direct one. The two issues we worked on were the idea of  making a non-phallic tower, which was an important issue  back in the early 90s, and the theoretical question of what is meant by ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – the Moebius is constantly turning on itself so there is no single outside or  inside, there is no frame between the two. So we saw this

kind of diagram not as an icon or a symbol, but rather as an investigation into the substrate of architecture.

From left: Max Reinhardt Haus by Eisenman Architects; CCTV by OMA

The final image I would include in this opening  presentation is one that my office received just yesterday: a poster of a new political party in Italy celebrating the Day of Memory, the day that Auschwitz was liberated. What is interesting to me about the poster is that they felt obliged to superimpose the Jewish star over the field of  our project in Berlin. Apparently they think no one would  be able to read the field without the Jewish star. For me

that was significant – I kept saying to myself, why did they have to do that? And I realised that was precisely the  point of our project: we forced them to superimpose the Jewish star over the field. These are some of the issues that concern me, and that can provide a start for our  discussion, even though both of us are capable of looking at these and other issues in many different ways.

Political party advertisement for the Day of Memory

BS Thank

you Peter. Let’s turn now to Rem, for his opening remarks. REM KOOLHAAS My

presentation tonight will be a little more personal. Basically, I think I can do architecture as a ournalist, and one of the most interesting things about ournalism is that it is a profession without a discipline. Journalism is only a regime of curiosities, applicable to any subject, and I would say this is still a very important driving factor in my architecture.

Rem Koolhaas

Architecture is a curiously old subject, with a kind of  terrain and laws and interests that are in some cases more than 4,000 years old. By contrast, we are today at the exact moment when you could say the whole world has  become the subject of architecture. I became an architect in the 1970s, a time that I would say was the beginning of  globalisation, so I could use my journalistic interest in the world. It has become an extremely interesting project to

see, as a kind of journalism, what the effects of  globalisation on architecture could be. The narrative and the anecdote – and I know these have become fairly obscene words in the profession – may sometimes dominate our preoccupation with architecture. This was the case with my 1971 studies of the Berlin Wall, which I looked at as a kind of architecture imposing strange  behaviour on people, as could be seen by the number of  efforts – some of them futile, and some successful – to escape from East Berlin. What I would like to say is that the entire envelope surrounding architecture – all the narratives and the tragedies – is incorporated into my concerns and the work we do. If I date the start of my work to completing my studies at the AA in 1972, what I can see since then is an increasing intertwining of the public and the private sectors, which has seriously undermined what I think of as the traditional legitimacy of architecture. I think we all wrestle with the effects of globalisation on the market economy, which make architecture both more important and at the same time less important. Globalisation seems to give architects maximum ingenuity, yet leaves us fundamentally undernourished regarding what we are able to do. None of  us is immune to that combination of a decline in traditional legitimacy and decreased architectural importance. I want to look at how stupid architects are in

this situation, because although we provide icons of  today’s market economy, we are the only artistic discipline that doesn’t really benefit from it. Movie stars make astronomical amounts of money, and we have art stars and sports superstars, but by comparison architects remain on a stubbornly horizontal line of income, with only a few like Foster or Gehry attaining a modest stratosphere of fame or money. Compared to other  incomes, their levels of fame or money are of course laughable, so we have to change architecture. And this is  perhaps my most fundamental difference with Peter. I think we have to look differently at the discipline of  architecture in relation to the world. If there is a repertoire of possible action between making changes in the world and leaving it as it is, the architect is always on the side of  change. If the repertoire is between executing ideas and observing them, the architect is always on the side of  execution. I don’t know how a single profession could be satisfied with using this combination of interfering, changing, executing and acting as the basis for practice, leaving abstinence, observing and reflecting by the wayside. I think we have seen a recent swerve in the kinds of relationship within architecture, and maybe even in a way that has made for a more embarrassing definition of  what we actually do as architects. As architects we are intellectuals, but we are operating strictly within

architecture. If I’m completely honest, I would say that what we’ve tried to become, in our office, is not architectural intellectuals but rather public intellectuals, in other words intellectuals who are able to contribute in domains beyond architecture. This also involves an effort to explode the cell division that is part of a typical architectural office. We have tried to do this, most importantly, through our attempt to look at work not just as separate architectural projects that come into our  offices, but in terms of their potential for generating new kinds of work. We do this by analysing the political and other components of each project to see if there is a cumulative effect to what we’re trying to do, building up an intelligence that is not just a knowledge about architecture but, increasingly, a knowledge about the world – or about discrepancies in the world. While we do this work we go out into the world as Europeans, and then go back to Europe as citizens of the world. There are these incredible discrepancies in how we see the world. Take the Strait of Gibraltar. We Europeans see it as a kind of sporting challenge, for swimmers to race across, yet for Africans of course it is often something very different, and crossing it can be deadly. Something Peter mentioned, regarding the diagram. For  us the diagram is no longer only a device that triggers

architecture, or enables us to trigger architecture. It is also a device with which to look at the world and to try to represent some of the bizarre conditions we observe. For  me this remains an important part of what we might call ‘the diagram’ today. I can show an example here, with a diagram that demonstrates the rate of urbanisation in Europe and North America. Here is another diagram, showing the production of important architectural texts by architects related to the effect I just mentioned, contemporary urbanisation in Africa. Of course as architects we all have strong opinions regarding effects like these. What we have observed in our work is that Africa committed itself to urbanisation at the exact moment that cities stopped being thought about. Today Asia is urbanising at an even faster speed than Africa or Europe ever did, and this urbanisation is occurring in an intellectual void as far as the west is concerned. Presumably, this is an emerging concern as well as an emerging ideology – at least as far as the east is concerned. We did the same kind of research into effects  by looking at shopping a few years ago. But today the office is not just researching media companies, but also working for them. So we use the diagram not only as a creative element for building but as a way of looking at the economics of companies, which you can see in some of our AMO research. In this diagram you can see how

we mapped an intersection of every title of Condé Nast, and how there is a potential for new magazines to be born and continually emerge out of these intersections. And we also look at buildings in this same diagrammatic way. When I say public intellectual, as I did earlier regarding what architects can become today, it is for me a daily tragedy to see how bad Europe is at doing this, and how incompetent its architecture is in terms of being able to convey its raison d’être in the world. You probably know that as an office we’ve been working on projects that try to address the issue of how to represent Europe politically in the world and at the same time explain something of  the continent’s grotesque history and the more or less  plausible destiny of the European Union – all of this in a kind of single major performance. It was a source of  incredible pride for us that the tent projects we did in Brussels, for example, immediately became a kind of  territory and centre for political action, as well as a kind of unexpected Islamic performance space. The office is increasingly geared towards this kind of   project and role, to enable us to devise the kind of  intelligence needed to enter this territory (though it’s not necessarily one we’re invited into). Perhaps this is the most critical thing for me; not only because, economically, we are practically inept, but because we are

surfing on a horizontal curve of change in architecture. Peter was talking earlier about extreme passivity. We are totally passive as a profession, waiting for the commissions to come to us, yet we are basically willing to nearly kill ourselves – and each other – in our efforts to get new work. Of course all of this, in a sense, is a kind of  grotesqueness. Populism is real, and I have a picture that shows something of populism in architecture, which  perhaps makes an interesting comparison with how Peter  showed his Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. It’s a picture o a mob of journalists trailing after Peter while he is walking around the memorial at the time of its opening. Here is Peter in the middle of this media scrum. I was looking at this and wondering, where do the politics and the economics of this spectacle converge? It’s a question we have been asking more recently in the office, regarding the space for architecture in the Chinese  political system and its economy. Contrary to what many  people think, China is not on its way to becoming a market economy; it remains an authoritarian state and is therefore able to do things in a completely different way from Europe. In a conversation like this one tonight, we could discuss our contribution as architects to that state, or we could comment on that state. Both are possible. For  me the important point to bring up regarding our current

 project for CCTV is not some point about its form. What is interesting about the project is its incredible accumulation of new facilities which can be used for  working with the media, a new condition in China. So the activity of the future audience for this media is crucial when thinking about CCTV. It is perhaps a very oldfashioned aspect of our work that we’re actually interested in people, not in humanitarian, humanist or  architecturally ‘nice’ ways, but simply in how people exist in the flows and behaviours of global culture today. We are at a moment when almost all cultures are not only colliding but also interacting with and influencing each other. How we address these new conditions of flow and exchange is crucial to our work. I am interested in seeing whether we can work from within this condition to create new and better conditions. This remains a very important issue for us as architects. For me the audience is both the  people who produce a building and the people who use it, the people who walk past it and even the people who enjoy the final triumphant image, the kind of image you can only dream of in your wildest dreams, an image with a flatness like a tourist brochure, or an image on the internet, images that exist in a constant and endless dialogue. I’ll stop there. PE Rem,

there is a question that goes to the heart of our 

discussion. You may say that the form of CCTV is of less concern to you than content or programme. I doubt whether many people (apart from sociologists) will be concerned, 50 years from now, with how well the  programme functions. There are many rather ordinary  buildings devoted to TV and media that probably work as well as CCTV. But it is disingenuous to say that the iconic form is not what catches everybody’s attention. It is the icon that is the building’s function. It is its content. Clearly, not all TV stations look like CCTV. CCTV is a fantastic project; it is fantastic because it is form as content, not content as form. RK  You’re

right, we wouldn’t be spending as much time and effort as we are on creating a form like this one at CCTV if we weren’t completely obsessed with that too. In mentioning it earlier, I was giving it as a kind of private indication of our larger architectural interests. I wanted to talk briefly about the city or cultural context. I recently gave a lecture in Cape Town where I created an inventory of the ways in which the public realm is driven as much  by the market as it is by politics, and is increasingly  becoming vacuous, inane. Comparing today’s public realm to that of the 1950s, there is no doubt that someone from back then could engage in more radical adventures than we can now.

PE One

thing we could do here is look at how the two of  us deal with the issue of globalisation. First of all, we  both tend to build in countries other than where we live and work. I don’t build in the US, nor does Rem in the  Netherlands. That is clearly one aspect of globalisation  present in our work. But even if this is part of  globalisation, both of us are still subject to local politics. For example, I am really trying to understand what it means to deal with the local politics related to our project in Galicia, which in itself is an anomaly within the Spanish context. Both of us were in the original competition for the project, and did it from outside Spain. You could say that globalisation does not really affect the  people there who are mainly concerned about their local culture, about speaking their local language, the autonomy of the province. They are trying to do something that is nearly the reverse of being part of a global economy, of living in a global market. To understand this idea is difficult even for people from Madrid or Barcelona, let alone those of us from New York. And understanding this nationalist drive for  autonomy in Galicia has little to do with my competence as an architect.

City of Culture of Galicia by Eisenman Architects

Maybe that is what Rem means about my looking at architecture too microscopically. I agree with him, but I am not a political analyst. When I move into political realms I find myself an amateur. I am not certain that we as architects can be global citizens in the true sense of the word, because I do not believe our training leads us that way. What we do is confront local situations, which ultimately confront architecture. The people in Galicia

want to know, does our project symbolise a nationalist spirit? The same kind of question came up when my office was working on a project in Taiwan recently. There the question would have been: how can this project help  people to take a stand against mainland China? We are doing a project in Jakarta now, and there are some tricky  political issues in Jakarta that I do not pretend to understand. We have to be willing to look at things in different ways. Nevertheless, CCTV is a spectacular   building – and a spectacular success, which is more than ust a rhetorical success. For an architect the question  becomes, how does one do a skyscraper after it? Has it not pushed the limit of the vertical building today? That’s the kind of question I am interested in. The reason I am interested in CCTV is that the horizontal connections operate as dynamically important to the vertical building, and thus will set the standard for high-rise buildings for  ears to come. But the question then becomes, does something have to be spectacular in order to change the model or the type of building as we know it? For me this is a question that must be on the table when we talk about topics like globalisation. Would one do CCTV, let’s say, in Istanbul today? I think one could, I don’t think the  building is just about China. BS Rem,

what do you think are the implications of this distinction you’re drawing, between global and ‘local’

interests? It seems we could easily end up recapitulating a familiar, I think outdated, discourse of regionalism. RK  It

is not at all my intention to suggest that an outbreak of a global family or global community is imminent, and that the architect can better enable this. But it is very clear that what we want to become, in our work  at OMA, is a kind of global expert, because it is from this  position that we could then try and answer the question Peter just posed – a really interesting question about whether an architect could do a CCTV in Turkey instead of, say, China. This is exactly the kind of question an architect must be able to answer as it is really about the culture – about where Turkey is currently poised in terms of its economy and a number of other factors. If you are aware of the regional associations, then you can be 100  per cent certain that no one in Turkey would ever ask this question in that form, but it’s something we can do, coming in from the outside. There is simply no political or economic space in Turkey to do a building like CCTV right now. It’s very important that we don’t go into  projects unprepared. As architects we have to be able to address almost any situation we find, and be active in terms of our own agendas. Maybe later in this conversation we can discuss this issue of passivity that Peter raised in his comments. It may be irrelevant, but CCTV was also not a World Trade Center. It was a

deliberate decision by us, as architects, to put forward this debate about globalisation in this particular architectural competition, in Beijing, and not in another project.

Construction sequence of CCTV Building by OMA

BS Peter,

you just described your idea of a critical  practice in terms of a particular architectural ideology, a way of thinking about architecture. Rem, you did the opposite, citing architecture’s relation to other things in the world. Despite your differences, one could say that ou each argue for situating architectural work in relation to something else, something beyond the specifics or the contingencies of any given project. The question this raises is this: beyond a project’s brief or specificities, what gives those ideas legitimacy, other than the work  itself? You clearly make compelling opposing cases. PE I

am going to follow with the last idea Rem put forward. In our World Trade Center project, the

competition conditions prohibited us from doing what we felt was right in that particular situation, yet we went into the project because we were citizens of New York and felt an obligation to do it. It seems important with any client to say what you want to do at the outset. In Istanbul, for  example, I had a long conversation with the mayor  explaining what we wanted to do in the project there and I said something like, ‘You know what would be really important? Going after the 2010 European Cup. So why not do a series of stadiums on the site?’At the time I happened to be interested in doing stadiums, but it was also more than just a coincidence of timing, because one  place where politics and sports and national characteristics all engage with each other is in the idea of  a stadium. I would have thought that if the mayor had  brought in Rem and Herzog and others to do a series of  stadiums, it would have captured the imagination of the  people, and in such a way that the stadiums would have  become political artefacts. That’s what I mean about understanding the local situation. But the stadium I would do in Istanbul would not be like the stadium we did in Munich, or the one we did in Arizona. I agree with Rem, ou wouldn’t do CCTV at the World Trade Center site.

World Trade Center competition entry, Eisenman Architects with Meier, Holl & Gwathmey Siegel

RK  What

I would propose for a sports building in a tough country like Turkey, whether or not it is a country spoiled by optical overdose, is the same kind of stadium I would do anywhere. PE This

is something you could propose if you had already won the competition. But suppose I won the

competition and I said, Rem, your stadium is going to look just like mine? RK  But

the question is just a way of trying to end this horrible predicament of artificial differences in architecture. Maybe as an architect I don’t see these differences as real, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter. PE I

don’t think these are artificial differences. At least our differences are important for me. But don’t we both engage in the media, which attempts always to produce what is new? Newness matters if you want to stay hot in the media. The media is one way we get work and we are constantly being forced to create some kind of difference  between ourselves. In that sense, you and I are no different. RK  No.

It is not about our difference. Nevertheless there are ways to outwit the media and assume responsibilities for our actions as architects, unasked. PE That RK  I

could be called a form of critical passivity.

don’t think it’s passivity. If you look back at some of the most important projects over the past decade, there have been moments when architects could have joined

together and made gestures together or said no together –   but they didn’t. It’s really staggering. I tried extremely hard, but I never convinced a single architect in the world to join me in an effort to refuse something which was imposed and which was absolutely absurd. During these competitions or other events I didn’t meet a single architect who wasn’t secretly grateful, thinking, ‘Well, that’s one less competitor and we’re definitely going to try to win this thing’. [Laughter] PE I

should tell the story of the Madrid competition. I remember calling and asking you what you felt about it and you said, for whatever reason, that you were not going to do the competition. You were right, I was wrong: this was a case where architecture ran afoul of the local  political process. Jacques Herzog, Juan Navarro, Sejima and ourselves all entered this competition. It was set up as a high-rollers’ competition, and they had various judges from around the world. I remember at the end of the  presentation, the mayor, who was not even supposed to be on the jury, got up and said, ‘OK, before we begin the udging, Herzog’s project is out, Sejima’s is out,  Navarro’s is out, Eisenman’s is out. We can’t consider  those projects because they are not right for Madrid.’ Of  course Rem was very lucky because he didn’t enter a  project in the competition. The same thing would have happened to him. So this modest Spanish project was the

winner. We spent a lot of time and energy on a project that, had we known what the terms were, we wouldn’t have done. Maybe Rem is right, we should have refused in the first place. RK  Of

course, at this stage of globalisation maybe you should, or could, encourage young, modest projects in Spain. PE Do

you believe that?

RK  Yes, PE You

I really believe that.

being bound to Holland the way you are?

RK  That’s

not the same. I am lucky to be a citizen of a country with a very small footprint [laughter], so our  expansion is inevitable and doesn’t really weigh down on the global situation. But I think, yes, we really have to consider that at certain points our participation –   participation by architects like you or me – is patently absurd. BS One

of the things we could say tonight is that you are  both absolute experts on globalisation – in architecture, at least. Peter, you observed in your earlier remarks that in fact you both do work globally, and much more abroad than in your local settings.

RK  I

think Peter has presented the facts in a way that says that since he realised a major monument in Berlin, he is a very impressive politician. [Laughter] PE I

have to tell you, there is no question that political decisions are a major part of how architecture is realised. For example, when we began our project for the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, it was with the ruling  political party, the CDU, and with Chancellor Helmut Kohl behind the project. When Kohl lost to Schroeder, it seemed the project was dead; there was no way it was going to begin again. RK  I

wrote in Junkspace that ‘only the dead can be resurrected’. It is a typical modern condition. [Laughter] PE As

an office, we have consciously avoided going to China, because I am not convinced that I have enough understanding of the culture there to be able to do a  building that could resist being appropriated. In other  words, I would not be able to make the distinctions needed to make a critical project that resonated in Chinese culture. How can you say, ‘We can do something in China, as we did with the CCTV competition, that we couldn’t do with the World Trade Center competition in  New York?’ How would you have known that? Because I,

for one, could not have made that judgement. RK  We’ve

simply equipped the office with the kind of  apparatus that enables us to make that kind of judgement, or at least we’ve tried to. I hate to seem too smooth about this, but it was through a laborious engagement with China ten years before that we came to take the decision about whether we should look east or remain focused on Europe or North America. It was part of the research studio which I set up at Harvard to really explore this question. That is what I find really sad about the  profession today, that we can create and have unbelievable ingenuity within architecture, but outside of  it we have such a dearth of knowledge and information about the world. Architects have such a tenuous relation with information about the world that pertinent judgement is becoming almost impossible. Like sheep, we all go in one direction and then in another. PE You

and I both teach an increasing number of  students from other cultures, yet I wouldn’t send a student from another culture to study with Rem in order to learn how African culture or Chinese culture affect architecture. I would want them to study with him because of how he deals with architecture, how he faces a problem, whether  it’s in Lagos or Beijing. Therefore there must be a universal knowledge that you and others possess. In other 

words, I’m not telling you to change your way of teaching according to where you are working. I am saying I want ou to be more like Rem Koolhaas – that’s the reason they go to your office, that’s the reason they study with ou. If that’s the case, then there is no specific condition in China – or anywhere else – that would warrant you changing what you are doing. Globalisation doesn’t mean that you change yourself. You don’t teach East Asian students any differently than you do your Middle Eastern or American students. You teach Rem. RK  This

is a really interesting subject, because ten years ago I became a teacher at Harvard on the condition that I didn’t have any involvement in design. I made an agreement that I would do research, because I proclaimed myself ignorant of many situations. All I offered was to undo that ignorance along with students, wherever they came from. Currently there is a new dean [Alan S Altshuler, who has since stepped down] and this relationship with the school and with the research-based teaching is becoming really controversial. I have had an extremely hard time trying to convince the dean that it is worth it. This is further evidence of the incredible resistance of architecture towards reinventing the discipline, and the incredible consistency of its beliefs. No matter how many apparent manifestations there are of this architectural belief, all sharing a single platform – that’s

what is most staggering about architecture. PE Would

you also say that you don’t want to teach design, that what you want to do in your studio is research into the strategies for design? RK  Yes,

to some extent.

PE I

would have thought that we both agree that teaching studios in the abstract is a waste of time. BS You

have been doing it for many years, and are committed teachers and not only architects. PE What

I can’t believe is how students still think that having a studio and going and finding out what a library is like will help them do what Rem has done in Seattle. I don’t think you have to do a lot of research to do Seattle. What you have to have is some intuition about  possibilities inherent in a site, in a building programme. I think that the genius in the project is something that you can’t teach, and therefore why bother with teaching studios? BS Each

of you should say something about how you have deliberately structured the relationship between your  offices and your teaching. Peter, you have been teaching design studios longer than anyone else in North America.

What have you observed changing over four decades? PE A

lot of Rem’s critics would love to hear the remark  Rem just made, that ‘I don’t teach design, I don’t want to teach design’. A lot of my critics would love to hear what Brett just said, that I’ve probably been ‘teaching longer  than anybody else in North America’. They would think  maybe it is time to stop. [Laughter] I would argue the  point this way. I have been trying to move from studio based design projects to doing more research on design. Unfortunately, everybody wants to design today, it’s all they want to do. They don’t want to do research on design, they want to design. So ultimately the studio goes  back to that problem. It is more important that I teach my students about the movement in Rem Koolhaas’s work  and thinking from his Bibliothèque Nationale to Jussieu, Seattle and the project in Porto. These are the four   buildings I use in my teaching to show an evolutionary  process in his thinking and work. I think students learn more about design from studying this transformation than from just trying to design a library. BS So

you don’t send them to Rem anymore? You mean they learn more about Rem by staying with you? [Laughter] PE No,

I still send them to Rem. I have a whole history

of students sent to Rem and vice versa, but I think it is more important to learn about the trajectories of work. Before this conversation tonight Rem said, ‘Let’s talk  about current issues today. Well, one of the issues is: what if newness has been a strategy cultivated by the media? How does one stand against it? I have introduced tonight the notion of radical passivity. Now what does it mean in terms of media? Both Rem and I are familiar with the films of Michael Haneke, for example. I would have thought that his films are an attempt to stand against the consumption of Hollywood-mediated movie stars, which has created an incredible passivity in film audiences today. I think Haneke is one of the new filmmakers to resist this impulse. He is not New Wave, he is not Bresson, he is not Godard, and he is not Antonioni. The question I would put is this: if Michael Haneke can do this in films, what would it be to do such a thing in architecture? I don’t have the answer yet, but I would have thought thinking that as a project could be something that both Rem and I would be interested in. RK  I

think that after all the excess, the word neutrality is  perhaps an interesting one to think about again these days. We have tried to do a number of neutral projects. BS For

neutral users, neutral architects, or just neutral

audiences? [Laughter] PE CCTV

is neutral? [Laughter]

RK  No,

the project is far from the idea of neutral users. And in any case, there is always a kind of neutrality in the  project itself. PE I

would have argued that we could agree that you and I are trying to do expressively neutral projects; I know I am trying to do such projects. To go back to Jussieu, or to our Dutch Embassy in Berlin, you can argue that they’re not spectacular in their being but only in the way they organise space, time, people, function, etc, and you can see a kind of neutrality in them. I think Rem’s Jussieu  building is a canonical building precisely because it is a critique of the spectacle, of spectacular form. For  example, if you compare Rem’s Seattle Public Library with Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, I think that Frank’s building is a spectacular building because it is intended to structure views of the city in certain ways. Because of this, it is in a way a building that, like the work of Bernini, creates a passive spectator. Bernini set up scenographic views and Frank’s entire building is about the scenography of Bilbao. Rem’s Seattle building has nothing to do with scenography, or so I would argue. I think it is much more interesting because it is more like

Borromini. Understanding the difference between the scenographic nature of Bilbao and what I would consider  to be the didactic internal nature of Rem’s building in Seattle is very important. I think it is important for  students to understand what that is, and in that sense Seattle is a far more neutral building than Bilbao. You may not agree with me.

Jussieu libraries by OMA

RK  It

is an excellent argument. [Laughter]

PE Ohhhhhh, RK  Well,

I got a star! [Laughter]

I think that you have been exceptionally generous in investing time in other architects and also in maintaining an architectural discourse.

PE Yes,

but I learn from it.

RK  That

is an amazing additional gift that seems to be completely independent of your work – it is clearly not a sideline interest. [Laughter] BS We

are on the topic of subjectivity and audience. One way to characterise it would be to say that Peter is arguing for an optical, thinking individual within architecture; a subject who experiences a building by more than just seeing it. PE No,

I am against opticality.

BS OK,

but what I was suggesting is something more than straight opticality. PE I

am against opticality in the sense of visual spectacle. I am interested in illegibility, as in Haneke’s films. By the end of Caché, for example, you’re saying ‘Who was sending those films to the characters?’ But the filmmaker doesn’t care whether you know the answer to that question or not. Haneke’s work is a movement towards a non-legible, non-spectacular way of dealing with function and meaning in film. If you give the audience information, then as a filmmaker you know they are just going to get comfortable and sit back in their 

chairs, watching the film. But if, as Caché suggests, it is not about figuring out a film, then is it about having an experience with illegibility? In other words, the spectator  is not active, but is instead what Blanchot would call non passive passive. When Rem uses the word neutral, I think  I understand what he means, because he says it to mean ou can’t keep going beyond the experience, you can’t keep getting more and more crazy. There are enough examples of craziness out there.

Poster for Caché

BS The

kind of subject you are describing is certainly thinking in confrontation with, for example, a particular  film. There is then still a kind of engagement. In the work  of OMA, the agency is undoubtedly mobile, moving in space on the included surfaces of Jussieu, for example. There is a kind of agency in this form of subjectivity that is engaged, no? PE I

think that the kinds of subject we take to be active in Rem’s buildings are different from those in mine. The idea of the event, of the voyeur of events, has always been  present in the eroticism that has always been part of his work – the kind of building section where you look  through and down into a space. I would agree that is a big difference in our work. RK  Can

I say what my dilemma in this discussion is? I  basically gave a presentation where I politely said that I live in the world of architecture with only half of my body or brain. I also announced a very aggressive effort not so much to escape architecture as to engage with other  terrains. It is not that I want to talk particularly about these other terrains, but it is bizarre that the subject of the other half is always the topic of discussion.

PE It

is important that you and I have this discussion.

RK  But

I would like to talk to you about what the situation has been. You were involved with a conference series that lasted for ten years, the Any conferences. You have been the publisher of many magazines, and you have instituted a kind of debate in New York. During tough times you have maintained credibility and overcome difficulties, and I think that this point of view is perhaps also an inspiration, a very important factor in architecture. I would like to talk about that effort, and about your  current position in relation to it. I mean whether you have something else, or whether you feel you have given enough. And why, as somebody who certainly in the 1970s could be incredibly public about almost anything, ou have today become a kind of intellectual architect, not a public one. PE I

would say, regarding this, that not many people tell ou how you are supposed to grow old.

RK  I PE I

know what you mean.

am over 70, and one cannot behave at 70 as one did at 40. I would like to but I cannot be an enfant terrible again. For example, I like not being pinned down, but this

ear I decided to join a university, like you did, Rem, on a one-day-a-week basis. I love the luxury of teaching at Yale. The second thing about getting old is that you have to look out for your family after you are gone. While I do not feel old, and I want to keep working, what does one do at 73 to stay vital to one’s own discipline? I would argue that the reason that you and I are at this table tonight, here at the AA, is that we represent a certain level of vitality to ourselves first; in other words, you are true to yourself, I am to myself. The question is, what does that mean when one is 74 or 75? To me and to Rem that is a good question, and maybe the next time that we get together I will have an answer for how I feel about the question we raised earlier: do I want to keep teaching? I’m not as interested in teaching per se as I am in having students working with me. I run my office practically as a research institution, very similar to Rem’s studios at Harvard, which I think is a good model. And I think it is  probably more important for a student to work in my office than it is to work in the studio with me because one has a limited amount of energy, and working as a method of teaching makes sense to me. If you said to me, as Rem said, ‘so what are you going to focus on?’, I would say that I am not going to start another magazine or another institution. I am trying to cut

down on these kinds of performative acts, because they take a lot of time to get together. Neither of us needs another book, but the urge to build is still there. I wanted to build a tall building; we are currently doing these tall  buildings in Jakarta, 50-storey buildings, and I find that a real challenge to do. There are several models of tall  buildings that I would like to build and see what they are like. Do I want to do another museum? – not necessarily. Do I want to do another stadium? – maybe. For example, I would like to do the project that Rem started out with. I would love to do a prison, it would be a stunning project. And I would love to do a real housing project. I think the one thing that I really admire about Rem, which we haven’t talked about yet, is also one of our   biggest differences. I think Rem has an urban strategy. When he worked with AMO on Lagos, he talked about these tears in the fabric – a notion that came out of the  project he did with Ungers many years ago, for Berlin as a green archipelago. By the way I think Ungers is one of  those people who has been overlooked in the architectural world, and Rem has done a lot to promote some of his urban ideas. If I had to say what was the most important thing to me about where I want to go, it would be that I want to find out if there is an urban project today. Is there something

that relates architecture to urbanity? I don’t have a cadre of those kinds of projects, like Rem’s La Villette project or Melun-Sénart. I think some of those archipelago  projects many years ago with Ungers were important, and if I were to say where his career worked for me, it is in Rem’s talk about postmodern urbanism. That’s where I would like to go and see what it would mean to do a housing project today. It’s interesting to see how the archipelago ideas sift down to everyday conditions. The ew York Times last week had a piece about a new suburban development. We are no longer in a world of  urban versus suburban sprawl. Today we are in the suburban archipelago, and I was completely taken aback   by their relationship to the green archipelago Rem and Ungers did years ago. Suddenly we are thinking about suburbs with holes in them. RK  But

I would say that the vast majority of those  projects are not really projects but rather readings and interpretations of existing situations. This investment in looking rather than doing, remains in my work. This kind of constant urban interest is really what I do. PE You

say that the green archipelago was not a project, that it was just looking at conditions. I am curious. RK  It

was basically about looking at Berlin and seeing

that there were vast unoccupied areas and thinking, this is a beautiful situation, so let’s propose it as a new model. BS Rem,

you brought up your interest in journalism and in investigating and discovering things in the world. And let’s say not just language, but the use of language, is a distinguishing trait with which to compare and contrast our projects. Do either of you see this as having evolved in key ways over the years? Peter, you just said that you see yourself withdrawing from things like magazines and ournals to focus on building? PE No,

no, no. Let me make sure that we get this right. I was taking a particular quote from Rem. I would say that if we were to look back 50 years from now and compare Rem and myself, the interesting comparison would be in the books. I think Delirious New York  will be compared to the PhD thesis I did in 1963, which has just been  published in German and is now being published in English [The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture]. I am  publishing my version of S,M,L,XL as a book we are working on now, called the Eisenmanual . I think that if  ou compared the books that he has done with the books that I have done you will see an important relationship to one another, but also difference, and one that I think is much clearer than in our buildings.

I know it is important for Rem to have done S,M,L,XL and elirious New York . My books are equally important to me. As I have always said, we wouldn’t look at those  buildings by Palladio the same way if he hadn’t written the Quattro Libri. And I doubt we would have looked at those white houses of Le Corbusier the same way either –  remember, a lot of other people were doing them at the same time – if he hadn’t done his Oeuvre Complète. So, Rem and I learn from some masters, and there is no question that books, if you understand the history of the world, were very important to those architects who we think are important. Rem, I don’t know if you agree with that? RK  Yes, PE He

of course I agree.

hates to agree.

RK  No,

I don’t hate to agree at all. But you simply can’t talk about books and the similarities between you and me, or between Le Corbusier and Palladio, because something quite drastic has happened in the past 30 years in architecture – to reading, publishing, to the aesthetics of   books and so on. Without an acknowledgment of the drastically different place that they occupy in architecture today, I find this a difficult discussion.

PE Oh,

well.

RK  In

a way, that was the pleasure we took in doing Content , a book that was subject to as many of the current conditions of architecture as possible without becoming ictimised by this situation. PE Let

me say one last point on this, Rem, because we come to this table out of mutual respect for one another. We don’t have to repeat point number one, even if we disagree on many things. It is a point to make on the basis of what you were saying about Content , and the way you chose to do your exhibition in Berlin. I chose another way to do my show at the MAK Museum in Vienna. What we know is that there cannot be two more didactically diverse ersions of how two architects would want to present themselves in public, in a public milieu, than what we can see with Rem in Berlin or me in Vienna. I am not saying that one of these examples is better than the other. But what makes it difficult to sit at this table and talk about architecture tonight, together, is that, whether Rem thinks of himself as a journalist or I think of myself as a sportscaster or an athletics director, there is a radical difference between us. I don’t want to try and conclude this point by referring to the enormous difference between architects like Le Corbusier and Mies. But Le Corbusier  did have a didactic model, the Maison Domino, which set

up the rest of his practice. You could say he had a second didactic model in his Citroën House. These were architectural models that influenced the world from 1914 to 1939. I believe that Rem’s analysis of the New York  Athletic Club in Delirious New York  is a didactic model. It argues for a continuity of space that was no longer  functionally necessary, because with the elevator we no longer needed contiguous spatial relationships that were functional. He then tips this relationship down to make it horizontal, in his La Villette project, and shows that you can striate space in some way in a diagram. Why I take Rem’s model to be so important is that it didn’t deal with ust architecture, it dealt with the city. I have yet to  propose that kind of a didactic model in my work, and I think that’s what keeps me going even now. It’s important to have such a model, and I am excited about the fact that I still have one to go and he has already done his, so it’s a question of whether you are climbing a hill or going down the other side. I like to think that I’m still going up the hill. BS And

with that last discussion of where each of you think you might be today with your own work, it seems a good time to wrap up and open the floor to questions. AUDIENCE At

the AA there used to be evenings called conversaziones that were something like tonight’s event – 

a kind of spiralling discussion. I find you both trying to outdo one another, each one trying to disappear into a ‘radical passivity’ or neutrality. I love it, the way you have sounded like, ‘I’m more neutral than you are  passive’, etcetera. So the question for you two is: why try so hard to be so indexical? In a funny way you are both going towards representation in your work, aren’t you? Peter, you want people on a certain level to always know that it is the Holocaust that your project in Berlin is memorialising, which is why you call it a field people can get lost in. To go back to the example you showed of a  political party putting a star on your project so that it could represent the Holocaust more clearly, isn’t that something that already happened to a project like yours? PE But

the poster was done by an Italian left-wing party talking about the liberation of Auschwitz, associating it with this memorial. They took a picture of the memorial, and superimposed a Star of David. And I realised that this is the success of the project – because unless you put a Star of David on the memorial, nobody will know what it is. AUDIENCE Except

that your memorial project has had the most media of any iconic non-icon project of recent times. In other words, it is indexical. So, you can’t get away from the things that have been added by the star,

including the star. So, I am asking why you both try so hard to deny the very spectacle that you inadvertently do so much to create? PE You

better ask Rem first. [Laughter]

RK  I

think that neither one of us is denying this media condition. But it is obvious that this is an incredibly difficult situation, because there is a conflict between the extent to which it is imposed on you by expectation, and  politically. The extent to which you yourself want to be spectacular is always in terms of the forms you create. Sometimes, instead, an architect might want to be spectacular in terms of the simple organisation of a  project, or sometimes spectacular in the restraint used. Maybe at other times it’s more about spectacular  articulateness, or simply emotion. So I think that what we are basically experiencing is that, seen from the outside, our range has been limited and is being eroded, because of the narrowing that is part of the spectacle. PE I

want to answer this in a similar yet different way. We were in a competition for a railway station with Zaha, which she won; we keep score of the times we lose to Zaha. She is my hero, actually. But out of this competition the regional governor said something like, ‘I really like Eisenman’s better, he should have won. So

Eisenman, you have a direct commission from me now to do a station in Pompeii.’ But the point is, he wanted me to do the exact same station. RK  But

you should do your project for Cannaregio now.

Cannaregio by Eisenman Architects

PE Every

time I go to an interview I always say, ‘We will give you a unique signature’. That is what clients want to hear, and that is how you get selected. Or we say something like, ‘We will give you an icon’. You can’t be saying ‘We are going to give you a non-icon icon’,  because that’s not what they want. After all, we are in competition against Jean Nouvel, Thom Mayne and others. Let’s take a neutral figure for this discussion,

someone Rem and I started out with: when clients ask  Richard Meier to do a project, they want a Richard Meier   building from him. He knows how to do that, and he  produces that. He has no problem with it. Rem and I are at this table and Richard isn’t, perhaps, because he has the signature. BS I

have to say, I was in Rome a couple of weeks ago and there were posters of his museum project everywhere. The conservative party had pasted their logo on top of it, attacking the building’s perceived disregard for Roman history and comparing it to an AGIP petrol station –  which Meier’s architecture, it could be said, might have a  passing formal similarity to. RK  What

you are saying almost makes me want to cry. Avoidance of that kind of thing is why Richard Meier is not at this table. You know we are dummies here tonight, it is not that we are so smart that Richard Meier cannot oin us here. I also think that architects have to have a deep respect for Richard Meier, on account of something that neither of us here tonight has been able to do, which is to resist the lure of difference and even the spectacular  in our own work. So, I’ve actually been rethinking Meier  in the past couple of years, as somebody who has been a lot more intelligent than architects have given him credit for. I would like to correct Peter’s initial anecdote,

 because what he forgot to say about our going to a Richard Meier lecture together many years ago – the occasion when we first met – is that every time Meier  gave a lecture at that time he came to Peter’s office  beforehand so that Peter could basically prepare the lecture and write the script for him. And the reason Peter  was angry with me was that I was attacking the script, not the dumbness of Meier. PE I

wouldn’t want you to cry for having had to come here tonight for this conversation, because nobody dragged you here, like nobody dragged you to those  places where you are going all the time for your work. You are a free spirit, you can always just say no. But I am glad you did come here tonight. I am glad to be talking to ou rather than some other people. So please don’t cry. BS Well,

now that it’s nearly getting to the point of  tears, we know it’s time to stop. To both of you, Peter and Rem, and on behalf of everyone at the AA, thank you  both so much for coming in and sharing your thoughts at this table.

PART II: THE COMMENTARY 1 FEBRUARY 2006 Two evenings after the Eisenman and Koolhaas conversation an equally large AA audience gathered to hear the analysis and commentary by two eminent architectural theorists and critics, Jeffrey Kipnis and Robert Somol. With a silent video of the previous event streaming on the overhead screen, the moderator of this second conversation, Mark Cousins, invited each of them to begin by performing an impromptu voice-over of what they thought the architects might have been saying during their conversation (Somol had been present, but Kipnis flew in especially for this follow-up event). After their  audacious acts of architectural ventriloquism, Kipnis and Somol then moved on effortlessly – without notes or  script, it should be pointed out – to offer devastating, stream-of-consciousness critiques on each architect’s  position as well as the inherent demands, expectations and even limitations imposed by the idea – and realities – of a critical architectural project today. – editor 

Jeffrey Kipnis, Mark Cousins and Robert Somol, 1 February 2006

TWO VIEWS: KOOLHAAS AND EISENMAN JEFFREY KIPNIS & ROBERT SOMOL, IN A CONVERSATION MODERATED BY MARK  COUSINS AA LECTURE HALL, LONDON

MARK COUSINS Following

Rem and Peter’s conversation with Brett here on Monday we thought, who better than Jeff and Bob to comment on the event? Up on the  projection screen you can see a video of that conversation. It’s silent now, because the volume isn’t on, but even so we might say that the event on Monday was a little like that – a lot of pauses, and silence. I mean it was strange to see two such eminent architects arrive, sit down together, and then act as if they were auditioning for the lead parts in Waiting for Godot. [Laughter] Actually, in response to the task given them for their conversation in front of a  public audience in London, I think they did pretty well. Recall that even Beckett didn’t have a character played by an architect born in Iraq, who was sitting in the front row of the audience and growling things under her breath like,

‘I don’t think this is going anywhere’, and then spending the rest of the time ostentatiously (but quite sensibly) doing her nails. [Laughter]

Mark Cousins

I feel the need to start by making a kind of bridge from, let’s say, the stubborn silence of Monday night to tonight’s event, which we might call an evening with the unstoppably articulate Jeff and Bob. So I propose starting with a brief game: I’m going to ask our guests, before they begin their deliberations, if they each could spend two or three minutes providing a soundtrack to the video

on now, dubbing what they wish had been said by Peter  and Rem. And then we can turn off this video, which is a sort of silent architecture looming over us as we start the evening. JEFFREY KIPNIS  

Well, first off, I think Peter’s make-up looks incredible. Do you want me to go first? ROBERT SOMOL 

You are the one who has theorised architectural ventriloquism, so yes, you should go first. JK  

I have to start off by saying that I think of the two  practices of Rem and Peter as critical practices, and that my discussion will be grounded on that view. Partly I think their difficulties on Monday night might have been due to how they have chosen their critical operations. Rem’s work I understand as having come out of  discovering form as not being ideologically loaded. For  him, form is simply one available tool among others; it is never going to be an ideological focus for him. And that freedom comes from his training at the AA at a time when the school was under the influence of Cedric Price. I have learned this point from Bob, about how a certain political  project was demanded of architecture at a certain time,  but no one knew a vocabulary for working towards that end. And so this insight, that the modernist vocabulary was not already irrevocably loaded with its own formal

ideologies, and in fact could be employed, deployed and redeployed, meant that you could do a critical architecture without it having a formal preoccupation, without engaging in the intricacies of formal discussions. By contrast Peter is entirely invested in the specificities of the canons of formal argumentation, and for him any critical  practice will only operate at that level.

Jeffrey Kipnis

So what we have is a situation where one architect is entirely devoted to the ideologies of form and the other is entirely devoted to the possibilities of discussing ideologies through form, but without any relationship to it whatsoever. This means that they share precisely the same goal and the debate between them is really about the techniques available to achieve that goal. So in response

to Mark’s opening request, that we try and think what each would have really wanted to say earlier this week, I wish Peter would have asked Rem, ‘Why do you think  that making architecture that pretends that arguments about changing a building’s programme or activities during a 24-hour day might mean a damned thing to anybody, since everyday buildings already do that anyway?’ Peter would go on, ‘I don’t need you to tell me to put a lot of programme in a building. When we go to a shopping mall we can see that there is plenty in it already. I know you’re really doing something else when you talk  about programme as much as you do, so why don’t you tell us the truth about what you’re really interested in?’ And then I think Rem should have asked Peter, ‘Why do ou think that confessing to us about all of the difficult  problems that are part of your design process – problems that everyone then becomes burdened with in trying to understand your work – why do you think this will make us look at your work in a way that matters on any political level whatsoever?’ That’s what I think the conversation  between them should have been, that’s what they should have said. [Laughter]

Cedric Price

MC 

Well, that certainly would have made the evening shorter. Bob, what do you think Rem and Peter should have said to one another?

RS 

Let’s see, I’d like to first make a preamble. I think  what’s interesting, and maybe this is a parallel to Jeff’s  point, is this: what they have in common common is at least as interesting as what they don’t share. The first point is of course that Peter and Rem are distinct from one another generationally, geographically and institutionally. In the past I have made much out of this; the fact that Peter represents the project of a semiotic critique and that Rem offers us a different generational  problem, representing representing the issue of institutional institutional projection. I think that this difference manifests itself in the work  we’re discussing tonight, so maybe one point of  discussion could be this: what do we mean by a critical  project, as opposed opposed to a projective one? one? I think this is the first question Brett raised with Peter and Rem that evening, and Jeff is responding to it already. But that question is also a bit too quick and stylised. I think the interesting thing is the way in which Rem now seems to be appreciated precisely for his forms. One of  the more interesting comments he made the other night was this, ‘Well, Peter, how do you account for all of your  institution-building in architecture?’ In other words, Peter  is a political actor in the sense that he has established institutions, schools, magazines, programmes, groups, etc. In a way, he has been nothing but a kind of producer of 

audiences and institutions within architecture. He really has projected a different space for architecture to take  place in. At least least that’s what I think Rem’s Rem’s compliment was getting at, it was a way of saying ‘You’re really on my side’. But getting back to Mark’s request, what I think Peter  really wanted to say to Rem was, ‘How do you teach green dots?’ And I think that’s really what Peter wants to know. ‘I, Peter, am a teacher and a pedagogue, and I want to know why you, Rem, think you can teach and how you would actually instruct somebody to do green dots,  because in fact I think teaching is a process-oriented field field and I’ve got a process, but I don’t know what the discipline of your work is, which means I don’t know how to reiterate it through teaching pedagogically.’ Since nobody asked it bluntly the other night, and Peter himself   brought up the comparison comparison of the Moebius Moebius strips in his Max Reinhardt Haus years ago and Rem’s CCTV today, maybe Peter just really wanted to ask ‘Didn’t you really steal my Berlin tower 15 years later with CCTV?’ [Laughter] And I guess what I then just wanted Rem to say was ‘Yes I did, and a lot of other stuff too’. MC 

Thanks for the opening impersonations, and for  saying things in their voices which those of us here all know they didn’t say. But now we come to the difficult

 part of this evening, which is, if you wouldn’t wouldn’t mind being ourself and offering your own views on the two architects we are discussing tonight. JK  

Yes, but he starts. [Points to RS]

RS 

Alright. But first I have to start with a slight confession, which is that a funny thing happened on the way to the AA. My laptop was stolen in Rotterdam esterday, and along with it tonight’s lecture.

MC 

But Jeff is not in the frame here, I trust. You don’t mean to imply that Jeff . . .

RS 

Well, the funny thing is that you’d think it was a Dutch conspiracy, but Jeff arrived in Rotterdam at the exact time it was stolen, three in the afternoon. So well, ou know, I don’t want to . . . It’s just circumstantial evidence, I’m sure. Anyway, so the episode is a very costly version of ‘the dog ate my homework’.

But maybe we can use this technical failure of not having any images or a prepared talk tonight as a chance for a little institutional invention. The other thing is that I’m thinking tonight’s session is kind of like the vice presidential debate. debate. The format of the negotiated negotiated debate in architecture is really an invention of Peter and his

Oppositions project; Oppositions project; he’s the one who has debated with everybody in the field. I was talking about this with the MA and PhD students here at the AA earlier today, about how the writing and the sensibility discipline the way in which the work associated with someone like Peter  manifests itself. I guess I want to start off by saying that on the one hand I’m not wanting to be a stand-in for either figure. Also, that I’m going to relate a little bit of a boring history, without images even, so doubly boring. And then maybe I’ll get to the issue of what we do now they’re gone, which is to says something like this: ‘What is the legacy and what is the project associated with these two figures?’ And I ask this in the same way that they had to ask what their own project was in relation to some of the earlier  architectural figures they found difficult to deal with. That’s mainly the trajectory of my comments tonight. But I also want to relate the event and discussion of  Koolhaas and Eisenman to a disciplinary context by showing a series of very provocative juxtapositions. The other disciplinary example Peter could have shown was Terragni’s Casa del Fascio at Como. Clearly, we know he has a strong connection to that project, in everything from its window detail to the way in which even the windows’ movement completes an ideal geometric figure in the

 plan. [In his book, Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, ecompositions, Critiques] he does a few hundred pages of analysis of the building’s plans to demonstrate this completion: a kind of ideal geometric project which is read through the breathtakingly attention-demanding axonometrics he made for his book on the building. Rem could equally have used an image from Como, of the ery same project, but he would just have shown the huge crowd of people in front of it. And I think this defines a line of differentiation – architecture as a mathematical  problem vs architecture as a statistical problem – which is maybe one of those lines we could draw between Rem and Peter. Jeff was mentioning earlier the sort of  institutional understanding of Peter’s projects as a deviation, via Colin Rowe and others, whereas Rem’s formation at the AA was not only under the guidance of  Price, but was also set against a background of Foucault, who was being discussed by all his cohorts – Bernard Tschumi, Elia Zenghelis, Robin Evans and others. I do want to get to the issues of what makes something a critical practice, and to the issue of the subject, the representation of the diagram. So my version is what I wished they’d said but at the same time am glad they left it for us to say.

The first question tonight, then, is this: how do you establish a discipline? Because Peter is very selfconscious about this question, in fact all of his work is about a certain degree of self-consciousness. I think for  Rem there is a classic, different form of misdirection, when he says something to the effect, ‘I know that, but I’m not going to tell you. And, in fact, you can go fail on our own, because I’ve got this other set of books that actually I don’t expose to architects.’ Peter, by contrast, is all about exposure and confession. For me this issue of  the nature of the discipline does relate the two. I won’t labour this point more than necessary, but it seems the one shared moment in their practices is their simultaneous discovery of the frame. It is something both of them do in the mid-1970s. In 1976 Peter is basically reimagining Le Corbusier’s Maison Domino, and at the same moment Rem is discovering the American frame in Manhattan. And both of them, to me, are a direct and explicit response to Colin Rowe’s ‘Chicago Frame’ essay of 20 ears earlier, where he argues in favour of the speculative intellectual project of Europe, which uses the structural frame of a building one way, for ideological purposes, as opposed to the banal speculator in Chicago, who justifies the frame in terms of economic and programmatic efficiency. In that essay Rowe wants to say that modern architecture in Chicago is not really architecture because it is not really disciplined. And his project is an answer to

the question, how do I discipline modern architecture?

Maison Domino diagram by Le Corbusier 

The way Rowe disciplines modern architecture is to give it back to history; in other words, the first thing he does is domesticate it by classicising it. This means the frame structure has to be an analogy for something, which he takes to be a classical column. So Rowe says that the Maison Domino diagram stands as the symbol for the modern in the way the column did for the classical: it is

not so much about construction systems as the way in which a building establishes proportion and scale and rhetoric. Along the way, he also makes this a sort of  America vs Europe problem. For Rowe, the key thing is continuity. Modern architecture is for Rowe not really any different to the classical, or whatever came before; at least it’s comparable. Both Eisenman and Koolhaas depart from this view. For  them, the discipline is established by breaks, and not by continuities. In the case of Eisenman, that break is called modernism, for Koolhaas it’s the metropolis, or  urbanisation or globalism. So Peter’s version becomes something like ‘Yeah, the Maison Domino is interesting. You’re right, it’s not about construction systems. And es, I’m interested in an intellectual project. But sorry, Colin, you got it all wrong – the Domino is neither a symbol nor an icon.’ As Peter himself would say about the Domino, it’s an index. In other words, what’s important about the Domino is precisely that it’s a selfconscious system, a notational system, an index of the design process that created it. And since Peter considers it the first key index of modern architecture, he wants to rescue it as a self-conscious modernist artefact, not as something continuous with the classical history of  architecture. But in many regards Peter’s view is very sympathetic to Rowe’s project.

Maison Domino diagram analysed by Eisenman in Oppositions

For Peter, a modernist project is one that is self-reflective, self-conscious and autonomous, in other words, architecture about architecture. I won’t go into details on why this is because it’s very clear how it operates in his work. What’s really breathtaking about Peter’s analysis of  the Maison Domino is that he actually redraws Le Corbusier’s dumb sketch as a series made up of a lot of  different axonometric drawings. This is something that Le Corbusier himself did not do: he obviously could have done, but chose not to. In other words, maybe this is the kind of mannerism or collaboration or complication that is

closer to Peter’s target – this operation of setting up the  process for himself, reconstructing a form of decisionmaking that made Le Corbusier end up with the sketch we all know. It’s as if there is a whole series of hidden yellow trace sketches and stages in Le Corbusier’s thinking that Peter uncovers, as if to say, ‘Corb didn’t get it right in some of these preliminary examples, but then he got this one right’. And Peter does that in order to say that the Maison Domino is a self-conscious artefact; it is notational of its own design process. Part of the seriality of his drawing – Peter’s reproduction of the sketch as a series of axonometrics – is more or less turning architecture into an autonomous, lifelike process of selftransformation, one where the object is, in a sense, designing itself. This creates a clear kind of history, of  architecture as a kind of index.

House II by Eisenman Architects

Eisenman vs Koolhaas frames; manipulated and warped vs stacked and shifted

By contrast the Koolhaas break is basically to say ‘You know, the problem with you Peter and you Colin is that ou celebrate the Europeans over the Americans but frankly, as a European, I can tell you: the American is more interesting. And in response, I’ll be looking at a similar diagram from the earlier part of the twentieth century, but it’s going to be this cartoon from Life magazine, from the same vintage as Le Corbusier. It’s going to show, even better than the Maison Domino, the  problem of modernisation and metropolitan lifestyle. This is what really is at stake.’ And so I think that’s also the first moment of grafting the project of modernism – not onto the project of autonomy, onto the mass-cultural condition, animating a kind of life of analysis – but onto the production of lifestyle. What’s important is this new form of subject that Rem uncovers, namely the metropolitan bachelors produced by the virtual plots of a Manhattan high-rise, stacked one atop the other. So for Peter the frame structure, the grid, was a way to index the process of design. For Rem the frame is really the most expedient way in which you can establish a series of experimentations, with different lifestyles

simultaneously imposed on top of one another. And you can go on from that point, you can take the trajectory of   both projects and both legacies from those two discoveries and structure the last 30 years as additions to those twin-possibilities, which is why I think they are significant not so much for what they themselves do as for  what they have enabled in architecture ever since. I think this is demonstrated very well in two other projects that Brett showed in his introduction on Monday night: the two IIT projects designed by Rem and Peter. What strikes me most as interesting about these projects is that they are very attentive to the context, the fact that it’s a Mies campus and they are bonding to Mies. But it’s not an obedient version of repeating Mies in either case, but actually two radically different forms of how you would read Mies today. Peter takes us through the ideality and reality of the grid, and Koolhaas takes us through the question of the metropolitan or the urban. I guess the caveat that I want as part of this effort would be: how do ou establish a disciplinary project while doing this?  Neither really go back to Mies in their projects, but of  course Mies is there. So they have to go at this through some other mediating figure, and in this case I think it’s Robert Venturi. The two possibilities for the IIT schemes are exactly the two avenues in contemporary architecture that were initially foreclosed by Venturi. Recall that the

accusation Venturi levelled against Mies and modernism was twofold: either architects are producing buildings as sculpture, which he named ducks, or they are producing  buildings as versions of cities, what used to be called megastructures. Those are the two avenues that Venturi seemed to foreclose in his work, and they are precisely the two trajectories that Eisenman and Koolhaas pursue as Miesian repetitions in their IIT projects. They are  positions that are only possible because of Venturi’s identification of their closure. So in a sense Peter  substitutes the idea of landscape as sculpture, as you can see in his Berlin Holocaust Memorial, which in a way  began as a variation of the grounded landscape project he did for IIT. And Rem takes building out of the equation and says ‘OK, it’s about landscape, but it’s the interior  and it’s the interior as city that will make a new avenue on campus.’ I would say that this is another way to think of  his Seattle Public Library, which was the first project shown by Peter in his presentation the other night. It’s a  project that continues the idea of experiments into more  popular instantiations, but is made out of grids that manifest themselves in very different ways.

IIT Student Center competition entry by Eisenman Architects (top), and as  built by OMA

Either the grid is a device for notation and a kind of  geometric regulation of the project – a kind of critical exposure of what exists and doesn’t exist in Mies – or it is merely an expedient device to organise people and activities in a particular configuration, ie, what I would call the production of lifestyle. This is why we would want to maintain some degree of  differentiation between a ‘critical’ project and a ‘projective’ one. But maybe that point will be elaborated a little later. Clearly, what Peter’s projects talk about (despite his animosity to Colin Rowe) is this huge history in architecture, and this geometrical protocol in architecture, whose unconscious he can elaborate on. For  Koolhaas it’s an urban and metropolitan project and therefore the idea of the interior as a form of city becomes a different kind of problem. And clearly, then, the association of the city with other models besides the skyscraper begins to matter: the shopping mall is a model, for example, in his Student Center at IIT. Rem’s project has stretched to graft itself onto yet other peripheral typologies within or on the fringes of architecture.

I think that the issue raised by Brett on Monday, about the kind of subjects that their practices have ended up  producing, is one of the ways you can start to differentiate the critical and the projective ambitions of the projects. Peter’s Holocaust Memorial is all about, let’s say, a specific kind of subject that he imagines for his work. It’s a critique of the humanist subject, and it’s going to be  produced through a kind of estrangement and alienation and that usually works one-on-one. It imagines a single individual who is going to see the projects in a certain way. As a parody at Monday’s talk, Rem showed a  picture of Peter lost in his own monument, being followed  by a mob of photographers and media people. The picture shows a kind of self-estrangement, and the monument has this quality because not many people can fit in there. So for Peter’s work, the subject is a sort of one-man operation. But I think his idea is basically about dismantling this condition, even though he’s seemingly interested in some kind of passivity now, a kind of   passive-distracted viewer. I think that Rem’s form of  subject is different, and always about a multiple or a  packed, crowded subject, a collective subject. Which is why the Terragni image of the crowd could really be the motivator for Rem’s understanding of the project at Como, as opposed to the window shift geometry analysis of the project made by Peter.

This will drive Jeff crazy, but I think that the other issue has to do with spectacle. The new issue for architects, whether theirs is a critical or a projective ambition, is how do we actually communicate with the public? And I think  for Peter this issue of the spectacle has always been a lure, a tease to criticality. He says, ‘Just get them in the seats and then we will alienate them.’ [Laughter] This view I  borrow from someone else who calls it the ‘Wow! –  Huh?’ project. Which is to say, you first seduce the iewer with something great, and then you hit them over  the head with the point you’re trying to make. MC  RS 

Maybe we can call this the Suspectacle.

The other version of this approach is the inverted ‘Huh? – Wow!’ project, and that is the model for Rem’s Seattle library. Which is to say, initially it’s off-putting,  but afterwards you just say, ‘You know what, that’s pretty amazing and I want to be a member of that group that likes that.’ You know Peter was saying that Rem’s project is an icon, but I couldn’t disagree more. What I think it  produces is a kind of logo, which is different from an icon. In fact, one of its tricks, or one of its capacities, let’s say, is to produce a new form of collective that didn’t know it existed before. There are other people operating in this city who often have offices here but have institutional affiliations elsewhere, who are also interested

in a compensatory form of the icon, in other words, in doing a project in such a way as to reproduce what is already existing in a community as its own self-image and give it back to them in a new form. I don’t find that a  particularly persuasive form of communication; it is conciliatory and more or less reproduces the image of a collective that the community has already imagined for  itself. That might just be ‘Wow! – Wow!’ as opposed to the ‘Huh? – Wow!’ or ‘Wow! – Huh?’ approach to architecture. JK  

And the ones doing it are basically crying all the way to the bank. RS 

So is it really a ‘Wow! – Wow!’ (or a ‘hugger  mugger’) strategy? In any case, I think that this is sort of a side issue, the question of who is the imagined subject in an architect’s work. Is it an individual subject of  estrangement, even if it’s packaged in the wrapper of  spectacle? It’s also how Peter really wants to differentiate himself from Franky Gehry because, let’s face it, that’s how he’s trying to map himself into a territory. And Peter’s world is constructed by his being between Rem and Europe and Frank in LA; each too hot or too cold. They’re basically the three bears. And he needs to have a little more klickklick [points his fingers to his head] than the West Coast with Frank, and a little more [waves his

hand] than Rem and Europe. For me the issue of notation is really Peter’s contribution and maybe it has come to a  bit of a dead end at certain scales. You can make this case when you look at the success of Eisenman’s early houses, the project that he takes from Corb, the transformation of  the Domino diagram. In these all we have are slabs, columns and openings and stairs; these are the elements that we have to make architecture from. And in Peter’s iew all he is doing is simply another series of  transformations that Corb could have done if he were still alive, but now producing his own genealogy for this transformation. All of this more or less works at the scale of the house, in terms of making the columns notational, using either real columns or fake columns – walls, slitwindows that are vertical and horizontal, more or less the same as the columns that have been displaced. But by the time this approach gets to Spain [in the City of Culture of  Galicia] the project of notation is no longer legible with the same means of expression, the same elements. So  basically you have to revert to (and this is my second concession to Jeff) huge areas of poché. These areas and facade treatments, soffits, all kind of barnacles on the side  – all of these have to be used in Spain to register the grid at a certain scale, because the actual systems or elements of the architecture are of such a scale that the project is no longer legible without the notation starting to veer back to the category of ornament. I think that Spain becomes a

test of the fact that the notational project of a Maison Domino starts to break down when applied to a bigger  scale. It’s necessary for Peter’s criticality, and that’s what differentiates him from Frank. The grid and its geometric manipulation produce a form of discipline in his work.

House II by Eisenman Architects

For me the legacies of these two figures together, Peter  and Rem, is a way for us to see how you overcome the modern in architecture. I was inspired by listening to Jeff  lecture at the Berlage Institute yesterday. Jeff has a different and much more subtle view of this point I have tried to make, which has to do with how each disestablished the ground in their work.

City of Culture of Galicia. Santiago de Compostela, by Eisenman Architects

I want to talk about the surface in relation to this, and more specifically about the issue of the articulation of the ertical surface – not the horizontal one. One could say that what modernism displaces from the classical is the question of ornament. Modern architects repress ornament and reinvest it in articulation, ie, in detailing. In other  words, we don’t have ornament but we have detailing.

The systems used in overall design will in themselves  produce the effects that we need at the level of detail. Clearly that wasn’t enough for Rowe, who in some sense wants to revert to facades, something you can see in the way he analyses projects. In other words, the problem of modernism, in Rowe’s eyes, is that it became an elevation; it was simply about the articulation of building systems on elevations, when it really needed to be a more dialectical, thicker condition. Even though we don’t need poché as we did during classicism we have to conceptually reproduce poché, and we do that through shallow space, or what Rowe referred to as transparency in architecture. It’s a different story,  but Rowe is the first follower who has a problem with articulation in modern architecture. Peter takes that  project towards notation. ‘I’m going to overcome the  problem of articulation through notation’, he says, whereas I think Koolhaas says, ‘let’s get rid of the detail altogether: what we should hope for is a pure section –  one that in fact doesn’t need an elevation’. In other words, the wrapper itself becomes irrelevant in the early projects of Rem. I think that those are two ersions of how to rethink the problem of articulation today. One response to the problem is a larger  contribution of the non-standard or of mass-customisation

or a greater investment in new material systems or  assemblies or construction systems, what Greg Lynn would call intricacy. There is a differential relationship of   part to whole, but it’s still both notational and tectonic as a problem. Imagine the kind of unseemly marriage of  Kenneth Frampton’s and Peter’s views on this; in one sense this is what the ‘project of intricacy’ becomes today, a topological problem, which I think still also  privileges a certain idea of ornament. The other way to approach the enclosing surface problem is via the graphic strategy, which Jeff in his lecture last night was associating with single-surface projects in architecture. For me the graphic project in some way comes out of the idea of appliqué, as opposed to ornament. It is a debate about graphic projection, which I suppose I am more polemical about, more interested in  personally. Let’s say that there are a range of practices that try to deal with this problem. Last night Jeff showed Greg Lynn’s work on one side of this comparison, and some of MVRDV’s work on the other. You could obviously differentiate the embryological house as the manipulation of the intricate assembly of parts to reduce the figuration to ornamentation. In another image, Jeff  then showed the Hagen Island project of MVRDV, which he described as Monopoly houses treated in a kind of  monochrome materiality. I think that those two ‘housing

 projects’, if you will, start to speak to the issue of  differentiated legacies of the critical projects we are talking about here with Rem and Peter. It shows interesting advances on their work. The last thing I want to say here has to do with pedagogy or research in architecture. This is an interesting issue today because the followers of those best known for their  research often take the message too seriously; they  believe in the myth of research. I think research has always been a bit of a conceit for Peter and Rem, but a necessary conceit, an important one. But everyone schooled in the methods of Rem or Peter actually believes deeply in what they were taught to do. And in some sense that is the problem today, whether one investigates the sort of technological-geometric problem that we might relate to Peter’s interests, or the sort of social-statistical datascape problem related to Rem and now his followers. The idea of architecture as a kind of science is, to me, what really needs to be overthrown today. And the early  promoters of this sensibility never actually say anything about this; they may say they believe their own press, but I don’t really think they do. I think that another generation is now taking on the problem of research as a kind of fake scientism – a kind of science-truth register – and that’s really what needs to be displaced in favour of a political register of conditions. So that’s my official comments for 

the discussion this evening. MC 

OK, we’ll go straight on to Jeff.

JK  

I would just say, the uncanny thing is that I said exactly the same thing the other day about Peter and Rem. [Laughs] RS 

Are you sure you don’t have my laptop with tonight’s lecture on it? JK  

The argument that I would like to make about Peter  and Rem is brief, and it’s different from Bob’s. The issue for me is this: what is a critical practice, why does a critical practice arise, and is its project finished? The question is not ‘was it wrong?’ but instead ‘is it finished?’ And if it’s finished, is there another practice that replaces it, or has the legacy of the critical project in architecture simply gone for the moment, because all of its  possibilities have been confirmed or its claims or clichés have been shown to have not been confirmed. The background for this is that the first generation of   projective practices in architecture was modernism, meaning that modernism imagined a new and better future and imagined it could substantiate this through the materialisation of a new world in architecture. So

 projective practices are really important but I think they come with a bad legacy, at least in the sense that all the  promises they made about their projective powers  produced frustration and failed to be realised. So we have a whole generation – and remember that Peter represents a generation before Rem – and this generation is looking at this issue of ‘OK, there is something wrong with the world, there is something we want to do for the world, but we can’t produce a better world because those guys  before us screwed up really badly trying to do just that. And even if we really believed we could have done a  better job, we couldn’t go public with that project.’ So what follows instead is an idea of a critical practice. A  basic way for me to understand a critical practice is to think of the careful examination of the body of received  practices to see which of them have become empty clichés. That’s a general framework. This framework means I take a look at something that continues to operate and examine whether our  relationship to its persistence is still vital, if it still does work. I ask if it is still a service, or has it become a cliché, an institutionalised form that we stay obedient to, even though it no longer has any efficacy in our lives. If you can slowly, tactically uncouple a practice from its habits or clichés, then in some sense you have liberated it and enabled it to be mobile again and responsive to culture.

So there is the problem of the critical practice in relation to a projective practice, which I think is a good place to start an analysis. The second point at the outset of these remarks is that I am going to read you something by Bataille, something probably 90 per cent of the people in this room have read or heard so many times it is going to drive you crazy. And the other 10 per cent of the people are going to find it so boring that you’re going to think it is unbelievable that somebody would want to talk about it. But it is what we are interested in here tonight. This is the quote from Bataille [from the Documents dictionary]: In fact it is only the ideal soul of society, that which has authority to command and prohibit, that is expressed in architectural compositions  properly speaking. Thus great monuments are erected like dykes, opposing the logic and majesty of authority against all disturbing elements: it is in the form of the cathedral or   palace that Church or States speak to the multitude and impose silence on them. It is, in fact, obvious that monuments inspire social  prudence and often even real fear. The taking of  the Bastille is symbolic of the state of things: it is hard to explain this crowd movement other  than by the animosity of the people against the monuments that are their real masters.

 Now, remember that this is a context, the context of a kind of critical project, a kind of philosophical thinking that is rebelling not only against the history of  monumentality and the history of architecture’s association with power but also against the appropriation of modernist promises about the rethinking of that relationship and its appropriation by power. What is incredibly interesting about this is that, unlike most writing by philosophers, it doesn’t confuse building and architecture. It’s a statement about architecture – not about dwelling, about the house or the building as such. It’s a statement about the power that is installed in social life through architecture as an expert practice. For critical practices, Bataille’s statement lays out three  possibilities, but at the time he made his statement we only understood two possibilities. When he talks about the monument and how it speaks, he’s talking about the semiotics of the monument. And so one critical project is to turn your attention to the way semiotics produces meaning and obedience and regulation. That is what Peter  does in his work. Instead of turning his attention to the language model, like Venturi did, re-establishing the commonality of communication and reconnecting architecture as a device of communication with the  population, Peter did something smarter, or more interesting. He changed the stakes from speech to writing.

At that point writing becomes a practice of discussing structural semiotics and its production of regulatory meanings that are insidious in relation to issues like science. The other thing that Bataille’s statement says is that architecture operates in terms of Church and State, that is, it lays out institutional structures of authority that are corroborated not by the semiotics of the form but by the collaboration of the building with the institutional  programme that occupies it. This is where the AA in the 1970s and Rem in particular saw their possibility for  making critical practices, in the relationship between an institution and the way it organises its power through the operations of architecture, which Rem saw as potentially  being undermined.

La Villette projects by OMA and Eisenman Architects

I think there is a third possible critical practice which we can look at today. Bataille reminds us at the end of his quote that people attacked the Bastille and that this is the  proof of the problem of architecture. Reading this you realise that when the ideal of an institution actually  produces meaning that becomes specific, in terms of  location and materiality in architecture, it then becomes ulnerable – the Bastille can be torn down. This is where architecture actually renders power structures and semiotics available to sedition. And so for me the  possibility of a critical understanding of material – an approach to construction and materiality that is no longer  grounded in phenomenology or a pre-critical or prehistorical persistence of the idea of institutions – is now  becoming available to us as a project. So that’s the context of my thoughts on the idea of a critical practice today, and that’s the way I think of it: as three kinds of  critical projects that can be seen. I see a lot of the work  that’s currently being done by, say, Jacques Herzog or  Jean Nouvel in terms of this third kind of critical project. I see that also as a critical project with a different kind of  undermining of clichés. In the diagrams I showed in my lecture last night, I tried to pick one possible place where these two architects, Koolhaas and Eisenman, have started to work and to show that they are pursuing exactly the same problem but from

two different points of view – from an institutional point of view and a formal point of view. Not only that, but they go back and forth in their explorations about the extent to which they are going to engage that problem. Bob has already mentioned the problem I talked about in my lecture last night, the disestablishment of the ground. The ground becomes political as soon as it becomes land. Land and ground are different things. Land is the  politicisation and the control of property and land-law continues to regulate property, continues to regulate  political space with an incredible power. Land is probably the last legacy of feudal control. The only insight capitalism has had about land and ground in relation to the feudal practices it replaced is in its change of land ownership. Feudal practices understood land as available as private property. Capitalism turned land into real  property. All you can do in capitalism is control, to a limited extent, the operations on land – but you can’t own it, or anything that grows on it, or all the people that are on it. Real property is a slight development in the deregulation of the feudal zoning of land. So architecture has a particular interest in the ground. It establishes the  power of authority in relation to the ground, which is what entry into a building is about, the reason why you go up a staircase to get into a church, etc. You either do this semiotically or phenomenologically. Or you do it in terms

of the dramaturgy, or institutional dramaturgy. So how do ou disestablish the ground? How does architecture make a contribution to a political discussion about institutional  power? I distinguish Le Corbusier’s lifting the object all the way off of the ground, as at his Villa Savoye, as the  beginning of architectural formalism. If you take the architectural object high enough on pilotis, then this erases the actual ground and you formally re-establish another ground above it. You have begun the process of  imagining a democratic possibility of equal floors, with none being prioritised any longer, or connected to the ground. The problem is that you can’t solve the entry  problem. If, say, you lift the building just a little bit off  the ground and you step off the ground onto what then  becomes in effect a stage, a dramaturgical problem arises,  but this stage condition isn’t going to change anything from a traditional ground condition. It’s the stage’s relationship to a play that matters more. And I think that’s a good way for me to begin to understand the operations of Rem Koolhaas – the difference between a staged plan and a free plan, and the difference between a platform and a built form.

Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier 

If you imagine that all Rem ever does is work with institutional programming – that all the operations of  ornamentation, form, structure are irrelevant to him since it’s the conceptual apparatus that is the institution – you have missed the point of his work completely. What I am going to do now is show you a picture of Rem’s Seattle Central Library. Looking at Seattle, what I ask you to pay attention to is the building’s relationship to the ground and the change in surface ornamentation. If you are sensitive, in other words if you get ridiculously interested in ridiculous little things in architecture, then this building has a fantastically interesting mechanism for 

disestablishing itself from the ground. And all of a sudden ou can understand something about the building you had  probably never noticed before. If you look at the ground  platform you can ask, ‘Where is the ground of this  building?’ The ground is not the street. It’s that little wedge near the bottom, which the building is sitting on as if it were a tentative podium. The fact that the building on top of this is bigger than it is at the bottom makes this a  provisional ground, and the fact that the facade treatment, its surface pattern, changes completely in relation to it, tranforms the language and how you enter the building. For me, I find that little wedge really important. And what happens when you enter that door versus what happens when you enter the door on the other side, and why it’s different, is what matters here. But you cannot see this subtle change unless you have been trained to see that from the point of view of making a formal analysis of the  building. And I know Rem knows it’s there. I also know it’s not important if he tells anybody because the building is not about a constituency, it’s about having an audience, ust as you would for a movie. A constituency is a casual audience, one with no real interest in particularities. But a small group of people within this group is the audience, for whom the movie can be seen to include big effects. To this audience these effects are a big deal – all of a sudden the possibility of life is reconfigured by the examination of a material practice. And I think you’d be a fool not to

understand that seeing this requires a formal sensitivity as an audience member, and that if you don’t see these effects right away, then there is something missing in our training. And I think that’s what Peter is about.

Model of the Seattle Central Library by OMA

So in a certain sense I am representing Peter’s argument here, in order to make Rem’s architecture and the whole discussion of this building available to you. But what this also means is that they share an argument about architecture. I could go through a lot of their projects and show this point. If we just look at their history of the treatment of the ground you will start to see them going

 back and forth over a shared critical project. And what ou see them asking is, ‘when do you use formal devices, and when do you use institutional devices?’ In Peter’s Wexner Center, for example, it’s nearly impossible to figure out how to enter the building; you never quite know when you are at the beginning of the museum. This isn’t accomplished by Peter through a set of distinct formal devices or operations in the design. Instead, what is accomplished is a Koolhaasian device, which effectively disestablishes the authority of the entry to an institution, and so deinstitutionalises the authority of a museum. So the Wexner Center, in many ways, can be seen as a Rem project; it does the kind of thing that Rem does a lot. But until you look at the procedures he uses on the interior, it is hard to see how he carries the project forward. What he ends up doing is a series of formal  procedures that put together the grid and shifted grid and the slice through the building.

Wexner Center by Eisenman Architects

What I thought I would do here in analysing Eisenman and Koolhaas is to look at two of their weakest buildings. I’ve been inspired to do this by looking at the papers recently published on Einstein, many of which have appeared this past year in celebration of the centennial of  his greatest paper. Many of these were written by focusing on some of the mistakes he made in his work:

 papers that were wrong, it turned out, thanks thanks to high school math errors he made, or because he didn’t sufficiently understand the underlying physics, or were  perhaps even fraudulent fraudulent because he he knowingly published published something he knew was wrong but did it anyway because he had some kind of libidinal commitment to seeing a  project through. By staying staying with a problem over years and ears of work, he eventually went on to produce the results we now celebrate.

Saitama Gymnasium by OMA

So I thought it would be interesting to show you the two weakest projects ever by Rem Koolhaas and Peter  Eisenman. They are both projects about the ground, and they are both projects that take a certain idea that each of  these architects was working on at the time and believing in too much. The first of these projects is by Rem: his Saitama Gymnasium of 1993, in earthquake-ridden Japan. It is incredibly interesting because what it does is create a gigantic scaffolding system with gigantic counterweights on pulleys, so that half the gymnasium can literally go up and down, creating different kinds of programmatic relationships. So if you want to hold a football match, half  the building can go flat thanks to these 100 million ton counterweights on the building. If you want to stage a  production of the Wizard Wizard of Oz, you can tilt part of the  building in a different way, way, thanks again to the other  counterweights, and use a little staircase in the middle of  the plan in an entirely different way. So the building is about doing two things: erasing the ground and introducing mechanical devices in architecture, something Rem studied for years and years because of his interest in architectural clichés – the cliché of the destitution of  mechanics in architecture is one that got his attention. He

is still interested in this cliché. So the elevator, the sliding door and the air-conditioning, all of these things are part of his examination of the inability of architecture to be content with the technology that has entered the field and reconfigured its sociology and politics. This has been a focus in his research and this project was the most extreme moment in that research. He decided to get rid of  all his relationships to history, all his relationships to the canon, to purify the work. It is the most generic work he ever did, and the source of the chapter on generic architecture that would appear later in S,M,L,XL. This  project is the first time time you see S,M,L,XL S,M,L,XL ever appear  anywhere in anything to do with Rem Koolhaas. This is the beginning of that book, several years before its  publication. This project project is where the title title of the book  came from. You can see in this project – a building with these massive, unbelievable counterweights counterweights – that he doesn’t know exactly what to do or say. There is no programme: all there is in the project (one proposed in a seismic zone) is a gigantic, ridiculous building on counterweights, a  building that is supposed supposed to literally move move up and down. It’s a crazy project that should give hope to all graduate students. I can remember how proud he was of this, I swear, it was amazing how proud he was of this project. He always showed it to you with this look on his face

like, ‘I can’t wait to hear how great you think this is’. But it’s more a complicated tragedy.

Long Beach Museum project by Eisenman Architects

Here is another project, this one by Peter Eisenman. It is his Long Beach Museum project, from the mid-1980s, the  point in Peter’s career where his archaeological projects are going into the ground, to reveal it as a new source of  semiotics in architecture. This was a very interesting intention, and one he put forward in projects like Cannaregio and several others. But at this point in time he was desperate for work. His office was about to fold, he needed the job badly, and he used every possible device to try and attract the interest of a developer. So in this  project you have buildings that are almost totally generic in the back while up front we can see him saying, ‘Here is where you put your museum, and everything else that is wonderful about the history of San Jose, you know, oil derricks, etc’, all of which were part of the context for this  project. In this, Peter turns the building into a tourist attraction. There is basically zero critical thinking about the architectural realm and he’s hoping that others are going to simply love the derrick and the special effects,  because if you look at the museum part of the plan, you see that it has no qualities at all, it’s just generic. We could look at other projects by these architects to see the same kinds of things happening with their work. Rem’s Strasbourg project shows a square and the vortex inside the plan. I don’t know if Peter mentioned this when he was here, but he has an analysis of Rem which

essentially argues for the internalisation of this diagram in much of his work. In Peter’s analysis, taking a vortex and  putting it back inside of a box becomes a governing formalism for Rem’s work. It’s an absolutely brilliant analysis of Koolhaas. By the way, what would have been fun for you all is to have Peter come lecture about Rem, and then have Rem lecture about Peter. Here is another project to try and show my point about Koolhaas’s formalism. First look at the section of Le Corbusier’s Cannaregio Hospital. Pay attention to the room and the roof in that section, because Rem is looking at it and trying to figure out how you do what Le Corbusier accomplishes in that section, which takes a ortex field – a plan with great movement – and puts it inside of a square, an orthogonal plan. Rem goes through a series of projects where he experiments with this, for  example in his Fukuoka housing project, which comes along soon after the Saitama Gymnasium project. In Fukuoka you see this incredible roofscape installed on top of an orthogonal, square plan. It is a project that is entirely formal, with political ambitions. It is grounded in the canon of the discipline of architecture, and you cannot  possibly understand it as a project if you are unaware of  the canon it is related to. If you know this canon, the  project becomes incredibly interesting. If you don’t and ou look at the project, it’s something you see as just

either a good movie or a bad movie. By the time of the Fukuoka project, you can see that Rem is beginning to develop an attitude about what it means to work on the ground. This a project exploring Le Corbusier’s Maison Domino diagram, now inflected by Rem, and he’s beginning to use it to work with buildings that deinstitutionalise their programmes. The library designed by OMA – with its voyeuristic relationships inside, its changing ground – contributes to the idea of  imagining a new future, which it does in new ways instead of criticising the way that the Maison Domino staged a certain kind of social relationship. So by now we are able to see how Koolhaas is able to take both the history of canonical projects and the history of  architecture’s formal language and shift these to an institutional critique of architecture. Accomplishing this shift is what we should admire Rem for, but it is something he’s able to do only because he has been working with the material of his projects. In Peter’s analysis, this moment in Koolhaas’s career is the  beginning of an internalisation of the vortex I mentioned in his Strasbourg project. At around the same time as Koolhaas was producing these  projects, we can see in Peter’s project at Long Beach that he has now moved out of the archaeological problem and

started to produce weird building form. We can also see this in his Ohio Convention Center. It was a competition he won because he had the best programme, because his consultant made a convincing argument that it was the only one of the finalists that really worked as a building. In this project Peter is trying to develop the argument about rethinking the ground, so he begins to go back to the resources that he was using for his first institutional histories and starts to do this kind of project. If, for  example, you don’t think that this Convention Center in Ohio is also a critique of the idea of a church and its institutional status (which it is, because of the way it handles the ground), if you think it is just a formal analysis of architectural poché, then you have missed the  point of the building. The project is powerful because it’s done as if it were a critique of a Catholic church, not  because of its discussion of stealthlike form, but because of the way in which you can read its poché interstitiality.

Ohio Convention Center by Eisenman Architects

Rem’s Seattle Central Library has as its most innovative experiment the use of surfaces and, in particular, the  pillowed surfaces of the exterior at the top. When Bob mentioned IIT earlier, and Rem’s relationship to Mies, he was dead on. Because in Mies there is an equivalence of  floor and ceiling to set up the space which is used by Koolhaas in his project for the campus, the Student

Center. Rem’s IIT begins to fold these two surfaces together and then starts to produce an equal potential for  each as a form of materiality within that interstitial zone, the space of the building. So the exorbitant, exaggerated, nearly hysterical use of surface by Rem begins with his IIT project. It is about creating a different kind of  equivalence between floor and ceiling, and it’s basically erasing the stage, or the pretence of a stage-like floor  found in his earlier work, to produce instead another kind of stage that is taken to an exaggerated level. When you compare this move by Rem to what Peter does in his building for the IIT Student Center competition, ou see Peter’s mistake. This is the first project where he would have been allowed to build with real materials and that creates problems. What would the use of local quarried stone have done, for example, to re-establish the status of the ground, when the whole project was about disestablishing the ground itself? Peter just got seduced  by the possibility of finally being able to answer a bunch of critics (myself included) who have attacked him for  ears for not paying attention to real materials and show us that we were wrong. He tries to show us that all of that Dryvit and dry wall and all that dematerialised construction he’s been using for years was the only right way to do it. So in a way we critics really screwed him up, and because he listened to us, he’s now putting the

ground back into a project that is a humorous and institutional critique of the ground. MC 

OK, we have some time, who from the audience would like to ask the first question? AUDIENCE 

In the images you have shown of Rem’s work, one of the slides seemed to suggest the question of  modernism in relation to urbanism, but Jeff never said anything about urbanism in relation to Rem’s work. My question to both of you is: how do you think that we can overcome the problem of modernism apparent in both of  their works? JK  

Do you mean, how can we overcome the problem which is so obviously ruining Rem’s work and is so really great in Peter’s? [Laughter] Wasn’t that the question? How can we overcome the legacy of modernism in both  bodies of work? Is that what you meant? RS 

I think actually the question is trying to make a case for why we can see them trying to reoriginate modernist diagrams, and to this extent, why each of them is maintaining a kind of modern. I guess I was trying to say that they have very different ideas of what modernism is, which they use for their own purposes. For Peter this is a late-formalist idea of modernism, a self-referential

 project, and that is what allows him to gain a distance from Colin Rowe, his teacher. For Koolhaas his diagrams are really imbricated within a mass cultural project. Peter  has confessed that he hasn’t done urbanism. For Peter, the important break was a realisation that architecture has never done modernism. And therefore his  project became one of bringing modernism to architecture  because, as he says, even the guys we associate with modern architecture were never really modern. It was up to him to bring us to the promised land of modernism in architecture, which he tries to do through a project of selfnotation. For Rem, the problem was always something else: that architecture in a certain sense died after the metropolis, or after modern urbanisation, and therefore a new form of architecture can be seen to have emerged. So for him the pressures of urbanism actually produced the end of a certain kind of architectural project and the  beginning of a new, critical project. But as I said earlier  the key point, I think, is that both architects talk about architecture by speaking through breaks. For Peter, the  break is an aesthetic one, a belated elaboration of  modernism in architecture. For Rem, it was the fact that the city produces a new broken condition that requires or  enables another new form of architecture. JK  

I would just caution the person who asked that

question that you should only entertain a question like that for a little while – and only while you’re still young. And then you should forget it, because basically you need a polemic of your own in order to start a body of work, to energise a body of research. I think both Rem and Peter  did that themselves, in their own ways. There was a short  period early in their careers when Rem would lecture and Peter would lecture and the first sentence out of both of  their mouths was something like, ‘For 400 years architecture . . .’ And then they would of course say two entirely different things. One of them wrote texts about anthropocentrism and this would become a completely different kind of new text, and the other would produce an argument about the processional section, from the ground to the piano nobile, and how the elevator erased all of that history. But the funny thing is that they would always start off with ‘For 400 years architecture did this one thing and now it’s time to do something else’. And when an architect is young and inexperienced, you do that kind of thing. You get an idea for a really big project within a discipline, you form a polemical conjecture, and from that moment on you give up everything else, because it  becomes a problem of expertise. You focus on it as an expert problem, and no longer consider its broader  cultural arguments. As the expert, you simply go from one step to the next, to the next and on and on, trying to solve that problem. As a young architect, you need to be

aware that this is what is going to happen in your career. So take time now at this stage to find the right kind of  cause: if you associate yourself with a bad one, or with some silly kind of problem that will never hold up to scrutiny, you end up spending your time on irrelevant stuff. I don’t want to encourage you to think there is something wrong with modernism and that there is something wrong with the city and you can set yourself  the problem of fixing it. When later on you find that it turns out there was never anything wrong with modernism and the city, then where will you be? You will have a good practice, and you will be teaching at good schools, everything will seem OK, but there will still be another  kind of problem. AUDIENCE 

Can I ask why you two are here to talk about Eisenman and Koolhaas? I mean, we had the architects themselves here on Monday. JK  

Why are we here? We’re critics! I’m going to let Bob answer. But let me say this, I refuse to be here when they’re here, because I have stuff to say about them that I have to say as a critic. I’m certainly not going to sit here and paraphrase them for you, because what I have to say about Rem and Peter has nothing to do with what they have to say about themselves, any more than what we write today about Shakespeare has anything to do with

what Shakespeare had to say about himself. I know a lot more about their work from the point of view of where and how I work as a critic than they ever will. [Laughter, and applause] Now Bob, why are you here? [More laughter] RS 

Well, the thing is, I really like shopping at Muji, and there is a store just around the corner. JK  

What I meant to say is that I think being here and discussing Rem and Peter is really important. Rem and I were talking today at lunch. He said that he was really concerned with the fact that a kind of intellectual laziness had become a part of the field; that today the architect not only has to do the work of making the buildings but has also to describe the work, criticise it for everyone else. The idea that a body of work would come out and other   people would comment on it and criticise it, discuss it and deepen the work, has essentially disappeared. Today the architect is supposed to do everything, and maybe a critic will paraphrase it or turn it into a pedagogy. I think this situation in architecture is a real loss. If you imagine, for example, that there is something like two million pages of discussion and criticism on the plays of  Shakespeare, even though people generally think that Shakespeare was a fairly simple guy. Bear in mind, he

didn’t know Freud, he didn’t know everything that would come after him, but he was a close observer of life and knew how to turn those observations into funny, smart  plays. The plays ended up with a content that went well  beyond what he observed. Our job as critics is to keep work like that, all good work, contemporary. And criticism and discussion and discourse is an independent  practice. It has no obligations to the source material and to repeating the source material as it originally appeared. And I really encourage you to read the work of architects that way, practise it that way and engage with it that way. Don’t ask architects to spoon-feed you what they’ve done. Don’t take that as the end of the matter. Because there is a lot of stuff going on in his work that’s better than he thinks, and a lot of other stuff going on – this is fairly obvious – that’s clearly not as good as he thinks. MC  JK  

Any other questions?

I have some questions for Bob. In your argument, are you relying on the forgotten legacy of projective architecture to distort or to disinter the idea of a projective  project? Are you projecting tactically, or are you calling for a projective architecture strategically? Let’s say modernism’s mistake was a kind of naivety regarding strategic projection. When you talk about a projective architecture, what are you talking about? Where would its

terms and conditions be? Not what problems does a  projective project include, not what is its graphic space,  but more, what is the goal of a projective practice? RS 

We talked a little bit about this earlier this afternoon in my meeting with the graduate students and I think that my argument is the following. Yes, in part a projective  project can recuperate the lost ambitions of modernism. Maybe the best example of the possibility for success of  this may be, in an unlikely way, that of the new urbanism. If you forced me to identify what might already be a  projective practice today, I would begrudgingly say that it’s something like that of the new urbanists. This, I think, is because certain critiques of modernism were foreclosed  by the critical legacy that you have already identified; they have already gotten rid of certain techniques and devices that would have been useful in instantiating  possible alternative, modern worlds.

 New urbanism in Seaside, Florida

I think this is part of the institutional project that I’ve seen in Koolhaas. But the new urbanists have actually done a  better job of producing a more comprehensive project that combines new diagrams, codes, images and even lifestyles which are deliberately intended to be different from normative ones – although they are, at times, admittedly fairly close in some ways to the modern realities they seek to offset. New urbanism’s particular  mixture of the classical and the vernacular is only one  possible instantiation of a virtual world that isn’t in the world already. We should therefore experiment with other 

forms of projecting alternatives, and for me that becomes the basis for a projective practice today. My particular  interest is in a mixture of modernism and mass-culture as an alternative to the world we already know. I think that the thing to observe here are the techniques that we gave up as architects because they had failed previous generations. You pointed out last night in your lecture, Jeff, that modernism didn’t fail, it just succeeded in another realm; i.e., the commercial realm of the developer  instead of what we define more strictly as architecture. So in fact modernism never was a failure, except in architecture, but what we then gave up as a discipline was the part that seemed the most architectural part. And then the new urbanists basically inherited it for themselves –  and it’s about time we took it back as a kind of political gesture, which it isn’t with them. MC 

Maybe it is an opposite kind of question to pose, especially thinking of the quotation you read from Bataille, but it seems to me that one of the problems for  the history of architecture is that the formulation of a  political project, in one way or another, has always been mortgaged to socialistic image, or to some utopian kind of   political goal. Now, one of the things that the Bataille quotation opens up is the possibility of having a strongly  political architecture that is not utopian but instead works  by selecting its own enemies. So my question is – and it

stems a bit from the point Bob made earlier – whether you think that the definition of the political is not about realising at a physical level some image of a utopia, but is in some sense about fighting, a project that is not dependent on something else, but simply fighting. JK  

But that’s still a project of resistance, right? When I hear Bob talk about his version of new urbanism I picture a big tract of incredibly interesting houses, like those Case Study houses of the 50s, with lots of bars and swimming  pools and, I guess, a kind of critical lounge. All I can think of is another kind of rich, gated community, but maybe with a very different sensibility. And I think that’s an interesting prospect because all of a sudden the  possibility of genres comes in. So instead of having to choose between new urbanism and the pursuit of a collection of entirely singular, individual practices, we could choose between new urbanism or hip urbanism, or  maybe even country urbanism. In other words, we could start to produce a set of lifestyles as different commodities. I’m not so sure that’s a bad idea; it might actually be an interesting kind of idea. But I also don’t think that this would sidestep the question of making a critical project today, or the question of the making of   poli tical projects. In other words, you cannot do an urbanism by constantly saying what not to do. That’s one of the great lessons of new urbanism: what they said they

didn’t do. They didn’t come in and say ‘don’t put in grids, don’t do this, don’t do that’, which is normally how we do cities today. Remember the modern principle, ‘don’t  plan’? Remember how important that intellectual idea was? Or even better, one of my favourites, was the architects who were proud they couldn’t predict the outcome of their work. You know the kind who said, ‘I think this building is incredible, but no one knows what’s going to happen in it! Isn’t that great?’ How are you going to convince people of things if you yourself don’t know what’s going to happen? I mean, you don’t go to a dentist and hear him say something like ‘I’m going to put this tooth in and it’s going to be fantastic, but I have no idea what it’s going to do.’

Case Study House 5 Photo Julius Shulman

So I wonder, is the reality of architecture’s efficacy on social life not so much the finding of a constituency as the degree to which it can help smaller groups of people find architectural expression? This has always been the  problem for theoretical architecture. A different way of   putting the same thing would be to say, ‘I don’t try to satisfy the needs of a particular audience. Instead, I feel like I work on the problem of a generic constituency.’ Which basically gets you into trouble. If we think we don’t ever have constituencies, what we have instead are small communities of audiences. And we would then see that the field is already practising like this, and as critics we would become more expert at serving local audiences. Is that sort of what your argument is, Bob or Mark? It’s not about giving up a political project, it’s just realising that the political project is in how you speak to select audiences? MC  RS 

We have time for one more question tonight.

While waiting for that question, we should probably confess that together Jeff and I are actually Peter. That’s it: we’re Peter’s project.

JK  

Come on, please ask one more question and then we can go home. AUDIENCE 

Now that you have seen something of the ideo of Monday night when Peter and Rem were here, could you imagine another pair of living architects who ou would like to see in here for a similar kind of event? JK  

Well, first of all, my challenge to you would be this: never accept that something is a failure. Your question is framed in a way that suggests it was a failure in some form. Basically you need to see Monday night for the positive content it contained, and there was a lot of it. Your job is not to be a satisfied audience member, any more than their  ob was to entertain you. Their job was, in some sense, to consider their positions in the circumstances of that setting, as honestly impossible. Therefore I think it was an event that was filled with content. And if you fail to get it, that’s your problem, not theirs. And if you want to know who would be really entertaining you need those young kids who are still at their polemical stage and are ready to argue naively about the instrumental possibilities of their   position. That’s something to watch, because that’s the stage that’s really great; they really get to each other, they knock each other out, they’re not protecting their social

relationships, their positions, and it can be incredibly fun and energising. It’s that stage which is definitely a form of entertainment. MC 

Given the fact that we have this large archive of  ideo recordings of lectures, one possibility is having someone answer himself from 30 years before, which might be quite interesting. I think you’ve created a format similar to this one in Ohio, where you teach, where you invite younger architects in to debate? JK  

You have to have a strategy. Basically I asked every child of Peter to come and defend themselves: Preston Scott Cohen, Wes Jones, those guys. And they got mad at each other, I think, for feeling like they are not the favourite child of their teacher. My favourite conference, ust to answer the question, the best conference I’ve ever   been at, was one in 1995 that assembled a group of   people, including Bob, me, Jesse Reiser, Greg Lynn, Bruce Mau and others, and instead of performing like a normal conference, what we did was we put ourselves in a room and let the audience sort of look down onto the room like a surgical team. Since we could never see the audience while we were making our presentations, we didn’t so much present to them as talk to each other. And the surrounding audience only watched us as voyeurs. But  because of that setting, and because of the time the event

took, the discussion was able to get to the level of being ery focused, very particular. It was no longer about making presentations as a way of performing or  entertaining. It was about subjects of interest, and also everyone at the table was already so close that issues mattered. You hit each other in the head with irons  because you rotate angles slightly, as opposed to having such diversity that there are no terms of engagement. There hasn’t been that for ten years, and it seems to me that the AA would be a good place to try to do that today. MC 

We hope that this evening can be seen already as a start to that. On behalf of everyone at the AA, I just want to really thank Jeff and thank Bob, and say we look  forward to having you back again soon.

PART III: THE BACKSTORY 20 JANUARY 1975 & 18 DECEMBER 1976 London in the 1970s offered a rich architectural counterculture of discussion, debate and communication. It was a  place that, in the words of Peter Eisenman, ‘understood architecture to be far more than a professional service or a  public good’: what it embodied instead was ‘an entire way of life’. In a conversation at the AA School in 1975 with the AA Chairman Alvin Boyarsky, Eisenman describes how the limitations of universities as a setting for teaching – particularly when it came to connecting theoretical and practical issues – had driven him in 1967 to create the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in Manhattan – the setting where he later  encountered a young Rem Koolhaas. The conversation, transcribed here, records his ambitions for the IAUS and the lessons learned from it. Attending Art Net a year after Eisenman’s 1975 talk at the AA, Koolhaas presented a lecture based on his recently completed research and writing of a book that would be  published two years later as Delirious New York . His talk  is a radical, carefully rehearsed critique of both familiar  orthodox architectural modernism as well as (more

subtly) the competing views of many of his contemporaries – including perhaps those of Eisenman –  as to what might possibly constitute a genuinely critical architectural practice. – editor 

Peter Eisenman, 1975

Rem Koolhaas, 1976

THE INSTITUTE IN THEORY & PRACTICE PETER EISENMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH ALVIN BOYARSKY 20 JANUARY 1975, AA TELEVISION STUDIO

ALVIN BOYARSKY Peter,

you are here in London this week as a guest of Art Net, the conference that Peter  Cook has organised around the subject of conceptual architecture. I’d like to first introduce you to our  audience. You’re a New Yorker, maybe the original New Yorker Anglophile. You have a PhD from Cambridge. You are a collector with many fetishes: books, prints, drawings. You are a publisher, you have handled major  research projects, you are a compere, an emcee in the British tradition, perhaps; someone who puts together  many packages, involving many people, in many places. Most important, you direct the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, in New York. It is around the Institute that I would like to ask some questions. PETER EISENMAN  Maybe

that’s not what’s most

important, but I’ll let that go and try and answer your  questions. AB Fair

enough. It has been some ten years since you  began with this notion of an institute, a school distinct from all other bodies or schools, which could be freewheeling and independent. This permits not only you  but many other people to operate as you wish. The staff  and students at the school are able to project themselves, as you do, into a New York milieu. With your   publications and other activities you also operate at a more international level. It would be very interesting for  those of us in London who don’t know very much about the history and objectives of the Institute to hear from you about this. PE The

Institute is about seven or eight years old. I think  I have to give a little personal history here, if I may. It was certainly designed as a vehicle for my own requirements. It didn’t have any kind of polemical or  overriding institutional notion, but rather was created to help me try and overcome the contradictions I found in my own life and working experience. These started when I first came to England in 1960 and where I spent three ears – in Cambridge, and often at AA juries. I realised that architecture was a way of life in England in

those days, not only for architects but for the public at large, which was generally very interested in architecture. There were columns in newspapers and there was a level of criticism and discussion in both Cambridge and in London that was about architecture. It was informed discussion, yet at a general level. And I think that was  partly due to the fact that the architects saw architecture as a way of life. It wasn’t just about the design of a  building, it wasn’t just a profession, something to be taught or codified. It was a way of existence. This was something very different to what we had (or I thought we had) in the United States, where architecture was conceived of as a profession, something useful. In the States architecture is considered a useful activity toward something Colin Rowe has always called the ‘good life’. America is a place where buildings are merely artefacts of  the good life, as opposed to having anything to do with the larger notion of a good society. Returning from England I went to Princeton to teach. And I went there for one specific reason: it was the most  backwater place one could think of to go. At the time it still lived in its Beaux-Arts heritage. It hadn’t had a new faculty member in 17 years. And one went there to try and  bring that kind of attitude [from England], to try and catalyse it there. It turned out that it is very difficult to try

and recreate Cambridge or the AA in the United States simply by importing Englishmen – which we did at Princeton in vast quantities. Ken Frampton, James Gowan, Tony Vidler and Tony Eardley were all there at one time – the same time. But that was merely an analogue of something else, and it didn’t flourish in the context of the United States. And I wasn’t necessarily flourishing in Princeton. Because what I found was that there was a split between the practice of architecture and the teaching of architecture, and they didn’t necessarily inform one another. I felt very strongly that there was this natural dialectic in architecture between theory and  practice, and that the university situated in isolation in Princeton did not offer enough reality to sustain the theory that it was professing to give, and the practice of  architecture on Nassau Street, Princeton’s main thoroughfare did not have enough theory to sustain any reality. And so I argued that one has to build some sort of hybrid, ery similar perhaps to the model of the AA – that was  probably at the back of my mind – whereby one could  bring students into a climate where there was an ongoing work situation as well as an ongoing theoretical situation, where they could see a relation to theory, and in their  theoretical work see a relationship to practice. That was the basic intention of the Institute. It has never had a

curriculum; it has never had a philosophy. Its only  philosophy, if it stands for anything, is to serve as a ehicle for critical discourse, for challenging the  prevailing empirical attitude in the United States vis-à-vis architecture – ie that it is something useful, something that can be marketed, a commodity. In the US the architect is someone who carries these kinds of things around. The reason I’ve always leaned towards Europe is that architecture there is something more idealistic and, in certain cases, more normative. There is a general feeling, one might say, that the Institute has now evolved from those early days, having gone through several ‘palace revolutions’ and changes of faculty. AB May

I interrupt here? I’m wondering if you might be able to talk about the various stages that the Institute has gone through? PE I’ll

try to do that. We started with the idea of   bringing graduate students from Cornell to New York, Colin Rowe’s urban design students. The idea was to give them a year in New York, working on real projects. We went to the city planning commission, and we had some friends in Jack Robertson and Richard Weinstein who were there. With some interaction we began taking some  projects from the urban design group to work on them at the Institute.

The first split came when Colin began getting his students to do some design studio rather than real, live projects and to fit those projects into some theoretical context. After  the second year we split, there was an out-and-out revolt at the Institute because the students didn’t want to work  on real things, they wanted to work on theoretical things, so the Cornell programme split apart. We then brought in Emilio Ambasz and Kenneth Frampton, both of whom had been at Princeton. Emilio is a young Argentinean, and he very much saw the Institute in a non-service role. In his view we were to generate our own projects and our  own research. So we began to work on what is known affectionately at the Institute as the Streets project. We got a grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington to study the whole idea of  the street in history, its present context and its potential future use. And that was a three-year research study, which we generated, rather than a peforming of a service. We were funded to suggest ways of operating, and that’s eventually going to result in a book. The second thing we did of that sort was Kenneth’s development of a low-rise, high-density form of housing, first as an idea, then as a programme. We took that  programme to the Urban Development Corporation to see if we could get some funding to develop a prototype. We secured the funding. In each case, again, we were

suggesting ideas to corporate or development structures. And we were much more successful with the housing; we were also given a commission to develop 600 units that are presently under construction – and that’s what Ken Frampton has been working on. A couple of years ago we realised that research grants,  prototype housing and the money for these kinds of  activities were drying up and unfortunately we had to go into service again – though we tried to describe this service as unique. We thought that undergraduates from arious liberal arts colleges could come to the Institute for  a year, be exposed to the theoretical and practical aspects of architecture, return to their campus, and then go on to architecture school or some other form of education. The idea was that we would provide a faculty and an intensity not possible at these colleges, so we would be creating something out of the real problem the colleges have maintaining themselves while also offering the diverse kinds of things that students want. So we have a threeear grant to do this, and an eight-college consortium –  Smith, Amherst, Wesleyan, Sarah Lawrence, etc., some of  the better liberal arts colleges. It’s very much a pre professional education. We never wanted to get into competition with the professional schools. We are working with a programme of continuing

education, for lay people at night. It is a programme that Colin Rowe and many historians and practising architects  participate in. We are bringing over Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton and Ron Herron this spring to do a kind of  think-tank in a dense two-week session as part of this  programme we call Continuing Education. And then we have a magazine, which we are using to try and develop a level of discourse internationally about ideas, and to see architecture as a critical vehicle. In addition we each very much want to carry on with our  own work. We are not a partnership so much as we are individual mounds within a total structure. We go out and get our own money and our own funding to do our  specific projects, whether they are research into semiology, research into housing, the actual construction of housing, a private individual house, or writing a book. So that describes a broad range of activities of the Institute.

DALI, THE CRITICAL METHOD & LE CORBUSIER  REM KOOLHAAS INTRODUCED BY PETER  COOK  ART NET, LONDON, 1976

Rem Koolhaas lecturing at Peter Cook's Art Net, held at the ICA in London, 1976

PETER COOK  As

you in the audience know, Rem has his work exhibited on the wall behind you, which gives me  particular pleasure in introducing him here. Firstly, I think  it is especially important for people who are prepared to wear their heart on their sleeve – or at least, behind Perspex – to also come and fill in the thinking behind their work. That is what we have here today. As a talk this

 presentation is going to be a sort of mixed thing, I think, with certain attacks on certain critical and theoretical  positions we’ll be familiar with, but with a sort of come back, a response, which has visual form. Please welcome Rem. REM KOOLHAAS The

lecture I’m giving today is slightly different than Peter suggested. It’s not a direct attack on anybody, or a detailed analysis of anyone’s position. It is an implied criticism of the entire critical architectural establishment … which for as long as I have been involved in architecture seems to be a small army of  tormentors who have almost never illuminated or taught me anything, and have brought me to tears on many occasions. They seem involved in a kind of vicious circle of flattery and apparent criticism, which is becoming more and more sickening. I was hoping that some of those who this talk is directed to would be here, but now they torment me by their absence. This talk is called ‘Salvador Dali: The Paranoid Critical Method and Le Corbusier’. Dali is a discredited figure, and in a way this is understandable. He is a rather corrupt  person; that’s easy to say. But I think it’s also possible to investigate his life as a rational enterprise, as a kind of  research into corruption and the sickening aspects of  society. What is a pity about his discrediting is that one of 

his major contributions – his paranoid critical method (PCM) – is dismissed as a theory. I want to talk about it here, and especially about its relevance to architecture. Dali was a surrealist, and even in the most sophisticated critical circles surrealism is associated with a movement that had as its ambition a kind of uninterrupted flow of the unconscious – a speaking with minimal interference from the critical or intellectual faculties. And it is true that this was maybe a first phase of surrealism in the 1920s. This can be seen in the exquisite corpse game of chance, where a piece of paper is folded and somebody draws a head, somebody else arms, someone else legs and then when the  paper is unfolded you get a monster, or an exquisite corpse. This is supposed to show a kind of unspoiled creativity, an innocence and inventiveness, which appeals to surrealists in its unpredictability. And this game was  played not only visually, but also linguistically, where sentences could be formed by different people… So surrealism always had this kind of small shock value, which was apparently pleasurable at one time. But after a few years of this game … it is immediately obvious that there’s a sense of boredom setting in, a stylisation by Tinguely and others, even taste and command creeping into this supposed lack of control. It is ust at this moment that Dali slips in. He had been a child

 prodigy and with amazing virtuosity he absorbed the  potential of surrealism, with a kind of automatic painting where there is no conscious control but just an incredible  photographic technique to make these non-events on canvas. Around 1929 Dali develops a pathological hatred for Le Corbusier, who would have liked to have suppressed these photos by Dali. In a well-known photograph from this time we can see Dali sitting in a chair designed by Le Corbusier … a whole panoply of tubular frame modern furniture surrounds Dali – all the things he was trying to  pretend that he never liked. But around this time Dali turned his attention to the internal mechanisms of paranoid phenomena, envisaging the possibility of an experimental method based on the systematic associations peculiar to paranoia. Subsequently this method would become the frenzied critical synthesis that bears the name of paranoid critical activity. Further, Dali only once offered an explicit statement about what his paranoid critical method is, in a text titled ‘The Conquest of the Irrational’. This shows a quality that is a  branch of innocent realism, but rather than a harvesting of  the irrational, is a kind of conquering of it. It’s really announcing a conscious phase of surrealism and the imposition of critical and intellectual control on the flow

of the unconscious. He says, ‘the paranoid critical method is the spontaneous method of attaining knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations’. Now there is only one way, or one easy way, to explain the paranoid critical method, which is by explaining what its opposite is. To do this we can look at a photograph of what was called reinforcement therapy in the United States. It takes place in a madhouse, and the doctors give the inmates of this  place cheerfully coloured plastic tokens when they behave normally. It’s a kind of points system, and every normal activity is listed. The doctors arrange normal events and then these allow the inmates to display normal behaviour  to the doctors: smiling when people meet, the application of mascara before tea-time, the making of polite conversation; the leaving out of loud noises; the goodholding of teacups and drinks. Altogether this kind of  normalcy results in a horrible caricature of normal  behaviour. What we have is a cluster of madness with medical supervision inserting itself into the situation and  perverting it in this way. Now the PCM is the exact opposite, whereby a sane person and a sane intellect insinuates itself into the aberrant processes of paranoid madness or psychosis. I have to rectify one interpretation that is usually insinuated about paranoia – that it is a  persecution mania. In fact around 1928 or 1929 the

French psychoanalyst Lacan wrote a dissertation which disclosed a wider interpretation of paranoia where effects all reinforce one another through interpretative activity –  and obviously persecution mania would be one kind of  the disease, in that every person one meets seems to be involved in some kind of conspiracy. Paranoia is a kind of conspiratorial interpretation of the world wherein all facts and all phenomena become a kind of magnetic field which is the reinforcement of one’s original paranoid delusion. So this is really an uncontrollable process of associations, where everything is connected with everything else. And Dali invents this method that abuses this disease-pattern and says, ‘I  believe that the moment is at hand when, by a paranoid and active advance of the mind, it will be possible to systematise confusion to help to discredit the world of  reality’. This is the ambition of the paranoid critical method – to discredit the world of reality. What is more interesting about Dali’s method is that it is active, deliberate … both paranoid and critical, with each given a kind of legitimacy … a kind of duplication of an existing reality through an interpretative activity… Architecture always has this kind of undeniable version of  reality, which allows paranoid methods to be realised in three-dimensional form. Dali really hated Le Corbusier 

and spent a considerable part of his life denigrating him. But whereas Dali is in fact rational with his method for   paranoia, Le Corbusier is really a clinically paranoid  person who tries to pretend he is rational. There are many quotes that point to a diagnosis of this clinical disease. ‘I live like a monk and hate to show myself, but I carry the idea of combat in my person’, he says in one. ‘I have been called to all countries to do battle in times of danger’, ‘the chief must be where others aren’t; he must always find the whole, as if in traffic, where there are no red or green lights’ – quotes that offer a definition par excellence of   paranoia; someone for whom even red lights look green… This lecture has a few postscripts. These have to do with my thesis that New York is infinitely more sophisticated than either of these two geniuses, Dali or Le Corbusier. The essence of New York, its immaculate secret, is that it has divided itself into equal lots, and each lot is a  provocation. Like the original maps Europeans made of  Manhattan, New York is a screen that lends itself to  projection. In the same sense the grid of New York is a kind of screen. Its miracle and its infinite wonder is that through subdivision it becomes a catalogue of different  paranoias, in the sense of closed, conjectural systems … If one stays within the lot it becomes a system – a kind of  collective sanity made up of individual insanity, individual components. Le Corbusier’s crime when

working on New York is to avoid or deny this system, the grid… Since my talk has been showing a migration of  (European) concepts towards New York, I would like to end by showing my own migration. In the 1920s the constructivists who, like paranoids, worked with a closed system, designed a floating swimming pool – a rectangle of clean water in dirty water – and they decided to build it to prove the validity of their concept. And as it was used it was discovered that it was actually faster to swim in one direction and not the other, so soon everyone was swimming in one direction. And when the paranoia of  Stalinism began in Russia, the swimmers decided to escape, and they swam the pool across the Atlantic in 40 ears of continuous swimming, to New York. The tragedy was that they had to swim towards what they were trying to get away from. So they hardly noticed the Statue of  Liberty, which was the whole reason for the trip. They ust swam on, with delicate first attempts at landing near  the island of Manhattan after swimming upstream, up the East River. Finally the pool has landed and we see the elevation of the pool at the side of Manhattan, this architectural thermometer or dipstick which can be inserted into any situation, to read its decadence. In an attempt to avoid the overly meta-analytic – an

approach that provokes an allergic reaction in Eisenman and Koolhaas when they’re assessing texts by others (assessing their own) – this afterword is structured less as an essay than as a programmer’s distributed array (of  ariables making up 100 points, each of which contains a single kernel of fact, observation or fantasy regarding the two architects and the relation between their ideas and the embodiment of a critical practice in architecture). Eisenman and Koolhaas can be seen to be utterly dependent on (and therefore inherently suspicious of) any  piece of architectural writing that questions their own writing about architecture. All (written) reflections on such a project have to internalise this fact; to avoid this trap, the writing here has been undertaken with a spreadsheet application instead of a word processor.

PART IV: THE AFTERWORD 11 OCTOBER 2009 In an attempt to avoid the overly meta-analytic – an approach that provokes an allergic reaction in Eisenman and Koolhaas when they’re assessing texts by others (assessing their own) – this afterword is structured less as an essay than as a programmer’s distributed array (of  ariables making up 100 points, each of which contains a single kernel of fact, observation or fantasy regarding the two architects and the relation between their ideas and the embodiment of a critical practice in architecture). Eisenman and Koolhaas can be seen to be utterly dependent on (and therefore inherently suspicious of) any  piece of architectural writing that questions their own writing about architecture. All (written) reflections on such a project have to internalise this fact; to avoid this trap, the writing here has been undertaken with a spreadsheet application instead of a word processor. Organised as a loose matrix of ten topics, each comprising a set of limited sub-topics, the following afterword invokes a key conceptual apparatus essential to both Eisenman and Koolhaas: a structural grid. Given the option either to warp this configuration through the open

superimposition of new lines between those provided here, or else to cement the orthogonal order found in its origin, the reader is in a position to read Eisenman or  Koolhaas into this grid without finding in it a definitive description of either. Accordingly, the reader is presented with a conceptual code able to avoid literary emulation or  narrative symmetry through an equal distance from the two forms of architectural writing that serve as the object, and not only the topic, of this essay and book. – editor 

Brett Steele moderating the conversation between Eisenman and Koolhaas, 30 January 2006

AFTERWORD(S): 100 POINTS ON EISENMAN & KOOLHAAS BRETT STEELE, LONDON 1.0 ON THE WRITTEN ORIGINS OF EISENMAN AND KOOLHAAS ‘Artists invent their precursors.’ — Harold Bloom 1.1 Eisenman (E) and Koolhaas (K) choose to launch architectural careers by writing, not building. For each, words become an architectural site for life-long invention. 1.2 In the case of Eisenman, his first architectural work  is a 1963 text written as a PhD and titled The Formal  asis for Modern Architecture ( FBMA). 1.3 Exactly ten years later, Koolhaas delivers his first written architectural work, an A4 booklet written as a fifth-year AA Thesis titled ‘Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture’. Six years after this, his 1978  book Delirious New York  ( DNY ) confirms how important

it was for him to begin by writing. 1.4 Twenty-five years after graduating from the AA, Koolhaas tells an audience at the school that the first thing he had to do after finishing his studies was write a book, ‘so that I could try and figure out what I wanted to do’ as an architect. 1.5 Forty-five years after completing FBMA, Eisenman remarks that the best thing about writing a PhD ‘is learning to sit still for three years’. 1.6 The extended period of isolation, writing and research by E & K at the outset of their careers (a threeear period for FBMA; five years for DNY ) approximates the time-frame of a building project. These are clearly architects writing. 1.7 The long gestation period of isolated first-person research required for FBMA and DNY  are singular events for both E & K. Soon afterwards, offices and professional commitments conspire to end their solitary, writerly habits. 1.8  FBMA and DNY  are architecture by stealth: a form of building (more than thinking) pursued with notepads, dictaphones and typewriters instead of the more familiar 

appliances of an architectural studio. 1.9 Few prospects for work, no clear academic or   professional agenda and no obvious financial security all make K’s decision to move to Manhattan in the early 70s confirmation of his fearlessness, or ignorance, at least when confounding architectural expectation. 1.10 Eisenman’s transatlantic departure for Cambridge  proves something similar: his youthful iconoclasm regarding the established professional career path of  graduate schools of the time. But he accepts his country’s  pretence that the best means of viewing American architecture is through the distant lens of a European past.

2.0 ON WRITTEN FORM AND THE WORK OF EISENMAN AND KOOLHAAS ‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.’ — Joan Didion 2.1 Eisenman’s FBMA remains unpublished for 43 ears, during which time the manuscript stored at Scroope

Terrace in Cambridge attains cult status as generations of  graduate students read the author’s words at the site of  their writing (unexpectedly, an architectural non publication becomes a site of postmodern architectural  pilgrimage). 2.2 Following his AA graduation Koolhaas makes Manhattan the unlikeliest of destinations for a 1970s architectural refugee, moving there with Madelon Vriesendorp at the height of the city’s moral, energy and financial crisis (K arrives at this dying metropolis and declares it not only done but also his own). 2.3  FBMA and DNY  each become operating manuals for  their respective authors’ future offices, much more than manifestos for disciples or critics. (Confirmation of the fact that architectural writing is best pursued for the real  purposes of its author, rather than the supposed ones of an imagined audience.) 2.4 The first edition of DNY  instantly becomes a collector’s item, and its aura is further enhanced when it is  photographed two decades later, aged and worn in appearance, for the opening spreads of S,M,L,XL. (Thanks to its reproduction, a retroactive manifesto is instantly converted into a modern architectural antique.)

2.5 Eisenman types FBMA on a specially built typewriter that requires university approval for the submission of a square 210mm x 210mm manuscript instead of a standard A4 academic format (the author’s obsession with formal orders begins with the layout of a  blank page, not with diagrams drawn on that page). 2.6 Eisenman’s PhD conforms to the prescribed structure of its context (a dissertation lined with footnotes and bibliography – a first hint of Eisenman’s hidden contextualism?) The volume’s shape makes it appear like a record album (and its all-black finish suggests a perfect  bookend to the Beatles’ White Album, released four years later). 2.7 ( ps Why do formalists always seek to produce or  inhabit objects and texts with orders of consistency, repetition and regularity that make their search a selfulfilling prophecy?) 2.8 Koolhaas’s writing style is entirely the opposite of  Eisenman’s. It embodies the perfect mid-twentiethcentury academic anti-model: Marshall McLuhan’s The lectric Bride (a manuscript delivered to his publisher as a cardboard box filled with magazine and advertisement clippings and a note asking that it be arranged in whatever  form the editors saw fit). As McLuhan notes, perhaps the

rise of television demands a new kind of (hot or cold?) writing. 2.9 In the design and layout of DNY  Koolhaas declares his minimalism in a different manner to Eisenman: through his minimal interest  in the book’s graphic design. Images, titles and blocks of text are displayed in a deadpan, factual manner, as if they were the disinterested legal evidence of a New York crime scene.

3.0 CONCEPTUAL IF NOT CRITICAL: CULTURE AS CONTEXT IN EISENMAN AND KOOLHAAS ‘Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.’ — Sol Lewitt 3.1 The critical and conceptual architecture of Eisenman and Koolhaas coincides with a ‘linguistic turn’ in contemporary culture: the arrival of language as a dominant model not only for the production of culture,  but also for its describing, its theories. (Note that many semioticians and other linguistic tribes set up East Coast

outposts at exactly the time that E & K professionally inhabit Manhattan.) 3.2 Eisenman and Koolhaas grasp almost simultaneously the potential for language – the production of texts – as a model for architecture as text . Detailed renderings for this kind of an architectural project arrive in the 60s and are quickly consumed by both E & K as if  they were blueprints drawn up by Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, Tel Quel, et al. 3.3 It transpires that twentieth-century architecture is eventually dominated not so much by voice, picture or   personality as by an explosive industrialisation of the  printed architectural page. This is the real architectural context of E & K, whose arrival intersects with this new force of nature and refracts it to invent new kinds of  architecture assembled one paragraph at a time. 3.4 The postwar arrival of a linguistic turn in contemporary culture foretells (and to a degree, forestalls) an even more massive disappearance than that of the author: the dissolving of all kinds of architectural knowledge into increasingly invisible, indescribable information and communication networks. 3.5 The linguistic and psychoanalytic models of the

1960s and 1970s were predicated upon the kind of stable reader/author relationships that are now under direct attack from twitter, flickr and Facebook. Has the architectural manifesto subsequently died, or did it just evaporate into a new kind of architectural space living within (or as) electronic communication networks? 3.6 Neither Eisenman nor Koolhaas seems entirely comfortable with an architectural world that has been largely turned upside down since they first wrote – and read – about it 40 years ago. Put another way: can one legitimately grasp the words of E or K when they’re conveyed via mobile phones or video cameras? 3.7 Despite their broader interest in contemporary culture neither E nor K seems interested in architecture as anything other than architecture. Both enjoy close allegiances with generational peers in other fields –  closer, perhaps, than with any other figures in architecture (a very anti-Team X sensibility: are they Team-I?) 3.8 The decline of the literary/critical theory model gains momentum in the 1990s with the aging of its  promoters and the unexpected arrival of an information space infinitely larger than that found bound in books: online life.

3.85 (An aside: S,M,L,XL appears in November 1995, the same month that Tim Berners Lee releases the  protocol that would soon become the world wide web, and the same month that the world’s first philosopher of  networks, Gilles Deleuze, despairing of networks’ inherently paranoid complexities, throws himself off his Paris balcony.) 3.9 Taking up the legacy of 1920s writers like Benjamin and Kracauer, E & K embody in action and mind a singular modern idea: that architecture can be a critical  practice focused on changing other people’s minds, and not only their own. 3.10 A critical practice in architecture gives equivalence to these two things: activities associated with the making of projects and architecture’s unique forms of critique. The key relationship between these two things is understood to be one of shared proximity, not apparent causality.

4.0 ON ARCHITECTURE’S WEAKNESS, OR THE HIDDEN STRENGTHS OF EISENMAN AND KOOLHAAS

‘The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition … always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.’ — Roland Barthes 4.1 From where or what in architecture do the uncertainties arise that make it such an insecure form of  knowledge? And to such a degree that a disciplinary or  cultural critique (architecture about architecture) can be made to seem so valid, necessary, even urgent? How do E & K pull off this career-long sleight-of-hand? 4.2 The high-profile channelling of architecture’s latetwentieth-century insecurities by E & K becomes immensely important and influential amongst subsequent generations of architects. This pair’s long-lived influence is a paradox, given that their theories have always emphasised architecture’s inherently unstable, uncertain nature. Perhaps theirs is a form of analysis more therapeutic than it is analytic? 4.3 Both E & K embrace architecture’s weaknesses in a ampire-like way, drawing strength from architecture’s  perceived disciplinary (Eisenman) or cultural (Koolhaas) decline. Where others see only abject loss or neglect in architecture’s steady erosion as a form of knowledge, E & K derive great strength – of mind, voice, even  professional identity.

4.4 The forms of travel and emigration embedded in the  biographies of E & K confirm the enduring importance of  tourism as a force for shaping architectural imagination. Eisenman travels abroad to write, and Koolhaas’s DNY  is  published alongside two other 70s architect-tourist manifestos, one written in Las Vegas and the other as a collage of Rome. (As Le Corbusier once said, ‘I write best and think most clearly about architecture when riding on ocean liners’.) 4.5 The idea of a continuous flow of knowledge implicit in the theories of critical theory could equally be used to describe and summarise the physical worlds inhabited by E & K. 4.6 Eisenman and Koolhaas bring to their writings forms of consistency (in layout, design, structure) normally criticised when applied by an architect to his  buildings (Eisenman’s essays are currently being reissued as volumes stamped with all the consistency of Richard Meier buildings – a form far more consistent than that of  his own buildings). 4.7 The inability of architecture today to attract meaningful public audiences helps to explain how writings by E & K have so successfully cultivated enduring audiences among architects (sadly, there are no

overbearing forces outside architecture able to upend its internal forms of equilibrium).

5.0 ON THE ACCIDENTAL SIMILARITIES BETWEEN EISENMAN AND KOOLHAAS ‘Each epoch dreams the one to follow.’ — Michelet 5.1 Eisenman and Koolhaas are masters of the written word – as built form. For each author, writing isn’t so much an activity that is ‘about’ or pursued alongside architecture as it is a way of critically thinking, reinventing and experimenting with architecture. 5.2 Even if this analogy holds, their words should not be confused with bricks, or their punctuation with mortar. 5.3 For E & K the act of writing is perhaps less important than their mutual recognition that architecture can be understood as writing. 5.4 Both E & K become dedicated teachers of  architecture during the early stages of their work as architects. This is a twist that neither anticipates.

5.5 Eisenman and Koolhaas refuse to teach architectural design in the conventional sense. Each uses teaching as an activity for analysing architecture, not the minds of their  students (Eisenman students diagram Terragni and other  canonical buildings; Koolhaas students compile data on everyday irregularities: shopping, Rome, the Pearl River  Delta and other examples of ‘the thing formerly known as the city’). 5.6 Conveying his suspicions regarding the utility of  teaching, Koolhaas comments that the main problem of  working with students is that ‘eventually your worst enemies become your best impersonators’. 5.7 In recent years Eisenman students have been given  briefs to re-make iconic OMA projects (Seattle Public Library and Lagos as if designed by Eisenman’s machine  – paranoia made critical?) The bizarre results convert Koolhaas into a language that Eisenman not only recognises but suddenly seems able to speak. The question is: what is he trying to say? 5.8 Throughout their respective careers E & K show little interest in their writing as a form of narrative. Writing is not story-telling but rather the basis for rational argumentation and explanation. In this way, a dogma of  modern transparency (truth) endures in each.

5.9 Through a shared dismissal of storytelling E & K  reveal how they are most alike: in their shared modernist  belief in abstraction, style and voice over the classical formulae of plot, character and story resolution. This is  perhaps one reason why each has been so successful in evading the pitfalls of postmodernism. 5.10 Is not their shared commitment to writing the most nostalgic of modern working habits embodied by E & K? Their belief in writing and publication as a professional  priority knowingly invokes the ghosts of Le Corbusier  ( L’esprit nouveau), Mies (G); Van Doesburg (de Stijl ), Gropius ( Bauhaus publications) and so many others. 5.11 Eisenman and Koolhaas have frequently been  published side by side, but have never built next door to one another. Is literary proximity always easier to embody than architectural neighbourliness?

6.0 ON THE UNDENIABLE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN EISENMAN AND KOOLHAAS ‘The skill of writing, and the differences between writers, lies in the creation of a context where other people can

think.’ — Edwin Schlossberg 6.1 Before discovering architecture K first works as a ournalist covering the 1960s excesses of European counter-culture. Koolhaas later transposes the journalist’s obsession with observation to the world of architecture. 6.2 Eisenman does the inverse. Deciding to relocate to Cambridge at the outset of his career, he abandons the city and submerges himself instead in the collegiate rooms and libraries of a medieval English cloister. 6.3 Each of these departures – one straight towards and the other away from the heart of the modern metropolis –  sets a template for a life’s work. They also mark the greatest difference between the two protagonists: one depends like an addict on the extraction of architectural ideas out of an observation of the city; for the other, the city has legitimacy only as the site for architectural adventure. 6.4 Eisenman’s detective-like uncovering of hidden formal order in the architectural universe (insane  planimetric ‘proofs’ of Terragni’s square-ness) is mirrored by Koolhaas’s celebration of the most accidental or invisible patterns treated as parts of the city (crazy statistical evidence becomes equated with figure–ground

certainty). 6.5 If Eisenman is Philip Marlowe crossed with Carl Sagan (the universe is a crime best solved by a diagram), then Koolhaas is Hunter S Thompson writing on Excel (surrealism performed by a spreadsheet). 6.6 The contrasting writing styles of E & K suggest neither enemies nor collaborators, but rather fellow travellers who share each other’s suspicions regarding the accidental qualities of architectural life. 6.7 Eisenman is to America (an American educated in Europe) what Koolhaas is to Europe (a European who left Europe to learn by looking at America). Each uncomfortably accepts the calculation of a Rowe-like mathematics regarding architectural ideals (that every  principle must be provable by its inverse). 6.8 Eisenman is an intellectual seeking architecture, while Koolhaas is an intellectual wandering in search of a  public. 6.9 Eisenman works in architectural series, Koolhaas instead burrows deep within discrete, self-contained architectural episodes. K’s allergy to repetition is grounded in the figures making up E’s infinite seriality.

6.10 Eisenman pursues his work without any coherent theory connecting architecture to the contemporary city –  from an office located in the heart of Manhattan. Koolhaas, by contrast, pursues a metropolitan architecture from his world headquarters located in the least metropolitan corner of the universe – Rotterdam. Do their  lives suggest that they dream of architectural elsewheres? 6.11 Koolhaas’s first act is one of declaration – naming his office before inventing any other project. Eisenman,  by contrast, simply puts his name on the door. Despite differences in office-naming strategy, both go on to  become magnets for subsequent generations of  experimenters.

7.0 A FEW QUESTIONS REGARDING THE FALSE PREMISE OF MAKING COMPARISONS BETWEEN EISENMAN AND KOOLHAAS ‘There are two kinds of people in the world, those who think there are two kinds of people, and those who don’t.’  — Groucho Marx

7.1 Doesn’t a 15-year age gap and the vast cultural differences between Europe and North America limit any real comparison that can be made between these two? Why do we attempt it? 7.2 Is a comparison of E & K merely a Trojan horse designed to smuggle symmetry back into architecture by means other than a floor plan? 7.3 In comparing E & K, do the differences in writing habits offer forms of transparency unseen in their (many other) architectural activities? 7.35 Moreover, is transparency by now a modern crutch, or just something we’re resigned to as a  postmodern inevitability? 7.4 Is the seeking of similarities between two architects working on different planets, on entirely different agendas, anything other than nostalgia for architectural individuation (something that can now usually be measured in microns, in view of the increasingly generic nature of architectural bodies as well as ideas)? 7.5 Does their extensive bibliography make a comparison between E & K harder, easier, more or less relevant than standing in front of two of their buildings?

7.6 Each author rejects the proven professional path of  working first as a disciple in a hero’s office. Each focuses instead on the invention of their own heroics: a critical or  conceptual architectural practice conjured up within an era that makes awe and wonder increasingly impossible. Is their greatest similarity merely an accidental coconspiracy?

8.0 ON THE CONTINUED RELEVANCE OF WRITINGS BY EISENMAN AND KOOLHAAS ‘Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of  relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present and future.’ — Susan Sontag 8.1 Writing has provided E & K with a form of  longevity and an ongoing presence in contemporary architecture during a period otherwise characterised by constant flux, change, even reversals. Is this a paradox or  a plan that reinforces, or cancels, the message of their  writings? 8.2 Hasn’t their career-long commitment to writing architecture now been challenged (historicised?) by the

industrialisation of writing by professional historians and theorists? 8.3 In the years immediately after the completion of  their first books ( FBMA & DNY ) E & K produce many smaller articles, essays and project documents. In each case, 15 years pass before the arrival of another major   book (and after that, each subsequent one arrives faster, and thicker). 8.4 As E & K settle into a mature stage of their careers, they manage both to have multiple books in simultaneous  production and to feed the needs of offices realising  projects at scales that dwarf the entire first few decades of  their architecture careers. 8.5 Their shared interest in problems of architectural form has proved to be an accidental key to ensuring their  longevity, as architecture moves into an era that seems more dominated by architectural formalism than ever. 8.6 Eisenman and Koolhaas remain interesting today, in  part, owing to their serious interest in remaining interesting. This quality cannot be overemphasised when assessing relevancy within any discipline. 8.7 Future interest in E & K is likely to grow over time,

not diminish, as the economy of instantaneous imagemaking gives way to a return to a culture of words and writing. (As Benjamin once noted, the invention of the modern photograph made the writing of captions utterly essential.)

9.0 ON THE DIFFICULTY OF WRITING ABOUT (WRITING ABOUT) ARCHITECTURE ‘Our task is overcoming the dialectical tendencies of  everyday language.’ — Ludwig Wittgenstein 9.1 How best to analyse two architects writing about architecture? Is more writing really our only option? (Cf  Laurie Anderson’s cautionary piece of non-advice: ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’) 9.2 The matrix of sentences comprising this afterword  presents a spreadsheet of fact more than a path to illumination – a deliberately non-textual strategy designed to avoid attraction or symmetry between itself and either  of the writing styles serving as its object. 9.3 This array displaces the otherwise presumptuous

expectation of an afterword providing a meta-analysis or  emotional explanation of its topic (something E & K both constantly provoke in their work, while simultaneously dismissing the habit in others). 9.4 Any meaning contained within the matrix of this essay lies not in any individual line of text, but rather in reading between these lines. Imagined connections  between points recorded by the author are likely to prove more stable and lasting than any message discovered on the surface. 9.5 Readers of this text can further modify its underlying programming code by scripting ten additional statements and appending these as operands to the ones already written. Unlike most architectural spaces, the textual space of this afterword is infinitely extensible. (That so few architects have made careers out of the artful addition to an existing building says a lot, one suspects, about architecture’s enduring fascination with the  preservation of origins.) 9.6 Today’s architectural text, like today’s architect, is  primarily a structure for organising information. Texts  process information, which is the primary documentoriented activity of all architects. Thus all architectural forms are unacknowledged memory structures.

9.7 Is there anything left to write on Koolhaas or  Eisenman that hasn’t already been written by the architects themselves? When will machines take over this role and perform the task more effectively than our more familiar forms of architectural writing, like those associated with E & K? (Is that not the end-game consequence of all transformative grammars – their  eventual redundancy when coded by more efficient artificial languages?) 9.8 Future architectural minds will be defined less by how they emulate the capacity of writing machines like E & K, and more by how they embed themselves into the kinds of writing networks anticipated by architecture’s own forms of decline and redundancy. (Have E & K not always been writing, in effect, about this: the end of their  own project, made inevitable by more robust writing networks?) 9.9 Should we be seeking new, expanded linguistic worlds, like Eskimos talking about snow, for the purposes of describing or explaining architectural writing models today? 9.10 Who reads architectural words these days anyway, and why?

10.0 SEPARATED AT BIRTH: QUOTATIONS BY EISENMAN AND KOOLHAAS ‘Method of this project: literary montage. I have nothing to say, and will only show. I will neither misappropriate anything worthwhile nor annex to myself any brilliant formations.’ — Walter Benjamin [1] 10.1 On Mies (architecture as genealogy): RK  ‘Is

Mies’s greatness “sustainable” next to the average late twentieth-century masterpiece? Can his typical plan survive the signature, in the first five minutes even?’ [2] PE ‘Mies’s

articulation of the corner, particularly at IIT, must first be distinguished from a similar concern that inhabits the major narrative of architecture’s discourse from the renaissance onward.’ [3] 10.2 On disciplinarity (architecture as expertise): PE ‘The

difference between self-expression and the critical concerns the idea of skill versus discipline.’ [4]

RK  ‘In

any discipline there are builders and there are wreckers – attention is focused on the first, but, in fact, the second category is more rare and probably more essential to the future.’ [5] 10.3 On the canonical vs the generic (architecture as singularity vs repetition): PE ‘I

discovered that the idea of a canon has more mobility than might have been at first assumed.’ [6] RK  ‘The

generic has formally become an issue now … for me the generic really represents an infinitely intriguing category.’ [7] 10.4 On the modern movement and the avant-garde (architecture as newness): PE ‘The

modern movement has tended to identify itself  with change and ideas of change, because it too has conceived itself to be a “permanent revolution” and consequently its particular mode of speculation has been historical rather than logical. There is an immanent danger  in this absence of logical thought.’ [8] RK  ‘The

bottom line is that the avant-garde needs the city but that the city can do very well without the avantgarde.’ [9]

10.5 On cities and their histories (architecture as part of  something larger): PE ‘It

was not until the late twentieth century that the classical could be appreciated as an abstract system of  relations.’ [10] RK  ‘At

some point in the life of a working architect it  becomes more important to know what the city is than what the city was or could have been.’ [11] 10.6 On ordinariness (architecture in its actual, rather  than idealised, circumstances): RK  ‘The

random sequence of commissions on which each architect depends is the opposite of an agenda.’ [12] PE ‘The

iconic building today reflects Benjamin’s observation that architecture is viewed in a state of  distraction.’ [13] 10.7 To each other (architecture as conversational): PE ‘Rem,

your problem is you don’t know anything about form.’ [14] RK  ‘Peter,

you certainly believe your reputation.’

 NOTES 1. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk , edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Berlin: 1982), note 1a8. ‘I always wanted to write a book consisting entirely of  footnotes’ is what this epigram (or my memory of it) is trying say. For  differing opinions, see Tiedemann, Adorno and others on Benjamin’s desire (or otherwise) to write only with quotations. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades  Project , translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLauchlin and edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). My thanks to Edward Bottoms, Aileen Smith and Mark Cousins for pointing me to the (multiple) citations in Benjamin’s writings. 2. Rem Koolhaas, ‘Mies-takes’, in Mies van der Rohe in America, edited by Phyllis Lam bert (Montreal, 2001), 719. 3. Peter Eisenman, ‘Mies and the Figuring of Absence’, in Mies van der Rohe in America, op. cit., 712. 4. Peter Eisenman, Anywise, edited by Cynthia Davidson (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 52. 5. Rem Koolhaas, Re: CP by Cedric Price, edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Basel, 2003), 6. 6. Peter Eisenman,Ten Canonical Buildings 1950–2000, edited by Ariane Lourie, foreword by Stan Allen (New York, 2008), 15. 7. Rem Koolhaas, ‘Discussion 2’, in Anytime, edited by Cynthia Davidson (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 143. 8. Peter Eisenman, The Formal Basis for Modern Architecture, PhD submitted August, 1963 (published Basel, 2006), 11.

9. Rem Koolhaas, Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning the Avant-Garde in merica, edited by R E Somol (New York, 1997), 294. 10. Peter Eisenman, ‘The End of the Classical’, in Architecture Theory Since 1968, edited by K Michael Hays (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 524. 11. Rem Koolhaas, in Anywise, op. cit., 86. 12. Rem Koolhaas, in Content  (Cologne, 2004), 20. 13. Ten Canonical Buildings, 201. 14. Peter Eisenman in Supercritical , edited by Brett Steele (London, 2009), 8.

A MEA CULPA BRETT STEELE OCTOBER 2009, LONDON

This short postscript to Architecture Words declares the need for a new kind of architectural publication today: one that openly embraces a ‘back pocket’ form of  delivering writing and editing, as well as the very nonarchitectural values of hesitation, delay, even  procrastination. Thanks here to Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Jeffrey Kipnis and Robort Somol, as well as the talented producers who make the idea of this  publication so compelling in the form of paper and glue: Pamela Johnston and Thomas Weaver, editors extraordinaires; Zak Kyes and Wayne Daly, graphic space-magicians. Thank you everyone, and here's to slowing architecture down.

I. MEA CULPA ‘He said “mea culpa”, can you put it better? “I’m saying I’m sorry, I made a mistake, I made … I committed a sin, I made a mistake. And I’m never gonna do it again, I never did it  before and I’m never gonna do it again”.’ This strange, haunting exchange between two unknown oices apologising or arguing over some unstated event opens the second track of the 1981 album, My Life in the ush of Ghosts, by Brian Eno and David Byrne. The apology/non-apology is part of a rambling, overheard conversation that at first hearing hardly even sounds like a  piece of music, let alone something that could be repeated here as the lead-in to an editorial statement for this new architectural series, Architecture Words. But the lessons of Eno and Byrne’s now classic song and album have stayed with me in ways that have allowed this strange fragment, as well as the peculiar circumstances of  its making, to serve as a much-needed mea culpa, at least regarding the enduring potential of editing and writing of  all kinds to transform elements of our found world –  audio, visual or otherwise – into something unique,

accomplished, even beautiful. To explain why I’ve begun this short postscript this way, I would point out that Eno and Byrne required two years or more to convert their  found audio clip into a remarkable track on a wonderful album. This apology, in other words, is really an appeal for the value of slowness, even hesitation, as its own architectural project. So, far from apologising for the (very obvious) delay between the events of 2006 documented here and the book’s arrival in your hands, I’d like instead to request your acceptance of the need to slow down architectural time in a world that is increasingly overwhelmed by the immediacy of tweets, flickr accounts and blogs, and intrinsically sceptical of the value of  slowness.

II. LEARNING FROM PROCRASTINATION: ON DELAY

 ‘We are the products of editing, rather than authorship.’  — George Wald The time it took to get this inaugural issue into your hands (so long that Architecture Words 2, 3 and 4 overtook it and are already published) is itself part of our larger 

ambition for the series: to apply the brakes to accelerating streams-of-consciousness, where everything thought is said, everything said recorded, everything recorded uploaded – and all of it is made available as raw material for Wiki-pedestrians everywhere, who are left to wander  somnambulistically across their flickering screens. In this formless landscape of a new cultural desert, older values  based upon architectural editing, re-writing and the crafting of arguments have almost vanished from sight. One of the defining traits of modern life is its always expanding, new and aggressive media and communication technologies. While Architecture Words seeks to appear  quite distinct from any other architectural publication (its design being the first hint of its modest iconoclasm), we acknowledge at the outset that we are not immune to the heightened forms of architectural reality appearing to us as an architectural celebrity culture – something modern media makes inevitable, though hardly acceptable. As a way of countering this, however, we hope that the series will simply provide the reader with an unexpected antage-point from which to see anew an architectural world dominated by an endless production, consumption and circulation of architectural images. rchitecture Words seeks to subvert an overabundance of  images, not by trying to deny their existence, but by

 putting them in their rightful place – in the margins of an architectural text. This naive editorial agenda will wear its heart (like its preface) on its sleeve: here, architecture words matter. With each new instalment (whether written, transcribed, translated or merely compiled) we will reiterate this idea in what we think are new, important and compelling ways. In doing so, Architecture Words will argue for something even greater: a realisation that words don’t just matter but are perhaps the ultimate form of all architectural matter – for the ways they can hold up our  world. Thank you for joining us on the adventure. Brett Steele Series Editor, Architecture Words

PART V: THE EVIDENCE A clear path for locating the nexus of an architect's mind can be seen to follow from an imagined direct connection  between an architectural architectural idea, the mind it resides in and and the eventual, inexplicable material realisation found in the form of a building, a space, a structure. This section of  Supercritical  provides  provides comparison without commentary, allowing the reader to draw conclusions, not buildings, in the terms of his or her own imagination. – editor 

Handwriting analysis: notes by Eisenman (top) and Koolhaas (above)

Awaiting the arrival of the participants, AA Lecture Hall, 30 January 2006

Video relay of Eisenman and Koolhaas in AA Studio One, 30 January 2006

Figure as Ground: aerial view of the City of Culture of Galicia by Eisenman Architects

Dutch Embassy, Berlin, by OMA

Parc de la Villette competition entry by OMA

Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas, AA Director's Office, 30 January 2006

Jeffrey Kipnis, Mark Cousins and Robert Somol discuss OMA's Seattle Central Library

Peter Eisenman in conversation with Alvin Boyarsky, AA Television Studio, 20 January 1975

Facsimile of the front cover of ‘The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture’ by Peter Eisenman

Facsimile of the front cover of ‘Exodus, Or The Voluntary Prisoners of  Architecture’ by Rem Koolhaas et al

Architecture Words 1 Supercritical  Peter Eisenman & Rem Koolhaas Edited by Brett Steele Series Editor: Brett Steele AA Managing Editor: Thomas Weaver  AA Publications Editor: Pamela Johnston AA Art Director: Zak Kyes Design: Wayne Daly Editorial Assistant: Clare Barrett Transcriptions: Arturo Lyon, Giulia Foscari & Brett Steele Event Photos: Valerie Bennett ISBN 978-1-907896-33-0 © 2008 Architectural Association and the Authors. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written  permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. ebook edition published 2013 Distributed on iBookstore and Amazon

All images courtesy of the authors For a catalogue of AA Publications visit aaschool.ac.uk/publications or email [email protected]  AA Publications 36 Bedford Square London WC1B 3ES T + 44 (0)20 7887 4021 F + 44 (0)20 7414 0783