Peter Eisenman: "After Derrida, There Are No Corners"

hi there's my great great pleasure to be able introduce our speaker tonight your husband is an old friend of circus University his affiliation with the school goes back years now he was also a good personal friend and our affiliation computer goes back 40 years 40 years this month if you did you start up though they'll get the true story I've been waiting for this moment for 40 years and thinking about how I might have this theater in curtain T that the very first question one must ask is which utilizing that we should speak about because in fact there are several there is of course Eisenmann the architect and builder this is the Peter who was well known to all of you his practice has followed a remarkable trajectory indicating with a small toy Museum and Princeton followed by a series of rigorously abstract houses through the wax of central Columbus a housing project and checkpoint charlie a school of architecture in cincinnati a football stadium a football stadium Phoenix I'm currently an entire cultural complex nearing completion in Santiago de Compostela in Spain there was also recently finished tomorrow to the Burdick Jews of Europe and Berlin this is a project of study elegance and dueling power and extraordinary subtlety this is I spend the fabricator of the architectural uncanny and then there are signs from the writer author of numerous articles essays books spending nearly a half-century of production from his doctor Cambridge to books with fanciful titles such as houses and carts codex and diagram Diaries his writings have traced the rigorous examination of the formal cultural critical or dependence of the built environment and its relation to other cultural systems the range of his inquiry and the following books on put are nothing short of staggering but this is an Icelander who is also well known to many of us from his high writings we are introduced to iseman the philosopher I don't have to explain this incarnation surprised to say that Peters pedigree bottles of lineage that must begin with Aristotle's letter passes through Thomas Aquinas vo remember that on to Nietzsche BG's aesthetics and into tremendous deserves linguistics around Louis Krouse instruct lism and arriving for an extended period of the deconstructivism Doctore death this is hidden stuff but nonetheless emblematic of peterson systems and persistence and always locating the other picture this post squarely in the middle of the Baskerville theory but less well-known was certainly an important decision in this vix his eyes indeed impresario thus particular Peter founded and directed the Institute for architects River studies for fifteen years between 1967 and 82 located on the 20th floor of eightwest 43 overlooking Bryant Park the food as it was known it was the kind of architectural think time built around a group of young architects their tissues and Ernest including Kenneth Franklin to stand Anderson party above zone beyond addressed Peter Wolf enjoy a good look well those years I don't click the ledger books ever saw Blackgate can I eat depth again it matters to become home peril and Samuel force of the world of architecture and contemporary discourse during that period a grand numerous suppose in exhibitions lecturers and published twice its issues of opposition's magazine which to the study is still the benchmark for what an architectural journal should be our own mark Loggins interpreting stoop and I know he credits Peter and his experience there with the firing his own ambitions towards a life in architecture to this day I don't know how Peter managed to keep that place afloat from here to here but I know that there are many of us who must have stood at will always remember its eventually too modest there are many other things like to describe to you including item of the lecturer who you will have the pleasure of meeting tonight and I spend the time provocateur minor also making appearances evening large Simone is iseman the fanatical fan of Rutgers that Pierre can be found in the dome tomorrow cheering on the loser team for the Jersey under the Iseman I'd like to talk about his Peter the teacher had mentor this is the Osmo request that one that few rarely talk about my own first encounter with Peter southward with the Union I was walking past the classroom where this young guy was lecturing to a group of upperclassmen I have heard some reports about this new instructor whose approach to architecture wasn't usually and interesting so I stopped moving away at listen to their life I remember being struck by the rationality and the logic that he brought to bear on what was for me a fairly mysterious I found it quite stimulating and decided to register for his course the next time it was offered this was postponed by a couple years due to something called the draft but when I got back to school in 1970 Peter was there and I was able to take his seminar on the formal analysis of Renaissance at modern facades this course consisted of weekly close readings of great facades for most periods it was a popular course and other destructive sections rhombus lesbian curly blonde feed and criticism finito and occasionally John Hannah who occasionally drop by to sit in piece of furniture proceeded from the intellectual traditions of faculty whipped over of Rome but a transcended all of them through the very focused and deep analysis to which he subjected in 3d the underlying premise to disagree was that within the formal dimension of architecture a oversized universal truth was about the mechanisms of perception and the underpinnings of meaning in a very particular way this was for me the moment when the light for the experience the experience of this course also planted the seeds for lifelong interest in the building facades that pitch this light of education and you know just before graduating to you surprised me by a state of work for five presidents this invitation to be his assistant attorney with a caveat that for two years lasted that long he would fire me the point being that he wasn't interested in creating a furniture a rather the relationship really was that of a research assistant he offered to pay me the whopping sum of $100 a week I accepted figure how could moonlight on the evenings and weekends that they cover the difference but the time Peters almost consistent over the two of us a small room with a nice view of the city these circumstances weren't asked for the offices location within the larger complex of spaces that made up Institute this proved incredibly fortuitous for me since these two served as an architectural that brought to his stores the likes of Michael Graves Roberts learn my furniture flooring James Stirling was sniffing but updates a sake Frank Gehry just to make you also during that period I remember that there was the small quiet yeah it was an incredible place it soon became clear to me that Peter had this remarkable ability to draw around himself the best the brightest and the most influential I then realized that more than a job I actually had entered a trying to postgraduate finishing school where Peter was the headmaster back interestingly actually others saw me as soon as the kind of architectural mafia with Peter in the world of they say they allege mystery sort that about in any but part of the curriculum I was expected to follow including early morning games of chess at the time there was an international championship musician one day Peter hands me a New Yorker article about the match written by George planner he said read this come in early tomorrow morning and bring the chess set those over the course of the next few weeks we played chess each morning between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. Peter was a much better player than me but I was determined to take him to task and so I thought they had to look at each night I studied opening and midday strategies in the ninth hole that I might offer a credible challenge day after day he humiliated until one day I actually brought the game to draw never play chess I'm not sure that I actually did that or that Peter left it to happen but after I listed I completed the course of study which was as it turned out a prelude for more advanced personal event seminar was the design construction house 6 the process was a dispersive one that began with a relatively simple transformation of a generic cube the first moves were somewhat arbitrary not unlike the first couple of rules of chess chess is certainly that we knew about dirt bikes or pawns but in doing that content any HIV field as it were in which each subsequent move is consequential in an accumulative traction and so the house became this game of three-dimensional chess in which Peter was the Grandmaster driving the process and I served as the novitiate of students responding with countless models and diagrams interpreting the opening and mid game strategies desperately trying to eat to it where the game was headed encounters with the client were remarkable lessons in persuasion here was Peter salesman extraordinary for the most interesting moments for those of consumption broke through such as that a boxless he came by for the review of the project up to that moment we were a bit sorry for the need to make the inverse symmetry legible house was conceived without reference to to be understood by the right side up or upside down you could virtually turn this thing conceptually away so this produces a lot of how do we actually in the environment when it exists obviously in relation to the ground plant and all of the earlier houses Peters here have done the presence of the staircase was always problematic about how the stair was situated his formal signature always was subordinated to its functional sign-in house it's Peter inserted his second stair and inverted one to challenge the persistence of this semantic reading Slutsky the painter so the solution wasn't the use of the color of something Peter had purposely excluded in all of the prior works this thus the right-side up stair would become green for growth and the upside down stair would become red for don't go it was exactly the right solution and over time this became one of the most iconic images of the house and for me one of the most instructional lessons there are many other stories about house excited to share with you like the mystery of the hanging column the gravity defying cantilever bathtub or the by design hold on the bedroom floor we recorded with the classroom I sleep together the same bed they have seen seven days because that's slot had to stay there suffice to say that the experience of working on that rocky house was with Peter was among the most cherished of memories that I have true to his word Peter did fire me at the end of the two years or rather he had to let me go towards the end money he got really tight American Express was threatening to pull this card the phone company was about to terminate service I had been working the last 12 months without pay and couldn't afford subway fare by the way you still owe me 1,200 bucks when I asked Peter of what Mighty Max he said go teach I said I didn't know this is the reason to do it to learn and employ date well I would like to believe that my experience with Peter was unique I know it was not there were individuals before me and many sense who were fortunate to have the many Peters as a teacher and mentor now it is 75th year he is in his uncanny manner still building and writing teaching and mentoring philosophizing and provoking and oh yes cheering for that loser team in New Jersey for all of these Iceman's architecture is the home team and you will always want peter out in front leading the charge please join me in welcoming Peter Thank You Randall I have several announcements to make what is that I've changed the subject of my lecture after having work like L to get it ready for being here I thought how can I subject these people on a Friday afternoon to Jacques Derrida and micro analysis of the effect of Deborah T and thought on the corner and architecture how could I do that and I thought in this country system protecting these kids had a tough season and you know let's have a little fun before tomorrow so I changed the talk so any of you who want the Derry doubt talk you have to send me an email email back to you and I have proof that this was here so I wasn't going to do that the other so therefore also I found out that it was a Muslim holiday today it's not something that I had been aware of I apologize to any people who feel that this lecture would be an affront to their religious beliefs so I changed the lecture to a Muslim project that I recently finished so in a sort of feeling that that would at least commemorate the holiday that's the second point I had to make the third is I am such a fan unfortunately of this particular room from New Jersey where my father went and played and my mother went I was taken in 1937 to my first game which is I guess six 70 years ago I went to my first game probably somewhere around this time of the year so I'm not here to give just the lecture this is only the subterfuge that mark is able to justify getting me here before on but it's the something change that might my wife in my job my young son are very upset about because this turns out to be parents weekend at my son's boarding school and when that notice arose in August my wife looked at me and she said you know you can always change your Syracuse lecture I said I could do that and she said you know the scent really likes it when you come up to school and I said yeah I dunno and I love going up to school she said so when I kissed her goodbye this morning she said all I can say is you guys better win so I've got it I'm here on a mission because otherwise I can't go home I'm going to talk about a project that we recently finished this summer that my good friend Jeff Kipnis says is the best thing we've done since the last 20 years I asked him this morning a long-distance call to Salt Lake City where he is Jeff would you tell me because I'm having a panic a lecture on the project tonight did you tell me why it's interesting and because architects don't know why their projects are interesting he said you know make up a story it'll do so this is not the Jeff Kipnis version of the project this is the Peter Eisenman version I really love this project I can't tell you why I'm really excited about it because at 75 it represents a reach thinking of some of the things that we've been working with and I want to talk about those issues before I show you the pics I was at Harvard at jury last spring and what was interesting about this jury where all the projects were single surface modeling projects with algorithms that I don't know what they were but clearly quite advanced and I don't understand computer language but in any case I was disturbed by several things and of course when I get disturbed through my 20 years of analysis the analysts always says when you're disturbed that's when you've got to look at why and I was wondering why it disturbed me because first of all that was also us work in other words you just let the Machine we're on it it produces things and it ran and it didn't matter if they were producing a hospital a school or whatever the same forms could produce anything and wasn't that what I was about wasn't that what all of my work was trying to get rid of the author get rid of function and just let things run and then I realized that a sort of problem for me was a kind of determinist what I would call a techno Digital determinism had crept in and was now a new kind of hierarchical thing that if you couldn't do this stuff you were a wonk and if you didn't understand it was you also in the same and of course as a teacher I was required to say something intelligent about these things and I couldn't because I didn't know what the value judgments that were necessary to be made and I was particularly taken by one students work making milled models which were interesting and I was not interested in what he did with the models I was interested in the models themselves as abstract entities and I started stacking these things up on one another and they're not say we're not stackable what was like putting one hand on top of another hand and another thing and I began looking at the section of inventing a section of this work and I thought this is interesting so I asked the young student if I can have those models they weren't what he had designed they were just studies of single surface models that he had produced as a beginning so I took these models and I brought them to New York and I assembled a team of computer whiz kids one from Harvard one from Princeton and one from Yale just so there was no overriding ideology and I brought them together and I said look I'll tell you what I want to do this summer I want to work on this competition for the sheikh zayed Museum and Abu Dhabi but what I want to do is to take these models and I want to think of producing a project that is starts from section rather than from plan because I said you know the matter what kinds of determinisms we think about all of this single surface modeling still in when it when it elevates in the section comes off of a plan and I said what about if we invent a section and then allow that section to distribute itself and plan of course functionally you'll see that it creates problems doing this sort of thing I mean there's a reason why the plan is a generator is people think that function is a generator in any case that was one of the ideas that could we make a sectional project as opposed to a planet as a fundamental disturbance to thinking about architecture the the second issue came up was that the question of the indexical project now the indexical project has been a hallmark of my work since 1978 and after 20 years of work on the index it no longer becomes a didactic and confrontational discourse to post-modernism or any kind of semantics and one needed to find a another way of thinking about signs in relationship to to their signified and I began reading I had begun reading I should say before this waiting for the moment when I could employ this kind of thinking on this particular on a particular project and I was reading about there were about four books I mentioned once I think the last time I was here Theodor Adorno book and Edward Syed's book both talking about blade style and I read over the summer a book by Thomas Pynchon one of my favorite authors called against the day and what's interesting about pension and against the day it is a book conceived of as in itself a late style book because pension is in his late style but also it's conceived about a moment in time a historical period around the Chicago World's Fair which was also a moment of late style in other words before modernism and what Pynchon is telling us and what Adorno talks about inside and all of these people talk about the fact that unless there is a new paradigm or a new discourse a new FD standeth Chloe would say we are bound to to move into at some point in time in history into what is called late style now late style is not mannerism which is the reaction to the high style monetarism but late style is a quirky finicky attitude toward meaning and form that in the sense does not pre-empting the idea of knowing understanding etc it is a sort of experimentation that does not have as a goal clarity let's say and mentions novel this particular one is clearly in that vein side eats eight sites Beethoven's mrs. Salinas which he said is is very different than all of the other Beethoven compositions and that its objective is very different and he also cites Adorno's late writing is very different from his early writing and I believe we are in a period of lateness I believe it is a very difficult time for young people like yourselves to be avant-garde because there hasn't been a new IV stem that hasn't been a new paradigm and so one of the things I want to talk about tonight is what do you do in a moment of lateness when all you want to do is newness or earliness and which is a natural idea now Pynchon is a very interesting example because what Pynchon does even though he sets the book into an historical context of lateness in the late 19th century he's talking about young people flying around the world's fair and balloons and spaceships and all kinds of new kinds of fangled aircraft as a sort of vision of the future and what pigeon is saying is is that in the moment of lateness if one looks carefully there's the possibility of the new that is the possibility might be so seated within the work of lateness and then interested me I thought hey I'm late myself I've always been late but would it be interesting to experiment with lateness as a teaching tool as a design tool and see where it goes like pretensions novel so if we're no longer interested in the indexable project that we're interested not in as it were the close reading that we had before but a different kind of reading then maybe we could find a post indexical close reading of our moment which would be very different than past kinds of close reading the last thing that I said up in this first of all it's about architecture has always been about the relationship of a thing to a human being and architecture throughout we could describe the subject object relationship as the dominant mode because the subject clearly is always within architecture or without architecture physically mental the functionally meaningfully etc and I began to examine how the subject object relationships change in moments of confrontation in other disciplines I began looking at I was going to talk about Richard Serra's work and and Richard Serra's new work as an example of lateness tonight I began looking at people in film like Michael snow when he started to work on film that involved the subject and last Thursday night I went to a film which I don't recommend this entertainment but if you want to know what I'm talking about in terms of the new subject object relationship you should see Michael hammock these new film funny games it is the most terrorizing experience I've had in a movie you witness no killing no bloodshed no anything but you sit there as if you're in a frenzy and terror I felt that walking out on the street I was going to run into a psychotic killer or you know when the elevator door opened I remember in the building we were in and somebody got in I thought oh my god and I was absolutely in an estate as a viewer which I've rarely been in in a film alright and I think that hanneke was trying to say look in the media age that were in in this moment of lateness this subject that is all of us have become passive and we don't know how to participate not to be active but how do we participate in a film and how to these films from cached to code unknown and to this funny games is a way of saying to the subject Hey look at yourself because I I came out of this film and I thought why don't I go to a film like this it's you know what kind of experiences this shouldn't films be entertaining and then I realized oh my god Here I am supposedly a quasi intellectual academic sang out what entertainment from my films right something I've always been against so what panicky did was to push me against the wall about why I was what it was like to be a spectator watching his film now I only say this is a preface I'm having a discussion with mister the Monday night as a kind of conclusion to my weekend and I'm really very excited about it he is very interested in my work and I'm interested in his work and so we're going to have this discussion but I think it's a meeting of late minds and I think this issue of lateness I think it becomes very important to this project that I'm I'm going to show you tonight okay that is a background I want to show the project and then we'll take questions after and see what you know comments and whatever that you have I mean I've laid out a broad brush condition I could have done a very meticulous close reading tonight but I thought it would you better to lay out the grounds in under which you work and I work today in which we work and that makes it both exciting and difficult to do that so with that in mind can we turn the lights out and we'll look at the pace are you going to be here because I can be over here this is the conclusion that's what we've produced it's another landscape doesn't look like a building uncertain we have no chance in the competition but that that's what we sent okay we always do a site analysis and we were given this particular symmetrical centralized and I'm sorry I've got to do a PS I got to back up a second another one of the investigations of the moment of lateness is the relationship of part-to-whole composition and what one has always been interested in is that from Albert II to the present the the object has always had this part to hold the house to the site the site to the street the street to the neighborhood the neighborhood to the city the city to the region etc there was always this relationship what we saw in this site plan was a very symmetrical site that had a you know a park what we would consider a part-to-whole it was binuclear this main axis down here there was a waterway that ran through here and it was planned by Skidmore Owings in Maryland had really nothing to do with Abu Dhabi with the Bedouin nature of the people the the nomadic quality and anything at all and it didn't even recognize in its centricity this is where this is the giant statue of shapes I egg would be the fact that while the arc of this circle went through John nouvelles museums aha hadith Museum tano Hondo's museum it missed Frank Gehry's is in which is one of the things that started this and we began to look at the site which is over here that is the circle which is this circle and then there's a larger Center which is the entire Convention Centre district here there is there are vectors therefore from this centre to this centre which are real on the site and here to the al-hasan fort which is here another vector which is very important in the landscape so we were doing a site analysis as if this part-to-whole condition didn't exist the here is a larger scale view of this and what we did we took things to the centre of the cultural center and and had this circle here which gave us this arm but then we made an arc here which is the centre of this circle is the centre of these four museums so we had these to centers we had the fort which for us denied the centricity and parked a whole relationship about here now what they had in mind the competitor of the competition organizers was that this would be the focal point of the center the museum which we were supposed to do would be here and they they were going to have a being on an art Biennale every two years this would be the center of the art Biennale and basically they wanted a building that looked like this and a building that looked like this two Halfmoon buildings or half circle buildings to reinforce the part-to-whole relationship and since they were sitting with these fabulous icons of lateness Rococo modern I called they they certainly wanted another one and of course this is precisely what we didn't want to do when the client wants something is precisely when you go and do something else this is the building density diagram and this is the road density diagrams who were just but as a as gridded structures the these slides out of water sorry in any case I'm going to proceed because I'm on a assistant always likes to make me make up a story about something that I'm not ready to make up but I've lost a slide but anyway it'll come somewhere another little to do it's the first time we've done it so anyway what happens is with these vectors that you see here the the lines the green and blue lines begin begin to be warped and and skewed and so this is the kind of template for the work that we were going to do these forces skewing these gridded lines producing something that completely obliterates the the great circle and the great symmetry of the Sun I got to go forward and I got to go hi there you go I gotta have this slide one of the things that we started from was the idea of an arabesque I've used arabesques before but being in a Muslim country and the fact that the the arabesque was made as a critique of Euclidean geometry and the fact that these new computer algorithms are in themselves critiques of Euclidean geometry we went back to the seventh century critique of nuclear and found the origins of the arabesque which were basically single surface horizontal schemes and I said look guys let's find for our best of a different scale and different nature and stacked them on top of each other to produce section not planned because you couldn't get plan them so my three colleagues found these particular forms that could have been for others and we use these in as a brown the frame a canopy and an overlay up above you'll see they're actually four layers which bring these together now I'm going to go back so we took those our best and we did we allowed these these force diagrams to begin to distort the each level and here you can see the the ground level you can see the original figure the compression of the figure the extension of the of the of the unit that compression here and you get a very structure which would be the ground level let's say even though we were not conceiving this as a plan that's what would be the the desert forms let's say if if one wants to talk like that clearly this has no functional value no anything but we were looking at it as maybe this could be where the music and this could be where the buy of me and Ally pavilions and they could relate across this way this could be a major path to a open plaza area up here above the circle and and we would have to rejigger the whole site plan in order to produce this project as a second strategy we said well they're not gonna buy all this why we could just say okay there's the there's the museum and the Biennale the villians and forget all the rest if we ever got that far there this is the second level which is the continuous over-under single surface path of movement and the whole idea was that the path of movement never touched the ground or the walls of the ceiling in other words it was a continual very similar in a sense to the idea of the Holocaust Memorial where you don't you you don't go anywhere in other words you keep doubling back and infinite gridded pattern and this is a doubling back that wait a minute that's an over another you can see here the over and under and it was very difficult to work out because we didn't want it to touch the ground we didn't want it to touch the walls we didn't want it to touch this down was the whole idea that these this was a nomadic movement in space and time and this would be a different kind of Museum since there was no stopping and being next anything because what we were arguing is that the better ones 90% of the Abu Dhabi ins or better ones they didn't have many big things much art they had blankets and various pots and things but the park was not native to this place and so we thought as nomads we would make a nomadic museum and all of it was in a sense intended to be digital projections and around this nomadic path the difficulty is that you know to get over and under and have wheelchair access and real kinds of considerations of of different levels it was a very difficult process working that out as a circulation because we just took the distortions of the of this level distortions by the site the last level is the canopy level we needed an enclosure and you'll see in section that the canopy level is two levels and these are lightweight steel panels that reflect the Sun and give shade underneath and there is that first diagram that I showed you the when you put all three of them together this is what you get and of course is sorry to say this is another one of these it's out of place because here is this same diagram this should come before the other one here is the base diagram undeformed by the site conditions that is that over the superposition of all three arabesques here's the ground-level the walkway and and frame level and the canopy level enormous in the engineer in New York did the engineering and I do because it's a very complex condition it was very difficult to structure this we wanted to hang this piece off of this piece would ended up not being able to do that this started to have legs and to fear with the it's certainly not a resolved project I show it to because it has a lot of things in it that I think there are worth talking about then we went and took that base condition in into section because the section was really the issue and how it would we deform the plan how does the section deform as it were with it and here this is the ground plane and the the sectional situation that you saw on these levels here's the alignment to the site topography and you begin to see this other level the over/under level coming into the structure of the spaces and you begin to see the projection both down and up the projection down into the ground the whole idea was that these things would be built into the sand using the sand as moles for the concrete floor and you can see they do this any number of times and then the same thing happens you can project up and the roof and shifts up so you can get these kinds of shifts in the roof and in the ground and then this is the new site topography which you see here which has to be navigated by this single surface walkway and there are the again the three levels of their material system and what they look like in acts of a metric projection when they're overlaid on to one another and then I'm going to show you a series of plans and this is where the thing which was not conceived in planned breaks down because you they're hard to read we show the news Vivienne's and the rest of the site development and what should we had to do plans at this scale so this is this sort of under surface where all the services offices shipping receiving parking etc and if you can read these are better than I am but dragging through this is this single surface level which makes it very difficult to read because these things look like spaces that you've been walk on but they're not they merely show different levels and the walkway level is here and the roof level and there's the beginning of the sections you can begin to see here's one level of the walkway here's another in here here but they have they're they're anarchic as it were although single surface with the bottoms of the space they move through the space and in a very strange way as does if you will see there's the canopy roof and then there's this other level which is the frame of the of the glass enclosure so this is the glass enclosure and these pods exist as it were in the in the ground and none of the exhibition is this area here which is merely an air-conditioned piece but you see the way this piece moves through the canopy roof now what we had wanted to do was to hang this level off of the canopy roof but proved impossible what you don't see here is there's another secondary structure which for us is still a problem if we go any further with this project would do something else but what is interesting for us is the way the the human movement intersects the ground level is the same way that this enclosure level intersects the canopy level both of them being single surface interfaces want with the ground one with the canopy this is a functional explanation it doesn't do much to help structural analysis which was not the way we had planned it again you see this level of structure which comes off the secondary canary level as well there's the required site model we made this was a middle model and what you realize when you're into these kinds of forms you can't sit in your office and make cardboard models or wood chipboard models or wood models because we always study everything in that but we could only study it in the computer and we didn't see this model until we were ready to ship it out it was it took a long time to get the computer program right and what you realize when you're working with either milled or printed models the computer program has to be precise and if there are any interruptions in the program the thing shuts down so this thing shut down two or three times and you have to somebody has to be sitting with it the whole time this took 48 hours of night and day to do the the little printed models that I'm going to show you took about 36 hours and I can't tell you how long it took to do the computer models for them so anybody that thinks these things the new technology speeds up it doesn't it affords you a very different attitude toward land bill form and openings and the object I think there is one of the sectional this was a printed model this took 36 hours to do and you can see the we had done these trusses between the canopy structure and this secondary structure and of course that's not the way Norden Singh ultimately was able to make it work all of the other things were placed you know in down into the land and as I said this is a this walkway this this and this as you can see within the spaces is a continuous over-under loop that you never get off you never stop in a space we started this model about two or three times in the computer program quit and we didn't work getting it to work this is a very complex issue I don't know much about it but I can tell you who it is and there's another view of the section I feel a bit like a spectator to this because while I I never what my role as the architect was in this project other than the I set the parameters which set these people off but I couldn't say much about what was happening because I didn't know how to correct it or say I'm not sure I like that and I'm not sure I like this project but I think you ought to look at it together and it's easier than talking about dairy they're the we did any number of sectional perspectives it's I suppose pretty strange internal environment I think one of the things is an eric turistic of our work is that the internal environments are more articulated and active than the exterior environments you would never from that model think that this is what you have this is my favorite drawing because it really tells you about the spaces in the ground and that the space you know the trusses in the structural system in these canopies these printed metal canopies with the arabesques overlaid into them which I'm very fond of this particular piece we have the lights I don't know how to I can't explain the theoretical structure I don't think this has anything to do with museums but it has something to do with architecture I think I find it interesting I find it both similar to people think that it has qualities of the Holocaust project but in a different key not in Euclidean work and I show it to you because I find it an intriguing project it's has spurred now we have two or three other projects which are large-scale urban interventions we are working on these are not compositions but the project a large project outside of Naples along the coast and a fantastically interesting volcanic area which looks like this project a minute it's made I mean it's a it's an area outside of Naples which has as part of it has slipped into the sea part of this volcanic area has erupted into it : a mountain and it's an amazing like room my clients Kingdom we are the intermediary structure between what is flowing into the sea and what is risen from out of the ground and so that one project that deals with the land the second is the site in rock where the old Fiera was that this a convention center area which was moved out and this is completely derelict area and you know on the southern southeastern edge of Roman way to Ostia and we're fortunate to be able to have these types of projects because I'm no longer thinking about objects even though I probably never have since the kind of retro project all of my projects have been in a sense landscapes and and non object oriented but I think the the the difference for me in this project important for me is that the subject is treated in a different way it is no longer a subject that reads closely and is no longer some subject that is passive by the way can't be passive there's no place to as a horse stop and sit down so dorama as it were a treadmill through this experience you don't know if you've seen it all or miss something because you don't know where the path takes you there no indications it just is it work meanders continuously through spaces and you can't get all you can't say gee I want to go to this one next you have to follow us at work the path and in a way and an invent as it were a narrative from your experience I think that is all I want to say about the project I'd be very happy to hear comments or questions about the relationship of this project to other works or the kinds of things that you all are thinking about thank you is it new by his studio and saying some we've got power vests what do you know about our best so if this is probably the cleanest form of seeing it become beautiful and I can also see East and some of the decorations in the room usually work excavations down below like to the roof but I hope in listening to you talk about the work you started out in your remarks speaking about the GSD being you know review and see work which seemed like it was on autopilot there right regime visits it could be a hospital as if it could be anything so then I look at this and in fact you do start from harvests and so the one could say well is it sort of context based enough to be derived is that going back to work with codons and taking the photon and then making Science Museum on the other hand I look at this and I think about a gala hombro I think about the Islamic architecture I think about Suk's the interpretive Suk's within the colonial city so it seems completely resonant with also historic forms marvelous way so how do you speak that relationship between things which are generated by exogenous mark I think that's a great fatigue because I don't think I can escape you know I started out and it sounded like the old Peter Eisenman right and I don't think the old theorizing that's going to go away yet that ain't the old Peter Eisenman on the thing it to think she did the suit you know I was in the souk in Tangier forty years ago you know and I remember what it you know it was like feeling you know not not sure where I was where I was going to be I'm certainly those resonances of the the place you know we did we always do a lot of research into what it's like to be in the desert you know the the whole fact that the desert it my mind my text says that the desert is the flattened to the casual observers a flat expanse it isn't a flat expanse it never is and we thought we would capture in some way and knowledge ously that sort of thing i was trying to get and what I would call a ok let me give you another shot at it to answer your question I would argue that what Michael havoc he does himself is he takes what one would call the effective sensual aspect of being an observer and transfers it in to the conceptual domain he makes horror a thinking project right and honestly what we tried to do here is to make sensuality a thinking project in other words to shift the grounds of the traditional categories between thinking and feeling experience and and knowledge etc and merge them in other words take it out of context this is what having and I are going to be talking about on Monday whether a that's what we do and whether in fact it's possible to do that in other words take something that somebody would say like Frank Gehry is totally in the affective sensual domain he never shifts into the conceptual abstract domain all right REM is in the abstract domain and is certainly the he's in and another thing about the subject which I don't want to get into but Greg Lynn for example is totally in the conceptual domain I think and what we would have tried to do for the first time because I live in the conceptual domain I you know all of the work has been that to try and see if I couldn't take a piece out of the affective domain and move it into mine and to see whether I could do that that's precisely what I wanted to do I don't know if it works we don't know we don't know who the jury is we don't know we don't know if the models got there in one piece I mean I think it was worth showing thing that you're not sure I mean you know you don't know is it good thing a bad thing is it going in the right direction so I select wouldn't be worth doing that I want I want Julie this to survive max gay person who's been following you were talking about your desire to make this myth rounds that were based on shifting away from vertical forces or extrusions into more vector based work so when I look at this our best patterns and then you go to section I'm wondering how it seems like you you're kind of back to where you were before Santiago let's say theoretically let's say I was trying not to be let's say I was ok let's let's accept that because I'll accept that as a critique does it produce something different than Santiago ok what is that that's that's what I need to do is better better yeah I think it's a break but you're right it's sound it's like pre Santiago's linebackers that rewinding the tape but the tape somehow this time comes out different better I mean it's almost too bad that I'm 75 as far as I'm concerned because I really feel like this is the work of a 40 year old or 50 you know and I got 25 years to really move it well my mother's 99 so I got a few years but what is the business tell me how does that happen I mean I mean okay you tell that Gomorrah to go to the 50-yard line there's nothing the architect I assume they will have we we showed projection though you know videos and things like that but there is no I mean it's amusing what Abu Dhabi is time to do which is an interesting idea that oil is going to run out in 25 years there's not gonna be any oil left what they're doing is planning for the economic future where they have a a cultural island in the desert where people will go for culture they I mean why do they need five museums I've already you know commissioned for this another museum with a BIA knowledge thing so we're assuming it's going to be like a foot spa right and what we're saying is like we did it the Wexner Center you've got to find the kind of art that allows people to see it in this kind of way this kind of peregrination through space and we set a challenge that this is not going to be like any other museum and it was something that evolved out of the sectional ideas that we were working with so you know curators would say you can't have it like this but the curators at the Wexner Center always said we can't have a museum like that and it's worked out very well I'm assuming that as a challenge for curatorial and art I mean you know painters will start painting things on the walls I'm assuming you know it'll be work that will be constantly you know specific the role of institutions like the Museum so you know actually it's really interesting on their way the acne tear down claim but I have two diamonds I see I'm trying to understand what this is because it sounds like you're criticizing you're saying what they can't do to conventional museum fetishized objects they don't have that culture when they have to other museums for that already we've done they already have the fetishized objects yeah and it's I'm really intrigued by the way that work asks institutional yeah yeah yeah we need the microphone person go ahead we'll get everybody an ethic west of town when he comes to because there is working closely but we're posting new organizational strategies like forward to yeah the guy things that probably or not but how do you make that decision on what guard 3/6 on the side of the place you pursue in terms of behind you to make those moves I'm making more of a regional or side limited a lot of those things that you well for example I was just rereading Roger Scruton to see esthetics of architecture Roger Scruton says to answer your question that architects create problems in order to make solutions in other words there are no solutions unless you create the problem he says that Bach and the Goldberg Variations creates the problem of atomic problems so that he can produce this you don't know ahead of time what the solutions are consider you've produced the problem right and the problem doesn't exist it doesn't exist in function that doesn't exist in history it doesn't exist if you are in a sense in a mode of transgression so that what what the artist architect does the the architect who or the architect who's an architect creates problems in order to solve and you can say which problems did you create well we created a lot of problems for ourselves and it happens as you're working through the project I promise you no architect whereas his or her salt starts out knowing what they want to do because if they did they wouldn't do it would be worth doing and so what you do is set up problems that you don't know the answers to and you keep elaborating those problems until you are able to find answers for them that's the only way I can tell you I mean I don't wake up I've been like I woke up this morning at five o'clock and I said I'm not going to give this then buried our lecture over till these I mean it really a minute is really dirty okay and I said why that has some fun let's film this thing right I want to make flames I want to be it's a holiday it's you know football weekend I I was at Cornell how's it going on Friday afternoon and they had a lecturer I wouldn't go right because I was ready for the party right so I really appreciated being here and I said to myself hey why not jump abroad right and I I made a decision to do that and that's the way I work you know I work through things I mean the first idea I had for this dairy na lecture was there were no corners before dairy Bob and and I started working through it and I said I don't mean there were no corners before dairy enough I mainly worked on corners after Derrida and that's what I really meant now I didn't I took a intuitive leap and Sarah before buried on and then they said no after dairy duh and this leads me to a whole set of things that I'm evolving on the question of the corner of dairy Don rhetoric and the fact that rhetoric has now changed from a semantic and formal domain to a textual domain and if you look at Richard Serra's work the first work on the corner is is formal and the the latest work is textual and I've got a whole thing on Richard Serra in the corner so things evolved right and and when you're thinking and working on these problems then you know suddenly a project walks in like this project in outside of Naples but slowly and suddenly say hey I know what I want to do on this project it's not what the the project is it's what the architect wants to do so it's purely a kind of haptic thing at the moment you can't know ahead yeah did you speak a little bit more about the similarities between this project well they're both field projects one is a Euclidean project and one is an attempt to be non Euclidean they both deal with the ground surface in it in other words the most important surface in the haricot low-cost project is the molded ground in other words most people think that the ground is flat and the whole experience of being there is the up and down the pillars are vertical but the ground has nothing to do with this and you realize that it's the ground and people suddenly appearing and disappearing in the ground and that's the thing when you you don't realize you look at this landscape and you see a surface that looks very quiet and easy because you can see over it from this side walk all the way around and you see this rippling surface but then when you go into it it is becomes very problematic and in a sense tense because you go down from looking at something that's a metre and a half or two half feet above ground not enough to interrupt the eye to go down 15 feet and 15 feet in a 2 foot 9 width becomes very confining isolating not something that you want to stay in you know where you're going because at every corner there's you either encounter somebody there's no you're not going anywhere I don't know if I've ever walked the whole place and I know where my favorite places are but it's hard to find them in other words have you said go find your favorite places there's no way to find them easily you know you have to stumble on them and say oh here it is because their own direction so it's it seems very similar respect that would be my innocence yeah yeah that microphone this this microphone relates to the process and I think it's beautiful projects no no I even though I might sound like I don't like to build I do I love being on a building site a lot I love going to Santiago and seeing those six buildings and what you realize the scale of Santiago you can look at it and drawing in a computer but when you're in this space I mean we have 30 foot deep poche in the ceilings you know that 30 foot deep as you know you say hoagie jeepers you know you could put a whole army of people that store that in the push a I seem casual about the building process but I'm not as I mean yeah what I like to build it no no I think I sound I would I like to work out some of the things you my problem is I'm not a finisher I mean all the people I have in my office of finishers and I'm a starter and they have this tension in the office because you know they my wife's at finish which is great I never finish anything I'm always wanting like this a book not supposed to be working on and I got stuck into this corner thing and I'm now working on that and she said good morning doing you know you book to read so he was due on the 8th of August I mean ASIS rocktober and I smile I mean what does it matter right and all the people to work on you know the construction documents in that office say Peter for God's sake stop you know doing these other sensitive we don't need any more competent we don't need any new projects we let's finish the projects that we have and of course the projects that we have all take 10 years to do and I have new ideas right and I don't have any patience to think we're going to work this one through for 10 years I have many people in my office that's what they do they've worked through the projects and there's an anxiety because we're supposed to be doing something today like talking about this thing right they think people in my office couldn't stand the fact that we inserted this took all of my time this summer destroyed the office in the summer time still we're out of money I have to go 100k today you know to sort of feed this thing and my wife says hey that's my inheritance you are you're you're doing you know and so I invited practices of drunk it costs me money to practice right I still all 12 hour plus so anyway I go ahead and last one because I think I've sense a certain okay one last question well I'm just with this this project was all Department material I mean not usually not usually because my projects demanded in materiality let's say they were reading projects and so cereal but this projects not only reading projects an attempt to overcome reading so the materiality of the project was very important in this particular case and you know Dean Hortense was really important and because he was someone that talked about what was the materiality of one thing is to pour concrete into sand but what were we going to do with the rest of it and it was Eva was able to figure out how we were going to have these printed metal our best printed metal plates and the enclosures that we were working on and how we would do the columns and what would they be in you know I still don't know what those columns are I mean he knows but you know I don't think they're metal I think you know how does the concrete if they're country join they're metallic forms so yeah they it was a concern not has not been he came anyway thank you all

Channel: Syracuse Architecture (Syracuse University School of Architecture)

Views: 18,031

Rating: 4.7391305 out of 5

Keywords: eisenman, architecture, warehouse

Id: 5tKpR2kGAU0

Length: 89min 2sec (5342 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2013