Lecture synopsis

Last night I went to a lecture by Peter Eisenman, famed architectural writer, teacher, and practitioner, at U of T. The lineup to get in went around the block, and the lecture hall was rammed with students, profs, and an assortment of black-clad local designers.

I wasn't sure what to expect, being (as usual) less familiar with his work than I should be. I know of a couple of his projects, and I have waded through an essay or two by the guy. I was surprised by his relative straightforwardness, and his lecture was interesting and, unlike the building he presented, clear.

I will attempt to give you a brief (my version) synopsis of what he said, which I found both interesting and a little frightening (in that post-modernish nothing-really-matters kinda way).

Basically, the guy has spent years working on buildings that, upon a careful examination, reveal things about the story of their design. So some weird iterative computer algorithm twists and mangles a box, and when that box is built as some art-museum or other, you can read the story of the mangling process in the actual building. This idea has, as far as I know, been close to universally accepted in architecture schools everywhere. Process, process, process.

Now he seems to have reached a point where a few factors have changed his mind a little:
People don't care about reading carefully anymore; if your building has some hidden story to tell, I don't really want to spend the time and effort to find it. I want my MTV.
Also, when presented with a fragmented jumble of stuff, people no longer assume there is a mystery to figure out. Sure, the stuff is jumbled and fragmented because of some complicated complex reason, but postmodernism has taught us that you probably can't know the reason anyway, and so you don't really need to care about it.

And so, Eisenman's new agenda is to erase the legibility of his process from his work. The project he showed us was for a train station, and it involved overlaying real, extrapolated, and imagined lines on top of each other, and then exploding this jumble of lines into a shrapnel of form. He then showed a bunch of really cool 3d models (seriously, they were pretty neat), and said that he liked certain things about some better than others, but was very vague about his criteria for critique. The only enemy to avoid seemed to be having the building look like anything you have ever seen before, and the only characteristic that he seemed to value lay in finding figural shapes which were to his liking rising from the mess. Needless to say, the building will be pretty crazy when it is all said and done.

So that was that. People asked questions, and he gave some funny answers. Students were no doubt taking notes to be used in addressing nagging guest critics who want to know why you chose a certain process, why the process is not clear in the project, and how on earth we are to evaluate a design anyway.

And function? - well, to quote the guy - "I have always stuffed program like you stuff a turkey".