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 Koolhaas 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 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 of architectural 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, self-contained 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
visitor. 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 made-
up 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
view. 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
versus 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,
your 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,
journalism 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
vector 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
journalist, and one of the most interesting things about
journalism 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 of
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 old-
fashioned 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
just 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
years 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
you 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,
you 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 could be called a form of critical passivity.

RK I 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
judging, 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, I really believe that.

PE You 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
you to be more like Rem Koolhaas – that’s the reason
they go to your office, that’s the reason they study with
you. 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
your 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, I got a star! [Laughter]

RK Well, 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
you 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,
you have today become a kind of intellectual architect,
not a public one.

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

RK I know what you mean.

PE I 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
year 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
New 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
your 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
journals 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
you 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
Delirious 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, of course I agree.

PE He 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
victimised 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
versions 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
just 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
join 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
you 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
you 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 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 the issue of 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 to a projective 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 that’s what I think 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
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 of the 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 mind being
yourself 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
yesterday, 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,
you 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. The format of the negotiated debate in
architecture is really an invention of Peter and his
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,
Decompositions, 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

very 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 self-
conscious 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
your 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
years 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
yes, 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 self-
conscious 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 decision-
making 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 self-
transformation, 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
you 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
you 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
viewer with something great, and then you hit them over
the head with the point you’re trying to make.

MC  Maybe we can call this the Suspectacle.

RS  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
view 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, slit-
windows 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
vertical 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
versions 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
vulnerable – 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 pre-
historical 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
you 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
you 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,
just 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
your 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
you 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 to high
school math errors he made, or because he didn’t
sufficiently understand the underlying physics, or were
perhaps even fraudulent because he knowingly 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 with a problem over years and
years 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 of Oz, you can tilt part of the
building in a different 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 you see 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 is where the title of the book
came from.

You can see in this project – a building with these

massive, unbelievable 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 to literally 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
vortex 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
you 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,
you 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
years 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 self-
notation. 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  Any other questions?

JK  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  We have time for one more question tonight.

RS  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

video of Monday night when Peter and Rem were here,
could you imagine another pair of living architects who
you 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
job 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

video 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,
just 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
very 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 counter-

culture 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
years – 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,

very 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
vehicle 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
various 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 three-
year 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
just 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 good-
holding 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
years 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
just 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
variables 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
variables 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
Basis 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 three-
year 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

years, 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 self-
fulfilling prophecy?)

2.8 Koolhaas’s writing style is entirely the opposite of

Eisenman’s. It embodies the perfect mid-twentieth-
century academic anti-model: Marshall McLuhan’s The
Electric 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 late-

twentieth-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

vampire-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

journalist 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 co-
conspiracy?

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 image-
making 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 document-
oriented 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 avant-
garde.’ [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 Lambert (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
America, 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 non-
architectural 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

voices apologising or arguing over some unstated event
opens the second track of the 1981 album, My Life in the
Bush 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
vantage-point from which to see anew an architectural
world dominated by an endless production, consumption
and circulation of architectural images.

Architecture 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 idea, the mind it resides in and
the eventual, inexplicable material realisation found in the
form of a building, a space, a structure. This section of
Supercritical 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

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or email publications@aaschool.ac.uk

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 Contents
Preface
Part I: The Event - Peter Eisenman & Rem Koolhaas,
2006, a conversation moderated by Brett Steele
Part II: The Commentary – Jeffrey Kipnis & Robert
Somol, 2006, a conversation moderated by Mark
Cousins
Part III: The Backstory
Peter Eisenman, 1975, in conversation with
Alvin Boyarsky
Rem Koolhaas, 1976, introduced by Peter Cook
Part IV: The Afterword
Afterword(s): 100 Points on Eisenman &
Koolhaas
A Mea Culpa
Part V: The Evidence - Photographs, Scans and
Screenshots