Tonight at the Yale school of architecture there was an event that celebrated the illustrious career of Eisenman. His last year of teaching.

 

A panel discussion was set up in the kingdom of paprika colored benches, with the student body buzzing with anticipation, Sarah Whiting, Wes Jones, Preston Scott Cohen, Jeff Kipnis, Joan Ockman, and of course Peter Eisenman took a seat at the front of Hasting Hall. Dean Berke, Phil Bernstein, Greg Lynn, Nader Tehrani, Rafael Moneo were amongst students and other faculty members sitting in the Audience. 

 

This is just to paint the picture to the caliber of the event. 

 

The panel discussion started and I, of course, mind still buzzing with excitement from seeing many of these figures for the first time, missed a few sentences of the opening and before I knew it, Wes Jones asked Peter:

 

“So Peter, Centerline or Edge.” 

 

Boom. 

 

Here we are, back at it again with the dialectics of the Phenomena and the Rational. 

 

Throughout the night, the conversation often circled back to a common theme around the uncertainty about the future of the Architectural discipline; Most of the panelists shared this anxiety, but with half the room filled with current students, two program deans, and a handful of the most influential contemporary architectural educators, the pessimism of the room was absurd.

 

Wasn’t this meant to be a celebration? 

 

As they continued their discussion on the dialectics of the Phenomena and the Rational, it just occurred to me that their discussion itself IS the root of their anxieties. This constant need to frame architecture in a dialectical and mutually exclusive manner is at the heart of their projected collapse of the Architectural discipline. 

 

Being an Architect in training, I often catch myself wondering about the future of the discipline. While I’ve never been able to pin-point my exact anxieties like many of the Critics present at the panel, I guess I subconsciously sense something aloof as well. Reflecting on their discussion of the night, shed some light to what has been creeping at the back of my mind for a while.   

 

My conclusion is that the panelists were part of a generation of Architects, Critics and Historians that were trained by their predecessors from either ends of the opposing spectrum. They’ve each upheld their schools of thought, developed the ideas further and propagated it into academia (even though the phenomenological clearly has the upperhand right now). However, I think they are coming to realize that they are coming to the ends of their polemics; but fail to realize that that is exactly why they have an existential dread for the future of Architecture. 

 

Coming to the ends of their polemics means the end of Architecture as THEY know it. 

 

As I have laid out in my previous post, I am part of a generation of architect(ure students) that are hurt and scarred from an increasingly polarizing world. When the world outside of the discipline is like the way it is, there simply isn’t space for a discourse that frames a metaphysical worldview in opposing imperatives anymore. In my senseless romanticism and optimism towards Architecture, I really do believe that Architecture  can help bridge the rift that our discipline itself has very much helped create. 

 

As Reynar Banham famously put it “Their status as masterpieces rests as it does with most other masterpieces of architecture, upon the authority and felicity with which they give expression to a view of men in relation to their environment.” 

 

In the case of our current situation, we can understand the environment as the social, political, architectural zeitgeist of the now.  

 

Therefore, if the days of the dialectical debate between the phenomena and the rational are over, then it must be our responsibility to define the new age. 

 

What I’m proposing then, is not an Architectural Production that is of the “other”. It is as much a-historical as it is historical. Nostalgic as it is speculative. It is a synthesis of the two ends. Phenomenology has served as a successful anthesis to rational modernism, and it is up to us to play the role of synthesizing the two in an act of resistance against the overwhelming idea of our discipline 'collapsing' at the hands of the existing dialectic.

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- T 

11/11/2022