I went to hear starchitect-gadfly Peter Eisenman in discussion with Catherine Ingraham at Pratt and arrived a few minutes late, after the hall was full. Three burly, uniformed guards explained the situation and asked to me wait in line to be admitted. (This, the security detail, impressed me much more than it should have.) After twenty minutes I was ushered into a classroom full of fashionable, sleep-deprived architecture students. There was a video monitor with a live broadcast of the event, showing murky, slow-moving images of the two speakers and their slides. Eisenman and Ingraham spoke about “autonomy” and “contingency” in form, and then about “speculative realism,” a notion Eisenman dismissed heartily. Then the architect told a terrific story about meeting a donor for the Wexner Center who explained that he was contributing 25M because, “The people of Ohio are going to hate this building." Before long I realized that this might be the best way to experience Eisenman: as a talking head, on a video screen, without a clear image of his work, as he was egged on by a spirited, quick-witted companion.
I’m not big on architectural theory, or on architects talking about their own work, but Eisenman is a terrific speaker and, in discussion, has the ability to describe unorthodox ideas in vivid, straightforward language that pushes one to think more deeply about what architecture is. I heard him speak at the Guggenheim Museum last year and, after presenting a well-prepared academic paper, he opened the floor to questions and the affair heated right up. Eisenman proclaimed, "Architecture can’t really do anything” in response to the first question, and that was just the beginning. I ended up leaving last week’s lecture at Pratt early, lured away by a dinner invitation, but I wondered whether one needed to see Eisenman’s work to understand his ideas. I don’t think so; I think he is all there in his words.