No Tengo

Eisenman's six point plan
14 May, 2008
Peter Eisenman set out his thoughts on architecture at RIAS 2008
Point one: Architecture in a media culture
Media has invaded every aspect of our lives. It is difficult to walk out on the street or stand in a crowded elevator without encountering people speaking into cellular phones at the top of their voices as if no one else was around. People leavetheir homes and workplaces and within seconds are checking their Blackberries. Their iPhones provide instant messaging email, news, telephone and music—it’s as if they were attached to a computer.
Less and less people are able to be in the real physical world without the support of the virtual world. This has brought about a situation in which people have lost the capacity to focus on something forany length of time. This is partly because media configures time in discrete segments.
Focus is conditioned by how long one can watch something before there is an advertisement. In newspapers stories keep getting shorter, the condensed version is available on the internet. This leads today to a corruption of what we think of as communication, with a lessening of the capacity to read or writecorrect sentences. While irrelevant information multiplies, communication diminishes. If architecture is a form of media it is a weak one. To combat the hegemony of the media, architecture has had to resort to more and more spectacular imaging. Shapes generated through digital processes become both built icons that have no meaning but also only refer to their own internal processes. Just think of anyarchitectural magazine today devoted, supposedly, to the environment, and instead one finds media.
Point two: Students have become passive
The corollary to the prevalent media culture is that the viewing subject has become increasingly passive. In this state of passivity people demand more and more images, more visual and aural information and in a state of passivity people demand things thatare easily consumed.
The more passive people become the more they are presented by the media with supposed opportunities to exercise choice. Vote for this, vote for whatever stories you want to hear, vote for what popular song you want to hear, vote for what commercial you want to see. This voting gives the appearance of active participation, but it is merely another form of sedation because thevoting is irrelevant It is part of the attempt to make people believe they are participating when in fact they are becoming more and more passive.
Students also have become passive. More passive than students in the past. This is not a condemnation but a fact. To move students to act or to protest for or against anything today is impossible. Rather they have a sense of entitlement. The generationsthat remember 1968 feel that those kinds of student protests are almost impossible today. For the last seven years we have had in the US one of the most problematic governments in our history. Probably the most problematic since the mid-19th century and president Millard Fillmore. Our reputation in Europe, our dollar, our economy, the spirit of our people, has been weakened. In such a state ofennui people feel they can do little to bring about change. With the war in Iraq draining our economy there is still the possibility that the political party responsible for today’s conditions will be re-elected.
Will this have consequences for architecture?
Point three: Computers make design standards poorer
This passivity is related to architecture. Architecture today relies on one ofpassivity’s most insidious forms—the computer.
Architects used to draw volumes, using shading and selecting a perspective. In learning how to draw one began to understand not only what it was like to draw like Palladio or Le Corbusier but also the extent of the differences in their work. A wall section of Palladio felt different to the hand than one of Le Corbusier’s. It is important to understand such...