023. On Peter Eisenman and on Towers

Extract from material gathered during the work on the competition for a university campus and a 120-multifunctional tower.

Peter Eisenman during a lecture in Vanderbilt University:

"I have always argued, that one of the ways one can understand culture and where it is through its architecture. For example in Princeton University you can measure the changing climate of relationships and the evolution of Princeton by which buildings were towers. In Princeton the first tower was the Chapel and it stayed that way for 30 or 40 years until after the War. The second tower was the Library, so the shift from the sacred to the secular. As Princeton became more and more secular institution even admitting women. The third tower at Princeton was the Administration building which was another sign of the movement of the times, the application of Administration and Management in our educational processes. The forth tower was Math and Science tower showing the movement toward the sciences at the Liberal Universities."

Now, we are a couple of years later and maybe it would be handy to define the current shift of paradigm. What will be the next good reason to have towers, if any. - reaching out for the divine, striving of human kind for self-assertion, an ambition of a single powerful individual? The most of the program for the competition tower that was developed was concerning the so-called auxiliary program - essentially voids with public spaces. Are then the towers with stacked piazzas the future of the business or is it just a dead end? Will communities ever be able to finance such investments and under which circumstances?

022. Part of the Family

The central role of Rem Koolhaas for building up new generations of architects

021. Dear Ben

What did you do when you were 26?

020. The choice of profession

Leave me alone!

019. Terms of interest...

...are too many!

018. Reconsidering the digital - post in progress

In order to retain its importance for people architecture must remain in retroguardia. In the wake of all forces and processes that shape the contemporary world - digitalization, facebookisation etc..These processes are too much rooted in the contemporary societies. Architecture in many of it's aspects has lost meaning. To become self acclaimed as a discipline it must point to the issues and qualities. It must not be visual, it must be shearly connected to the human body and human  physicality.

The Bird's Nest has been a turning point. The cost of the building (400 million dollars) was equal to the cost of the whole opening ceremony of the Olympics. Most of the people around the world have seen both the building and the event only in the digital. Will it be possible one day to actually have the opening ceremony only in digital without ever spending money for real event as well as for stadium. The budget for a rendering company could be ten times smaller but in the end most of the people would never feel the difference. Preparing renderings has shifted from being mearly a service to architects to a discipline on its own.

The way the work proceeds at major architectural companies bases mostly if not entirely on a digitally generated images. Most of the implications how a building could be done in terms of interesting structure are just put aside.

The same processes don't concern only the iconic architecture and particular event (insert remarks from Sennet and the density). Internet has such a profound impact on our daily lives that, our social life is there, life of a nomad.

Yet we are still longing for something more than an image, for a true presence of space, another person and a story. Therefore should architecture continue this insane competition or marriage with the digital pretension of being important? What is my personal response?..

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