Deconstructivism, that hoary portmanteau, is back in circulation. The culprit, as ever, is Dezeen. The online publication embarked earlier this month on a retrospective series of articles intended to highlight Decon’s protagonists—Gehry, Hadid, Eisenman, et al.—who, as every historian of the period will rush to tell you, hardly comprised a “movement.” What is the reason for this efflorescence in interest? No anniversary. (An unpropitious 34 years have passed since the MoMA exhibition at which the term was coined.) No untimely demises. (At 93, Gehry is still kicking around.) Maybe inspiration arrived in the form of Joseph Giovannini’s book, Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde, which appeared late last year. In any event, Eisenman, in his chat with Dezeen, was not having it.
Nor is he eager to engage in any goodwill for his onetime disputant Christopher Alexander, who died in March. As he indicated in a talk with NYRA, Eisenman is still awake to the style wars of yesteryear. We invited a contemporary partisan from the other side of those wars, Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson, to pen a tribute in the Pattern Maker’s name. Our intention is not to relitigate old debates; we simply don’t have the luxury, as “Notes on Field Notes” (the subject of this issue’s poster) suggests. Rather, it is to investigate why Alexander’s ideas have the purchase that they do. To that end, he may have recognized his patterns at work in Diversity Plaza in Jackson Heights, Queens (see “All Over the Map”). We counted at least nine of them in evidence. ⬤
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Issue #29 is a limited-edition Risograph print of 1,000, designed by Freer Studio, printed in SoHo at a83 and collated and folded at citygroup. Read on below for some excerpts.
Remembering Christopher Alexander…
NATHAN ROBINSON SAYS THE OBVIOUS
As Alexander told biographer Stephen Grabow for the 1983 book Christopher Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture,n Alexander got to the architecture program, he thought it was a “lunatic asylum,” an observation confirmed when he drew a house he felt was absurd and hideous and was told by his instructor that it was “exactly what we’re looking for.”
That alienation from his peers in the discipline would follow him for his entire life. Though Alexander received the first-ever PhD in architecture at Harvard and spent decades as a professor at Berkeley in the department of architecture, he always remained an outsider among architects. (His magnum opus, The Nature of Order, even thanks his Berkeley colleagues for their “unrelenting hostility” to his work, saying it “gave me strength.”) Alexander believed that nearly all buildings designed in the last century were ugly and lifeless. In an acrimonious debate with Yale’s Peter Eisenman in 1982, Alexander accused Eisenman and his colleagues of “fucking up the world” by building places that are prickly, inhuman, discomforting, and arbitrary.
PETER EISENMAN CONSIDER COMFORT
I never worried about Chris Alexander. I never lost any sleep over him. In those days, nobody was doing a doctorate in architecture. I arrived at the University of Cambridge in the fall of 1960 after having done very well in the Liverpool Cathedral competition…. They said they wanted me to stay, and they said I could do a dissertation. I had an idea: I wanted to do The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture. That’s when they said, “Here, read Alexander.” He had been at Cambridge a few years previously and had just completed his dissertation at Harvard—Notes on the Synthesis of Form was floating around in a draft copy before it was published as a book. I read his manuscript and it was the opposite of what I was thinking of doing. I thought it was antiform. If I was a formalist, he was an antiformalist. That’s all. So reading his manuscript put me into gear to really want to do a doctorate—I wanted to come out on the other side of Chris Alexander.
MISHA SEMENOV MEETS THE PATTERN MAKERS
The architects were one problem. Alexander grew increasingly frustrated with the slow impact his work was having on the field of construction at large. In a 1996 lecture, he expressed this exasperation: “I really thought that I would be able to influence the world very fast. Especially when I got to the pattern language. I thought, boy, I’ve really done it.… The patterns are self-evident and true. They will spread. And, as a result, the world of buildings will get better.” However, he admitted, “it hasn’t yet worked out like that. In practical terms, so far, I've done almost nothing.…We’ve still got this gigantic amount of construction out there which is defining the world that all of us live in that is still going on in exactly the same fashion.”
Also in the issue…
LOUISE HARPMAN OPENS HOUSE
A piano quintet heralded the return of Cooper Union graduates Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto to the Great Hall on April 6th for the presentation of their newly completed building ensemble, the Taipei Music Center. The event was refreshingly unlike most “show and tell” lectures by architects in that “Lyrical Urbanism,” which inaugurated an exhibition of the same name, was staged as a series of performances. The short piano set, arranged by contemporary Taiwanese composer Julian Shuo-An Chen, was followed by soloist Nader Tehrani, dean of Cooper Union, who introduced Reiser and Umemoto at length.
TANVI MISRA VISITS DIVERSITY PLAZA: ALL OVER THE MAP
On a blustering weekday afternoon in January, I walked briskly around the plaza several times with Krishnan, who had just started his tenure as a council member. As we talked about the plaza, a couple of his constituents came up to congratulate him and communicate the neighborhood issues on their minds. One man, after passing on his good tidings, also offered a piece of advice: “You should come through here every 15 days to meet and greet with your constituents,” he said in Hindi, which I translated for the council member. “If you do that, you will never have to ask for a vote again.”
MARIANELA D’APRILE ADDS CAVEATS
Scene after scene, we see our protagonists turning away from themselves, away from what really ails them. All of this unfolds against an alienating architectural backdrop: towers whose repetitive facades belie the potential diversity of their inhabitants, an esplanade that carries pedestrians high above street level, streetscapes that read monotonous and blank. We get a feeling of place-specificity through shots of building exteriors and rooftops—the film opens by panning over the rooftops of the Olympiades shopping mall, known at the Pagoda—and the camerawork also gives the impression that the world is closing in around the protagonists, tight and suffocating. Audiard colors this sense of estrangement with an overtone of entrapment through closely cropped interior shots that flatten foreground and background, showing the characters suspended inside small worlds, each of them in a separate isolation.
EDWARD PALKA KEEPS SCORE
In recent months and years, you may have noticed a letter grade posted at the entrance of buildings across New York City. These Energy Efficiency Rating scorecards signal a new era of transparency around energy consumption—and the beginning of a substantial change in how building owners plan for it. With the latest ratings about to be released by the city, it’s an opportune time to consider what exactly these scorecards tell us.
MICHAEL NICHOLAS TAKES NOTES ON THE GREEN NEW DEAL
Why does the discipline tasked with sorting the built environment seem so woefully unequipped to respond to a problem that manifests between humans and their physical surroundings? It’s certainly not for lack of ideas. But the rush to reorient the field around an existential threat has inadvertently destabilized the role of design, as the rigid methods of the past chafe against the complexity of the present situation…. the emphasis of professional degree programs remains firmly on exercising the design faculty and only occasionally reaches beyond practical applications to pursue ecological concerns—and even then, as an alibi for experimental form-making.
The work of the University of Pennsylvania’s Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology stands in stark contrast to this approach.
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This issue marks the first time we have made good on a syndication agreement with Urban Omnibus, where Tanvi Mira’s article originated. We are extremely excited to have the chance to give articles of their calibre and depth a home in print and bring them to our readership.
We would like to thank Maggie Moore Alexander, who allowed us to use the diagrams, which come courtesy Christopher Alexander and the Center for Environmental Structure, and mention the Building Beauty post graduate architecture program, which continues Alexander’s work.
NYRA is a team effort. Our Deputy Editor is Marianela D'Aprile, our Editors at Large are Carolyn Bailey, Phillip Denny and Alex Klimoski, and our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc.
For their support, we would like to thank first of all our subscribers, as well as the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, Thomas Phifer, and Stickbulb.
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Thanks for sharing, it's always interesting to see how the Eisenman / Alexander debate "lives on". A transcript of it can be found here and it's worth a read: http://www.katarxis3.com/Alexander_Eisenman_Debate.htm
To quote the editor's introduction: "Some people may only have heard of the 1982 encounter because Alexander said Eisenman was “fucking up the world" in a public forum; but if this is all one knows about it, one is not prepared for the generally good-natured tone of most of the exchanges."