The New York Times, October 13, 1996, pp. C11, C14.
Critic's Notebook: Saluting A Building By a Man Who Stirs
Things Up
By Paul Goldberger
Cincinnati, Oct. 11 -- It's hard to know which took more
bravado: the University of Cincinnati's decision to
commission Peter Eisenman to design a new building for its
College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning, or Mr.
Eisenman's resolve to treat the completion of his building
as the most important event in American architecture since
Frank Lloyd Wright convinced Solomon Guggenheim that
pictures looked good in round spaces.
After all, what other academic structure opens with not
just a black-tie dinner and a ribbon-cutting, but a two-day
symposium, an evening of performance art inspired by the
building's design and a so-called "summit meeting" on the
future of American architecture, featuring some of the
country's most celebrated architects?
The meeting, presided over by Charlie Rose, who taped it
for eventual broadcast on his public television program,
included, among others, the architects Richard Meier,
Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, David Childs, Henry N.
Cobb and Stanley Tigerman, all of whom journeyed to
Cincinnati to attend the opening. Philip Johnson missed it
because of illness, but he had paid his homage to Mr.
Eisenman by going to see the new building last summer, and
announcing that it "had no equal in American architecture."
In a notoriously competitive profession, the honor paid to
Mr. Eisenman by his fellow architects is nothing short of
extraordinary. All the big names invited here came, except
Frank Gehry, who canceled at the last minute. For years,
Peter Eisenman has been the architecture world's most
public intellectual, a theorist who delights in media
attention, and while his colleagues grumbled mildly --
"Only Peter could have gotten us to show up for this," said
Mr. Graves, no media-shy figure himself -- they were more
than happy to bask in his reflected glow.
Part of the reason is that Eisenman buildings are rare, and
every one of them is something of an event. Mr. Eisenman
has made a career out of pushing the boundaries of
architecture, designing buildings that are deliberately
provocative, and he has said he is satisfied if his
buildings force people to take notice.
"Walter Benjamin said that most people think of
architecture casually," he said during the televised
discussion, which was taped in the atrium of his new
building. "What I like about this building is that you
cannot take it casually."
Mr. Eisenman's building, officially called the Aronoff
Center for Design and Art, is technically an addition to
three bland, institutional-looking campus buildings, which
it joins together with a long, twisting, multilevel
concourse. Its form is sharply angled, with few of its
walls perpendicular to the floor; from the outside, many
walls lean outward, and the whole building looks rather as
if it had been frozen after the first shocks of an
earthquake.
Such is the power of the Aronoff Center that the
architects' panel discussion, which was supposed to take as
its topic all of architecture at the end of the 20th
century, kept coming back to the building itself.
Was the Aronoff Center too much of an "object" building, a
signature structure intended to grab attention more than to
solve a problem? Did it mark the final gasp of modernism,
or the beginning of something else? Did it symbolize the
breaking of barriers between inside and outside, or the
blurring of form and function; was it the modest building
its architect somewhat disingenuously pretended it was, or
the ultimate expression of a powerful ego?
Any structure that can bring more than a dozen of the most
celebrated architects in the country to Cincinnati, and
then keep them talking for nearly three hours about it,
must amount to something. In one sense, the building has
already fulfilled the expectations that Mr. Eisenman and
the University of Cincinnati have had for it: it has
attracted attention. The Aronoff Center is the most
conspicuous example thus far of a program begun in the
mid-1980's by Jay Chatterjee, dean of the College of
Design, Art, Architecture and Planning, and Joseph Steger,
the university president, to commission famous architects
to design university buildings.
Projects by Mr. Cobb, Mr. Gehry, Mr. Graves, Mr. Childs and
the team of Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti are complete
or under way, though their impact is still relatively small
on this large campus, whose tone is mostly set by a series
of mediocre concrete bunkers built during an explosive
1960's expansion. (Bulldozers might do more than new
architecture to make the place an attractive environment.)
University officials are not hesitant tb admit that they
want to use architecture as a marketing tool, and in Mr.
Eisenman they have found their perfect vehicle, since he
has devoted most of his career to an attempt to force
architectural issues into the public dialogue.
At Thursday night's celebration dinner, Dr. Steger, a man
who introduces architects the way most college presidents
introduce star quarterbacks, presented Mr. Eisenman as a
hero who has brought fame to his campus. The president
spoke jubilantly of being visited by a tourist from San
Francisco who said he had come to Cincinnati solely to see
the buildings by Mr. Eisenman and Mr. Graves.
"He came and spent a night in Cincinnati, which he never
would have done otherwise," Dr. Steger said. "We knew we
can't turn this place into the University of Virginia, but
at least this way we could get people wanting to come here
just to see what we have. If you walk through Peter
Eisenman's building and you're not energized, I suggest you
see your doctor."
Few people, so far, seem to be calling for their doctors.
Indeed, what was most notable about the architects' session
moderated by Mr. Rose was that no one seemed to be
challenging the premises of the building at all. Neither
student questioners nor fellow architects ever asked
whether Emperor Eisenman had no clothes, save for one
comment about whether more resources should go into public
housing than into expensive, highly designed buildings like
this one.
Such reticence may come partly from student meekness,
partly from the respect of fellow architects. But some of
it is a result, surely, of common sense, for the startling
truth about Mr. Eisenman's building is that it is very
difficult not to like. It is vastly more reasonable, even
benign, than it at first appears to be.
Mr. Eisenman, 66, loves to surround his buildings with talk
about upsetting the architectural order, but at this stage
of his life, he is more interested in pleasing people than
in truly disturbing them. The odd angles and clashing lines
of the Aronoff Center, so discordant at first glance, have
a strange way of unifying themselves into a harmonic whole.
The building is clear and reasonably logical in its
organization, and deeply intertwined with the surrounding
architectural context: not the things you expect from a
revolutionary piece of architecture.
As a radical, Mr. Eisenman has a bark that is worse than
his bite. He has created in the Aronoff Center a building
that symbolizes community and that will function as a
unifying force for the various departments within the large
art and design school as it brings at least some
architectural coherence to a confusing part of the campus.
True, the building does not have a clear entry, much of the
lighting is garish, and it has been built of mostly
inexpensive materials, so there is little certainty that
two years from now it will look as good as it does today.
(Given the use that students grind out of their buildings,
two months might be more like it before this temple of
plasterboard, paint and acoustical ceilings begins to show
wear and tear.)
The clashing angles make being in the Aronoff Center feel
like living on a fault line: the message of the building is
to express the discordancies in life. Seamlessness is a
form of fakery, Mr. Eisenman is saying, since nothing is
really simple and nothing in life is really seamless. But
is exaggerating that idea also a form of fakery? Well, it
is certainly a form of mannerism, and this is nothing if
not a highly mannered building.
But it is full of energy and spirit, a building that
challenges the eye without disturbing it unduly. In many
ways this building sums up the conflicting concerns of the
20th century: it unites the power of modernist abstraction
to the ordered, synthesizing impulses of civilized
urbanism. It takes its place with Paul Rudolph's Art and
Architecture Building at Yale and Le Corbusier's Carpenter
Center at Harvard as one of the most important attempts in
our time to house the teaching of art and architecture in
an environment that is powerfully iconoclastic, teaching
the value of creativity not by neutrality but by assertive
example.
[Two photos] The opening of the Aronoff Center, designed by
Peter Eisenman, attracted many top architects to the
University of Cincinnati, including, from left, David
Childs, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, Stanley Tigerman
and Michael Graves.
[End]
This article with photos at:
http://jya.com/gargoyle.htm
Critic's Notebook: Saluting A Building By a Man Who Stirs
Things Up
By Paul Goldberger
Cincinnati, Oct. 11 -- It's hard to know which took more
bravado: the University of Cincinnati's decision to
commission Peter Eisenman to design a new building for its
College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning, or Mr.
Eisenman's resolve to treat the completion of his building
as the most important event in American architecture since
Frank Lloyd Wright convinced Solomon Guggenheim that
pictures looked good in round spaces.
After all, what other academic structure opens with not
just a black-tie dinner and a ribbon-cutting, but a two-day
symposium, an evening of performance art inspired by the
building's design and a so-called "summit meeting" on the
future of American architecture, featuring some of the
country's most celebrated architects?
The meeting, presided over by Charlie Rose, who taped it
for eventual broadcast on his public television program,
included, among others, the architects Richard Meier,
Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, David Childs, Henry N.
Cobb and Stanley Tigerman, all of whom journeyed to
Cincinnati to attend the opening. Philip Johnson missed it
because of illness, but he had paid his homage to Mr.
Eisenman by going to see the new building last summer, and
announcing that it "had no equal in American architecture."
In a notoriously competitive profession, the honor paid to
Mr. Eisenman by his fellow architects is nothing short of
extraordinary. All the big names invited here came, except
Frank Gehry, who canceled at the last minute. For years,
Peter Eisenman has been the architecture world's most
public intellectual, a theorist who delights in media
attention, and while his colleagues grumbled mildly --
"Only Peter could have gotten us to show up for this," said
Mr. Graves, no media-shy figure himself -- they were more
than happy to bask in his reflected glow.
Part of the reason is that Eisenman buildings are rare, and
every one of them is something of an event. Mr. Eisenman
has made a career out of pushing the boundaries of
architecture, designing buildings that are deliberately
provocative, and he has said he is satisfied if his
buildings force people to take notice.
"Walter Benjamin said that most people think of
architecture casually," he said during the televised
discussion, which was taped in the atrium of his new
building. "What I like about this building is that you
cannot take it casually."
Mr. Eisenman's building, officially called the Aronoff
Center for Design and Art, is technically an addition to
three bland, institutional-looking campus buildings, which
it joins together with a long, twisting, multilevel
concourse. Its form is sharply angled, with few of its
walls perpendicular to the floor; from the outside, many
walls lean outward, and the whole building looks rather as
if it had been frozen after the first shocks of an
earthquake.
Such is the power of the Aronoff Center that the
architects' panel discussion, which was supposed to take as
its topic all of architecture at the end of the 20th
century, kept coming back to the building itself.
Was the Aronoff Center too much of an "object" building, a
signature structure intended to grab attention more than to
solve a problem? Did it mark the final gasp of modernism,
or the beginning of something else? Did it symbolize the
breaking of barriers between inside and outside, or the
blurring of form and function; was it the modest building
its architect somewhat disingenuously pretended it was, or
the ultimate expression of a powerful ego?
Any structure that can bring more than a dozen of the most
celebrated architects in the country to Cincinnati, and
then keep them talking for nearly three hours about it,
must amount to something. In one sense, the building has
already fulfilled the expectations that Mr. Eisenman and
the University of Cincinnati have had for it: it has
attracted attention. The Aronoff Center is the most
conspicuous example thus far of a program begun in the
mid-1980's by Jay Chatterjee, dean of the College of
Design, Art, Architecture and Planning, and Joseph Steger,
the university president, to commission famous architects
to design university buildings.
Projects by Mr. Cobb, Mr. Gehry, Mr. Graves, Mr. Childs and
the team of Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti are complete
or under way, though their impact is still relatively small
on this large campus, whose tone is mostly set by a series
of mediocre concrete bunkers built during an explosive
1960's expansion. (Bulldozers might do more than new
architecture to make the place an attractive environment.)
University officials are not hesitant tb admit that they
want to use architecture as a marketing tool, and in Mr.
Eisenman they have found their perfect vehicle, since he
has devoted most of his career to an attempt to force
architectural issues into the public dialogue.
At Thursday night's celebration dinner, Dr. Steger, a man
who introduces architects the way most college presidents
introduce star quarterbacks, presented Mr. Eisenman as a
hero who has brought fame to his campus. The president
spoke jubilantly of being visited by a tourist from San
Francisco who said he had come to Cincinnati solely to see
the buildings by Mr. Eisenman and Mr. Graves.
"He came and spent a night in Cincinnati, which he never
would have done otherwise," Dr. Steger said. "We knew we
can't turn this place into the University of Virginia, but
at least this way we could get people wanting to come here
just to see what we have. If you walk through Peter
Eisenman's building and you're not energized, I suggest you
see your doctor."
Few people, so far, seem to be calling for their doctors.
Indeed, what was most notable about the architects' session
moderated by Mr. Rose was that no one seemed to be
challenging the premises of the building at all. Neither
student questioners nor fellow architects ever asked
whether Emperor Eisenman had no clothes, save for one
comment about whether more resources should go into public
housing than into expensive, highly designed buildings like
this one.
Such reticence may come partly from student meekness,
partly from the respect of fellow architects. But some of
it is a result, surely, of common sense, for the startling
truth about Mr. Eisenman's building is that it is very
difficult not to like. It is vastly more reasonable, even
benign, than it at first appears to be.
Mr. Eisenman, 66, loves to surround his buildings with talk
about upsetting the architectural order, but at this stage
of his life, he is more interested in pleasing people than
in truly disturbing them. The odd angles and clashing lines
of the Aronoff Center, so discordant at first glance, have
a strange way of unifying themselves into a harmonic whole.
The building is clear and reasonably logical in its
organization, and deeply intertwined with the surrounding
architectural context: not the things you expect from a
revolutionary piece of architecture.
As a radical, Mr. Eisenman has a bark that is worse than
his bite. He has created in the Aronoff Center a building
that symbolizes community and that will function as a
unifying force for the various departments within the large
art and design school as it brings at least some
architectural coherence to a confusing part of the campus.
True, the building does not have a clear entry, much of the
lighting is garish, and it has been built of mostly
inexpensive materials, so there is little certainty that
two years from now it will look as good as it does today.
(Given the use that students grind out of their buildings,
two months might be more like it before this temple of
plasterboard, paint and acoustical ceilings begins to show
wear and tear.)
The clashing angles make being in the Aronoff Center feel
like living on a fault line: the message of the building is
to express the discordancies in life. Seamlessness is a
form of fakery, Mr. Eisenman is saying, since nothing is
really simple and nothing in life is really seamless. But
is exaggerating that idea also a form of fakery? Well, it
is certainly a form of mannerism, and this is nothing if
not a highly mannered building.
But it is full of energy and spirit, a building that
challenges the eye without disturbing it unduly. In many
ways this building sums up the conflicting concerns of the
20th century: it unites the power of modernist abstraction
to the ordered, synthesizing impulses of civilized
urbanism. It takes its place with Paul Rudolph's Art and
Architecture Building at Yale and Le Corbusier's Carpenter
Center at Harvard as one of the most important attempts in
our time to house the teaching of art and architecture in
an environment that is powerfully iconoclastic, teaching
the value of creativity not by neutrality but by assertive
example.
[Two photos] The opening of the Aronoff Center, designed by
Peter Eisenman, attracted many top architects to the
University of Cincinnati, including, from left, David
Childs, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, Stanley Tigerman
and Michael Graves.
[End]
This article with photos at:
http://jya.com/gargoyle.htm