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By Design: Architects kick around the millenium, in that abstract way they have By Adele Freedman A conference called Anyone, held last weekend, drew everyone who is someone. The first of 11 scheduled annually to 2001, the international chin wag was the idea of Peter Eisenman, the powerbroking New York architect and theorist. The aim was to get architects together with artists, philosophers, critics, economists, and other thinkers to kick around the millennium. "I'm interested in the transition from nostalgia to something that recognizes the paradigmatic shifts in this century the shift from the mechanical to the electronic, from one truth to many truths," said Eisenman, wearing sneakers and a souvenir Anyone T-shirt, during his opening remarks at the University of California in Los Angeles. "These shifts have occurred in the other disciplines. So today we open up our discipline to many other disciplines. The significance of 'anyone' is that it's one of the singular pronouns in the English language that deals with the possibility of an indeterminate condition, undecidability, indefiniteness. That's the discourse moving us from the end of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st." It was a very happening guest list that included French philosopher Jacques Derrida, an electric, sweet presence; Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, sharp-witted author of Delirious New York; the suave architect Rafael Moneo of Madrid, whose handsome projects include the Roman Museum in Merida, Spain; Frank Gehry, who spent most of Saturday dealing with a crisis (Walt Disney's widow suffered a broken hip) that could have threatened his most important commission yet, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; and Japanese superstar Arata Isozaki, impeccable, who put Mickey's ears on the Disneyworld administration building in Orlando, Fla. The format was that old-time panel, which turned out to be more individual performance than discussion. The gist of a lot of big talk was suggested by such phrases as "the sealed mark of the double point" (Derrida), "demiurgomorphism" (Isozaki and economist Akira Asada, who appeared as a pair), "the anarchic subject" (theologian Mark Taylor in a monologue that evoked Gertrude Stein), "untimely architecture" (Barcelona critic Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubio describing the work of Gehry, Tadao Ando and Alvaro Siza), and "the distinctive casbah" (American literary critic Fredric Jameson in his keynote address, Demographies of the Anonymous). Understandably, when his turn came to hold forth, cyberpunk author William Gibson, a gangly innocent, cut it short, calmly announcing: "I'm an 'anyone' receiving architecture. I'm out of my depth." The barrage defies summary. It went from slide presentations of specific projects to something suggestive of courtroom histrionics, as Harvard Law School professor Roberto Unger passionately stalked the stage, pleading his case on behalf of "forms that enable people, as individuals or groups, to express themselves by transforming their situation." He wheeled to mark the end of a thought, and arched his left eyebrow to dramatic heights in the service of polemics. Asked to respond to Unger's oratory, Derrida, gathering his thoughts for a long moment, said: "I am absolutely paralyzed." Jameson, a vigorous intelligence, developed the twinned theme of the disappearance of public space and the appearance of new social movements that are separatist in nature. He mentioned black feminists, Yuppies and "a host of small groups," each a distinctive casbah inside a sealed bazaar. "Each group fantasizes the totality of the others as the bourgeois state - they don't want anything to do with them, they don't see them - this is separatism," he said. "Each of the small groups begins to function as a political party. There is nothing in this State for these groups. Today there's no longer a bourgeoisie or bourgeois culture, just commercial junk. A higher unity can be achieved through a great collective project, an expression of our spirit and values. But in our State, unfortunately, the only form in which such a collective project achieves figuration is the form of war." More upbeat was Arata Isozaki, who insisted on speaking "not as a professional architect, but as an anyone." He treated of some abstract thoughts offered up by speculative fragments. Moderator Jeff Kipnis then confronted him with Nietzsche's theory of the eternal return and Hegel's dialectics of tragedy and farce. Isozaki promptly became himself: "I don't care, tragedy or farce, I can work either way. For architects in their daily works, conceiving some concepts, we are not following theory, methodology. We use every kind of input - accidental, unpredictable, contradictory. We cannot go the steady predictable way. Anything can happen in the future, tomorrow. After we finish, we look back at the process. Only at that time we can find the way in which we came." For a full account of the
Anyone proceedings, co-sponsored by the Getty Center for the History of Art and
the Humanities, look for a Rizzoli International book in October. Next year,
there will be an Anywhere Conference in Tokyo. In 1993, Anyhow will take place
in Berlin. And in 1994, it's Montreal for Anyplace. Venues have not yet been
announced for Anybody, Anymore, Anything, Anytime, Anyway, and Anywise. Any of
them may turn up at a casbah near you. |