Peter Eisenman set out his thoughts on architecture at RIAS 2008Point one: Architecture in a media cultureMediahas invaded every aspect of our lives. It is difficult to walk out onthe street or stand in a crowded elevator without encountering peoplespeaking into cellular phones at the top of their voices as if no oneelse was around. People leave their homes and workplaces and withinseconds are checking their Blackberries. Their iPhones provide instantmessaging email, news, telephone and music—it’s as if they wereattached to a computer.Less and less people are able to be inthe real physical world without the support of the virtual world. Thishas brought about a situation in which people have lost the capacity tofocus on something for any length of time. This is partly because mediaconfigures time in discrete segments.Focus is conditioned by howlong one can watch something before there is an advertisement. Innewspapers stories keep getting shorter, the condensed version isavailable on the internet. This leads today to a corruption of what wethink of as communication, with a lessening of the capacity to read orwrite correct sentences. While irrelevant information multiplies,communication diminishes. If architecture is a form of media it is aweak one. To combat the hegemony of the media, architecture has had toresort to more and more spectacular imaging. Shapes generated throughdigital processes become both built icons that have no meaning but alsoonly 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 passiveThecorollary to the prevalent media culture is that the viewing subjecthas become increasingly passive. In this state of passivity peopledemand more and more images, more visual and aural information and in astate of passivity people demand things that are easily consumed.Themore passive people become the more they are presented by the mediawith supposed opportunities to exercise choice. Vote for this, vote forwhatever stories you want to hear, vote for what popular song you wantto hear, vote for what commercial you want to see. This voting givesthe appearance of active participation, but it is merely another formof sedation because the voting is irrelevant It is part of the attemptto make people believe they are participating when in fact they arebecoming more and more passive.Students also have becomepassive. More passive than students in the past. This is not acondemnation but a fact. To move students to act or to protest for oragainst anything today is impossible. Rather they have a sense ofentitlement. The generations that remember 1968 feel that those kindsof student protests are almost impossible today. For the last sevenyears we have had in the US one of the most problematic governments inour history. Probably the most problematic since the mid-19th centuryand president Millard Fillmore. Our reputation in Europe, our dollar,our economy, the spirit of our people, has been weakened. In such astate of ennui people feel they can do little to bring about change.With the war in Iraq draining our economy there is still thepossibility that the political party responsible for today’s conditionswill be re-elected.Will this have consequences for architecture?Point three: Computers make design standards poorerThis passivity is related to architecture. Architecture today relies on one of passivity’s most insidious forms—the computer.Architectsused to draw volumes, using shading and selecting a perspective. Inlearning how to draw one began to understand not only what it was liketo draw like Palladio or Le Corbusier but also the extent of thedifferences in their work. A wall section of Palladio felt different tothe hand than one of Le Corbusier’s. It is important to understand suchdifferences be
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