A short essay on intensity

Last night, Peter Eisenmann told a crowd of young aspiring architects, “If you don’t know Maya and Rhino, I won’t hire you.” It was a bold statement from an aging architect summing up his lecture on how architecture has transitioned from Corbusier to Gehry. Eisenmann only traced “Ten Canonical” buildings and yet any student (or instructor) of architecture today can’t help but feel powerless in the wake these buildings of “undecidedness” that plague the critique process, buildings that in themselves provide inadequate justification to their fruition, taxonomy, or even quality. It is here, I contest, where theory nudges the lagging momentum. Perhaps it is in texts that architects will move forward in the days ahead of economic and design uncertainty.

Why invoke the Deleuzian Fold? The blob buildings are not catching on—at least not as planned. The word blob in architecture comports an insulting flavor. Lynn foresaw this and used blob in the title thus highlighting his own weakness (McCain’s choice of young Palin, anyone?) in an attempt to sooth the blob pejorative. And yet we are still faced with the critique’s criticism: how do I qualify this design?

We are truly dealing with blobs of simulated matter that have no place in a Cartesian geometry class. No matter what architecture you experience or admire, you cannot deny that we are in a place that does not design the way our instructors were taught. We don’t listen to the same music or wear their same clothes either. In the words of Eisenmann, nobody writes music for a harpsichord anymore. To write the music that people listen to, we need to play the instruments that they are listening to.

That is why.

You can’t be a Walter Gropius for very long. It’s almost a rule that the sequel can’t be 1.5X better than any original and usually is lucky to achieve .5X. Gropius got a dozen years teaching studios until someone else came along to “bigger and better” his work. Gehry is an obvious response to many things in architecture, his feature will not last long either.

And hey, just like these authors, I managed to write without using the word intensity as well. I don’t quite see how intensity has parallels in these readings. How is intensity via layer seen in Berkel? Where does Lynn point to intensity through force? And what does passé-partout mean? Intensity is a value in need of measurement. If any system were to make room for intensity as an idea, it seems like it would sit more appropriately on the geometry side of points, numbers, and real measurements. Topology has few qualitative attributes, at least compared to Cartesian geometry. [Unless you mean intensity as a default to measurement such as, “that cocaine was intense! I don’t what happened!” where intensity sort of bypasses qualitative analysis. But I don’t think this method works.] Am I wrong?