The Meta-Project, Eisenman, and Capital: Lessons for Critical Architectural Practice

Author: C. S. Kayatekin, U. Gorchu & M. Frantsuzov
Year: 2023 (The Plan Journal)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/kayatekin-et-al-2023-meta-project-eisenman-capital.md

Summary

Reading Peter Eisenman's Architectural Association lectures, the authors examine the "meta-project" of Eisenman's oeuvre and its "growingly lopsided relationship to capital." They interpret Eisenman's unusual 2010 lecture (in which he voices "powerlessness and loss of control in the face of capital," and even the question of retirement) as a "therapy session" — a psychoanalytic transference in which his professed anti-phenomenological project masks his deeper anxiety over capital. They chart the meta-project's trajectory through phases of the architecture-capital relationship: "Corbusian" (autonomy, insulated authorship), "Miesian" (commodification and the copy+paste), and "Venturi-Brownian" (accommodation with the phenomena of capital and media).

Key Claims

• Eisenman's "gone-silent" capital: in most AA lectures "capital"/"capitalism" never appears; only in 2010 does Eisenman voice powerlessness before capital. Reading by his own method of "what you want to fool me into thinking [is a] problem," his anti-phenomenological project is the "decoy," while the meta-project's "growingly lopsided relationship to capital" is "what was inside me, hot, and making me anxious."
• The phases of the architecture-capital relation:
  • Corbusian phase (1975): autonomy; clients' resources "harvested for the purposes of setting in motion the autonomous meta-project" under Eisenman's complete authorship, "insulated from the influence of clients."
  • Miesian phase (1989): "pronounced commodification of Eisenman's work" — a developer wants to replicate the Carnegie Mellon Research Institute as leasable office space ("copy+paste"), signalling "the collapse of the significance of genius loci."
  • Venturi-Brownian phase (1993): the project "embraces and engages in discussion with the phenomena and zeitgeist of capital" (the rave movement, the shopping mall, Disney's "mediated environment"); "architecture as event"; "capital effectively taking over the philosophic arguments." Eisenman: "Media has in fact turned architecture into what it is. I am here, because I happened to be mediatable."
• Critical lesson: the commodification/consumability of architect and oeuvre (echoing Adorno & Horkheimer: "Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in") undermines claims to autonomous, critical practice; the "meta-project" becomes an accommodation with capital.

Connections

Concepts: Critical Architecture · Star Architecture · Iconic Architecture · Ideology
Authors: C. S. Kayatekin, U. Gorchu & M. Frantsuzov · Peter Eisenman
Debates: Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: Changes are Coming (Belogolovsky & Eisenman) · The Architecture of the City (Bismarck)

Direct Quotes

"[W]hat was inside me, hot, and making me anxious." (Eisenman, framing critical psychoanalysis, as quoted)

"[T]he commodification and consumability of the architect, as well as the architect's oeuvre, is ... an extension of the dynamics previously observed in the Miesian phase."

"Media has in fact turned architecture into what it is. I am here, because I happened to be mediatable." (Eisenman, as quoted)

"Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in." (Adorno & Horkheimer, as quoted)

Open Questions

• If even Eisenman — the champion of formal autonomy — is revealed as "accommodating capital," can any critical architectural practice escape commodification, or does this vindicate the flat/adorno-hesitant positions of the projective turn?