ED KELLER & JOSEAN RUIZ ESQUIROZ : INTERVIEW/DISCUSSION

ED KELLER & JOSEAN RUIZ ESQUIROZ : INTERVIEW/DISCUSSION

August 26th 2009

[NB: There are small edits for grammar, otherwise a transcript of the conversa@on. This interview was conducted as part of Josean Ruiz’ PhD research and subsequently published as an appendix in his PhD documenta@on.]

!JR. …What was the name of this guy that wrote about the leOer to Paul?

EK. Giorgio Agamben ( The Time That Remains, A commentary on the Le3er to the Romans), and the text is called “The Time that Remains”; you might want to read also by him “The Open”, and other essays. I think his understanding of temporal models is just crucial. And the other example is this great film from the seven@es called Don’t Look Now, have you seen this movie?

JR. No.

EK. Set in Venice. It was directed by Nicolas Roeg. It is a very low key horror movie. The main character ,played by Donald Sutherland, is an art restorer, he might be an architect actually, and his job in Venice is to restore a church; something very tragic happens at the beginning of the movie, that sets the en@re movie up. I am wondering ... if Peter saw this film and when he saw it. You can ask him if he saw it, and if he remembers it.

JR. He typically doesn’t use cinema to explain his work. In his conceptual framework he quotes David Lynch, and now he is very interested in Michael Haneke, director of Code Unknown and Cache.

EK. Cache is a great film. Have you seen this film?

JR. Yes.

EK. All the reviews I’ve read of this film foolishly treat it like a thriller. But the film is … obviously an allegory about the French rela@onship to North Africa. The main character's brother was an Algerian. The whole film-‐ it is a very simple film-‐ is an allegory of the French rela@onship with North Africa…in my opinion. It is a great film, really, really good.

JR. I think that Eisenman is interested in how Haneke works with what is not seen, in how he creates this extension, this horror, this unbearable psychological state without using explicit imagery. It is the opposite of pornography.

EK. Yeah, exactly. Although Haneke did this film called Funny Games, which he made first in Europe and then he made a remake for Americans, I haven’t seen it, it sounds very, for several reasons, hard to see. But, have you seen the Haneke film The Time of the Wolf?

ED KELLER & JOSEAN RUIZ ESQUIROZ INTERVIEW/DISCUSSION August 26th 2009

JR. I started to see it, but I couldn’t finish. It reminds me of Stalker actually.

EK. A bit, yeah, but no mys@cism, no mys@cism, just pure brutality. I think there is a connec@on in a way between Time of the Wolf and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, which is being made into a film…Ok, but hang on a second. We are talking about temporal models. You know the film Irreversible, this French director, Gaspar Noe. The film goes backward in @me…

JR. Like Memento...

EK. Kind of…but it is much harsher than Memento. It is a very, very, very hard film. A terrible thing happens at the middle of the film, actually a terrible thing happens at the end of the film too, but because you are going backwards in @me you see the beginning, of course, at the very end of the film, and you see the consequence for the characters before it happens. And so you’re leh with a very complex reading of consciousness or lack of consciousness…in their situa@on. If you are talking about temporal models in Peter’s work or in Bernard Tschumi's work, as unpleasant an experience for me as watching the film Irreversible was, the end result was that it is not only a masterpiece of filmmaking but also that it is an extremely morally profound film, because of the way it aOempts to highlight our awareness of ourselves as beings in @me; it gives us more strength as viewers of the film... more strength than the characters in the film have.

JR. You are very interested in the moral message of films no? I mean Tarkovski is a very moral guy…

EK. Tarkovsky says “There is nothing except morality”, in an interview, or in one of his diaries. But I am not interested in morality in a conven@onal sense [neither was Tarkovsky]. I am interested more in a sub-‐discipline of ethics that has something to do with how bodies interact, you know, very much along Deleuze's reading of Spinoza’s sense. How bodies can interact with each other. Morals have nothing to do with an essen@al right or wrong. Morals have to do with systems that are more or less aware of what they can do to other systems. So for me Irreversible is an amazing film because it produces a kind of micro-‐historical consciousness in the viewer, which is a deeper historical consciousness than the characters in the film [who are prisoners of their situa@on] have access too. And the reason I bring this up, quite specifically, is because in Peter’s work and in Bernard’s work, they both have very strong opinions about how architecture can func@on to accomplish exactly that goal. There is a strong component of doubt in both of their prac@ces; they’ve instrumentalized that doubt, very carefully, but the doubt runs all the way to the depth of their own thinking about the world, so obviously their work is a kind of externaliza@on of the tac@cs of opera@on that they carry out in their own life, in their own reality, on an everyday level. For example: when I asked Tschumi about the func@on/model of @me in his work, and whether he aOempts to instrumentalize certain kinds of temporality in his work to produce, let’s say, a heightened consciousness for the people who use his buildings, he didn't answer me


directly [my ques@on might have been too direct or too simple]. He answers by asking me if I've read the story by Kaja “The Burrow”; an allegory that is built on doubt and ques@oning-‐ not only whether is safe to go outside of the 'burrow', but whether other agents even exist at all, because the mole [the creature in the burrow] never has direct contact: it can only hear what it thinks might be sounds from other creatures in other burrows, or creatures above ground. So doubt is a crucial factor for both of them. I also suspect that they approach @me, or have models of @me which are different…[Peter and Bernard.] Peter’s, as I’ve said, I think is a model of @me which is concerned with the produc@on of a historical consciousness [either in an individual or in a group] not through any reliable interpreta@on [or message] but only through embedding of informa@on. And I would be surprised if he himself hadn’t already thought through problems of InformaDon Theory coming up from the fihies or the for@es, from Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, John von Neumann, you know these mathema@cal giants from the thir@es to the six@es. Thomas Pynchon! Peter is a huge fan of Thomas Pynchon, I know this. Now, I have never spoken with Peter about this stuff, so I am really an external observer.

JR. He finally started to quote Gravity's Rainbow in every lecture. I mean, I have the history of his quotes and he never used to quote Thomas Pynchon un@l very recently. He never used to quote Debord’s Society of Spectacle of 1967, which he considers a book about @me, but he is quo@ng it now in 2009, when he lectures about the concept of Lateness.

EK. Yes, Lateness, I know. I heard him speaking about it a liOle bit a few months ago when he talked to Wigley. And Mark (Wigley) is also trying to talk about this very directly as well. Not so much lateness as the kind of obsolescence of architecture as a prac@ce, as a discipline which is always so far behind, late, in a way, but also by defini@on because it is a discipline of so much physical intensivity and so much capital intensivity that it has to be about massive temporal movements. This is how I understand Guy Debord. Debord was a thinker of temporality in the Society of Spectacle: he understands that global capital changes the nature of Dme, not just the human percep@on of @me but the very nature of @me. That it literally builds a new interface to @me. One of the most powerful thinkers on this is Frederic Jameson. Frederic Jameson has really deeply thought through this problem. Now I would not claim to be a scholar of Jameson, per se: the only book of his that I really know is The Geopoli@cal Aesthe@c (The Geopoli@cal Aesthe@c: Cinema and Space in the World System). I’ve read some essays, I’ve read bits and pieces of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. The GeopoliDcal AestheDc is a book he wrote around 1990 or 91, that I didn’t discover un@l about 2003...in the beginning [of the book] GeopoliDcal AestheDc is a study of specifically American conspiracy theory films, like Three Days of the Condor, Klute and The Parallax View: as global symptoms; in a medical sense. They are symptoms of a move towards consciousness on the part of either the filmmakers or the popula@on within which that film can actually func@on. Jameson is looking at film as an index ... of a move towards a


kind of consciousness or the produc@on of a cogni@ve map. A cogni@ve map of what? Not just of complex sociopoli@cal or geopoli@cal rela@onships, but of new kinds of @me and agency that were not possible prior to the development of broadcast, communica@on, prior to the development of cinema and its prolifera@on from the nineteen for@es forward as a major American cultural export and economic engine. And so when I look at Debord, I see him through that lens. It is not just that people can or cannot perceive their own posi@ons within a historical flow. With Society of Spectacle what Debord is trying to say is : “there are mechanisms in capital and in media which actually alter the nature of @me itself”. Time is [cons@tuted in] a set of intangible rela@onships between bodies, what bodies can do to each other, and how far in space and how far into the future and into the past they can reach. This is why Memento is such a beau@ful [sad] movie; it is about a body that has had part of its capability to extend itself in space and @me amputated. Debord recognizes that the society of the spectacle is a byproduct of a set of rela@onships [media, poli@cal, economic, subjec@ve] that are in@mately connected to forms of power along the French dis@nc@on between “pouvoir” and “puissance; “pouvoir” being a power for control…

JR. For me the point of The Society of Spectacle is that shih in what was understood as something that was absolutely interior to yourself, something like Time, understood as something that nobody could take away from you, as Debord synthesizes at the beginning of the chapter of the Spectacular Time with a quote by the baroque Spanish writer Baltasar Gracian, who wrote “they can take from you everything except Dme, which is enjoyed even by those who don’t have a home”. I think what Debord is trying to show us is that the idea expressed in this sentence is wrong. He shows us in The Society of Spectacle that Power is taking away from us the 24 hours of our daily @me, through the TV industry, the tourism industry, etc. Working @me was already part of the previous organiza@onal system, but now leisure @me has been added. Our leisure @me has been taken away from us. So power is taking away from us what was previously understood to be part of our own interiority. And that’s why for me it’s a very sad book…

EK. Yeah, very sad. Debord was a very sad man, he is just like Jean Luc Godard. Now there's a profoundly sad guy… that’s my opinion. I remember reading in Once [a book by Wim Wenders],a passage where Wenders meets Jean Luc Godard, I think in Los Angeles, at a backyard beer drinking session, and they end up driving around in LA for a few hours; he has a couple of pictures of Godard hanging out in LA. Wenders and Jean Luc Godard in the seven@es, hanging out in Los Angeles in Hollywood; this guy [Godard] had to be incredibly pissed off on many different levels!! And Wim Wenders says “you know, I came away with the conclusion that he was one of the saddest men in the world, one of the saddest men I ever met”. If you look at Godard’s work you realize this man is profoundly melancholic, in a produc@ve way…profoundly melancholic... Now there is another really beau@ful thread to follow in Pynchon. Like my knowledge of Fredric Jameson, I have to preface this by saying that I know only one work by Pynchon very well and that is The Crying of Lot 49. It is a short novel that he wrote in the mid six@es.


JR. Maybe I could read that one, because I had a hard @me with Gravity’s Rainbow which even for an English speaker is extremely difficult to read.

EK. Yeah, yeah. It is amazing. I've only read part of Gravity’s Rainbow. I read the first twenty pages. I have a weird rela@onship with certain books that I really love, and I’ve had it since I was thirteen or fourteen years old. I’ll pick up a massive book and I’ll start reading it, I'll fall in love with it, I’ll get forty or fihy pages into it and I’ll put it down. This has become a kind of ritual in my life. One of the first books I did this with was The Brothers Karamazov. I started reading it and I put it down; I was fourteen. A year or two later I was hitchhiking, travelling out west in California, and I was going to be in a bus for three days, I saw the book in a bookstore, I bought it and I read it cover to cover on the bus trip. It became one of my favorite books for a decade. Same thing happened with Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.

JR. What about Proust?

EK. That’s on the bookshelf right now. (laughs) Just like Mason Dixon is on the bookshelf, just like The Man without QualiDes is on the bookshelf, there are a couple of other really massive things that are on the shelf…Gravity’s Rainbow is one of them. But anyway, back to Crying of Lot 49, which seems to be a kind of short comic novel about American culture, but actually is a profound medita@on about the problem of entropy, and it is excep@onally beau@ful. So, I could easily see a discussion, I mean I think it would be a beau@ful discussion to have with Eisenman, about Pynchon’s model of the possibility [or not] of a historical consciousness in The Crying of Lot 49 . Get Peter’s take on that, and how Peter’s own work relates to that kind of model of historical consciousness. Because actually in Crying of Lot 49 each of the characters has a different agency to see themselves within their context. In the conversa@on that we are having right now, when I am talking about historical consciousness what I mean is the ability of an agent or a popula@on of agents to see themselves within a context, a temporalized context. Which might be a quite different…

JR. The idea of “lateness” is in a sense, to be aware that we are living in a period, a terminal period, which has leh its revolu@on far away, maybe in the twen@es. So now in this late period, forms get extremely complex like in Pynchon, like in Eisenman, everything becomes mannerist, very unnecessarily complicated. It is not the first @me that this happens in the history of western culture, but maybe this concept of “lateness” is related to your idea of “historical consciousness”.

Another temporal idea that Eisenman used several years ago was the idea of “presentness”. Which he defined, as the capability of some singular works of art to escape @me. It is something that has not been reabsorbed by the discipline of Architecture.

EK. Yeah.


JR. He explains for example Le Corbusier’s La ToureOe. It is funny because Eisenman never quoted Debord in his texts, neither did Tschumi. I think Debord is a late reference, post 2000 in Eisenman, but Debord is a very important guy for Tschumi and he never quotes him. I think Tschumi’s understanding of @me is much more poli@cal than Eisenman’s, and much more than Lynn’s, where it is more asep@cal. I mean his (Tschumi’s) work in the seven@es at the Architectural Associa@on was about transla@ng the idea of the barricades in Paris, the idea of reading Kaja and Joyce’s Finnegan's Wake, and trying to incorporate the narra@ve structures that could be found in literature and in cinema within architecture, and trying to occupy space in a poli@cal way. But this poli@cal occupa@on of space crea@vely comes from the SituaDonists, and I think it is the only posi@ve interpreta@on of Debord; taking the street crea@vely. But he (Tschumi) never quotes Debord.

EK. You know there is another book which provides you with a beau@fully wriOen take on alterna@ve culture and the rela@onship between the SituaDonists, the Le3rists, the Dadaists and various other 'conspiracies' if you will, back through European history over several centuries, which is a book called LipsDck Traces, by Greil Marcus. He is a rock n’ roll cri@c and historian; in LipsDck Traces what he tries to do is comprehend, for example, the Punk Movement as it emerges in Britain with groups like the Sex Pistols, in rela@onship to the Situa@onists ; through Malcolm McLaren’s agenda and opera@on as a kind of subversive pop culture impresario, etc. Marcus traces the thread of that subversiveness from its mainstream implementa@ons through the music of the Sex Pistols, back to the Situa@onists, various strains of revolu@on and nihilism, and so forth. It is a really, really, good book. Very easy to read, super fun. it puts a posi@ve spin on the consequences of the Situa@onists and it aOempts to track a way that some of their stated and unstated goals would manifest in pop culture, and again in historical consciousness, as produced by something like the punk culture in the seven@es. So that might be a really interes@ng and unexpected text for you to take a look at and use it as reference to try once again to understand the problem of temporality in someone like Debord. I agree with you, I think Debord is an extremely important figure for Tschumi, and Constant as well.

JR. But it’s curious that strong influences aren’t quoted in their essays. So we have Eisenman’s Cannaregio, IAUS, and Opposi@ons. You didn’t live directly that period. But then we have The ManhaOan Transcripts, we have La VilleOe, which could be understood as the architectural con@nua@on of the ManhaOan Transcripts, and then we have the GSAPP, the school of architecture created by Tschumi which you lived directly. When did you start teaching in the GSAPP?

EK. When did I start teaching? In 1998. I was a student from 1991 to 1994. I did the three year M.Arch.

JR. Did you have Greg Lynn as a teacher?


EK. He was an advisor for an Independent Studies seminar that I developed during my third year. He was in a lot of my reviews, but he was never my studio cri@c. I had Bill McDonald, Amy Anderson, Wayne Berg, Jesse Reiser, and I had Alex Wall and Stefano De Mar@no, who had worked with Rem back in the early days. They taught seminars and they taught a studio that I was in.

JR. I think those years are the most important years in Tschumi’s deanship. From 91 to 94, if you analyze the Abstracts, you can see the transforma@on from the let’s say residual Deconstruc@vist language…

EK. Yeah, and fully away from the weak postmodernism/neoclassicism which was s@ll very powerful in the eigh@es. You can find student projects by some people that taught in the GSAPP some years later, yet when they were students in the eigh@es in GSAPP they were doing straight ahead Stern postmodernism.

JR. In your last year 93-‐94, the first year of the paperless studio, did you take that class?

EK. The paperless studio came a couple of years later. I was one of the very first people who was using the computer. If you want the back end story of this I’ll send you something [EK interview from PARPAINGS]. But, basically in 1992 I bought an SGI, I started using Sohimage, I started doing anima@on and modeling, there were very few other people in New York who were doing that. I was perhaps the only student at Columbia doing it. In 93 I wrote a proposal for the school which I gave to Bernard outlining what sohware and hardware we would need to buy for the school. I got very involved with that. I was actually T.A.ing third year studios when I was a second year student. I was teaching computer courses and, yeah, when I graduated from the school in 1994 I was a TA for Greg and for Jesse and Nanako in 95 and 96. I started teaching in 1996 at RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Ins@tute). So the first year I was teaching was 1996, the first year I taught at Columbia was 1998. But the first real paperless studio was 1995 -‐. I think the spring of 95.

JR. I think the first cover of an Abstract that was a rendering, not as a representa@on but as genera@ve project through digital tools, was in ‘93-‐‘94. The first paperless studio was just with six teachers, Hani Rashid, Greg Lynn, ScoO Marble, Stan Allen, Keller Easterling and Bernard Tschumi. I guess the equipment was very expensive so that’s why it started with very few students.

EK. It was very expensive [more than $30k in 1992], and it was very difficult because the first move was to get Sohimage, which was an incredibly expensive sohware, running on very expensive computers. So the first SGI (Silicon Graphics Interna@onal) that they had, they actually managed to get donated to the school by Sohimage with free sohware on it; this was through the work that Eden Muir and Rory O’Neill did raising money and building connec@ons with the sohware and hardware companies. Eden and Rory actually helped get money from a grant which as I recall, Columbia GSAPP split with Columbia School of Journalism. There was a decent amount of money, maybe something like a


million dollars. I don’t know how the money was deployed; but this was a very important grant. During this period Eden picked people in the art history department to work with to create anima@ons of the reconstruc@on of cathedrals. I don’t remember what cathedral it was…it might have been a kind of an analy@cal anima@on of Amiens Cathedral, I don’t remember which one; but it was a beau@ful thing for the @me, even now it would be a beau@ful anima@on. And that was one of the ways that they raised consciousness of what the sohware and hardware would do. That was all taking place at the same @me and Bernard was clearly aware that that was the way the school had to go. So…but we digress.

JR. In 1991 Peter Eisenman…You worked for Peter Eisenman, didn’t you?

EK. It was in 1992. I wasn't a designer-‐ all I did was renderings for the Moebius Tower (Max Reinhardt Haus). The designers were: Lindy Roy, Rick Lausanne, etc. I worked on that doing renderings and I also was working for a number of other firms that year while I was a second year student. I was in the school but I was doing compe@@ons for KPF, for Ed Mills …doing renderings on some, design on others. Ed Mills was doing collabora@on with Perkins and Will [a larger corporate firm] for a compe@@on for the police headquarters in the Bronx. So I did renderings for that around the same @me I was doing renderings for Peter, and a few other compe@@ons the next spring. I did at least 15 compe@@ons, with other firms and on my own, during my second and my third year at the GSAPP.

JR. How did you start to teach in 1998?

EK. I had met a number of @mes with Bernard because I wrote a proposal for new infrastructure and new sohware. Of course Bernard had seen my work on final reviews. And I had worked for Greg Lynn on Cardiff and Yokohama. With Greg Lynn we [myself and Gregg Pasquarelli] worked a bit on another compe@@on before those which was called Cabrini Green (1993), we didn’t finish that compe@@on but we did do a bit of research work on that. And I helped out Greg Lynn’s office on a couple of other projects doing renderings, and puxng up an exhibit that we did at Ar@st’s Space; I don’t remember when that was, I think it was more like 96. I got my first teaching gig at RPI in 96. At that point Sanford (Kwinter) was actually at RPI for a year and a half or two years.

JR. What is RPI?

EK. It is the Rensselaer Polytechnic Ins@tute. A number of people started teaching there.

JR. Where is it?

EK. Troy, about ten miles from Albany NY. They had just goOen a new dean, Alan Balfour, who had been at the AA. And Sanford Kwinter had been hired to start a new post graduate program at RPI-‐ which never started, for various reasons. At the @me, I came in, Jason Payne, Joe Macdonald who’s now at Harvard…


JR. You were in your twen@es.

EK. Well, In 1996 I was thirty…Yeah, a number of people went through that school. It was a place to go and teach, kind of like PraO, when you first get out of school. City College in New York City, that's another place where recent graduates ohen get their first teaching gigs. So I taught there for a few years, I also taught at Bennington College, Parsons in NYC, and I con@nued working on projects in New York City, doing compe@@ons, and going to a lot of reviews at Columbia and PraO. There were a number of people there who were incredibly suppor@ve… Bill MacDonald, Sulan Kolatan, Evan Douglis…

JR. Did you par@cipate in the ANY conferences or in ANY magazine?

EK. I didn’t par@cipate in any of the conferences. I wrote one or two liOle pieces for some of the magazines. I did a book review for Cynthia, Greg Lynn was very suppor@ve, he invited me in underneath his wing, to contribute a bit to some other pieces here and there, so I wrote a short piece on movement in rock climbing, actually it wasn’t even a piece! It was three cap@oned pictures! And I also par@cipated in the Mech-‐in-‐Tech discussion, they were having online, I think in 1995, maybe, around the spring of 95. That was published in ANY magazine at the @me.

JR. I checked all the Abstracts, the ANYs, and I am also interested in AD, the Bri@sh magazine Architectural Design, because I think this is one of the magazines that first incorporated the Avant Gardes, so I have been tracing its issues since the 80s through the 90s. And I found you there a couple of @mes. The last one with an exhibi@on that you did in LA.

EK. Yeah, Expanded cinema.

JR. In the issue called CollecDve Intelligence… so you have par@cipated in very important think tanks, although all these events came aher what I am trying to explain with my PhD.

EK. Yeah.

JR. What is your rela@onship with the Manha3an Transcripts? Do you think it’s an important book for architects?

EK. Manha3an Transcripts was enormously important for me; but I don’t think it is important for many architects, because most architects get close enough or pay enough aOen@on to what Bernard was researching in the Transcripts: a radical problema@za@on of the produc@on of consciousness, whether through architectural methodology, representa@on, or through other means. The Manha3an Transcripts is an aOempt to break that down into a provisional set of categories, using the SEM triad ( Space-‐Event-‐Movement)…


JR. … you know, there are a lot of parallelisms between Koolhaas and Tschumi. They both came from the AA (Architectural Associa@on) to New York, they both went to the IAUS (Ins@tute for Architecture and Urban Studies), they wrote a book about New York, they both were finalists in the La VilleOe Compe@@on, and so on, and so on. Historically, Koolhaas is gexng the most notoriety and Delirious New York is now considered one of the most important books of architecture in the last quarter of the XX century. But the ideas in both books, those related to the manipula@on of programs or events, are similar. The ideas of transprogramming for example…

EK. Delirious New York is a book that people can read and immediately pull obvious answers to obvious ques@ons out of. Manha3an Transcripts is not a project that people can do that with. Manha3an Transcripts is a…if you will, Delirious New York is fully aware, itself, that it is a text of pleasure. Using Barthes’ criteria to dis@nguish between text of pleasure and text of bliss, a text of pleasure can be absorbed and directly experienced…pleasure, “uncri@cal” pleasure is created. Bliss however creates fric@on…Manha3an Transcripts is a text of bliss. At least in retrospect that's how the cards have played out. You may find it funny that I would say that about Rem Koolhaas, and about Delirious New York, because most people would say Rem is Avant Garde and Delirious New York is an intellectually cri@cal piece of work. But the fact is that Delirious New York is something that can get translated into the mind of students, into the minds of prac@@oners, and ul@mately can lead straight to Martha Stewart, which it did; by that I mean Rem's eventual connect to Martha Stewart. You see what I am saying, there is a pathway there by which it greases the wheels for a movement into pop culture. Very, very smoothly.

JR. I don’t know who Martha Stewart is, but I can guess who she is.

EK. Ok. Martha Stewart is a figure of mainstream American culture…cooking, interior design, you know…Gemütlichkeit. So, look, it sounds like I have been harsh in my assessment of Rem. I am not. Rem is incredibly interes@ng. But Bernard didn’t try to do that, he did something different which is much harder to digest, frankly. Bernard’s project was…well, it was La VilleOe and it was Columbia. It was a body of theory which can’t translate directly into pop culture. And which is more difficult for students and other architects to absorb. Which is in my opinion what The Manha3an Transcripts is. In that sense it is closer to Peter’s work. Because much of Peter’s work is much more difficult -‐as you well know because you are studying it-‐ for a mainstream absorp@on. Peter might be able to build museums or stadia, but the deeper aspects of his work don’t get translated immediately, they are latent, they are hidden messages, they are a steganography if you will, a hidden wri@ng. Bernard’s work is invested in that same prac@ce. Rem is trying to do the same but he found a channel to Pop Culture, to governments, to ci@es, to regions, which either by skill, personality, luck or strategy, enabled him to build projects that others would have loved to build but didn’t for one reason or another. But; my point is to pick up on your observa@on: there was Bernard, he writes a book about NYC and comes from the AA, etc. and there was Rem, they are


paralleling each other, I mean we always thought when we were students [in the early 90s] they had to be rivals, very strong rivals. I can tell you an anecdote. Alex Wall was a Studio Cri@c of mine when I was at Columbia, he now runs a school in Germany at Karlsruhe. He worked for Rem in the beginning; Stefano De Mar@no also worked for Rem in the beginning, they co-‐taught studios and seminars at Columbia, and I was lucky enough to have them as my cri@cs. At that @me I was a liOle disappointed with some of the experiences I’d had at Columbia actually, and Alex and Stefano really saved it for me. I met them exactly at the moment I was mee@ng Jesse and Greg. So somehow I missed some of the people who I would best have fiOed with at Columbia un@l the end of my second year. And then I made these connec@ons which were very important intellectually and professionally. In my third year Alex and Stefano were really the kind of saving grace for me. I was able to have conversa@ons with them about what I wanted to do in my projects that for various reasons I hadn’t been able to have with other cri@cs. Ok, so at the end of my experience at Columbia, Alex said you know maybe you should talk to Rem and go to work for Rem. I said, “Well that sounds exci@ng, I have my own prac@ce in New York though, not as an architect but as a consultant. So, I don’t know if I want to leave New York.” And Alex said “You really should meet Rem." He felt so strongly about it that he set up a mee@ng between Rem, and me, and another student I was close to at the @me: Gregg Pasquarelli. Gregg and I were sharing a live/work space and occasionally collabora@ng. So, Rem was in New York, Alex got in touch with us and said Rem is in New York, he’s going to meet you guys. So, he came over, to our apartment. And had breakfast with us. We put out a nice spread…you know, coffee, snacks. To be perfectly honest I had no idea how big a deal it was. When I got out of school at Columbia I was so relaxed about things, I was more relaxed at that moment in 1994 that I would ever be again in my life ever (laughs)…. So what happened ... Alex said, “Rem is going to be in town tomorrow, you guys are going to pick him up in a taxi, at his hotel”. He was staying at a hotel he favored in NY, apparently; I think it was the Gramercy Park. So I went up there in a cab and Rem came out and we rode back to my apartment. Now, the thing is that the apartment wasn’t a small apartment, it was a huge loh in LiOle Italy. Where we had an office set up as well. And it was set up as an incredibly good live-‐work space. So it wasn’t like invi@ng Rem to a liOle apartment. It was like invi@ng him to an office basically, even though there were only three of us in the space and we didn’t really have an office yet. So he came over and we showed him our student work. Gregg showed him his work, I showed him my work. We showed him the compe@@ons we had been doing with Greg Lynn…all that stuff. And at the end of it he said something along the lines of “This is interes@ng stuff, so, what are you guys going to do now, you want to come work for us or something?” And we both looked and we said “We’ll have to figure out, we need to think about it” (laughs). Gregg Pasquarelli tells this story also, very wonderfully; you know, it’s a kind of a joke I think for fiheen years now between me and Gregg, basically we had a great interview with Rem, he was very kind to us, very nice, we were very polite, and we basically turned down a poten@al job. (laughs). In retrospect I s@ll think it may have been one of the stupidest things I've ever done in my life.


JR. Well, he would remember you for that.

EK. I don’t know if he will. I don’t think he will remember me [chuckles]. In any case in the cab ride down from his hotel, we tried to have a conversa@on, and honestly I had really not evolved enough yet to have a conversa@on with Rem Koolhaas, about anything. I suspect Rem didn’t know that, so he was trying to have a real dialog with me, and one of the topics was the rela@onship he had with Columbia. I said something like “You know, it would great if you were around at Columbia more”, just being friendly, as a student who is about to graduate from school would be, and he said something like “Yes, I really would like to be around more ohen also, so I wish something could be done about that.” It wasn’t clear to me at the @me but in retrospect I realized he perhaps saw me as an informal conduit to Bernard; perhaps not… This anecdote illustrates that specula@on, that some folks think they have always been rivals on one level, but for my part, I can't say. I think they must respect each other enormously regardless... although it may sound naïve of me to say that.

JR. Eisenman told me last week that there are oedipal problems. The first is between himself and Greg Lynn, like the father and the son. And then in a more horizontal level the jealous brothers, Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas. (laughs)…some@mes we talk about family maOers. So my thesis is about these three guys, and Rem Koolhaas is going to be like a shadow, same with the word “deconstruc@vism”. I mean, it is very difficult to talk about the period between 78-‐95 without feeling the smell of Rem. He is now a colossus. His wri@ngs are everywhere, maybe too prescrip@ve or pragma@c, of his architectural prac@ce, but now he is the one. Anyway, I am impressed because it seems that I am describing a family, and how this family is irradia@ng concepts. I guess New York city helps in this, becoming a center of radia@on.

EK. There is no ques@on that NYC in the seven@es [was a powerful force to change and mold people], I only vaguely remember it; my family came from New York City, we leh the City, my father con@nued to work in the city so I came into the city frequently. I remember it being an incredibly intense, harsh dangerous place. But that is my recollec@on as a child, you know, five or six years old, ten years old. I can imagine that for Bernard and Rem coming to New York City at that point, at the age they were which would have been maybe fiheen or twenty years older than me, it must have been earth-‐shaOering. New York must have been one of the most incredible ci@es in the world, period, The City to be in. There is no doubt that that was the case. There probably also was a liOle bit of it being the exci@ng place they had gone to at a specific moment in their lives, which became a kind of a roseOa stone for decoding all other urban experiences ever aher. Just as when one first falls in love, it becomes a roseOa stone for decoding everything else aher; for many people at least. You know what I am gexng at. It is a kind of nostalgia, which even the most cri@cal mind can have about the vortex of New York City, the intensity of New York City in the seven@es.


JR. Do you know the anecdote of the Red Square in Moscow?...( I tell him the same story again)

EK. That’s great! What a great story!

JR. Eisenman didn’t know that story but Jeffrey Kipnis did.

EK. Very nice. You know, there is a novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares “The InvenDon of Morel”. This book was in part the basis for a screenplay that Alain Robbe-‐Grillet wrote for Last Year in Marienbad, the film by Resnais . Which is an incredible, incredible film. The reason I’m bringing this up is there is…there is a melancholy in the story of Morel, you should read it, because it is en@rely about a specific model of @me and what it means to be conscious of history, and whether linear progression and evolu@ons in @me are possible or not. Since the main character ul@mately has to make a decision about whether they go on living, or die and trap their own image in a recording. I imagine both Bernard and Peter would be familiar with this novel ... Bioy Casares was a friend of Borges, and Borges wrote an early review of “The InvenDon of Morel“ hailing it as a masterpiece.... So, I would be surprised if they [BT & PE] didn’t both know it. It’s such a profound statement, a melancholic statement about whether @me exists; whether repe@@on or change rule the world, and what we as humans can do in rela@onship to that ques@on of repe@@on. For both Bernard and Peter, their en@re body of work has engaged that directly. Obviously they are very different architects, and they undoubtedly have different takes on what @me is and whether change is possible or not [ontologically]. But I think that that’s the kind of ques@on at the crux of their work: to unfold whether @me is real and what its nature is. How architecture as a discipline can func@on as a tool to ask that ques@on, whether @me is real, and how we can poten@ally create noise or change within that @me.

JR. I want to ask Peter today…I have an analogy between the three theses on Bergson by Deleuze, about movement in Cinema 1 and let’s say its refrac@on in architecture. Maybe it is too literal. The first one is that it is wrong to aOempt to build movement from sta@c images. But we do it all the @me. So the first one would be the “frame”, the frozen movement. In terms of architecture, there have been several aOempts to freeze movement like in the Baroque for example, or even now Greg Lynn. The second thesis is the reconstruc@on of movement through a sequence of sta@c images. There are two ways, the classical through privileged or eide@c images, and then the modern one, which is the reconstruc@on through any-‐Dme-‐whatever. In architecture, we could find this for example in several of Eisenman’s projects, where different stages in the transforma@on of an object are intersected, as in an Edward Muybridge chronophotography. Finally, we have the third, in which movement is understood as a sec@on of dura@on, as the frame was a sec@on of a movement. And that implies a thicker idea of @me, a mul@dimensional idea of @me. And this idea of @me is what I am trying to show within architecture in my PhD. That’s why I choose Peter Eisenman’s Cannaregio as the star@ng point of my PhD. I am aware of certain interes@ng precedents in Rossi and Hejduk.


Maybe Tschumi’s La VilleOe has this kind of cultural incorpora@on of different @me dimensions. This is my analogy of Bergson’s three theses on movement through the op@cs of architecture.

EK. I see it. I see it very well. I think you can have an extremely produc@ve conversa@on with all three of those guys, about exactly that. I also think that one of the biggest problems of the applica@on [of Deleuze's Cinema books]…there are a few reasons why Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 simply aren’t applied by architects, they are very difficult books. One needs to have a preOy comprehensive knowledge of the films he is talking about... this is a point that I think Rodowick made on Deleuze ... the point that... [thinking] no it was Badiou I believe-‐ (Alain Badiou) who made a comment in his book on Deleuze (Deleuze: The Clamor of Being)…to the effect that Deleuze wrote these books almost with the assump@on that someone reading them would be familiar with the rest of his body of work. So he is carrying on a conversa@on that you can only really fully engage if you’ve read all of his other works, all of his major works. Anyway: with that point being said, it is fucking hard to extrapolate from Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 in a produc@ve manner. Not just filmmakers, but anyone trying to pull something out of Cinema 1 or Cinema 2…

JR. Which is for you the most influen@al work by Deleuze in the architectural milieu? I know that in 1991 was the first @me Deleuze was quoted in an architectural text. I mean…the first @me that I read Eisenman quo@ng Deleuze was in 1991 with the Rebstockpark project. The transla@on to English of Bergsonism is in 1988, same year that the Deconstruc@on show in MoMA. The transla@on of A Thousand Plateaux to English is one year before.

EK. 88, Yeah, that’s right. I thought you said 98, and I remember reading it before.

JR. Cinema comes later. I know that there was a book that Eisenman told me was his first reading of Deleuze, which is the Bacon one.

EK. ….it is the logic of sense book but it is not the big one. I haven’t read that book.

JR. When you were in Columbia in those very interes@ng years, that was when the Deleuze discourse emerged in architecture.

EK. I read Bergsonism in 1993 I think… Look, there is another argument here; I want to extend this because you raise the ques@on of the trajectory from the Movement-‐Image to the Time-‐Image and how that can get built out [by architects]. There is another point that Deleuze makes in rela@on to this in the Cinema books, which outlines three different models of memory. In the first case we have automa@c recollec@on, in the second aOen@ve recollec@on; and in the third inven@ve: a dream memory, this is where the Time Image comes into play, as the @me-‐image is not just a visual image but is indeed related to a concept that Bernard has been ... working through on a


pedagogical level in his studios recently [2007-‐08]. The concept image [concept-‐context-‐content] in a studio that he did a couple of years ago. As well as his office.

![For Deleuze ] the term image is not just an image, it is more like a concept structure. Deleuze uses film illustra@vely to play this explora@on out. These three models of memory can get @ed back to different kinds of instruments, techniques in film being one set of examples; but it is much more difficult to @e the concept of an automa@c memory structure to an architectural frame or to a filmic frame than it is to @e the basic idea of framing. Deleuze in the Cinema books is making a layered reading of these problems coming out of Bergson and others [Vertov, for example], because obviously framing has something to do with literally framing-‐ but just as literal movement does not produce a @me image, literal framing or breaking of a literal frame does not produce a @me image.

So the transla@on problem for us as designers and thinkers is a big stumbling block; it is hard for people to pull useful material out of Deleuze and GuaOari. Because they speak very precisely about terms that ohen @mes architects and filmmakers are very hasty to literalize and translate into their disciplines.

I know you have to go. So let’s get walking…

!JR. I cannot be late to speak to Eisenman. (we go together from the liOle restaurant in 17th street to Eisenman’s Office in 25th street, and in the door we said goodbye).

!


ED KELLER & JOSEAN RUIZ ESQUIROZ : INTERVIEW/DISCUSSION

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Transcript of ED KELLER & JOSEAN RUIZ ESQUIROZ : INTERVIEW/DISCUSSION