what this paper says about the latest building. It always matters on that day, to the person who’s being written about. I’m not sure how much cultural weight in the long run it has, because it’s not a reading culture anymore. I just don’t think the newspapers have that kind of authority. So that is for sure. In other, more classic ways, do people listen to what you say and then try to find ways to design around it? I suppose some do. But you’d have to ask them. I really don’t know.
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Sylvia Lavin, »The Uses and Abuses of Theory,« 113–114. [n.5] Also see essays written in response: Jeffrey Kipnis, »Rebuttal: Theory Used and Abused,« Progressive Architecture 71 (1990): 98–99, and K. Michael Hays, »Rebuttal: Theory as Mediated Practice,« Progressive Architecture 71 (1990): 100.
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mm: “Criticism is not an objective science but rather a creative art,” 19
you wrote in »The Uses and Abuses of Theory.« 19 ------------------Are there also other ways of current thinking and writing on history, theory, on projective creativity in architecture, being turned into the art practices now? sl: Well, it’s like what I was just discussing in my seminar.
I certainly think that the moment that you start thinking of criticism as a writerly practice (which I wasn’t thinking so much back then, but I would think now) would definitely approach the kinds of things that have been said about curatorial practice — that it has a kind of performativity and produces affects of its own. And whether it’s important or not to call those art, I would not say that now. But it is certainly not merely reactive in the classical sense of the object produced by an artist and responded to by a critic. That I don’t think is the paradigm anymore. mm: In this situation, do you understand previously formulated
critical practices of resistance to classical and modern architecture, which in Eisenman’s case also introduced the shift from the metaphysical project of architecture to architecture after the metaphysical, as accomplished, or still active and open-ended? Are they adaptive and adaptable? Or are these critical practices ignored and abandoned, unfinished by contemporary non-critical practices?
sl: Okay, well, I just opened the show yesterday that I curated
at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) * called Take Note, and it takes as its ground zero Peter Eisenman’s Notes on Conceptual Architecture. So it takes exactly your question
* [Ed. Note: The CCA hosted Sylvia Lavin’s exhibition Take Note in the Octagonal Gallery from February 4 to May 30 2010.]