Lively Debate in Piecelines
“Often the only way to move things forward and create something new is through considerable disagreement,” says Lecturer Caroline O’Donnell, in describing the coteaching partnership between her and Peter Eisenman (B.Arch. ’55), a Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of ’56 Professor and visiting critic in architecture. The coteachers frequently engaged in heated discussions over interpretations of theory and methodologies of critique in their class, the spring semester studio Piecelines: The Specter of Walls. O’Donnell felt it was a revealing and exceptionally beneficial relationship for students to witness. “The students were extremely interested in seeing us clash with each other, because we are working with challenging and complex ideas which can have many interpretations,” O’Donnell says. The dynamic relationship between O’Donnell and Eisenman is the result of a combination of familiarity (O’Donnell started out as Eisenman’s student, then was his teaching assistant at Princeton University, and finally worked with him in practice for a number of years) and the studio’s subject matter. “Peter Eisenman and I have many alignments and overlaps, which is why we have always worked so well together. Conflicts arise in our differing views on concept and percept. Peter advocates a
Visiting Assistant Professor Dana Cupkova knew Lise Anne Couture by reputation only until a few months ago. When architecture chair Dagmar Richter suggested that the two partner to teach a studio, “I was rather hesitant at first,” says Cupkova. “Even after some initial conversations with Lise Anne around process and approach, I couldn’t foresee in detail the dynamics of our collaboration. Now I’m really excited and happy with how the relationship and work review process have developed.” The project for the spring semester studio MOCA LA was a new design of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). The project focused on embracing the fluctuation between traditional and experimental use of exhibition space, and looked for ways to mesh the white-box approach of many museums with a new degree of experimentation while simultaneously questioning the role of architecture as a cultural entity within this process. This subject matter helped dictate the tone of the partnership. From Cupkova’s perspective, it was about negotiating dual approaches and looking for areas of overlap to start from, while sharing an approach to computationally based design work methodology. “We wanted to try to understand each other’s approach to the problem and set up a critical collaborative process which would enable us to find a third new condition emerging from the two original tendencies,” she says. The partners embraced this notion of starting with areas of common ground as the basis for their teaching approach and quickly put it into practice. After having students develop their individual ideas, they then asked them to work in teams of two and negotiate between two diverse systems. The result? “What we saw was the students modeling our teaching partnership,” says Cupkova. “Normally you don’t see this type of mutually supportive strategic thinking until you enter a larger firm after college where you need to work in teams. But we saw it starting to emerge within the students’ projects.” This spirit of collaboration was emphasized even further when the students visited Gehry Partners and Morphosis Architects in Los Angeles, and Couture’s firm Asymptote in New York City. The students were able to witness firsthand people working iteratively to generate new ideas from separate starting points. Particularly exciting were the materials and ideas that came from this collaboration; new thinking and direction emerged, which would not have happened without two separate criteria as the starting point. According to Cupkova, “You start with one person’s idea and can embed another person’s set of criteria, and you come up with something completely new and usually much better than either of the singular starting points.” “When the collaboration works well, it goes beyond reproduction of style and morphs into research...which is incredibly satisfying,” adds Richter.AAP
conceptual architecture, and my own interest is in perception and how architecture is experienced. But both trajectories stem from a fundamental agreement that architecture is legible, that it has the potential to be read. And that is the basis of the studio,” says O’Donnell. Piecelines focused on a site in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Around the city, 34 walls called “peacelines” were used to seal off warring factions of Protestants and Catholics in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and have produced massive scars and disruptions in the urban fabric. “Our studio dealt with the way in which the removal of these fragmentary structures can produce an architecture that is neither genius loci nor zeitgeist but another kind of specter,” says O’Donnell.
Students were asked to translate ideas from seminal texts into architectural form. “My job was to help them translate, clarify, and develop their work in our regular reviews, before they presented it to Peter and me in a formal critique. And one area that he and I usually ended up agreeing on was how well a student translated a text into form.” The studio experience was a positive one for O’Donnell. “I can only be Caroline O’Donnell. I can’t be Peter Eisenman, and I would not and could not teach the ‘Peter Eisenman Studio,’” she says. “But the discourse and conflict of this studio, and our own putting up and pulling down of walls has created a third zone of discourse, just like the project we are working on.”AAP
1+1=3 At left: Top: Michael Jefferson (M.Arch. ’11) and Suzanne Lettieri (M.Arch. ’11), Time out of joint: The collision of ideal, historical, and distorted grids (2010), for Piecelines, O’Donnell/Eisenman Option Studio. Bottom: Elizabeth Hollywood (B.Arch. ’11) and Kelly Holzkamp (B.Arch. ’11), System Studies (2010), for MOCA LA, Couture/ Cupkova Option Studio. Above: Top: O’Donnell (second from right) and Eisenman (third from right) critique a student’s work in the Piecelines studio. Lower left: Gillard Rex Yau (M.Arch. ’11) and Matt Luck (M.Arch. ’11), In.Completion (2010), for Piecelines, O’Donnell/Eisenman Option Studio. Lower right: Couture (with arm raised) during a critique in the MOCA LA studio.
News08 Spring2010
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