Mise En Abyme

“Skyline didn’t build anybody up,” asserted Peter Eisenman at a recent event about the short-lived (1978 to 1983) but influential monthly of that name—a name that survives in the title that has been willfully given to this very column and an event that was organized by this very publication. Eisenman, the overseer of the Institute for Architecture and Urbanism, of which, along with the more formal journal Oppositions, the newspaper was a house publication, traded anecdotes with its second editor, Suzanne Stephens; the graphic designer of its Massimo Vignelli–blessed first iteration, Lorraine Wild; and the graphic designer of its looser second iteration, Michael Bierut, now a partner at Pentagram, the multidisciplinary design studio at whose lofty offices the panel was held. Bold-named attendees included Cynthia Davidson and Mario Gandelsonas. There was a charming slideshow, curated by NYRA publisher Nicolas Kemper, illustrating the boldness and rigor (as well as the constraints of doctrinaire modernism and waxy paste-up lettering) of another time. Stephens issued a sassy and detailed disquisition on her successful fight for contracted compensation—an insistence on the dignity of work rare among the legendary movers and strivers at the Institute.

The strange thing about a skyline is you can only see it from a distance (the view of the outsider) or from a great height (the view of the insider). The success of the Institute—which convened a late-1970s/early-1980s scene as legendary in our microworld as Max’s Kansas City was in music and movies and the Factory was in art (Interview was mentioned as an inspiration)—lay in selectively converting outsiders into insiders. The word that went mostly unsaid at the event was power. The name most often said—mainly in reference to a navel-gazing column that told you where to shop for his Corbusier eyeglasses—was Philip. Long production hours—and the subsequent dawn walks home past a pregentrified Bryant Park—were explicitly recalled. Less was said about the bullying culture that endures even now, not trivially under the influence of the Skyliners’ generation, in offices and schools. Perhaps Eisenman was right, on a technicality, that Skyline didn’t build anyone up, in the sense that Eisenman has never been just anyone but rather one of the greatest servants and masters that the American architectural profession has ever seen.

In the Q&A, the panelists were asked how to make a scene today and why the critical work of Skyline at its best seems now so unequaled by its would-be inheritors. Bierut talked about how the forces working against good design today are more myriad and fluid—confluences of behavioral economics, habituated tendencies, and institutional learning—than the simpler enemies faced by architects circa 1980. Which, one can speculate, were mostly bad taste, middle-class provinciality, and each other. Eisenman had a simpler response: “Not my job.”