Take It Easy?

“I’m for slow,” opined Peter Eisenman at a Cornell celebration marking the anniversaries of its art and architecture departments. He went on to compare his favorite architecture students with fine wines that mature with age, a remark nearly as strange as the event set-up itself. Eisenman’s conversant was the filmmaker Shelly Silver, who delivered a fiery critique of pedagogy in an era of “pending climate catastrophe while society is driven by the growth that capitalism demands.” Her presentation started with a montage juxtaposing children in a classroom with roadkill; his was a humble tale of a kid from suburban New Jersey who couldn’t cut it in organic chemistry but discovered that he could “make models and draw [his] way through college.” The concluding question came from Log editor and critic (and Eisenman’s partner) Cynthia Davidson in the audience: “The world is spinning faster now than it was for the Futurists a century ago. How do we participate given how slow architecture is?” Something of an answer may have been lurking, but it didn’t quite make it to center stage.