Not so many years ago, while we were deciding whether to take Peter Eisenman’s Friday morning seminar, we contemplated its value vis a vis the lateness of our Thursday nights. Thursday nights were party nights, after all, nights where frat parties took over and keg stands were done, nights joints led to bong rips and beers led to shots. And more, and worse, and more of the worst. We made the call, though, one Thursday evening. “It’s Peter Fucking Eisenman,” we said to our compatriot. “We’ll wake up for that.”

And we did. Every single Friday morning for a semester, we woke up, shook off the fog of the night before, and stumbled in to hear the teachings of this great architect. We loved—still do—House X, were entranced by Checkpoint Charlie, wondered and marveled at the way he talked and wrote about architecture: so seethingly straightforward, so banally complicated. We thought that just by being in his presence that we would learn more about architecture than we’d ever thought possible. We thought we’d get one-on-one time to discuss the split-apart master bedroom, have long hallway strolls in which we picked apart the Denkmal, pound the studio table for the inanity of Chora L Works.

And we didn’t.

Part of it was our fault and our decision—we didn’t like Derrida and didn’t care to—but part of it was the realities of academia. Many architects teach because they get something out of it. Others teach because they need to support their studios. We’ll never know which category Peter truly falls into—and we have a feeling it changes at any given moment—but after reading Elizabeth Farrelly’s Sydney Morning Herald piece about the relationship between architects and the students they teach, we don’t feel quite so alienated. We grew up in the halls of the ivory tower, but we forgot that our professors were people as much as our parents were, neglected to engage with them while we prayed that they would pick up the slack with us.

Speculating on a professor’s leaving of the architecture department, Farrelly wonders:

Could it relate to an administrative load, here, that is nominally one day a week but impossible to compress below four? To a funding system that rewards unreadable articles in unread journals but ignores all creative engagement with practice, public or pedagogy? To an appointment regime whose rigid PhD prerequisite precludes nearly all architectural greats from teaching here?

We wish it were just part of Down Under’s doing it all backwards. Sadly, it isn’t. Columbia’s difficulty in finding someone to take over GSAPP—interim dean Mark Wigley finally ended up with the gig after either assisting or, in a spectacular and much-posited power play, resisting the process that could have led to Zaha’s appointment—was well-documented, and Princeton went through three deans in the three years we were studio-bound. It’s no surprise that Yale remains the pinnacle of education under the firm but gentle guidance of Robert A.M. Stern, while Harvard flips in and out of excellence, its students tending more towards the SOM/HOK/KPF school of architecture and less towards the sheer joy of burning your fingers off with the NASA space-foam.

The system has been broken for a long time. And it isn’t, all Toni Braxton aside, gonna unbreak itself.

Architecture as a cultural art gets lost in translation [Sydney Morning Herald, via ArchNewsNow]
Building Respect at Yale [New York Times]