« Empty Formalism »

I’ve just been slammed for the first time, but I’m not sure if it counts as it was in Canada.  I gave a lecture on Asymptote at Banff Session 2006: New Modes of Practice, which was an AIA like event held every few years in Canada.  I don’t think it went over so well.

From an interest in the peculiarity of place, we turn to an architectural process that revels in producing facile and nearly unbuildable forms applied through socially dubious methods. In a delightfully arrogant and well-spoken manner, Alex Pincus was a credible, if not refreshing representative for Hani Rashid from the New York office of Asymptote. Armed with a recently acquired Master of Architecture degree from the paperless architecture school at Columbia—not to mention some professional initiation of obscure parlance from his former employer Peter Eisenman—Pincus was on message espousing Asymptote’s party line. Working at various scales, Asymptote produces investigations that range from products to skyscrapers, as well as attempting to engage in urban design. Somehow all the scales seem to share a common theme that is richly rhetorical while fetishizing the aspects of empty formalism.

I don’t really remember anything I said at all, but aparently I went out with a bang.  

Fisher asked Pincus to defend rather than define his position on buildings that do not consider a sense of place. Pincus merely responded that, “place is a completely constructed concept and the world as we see it is constructed by our own minds. Architecture is by its very nature, alien environments.” Thankfully, most architects would disagree.