Celebrities
"Are you interested in the history of architectural education in Cornell, and also what is your vision for the duration of architectural education in this country? And how does that building fit into that vision?" -- "No."Cornell is an excellent place to attend to talks by famous scholars and especially the College of Architecture, Arts and Planning (CAAP) regularly brings high-profile people from their field to campus. Last year there was a talk by Peter Eisenman (which I unfortunately did not attend), in February David Harvey, the famous Marxist geographer, gave a lecture, and today Rem Kohlhaas was here. Kohlhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture have been commissioned to design Milstein Hall, the new building for the Department Of Architecture on campus---something planned since 1994 and now being commissioned to the third architect...
His talk apparently was a very spontaneous idea and announced only on the same morning. I saw the posters just by chance and as I find Koolhaas' architecture quite interesting (for example, the Dutch embassy in Berlin) I decided to attend.
Although his talk was not much of a lecture but rather an ad-lib discussion between Koolhaas, his two collaborators, faculty of the CAAP, and the audience, it was all worthwhile. Kohlhaas made a very down-to-earth, witty, and sympathetic impression. He began with some very general remarks about the current status of architecture and then talked about the CAAP in the seventies -- apparently a time of a schism between "a teutonic and an anglosaxon faction", the former being led by German architect O. M. Ungers, the latter by Colin Rowe. Overall it was a nice mixture of theoretical arguments about architecture and talk about the everyday work and worries of an architect.
posted by Hobbes vs Boyle @ 7:32 PM
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