On October 23-24, 1986, the fourth annual symposium of the Center for the Study of American Architecture, School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin was held. The subject: “Buildings and Reality: Architecture in the Age of Information.’, Several of the papers in this issue of CENTER (those by Horace Newcomb, Peter Eisenman, Karsten Harries, Coy Howard and Michael Benedikt) served as bases for discussion at the symposium. Exchange among the paper authors as well as other symposium participants, including filmmaker Bo Gehring and Newsweek architecture critic Douglas Davis, was not limited, however, to material covered in the papers.

Controversy developed over a broad range of issues, from appropriate roles for media technology to the future of labor-intensive craft. The symposium was marked by few comforting or comfortable resolutions and was, in fact, notable for its provocative points of view. For almost anyone in attendance, there were perspectives to applaud and perspectives to make one’s blood boil.

An early point of discussion introduced by Douglas Davis in the first session, titled “The Media as Environment,” centered on debate over the actual impact of media on perception and behavior over the last generation. Davis stated: “We have all grown up through this constant declaration of revolution and prediction of the effects of this or that medium. I submit that we have been constantly wrong-that we have, time and time again, mispredicted. We have been warned over and over again that the prolixity of cultural offerings on the television screen would keep us all home. We would have no reason to go out…. The fact is that we do go out. The fact that during the period when television became pervasive, the number of books that were purchased per capita doubled. I don’t have to tell you about the statistics in terms of the number of people who go to the theater, who attend museums, who jog. The activism of the television audience is overwhelming.”

But if Davis asserted a societal resilience in the face of the forces of media behavior modification, Peter Eisenman offered himself as a personal exception-a bona-fide example of the media’s power to alter perceptions. He lamented,” I find myself unable to watch a real football game anymore because I’ve lost the capacity to follow the play. I’m so attuned to watching instant replay that it’s very difficult to watch the game, and to be at a stadium where they don’t have instant replay is a source of great anxiety.” In a broader sense, he concluded, “I do watch a lot of television, and I think it’s wrong to say that television has not modified a lot of my world, my behavior-especially my behavior towards reality.”

Undaunted by such a personal view, Davis reasserted in a later session his conviction that “almost all of our predictions about the social, psychological and political impacts of television upon us and upon the world have been consistently proven wrong. The whole notion, for example, that television would prove to be a homogenizing force, which is the central idea behind the phrase ‘global village,’ has completely self-destructed in front of our eyes. The globe is probably more anarchic, more split apart, less homogenous than it was before the introduction of television.” Davis reasoned that the explanation for such diversification in the midst of the apparently homogenizing effect of media might be explained by the observation that in our own era, “There is always a negative for every positive…. There is always a counterrevolution – always a counter-cycle for every cycle.” Thus, a kind of self-leveling, conservative force overall in society would mitigate against radical or sweeping behavioral changes.

Michael Benedikt, at the end of the final session, returned to the issue of media impact on perception and behavior by citing conclusions of social scientists and developmental psychologists on the subject. He noted their quantifiable observance of altered attention spans, conversation skills and characteristic interpersonal relationships and suggested that the power of a medium as dominant and quotidian as television was inescapable. Its pervasive presence over the last generation naturally would produce observable changes.

In spite of respectful acknowledgments of contrary points of view and even, in Davis’s case, a repeated effort to describe varying perspectives as less divergent than they seemed to the audience, there was little real resolution achieved on the subject of media impact on perception. Neither Davis nor Eisenman nor Benedikt seemed convinced in the least by their colleagues’ arguments. It was thus, perhaps appropriately, left to the audience to divine their own sympathies on this seminal and controversial subject.

A second topic of debate that recurred frequently during the course of the symposium centered on discussion of the degree to which architecture is, or should be, like various contemporary communications media. After several exchanges on the subject, filmmaker Bo Gehring observed, “I come from a somewhat different creative world than you architects. We have a different vocabulary. What we do is ephemeral. Some of the better or worse media work stays with us for years, but compared to architecture it is ephemeral. My reaction to Postmodern architecture-just looking at it as I would with my background-is that it is architecture created by art directors. It is a very conscious use of disparate visual elements and some of it I find very impressive. In terms of a larger pattern, though, I’m not very happy with it because of the difference of architecture I’ve noted…. Because of its presence and its physical reality, I personally would be happier if architecture were not considered by the same creative rules that my side of the business is.”

Discussion also focused on similarities and differences in the process of creating media works and architecture. Gehring again noted, “My projects last about three weeks and they are gone from my life. They don’t sit on the site and either elate me or bother me for any period of time after that. We do some publicity and some of the better work stays around, but, by and large, it is just gone. I don’t have to deal with it any more, so there’s no intellectual baggage of any kind. But with architecture I think you have a very different problem because it is not even like a book. It just stays there.”

Peter Eisenman commented on the degree to which this traditional perception of architecture may be changing – at least from the point of view of the designer. He expressed a consciousness of architecture, not just as built artifact but as media material, and noted the degree to which print media is currently influencing architecture. He observed, “Architects today work to turn out things so the media can consume them. The minute they are consumed, they are gone. They cannot persist. The media demands something new every month. They demand this search for newness.”

Gehring acknowledged this contemporary, more ephemeral aspect of architecture and drew parallels to trends and fashions in media graphics. He commented, “If I were looking at this as a bunch of student work in network graphics, I’d say that the present state of architecture has few symbols and it’s looking for all kinds of gadgets. In print graphics and in broadcast graphics, we’ve gone through a phase over the last five or six years of what people in L.A. would call ‘wet magazine-look graphics’ with strong diagonals and very unexpected shapes, and I would see Postmodernism as a parallel to that. The questions is – what next?”

With Benedikt’s impassioned plea for a return to the real in architectural still ringing in the audience’s ears, Gehring predicted, “The idea that you can use entirely traditional or entirely, with due respect, ‘realistic’ methods to come up with design innovations-I think those days are gone…. I love Mies. I love structures that look like exactly what they do. But this is 1986 and when you’ve had a movement like Postmodernism and, correspondingly, all this graphics and media thing that I’ve been involved in, I don’t think it is as simple as saying you’ll go back to a realistic sensibility of materials and get a meaningful architecture of the future.”

As with the issue of media impact, the question of the degree to which architecture is, or should be, like media artistry gained no significant consensus. The point of view that architecture should possess a stability and permanence apart from the exigencies of ephemeral trends remained on the table alongside a seeming acquiescence to the short attention span of cultural forces today. Again, the issue was provocatively exposed for examination but left in a state of controversy.

Probably the most consistently clear dichotomy of perspective in the symposium arose between points of view expressed by Peter Eisenman and Karsten Harries. Harries, whose paper directly followed Eisenman’s in the second session, began by emphasizing common ground between the two. He agreed with Eisenman that “through design we have lost an authentic environment” and that “authenticity is today a fiction.” He disagreed, however, that this represented a particularly new or interesting phenomena.

Harries observed that “authenticity has always been a fiction.” Whereas Eisenman evoked the quaint German town of Brakel with “no electric neon signs, no Postmodern buildings” as “absolutely an authentic environment,” Harries viewed such an environment less nostalgically-as embodying the dreams and fantasies of its builders in a way which is not so different from the manner in which we might embody dreams and fantasies in buildings today. He deemed Brakel’s “authenticity” as largely a product of current perceptions.

While Harries agreed that it would be kitsch to try to recapture a sort of architectural “paradise” of Brakel, he felt this “does not render the idea of such a paradise altogether meaningless. It continues to give direction to our thinking, even though it may be a mere dream, a mere fantasy…. There is something significant to be learned from the Brackels of this
world.”

Harries was also uncomfortable with Eisenman’s assertion that “architecture today is a fiction-a narrative.” He asserted that notions of “fiction,” “text,” “presence,” have been taken too seriously. He countered Eisenman’s reliance on “presence” by stating that “a lot of rhetoric-not only in architectural criticism … (Derrida is only one representative)-has taken presence much too seriously. They had to take it seriously because otherwise they wouldn’t have anything to work against. In order to celebrate absence in the way they did – elusiveness, trace and so on – you have to be terribly committed to a strong notion of presence. It turns out, however, to be very hard to come up with people you can really deconstruct without serious misreading.”

Of Eisenman’s paper in particular, Harries noted, “The idea of presence is taken here far too seriously, and if it is no longer taken so seriously then some other notions that are developed by playing off that notion can also not be taken so seriously.”

The group of individuals who participated as speakers in the symposium possessed rich and diverse backgrounds. They represented widely-varying disciplines-filmmaking, philosophy, psychology, architecture, art, literature. They brought with them experiences from a wide range of geographical locations. They possessed clearly divergent value systems-from Horace Newcomb’s comfort with “firm bases for judgments, for ethics, for morality and even for political action,” to Peter Eisenman’s aspiration to be “continually dislocated … continually in diaspora.” The topic for discussion was a new one without the benefit of conventional wisdom to guide it.

The resultant discussion was thought-provoking and often disturbing. For those uncomfortable with questions and irresolution, it was a troubling two days. For those who thrive on the stimulation of controversy and disagreement, it was a treasure-trove of material to think on for months to come.