Eleven Authors in Search of a Building: The Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the University of Cincinnati

Rating:
Summary: Self-Serving Gibberish
Review: Cynthia Davidson interviews Eisenman (her husband), the self-styled "theorist", and other pretentious colleagues about Eisenman's incomprehensibly idiotic building, The Aronoff Center. For Davidson and Eisenman, Architecture has nothing to do with designing spaces that enhance the human condition, but rather it is a substitute for the psychoanalyst's couch. And a passing glance at the Aronoff Center is all that is needed to assure you that Davidson and Eisenman both have a great deal of time due on that couch. The intellectually dysfunctional Eisenman is fond of "destabilizing", "disorienting", "disturbing" and "unbalancing" the viewer or occupant. Feeling uncomfortable in your surroundings is, for Eisenman, a quality we need more of. The uncritical Davidson soaks up this idiocy and presents it without so much as a smirk. As any student will tell you, exposure to Eisenman dulls the mind and the critical capabilities. This book (and its author/collaborators) is no more that a PR exercise for Eisenman and his amateur journalist wife. Predictably, the author comes out in favor of her husband's most absurd pronouncements. Be thankful that you don't have to sit around the dinner table listening to these two clowns.

Rating:
Summary: Self-Serving Gibberish
Review: Cynthia Davidson interviews Eisenman (her husband), the self-styled "theorist", and other pretentious colleagues about Eisenman's incomprehensibly idiotic building, The Aronoff Center. For Davidson and Eisenman, Architecture has nothing to do with designing spaces that enhance the human condition, but rather it is a substitute for the psychoanalyst's couch. And a passing glance at the Aronoff Center is all that is needed to assure you that Davidson and Eisenman both have a great deal of time due on that couch. The intellectually dysfunctional Eisenman is fond of "destabilizing", "disorienting", "disturbing" and "unbalancing" the viewer or occupant. Feeling uncomfortable in your surroundings is, for Eisenman, a quality we need more of. The uncritical Davidson soaks up this idiocy and presents it without so much as a smirk. As any student will tell you, exposure to Eisenman dulls the mind and the critical capabilities. This book (and its author/collaborators) is no more that a PR exercise for Eisenman and his amateur journalist wife. Predictably, the author comes out in favor of her husband's most absurd pronouncements. Be thankful that you don't have to sit around the dinner table listening to these two clowns.