Architecture Words 1: Supercritical ­ Peter Eisenman meets Rem Koolhaas

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Architecture Words 1

Peter Eisenman & Rem Koolhaas SUPERCRITICAL

SUPERCRITICAL PREFACE

This modest book documents a remarkable meeting of two architectural minds that came together at the AA in early 2006 for an extended public conversation. More than 35 years after first encountering one another in Manhattan at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (which Peter Eisenman had founded five years before, and which Rem Koolhaas briefly participated in while living in New York following his graduation), today these two architects remain at the forefront of architectural culture. Eisenman and Koolhaas are also the two leading proponents (in ways that are at times openly opposed to each other) of a critical, conceptual form of architectural practice – a topic this book traces through an examination of their many activities: design and building, writing and teaching, debate and provocation, exhibition and public promotion. A couple of evenings after the public conversation between Eisenman and Koolhaas, their claims were subject to further amplification, open interrogation and non-stop interpretation by two of the world's leading theorists of contemporary architecture, Jeffrey Kipnis and Robert Somol. Focusing on the disciplinary and cultural connotations and consequences of the work, Kipnis and

Peter Eisenman & Rem Koolhaas with Jeffrey Kipnis & Robert Somol

Architectural Association London


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