Cardboard vs. Interdisciplinarity

 Cardboard vs. Interdisciplinarity


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“Cardboard is connotative of less mass, less texture, less color, and ultimately less concern for these. It is closest to the abstract idea of plan.” - Peter Eisenman

"Cardboard is used to shift the focus from our existing conception of form in an aesthetic and function context to a consideration of form as a marking or notational system. The use of cardboard attempts to distinguish an aspect of these forms which are designed to as a signal or a message and at the same time representation of them as a message." - Peter Eisenman, Oppositions 6

"Architecture is not an isolated or autonomous medium, it is actively engaged by the social, intellectual, and visual culture which is outside the discipline and which encompasses it... it is based on a premise that architecture is inevitably involved with questions more difficult that those of form or style." - Robert Somol & Sarah Whiting, Perspecta

"Interdisciplinarity, which seeks to legitimize architecture through an external measuring stick, thereby reducing architecture to the entirely amorphous role of absorber of heterogenous life... [discipline] is not a fixed datum or entity, but rather an active organism or discursive practice, unplanned and ungovernable...unites forming a number of autonomous, but not independent domains, governed by rules, but in perpetual transformation." - Robert Somol & Sarah Whiting, Perspecta

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After reading Oppositions and Perspecta, I found that I was heavily leaning towards understanding and agreeing with the idea of interdisciplinarity and disagreeing with the notion that architecture as a discipline needs to return to autonomy and purity. The opposing viewpoints from both readings suggest that the discipline of architecture is a scale and can balance or tilt towards becoming a product of culture and can overlap and share commonalities between other disciplines, or that architecture must be separate. 

In an interview¹, Eisenman comments that he does not think about the users/viewers of his architectural projects, but instead focuses on the experiential qualities of a space. This mode of architectural design is one that I do not believe could function as a conceptual language with all the considerations and stipulations that are included in architectural projects today. 

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¹Interview with Peter Eisenman: "I Am Not Convinced That I Have a Style", https://www.archdaily.com/785334/interview-with-peter-eisenman-i-am-not-convinced-that-i-have-a-style







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