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Rowe & Eisenman – Compare & Contrast

Colin Rowe, Introduction, Five Architects; 1979

…if we are here presented with what might seem to be an argument for pure passivity, with an argument that the architect should act simply as the midwife of history, then we might also recognize and entirely contrary strand of though which no less urgently clamors for attention. The idea that any repetition, any copying, and employment of a precedent or a physical model is a failure of creative acuity is one of the central intuitions of the modern movement. This is the deep seated idea that repetition establishes convention and that convention leads to callousness; and thus, almost constitutionally, modern architecture has been opposed to the dictatorship of the merely received.

Peter Eisenman, The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End, Perspecta 21; 1984

Therefore, to propose the end of the beginning and the end of the end is to propose the end of beginning and ends of value – to propose an other timeless space of invention. It is a timeless space in the present without a determining relation to an ideal future of to an idealized past. Architecture in the present is seen as a process of inventing an artificial past and a futureless present. It remembers a no-longer future.
This paper is based on three non-verifiable assumptions or values: timeless (originless, endless), architecture; non-representational (objectless) architecture; and artificial (arbitrary, reasonless) architecture.