In lieu of the “Architecture Sucks” t-shirt I was considering, today I wore a t-shirt that I had bought online some time ago. It’s black with white lettering, and has a silhouette of George Costanza of Seinfeld fame and some text. I don’t have an image of it, but imagine something like this:
Vandelay Industries
Latex, Architecture,
Importing & Exporting
For those of you unfamiliar with Avery Hall, our studio is on the 5th floor. The administrative offices are on the 4th floor, and the main auditorium is in the basement. The floors are connected with one very small, very slow elevator.
My classmates and I were up in studio, and around noon, began to head downstairs to the auditorium to hear Mark Wigley and Peter Eisenman give their talk. Some of us decided to grab the elevator, and we pretty much filled it up. The doors close, and the elevator begins its descent.
We stop on the 4th floor on the way down. The doors open, and none other than Mark Wigley and Peter Eisenman decide to squeeze on, and the conversation in the elevator comes to an abrupt halt. I end up standing belly-to-belly with Eisenman, with Wigley behind him, looking over his shoulder. Both of them are obviously reading my t-shirt. The elevator doors close, and we’re moving downward once again. Nobody speaks.
After a couple seconds, Eisenman simply says, “George Costanza.”
I try to smile politely. “Yep,” I manage to utter.
What follows next is about thirty seconds of awkward silence as the elevator makes its way to the basement. I’m still belly-to-belly with Eisenman, and Wigley is still looking at my t-shirt from over Eisenman’s shoulder.
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Finally the doors open, and that’s the end of the encounter. I can’t help but wonder what the conversation would have been like if I had worn my “Architecture Sucks” shirt.
As for the talk itself, all the heavy theory and discourse was a welcome change from two years of listening to my former boss yammer on and on about “strategic design” and marketing. I won’t go into detail what the talk was about (theme: corners), but I generally found that Mark Wigley was witty, engaging, and seemed to make a lot of sense, listening to Eisenman talk pretty much made me want to shoot myself in the face.
In other news, I’ve heard back from one firm I contacted in response to an ad on Archinect, and they want to interview me. Not a moment too soon, as I never cease to be amazed at how easy it is to piss away money in this city. Stay tuned.