Aldo Rossi's La Nuova Piazza, Fontivegge, Perugia, 1988

…the sad deserted wastelandish no-mans-land 1988 iconic civic center with town hall, theater, housing project, and modern piazza elevated on a parking podium by renowned Italian architect Aldo Rossi (with whom I did my thesis project at the I.U.A.V. in 1991) is what I happened upon on my way out of town today – while contemplating two shockingly out-of-touch and retrograde lectures (that really stood out in an otherwise sophisticated series of Festarch talks and conversations comfortably hosted in this lovely Umbrian hill town) by Peter Eisenman (whose only interest seems to be in making his mark – that tired old ‘architect-against-the-world’ sort of thing – complaining about sustainability, apparently resenting the pressure on architects to pay attention to the health and well-being of the people, places, animals, plants, land, air and water they impact because it prevents him from sharing his full creative genius with the world – instead of understanding the possible enrichment of his work by attention to all of that lively complexity) and his wife Cynthia Davidson (who actually said “…sustainability doesn’t need to be done, it needs to be theorized…” and “…to give in to it is to capitulate to the marketplace…” huh?), both of whom seem to be realizing that the narrow territory – namely style and theory – that their work concerned itself with during it’s formative years – is no longer enough, and now feeling left behind they seem threatened, hostile and from another time – which is especially unfortunate given the real respect that I had for Eisenman while in college, where I spent a great deal of time reading his texts, writing a paper on his work, and even making a pilgrimage to Columbus in 1989 for the opening of the Wexner Center.