Peterson on Poetry & Architecture at SEGUE

Here's Tim Peterson's write-up and introduction for SEGUE's "poetry and architecture" event the weekend before last. Having attended the event myself, I was struck by how monoceptual the 2nd architect, Benjamin Aranda, seemed in comparison with Robert Kocik and Vito Acconci, whose presentations converged for me at many moments. As far as I can tell, Aranda's work abstracts (or eschews?) urgent architecture problems such as how to create facility (in Kocik's case), and how to confuse public and private spaces through built objects and environments (in Acconci's). In turn, the work is little more than decorative, if not a predictable twist on big name, big money architecture (Frank Gehry's work came to mind seeing Aranda's). Aranda, in short, cookie-cuts fancy mathematics to design furniture, sculpture, and structures. The result is something seemingly very far from problems of embodiment and (public) space that I feel architects must turn their efforts to presently, if not always. That Aranda has collaborated with the painter Matthew Ritchie is telling given Ritchie's own cookie-cutter appropriations of complex systems theory to manufacture his paintings.