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In March 2003, Bernard Tschumi convened forty of the world's leading architectural designers and theorists -- Elizabeth Diller, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Rem Koolhaas, Greg Lynn, Winy Maas, Thom Mayne, Ben van Berkel, Mark Wigley, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, and many others -- for a conference at Columbia University. The exceptional array was asked to predict the conversations and directions of architectural practice in the 21st century. Speakers addressed the categories of current architectural discourse -- form, aesthetics, material, detail, politics -- and questioned their future validity. Other topics included architects' obsession with the detail, the possibility of practicing a politics of material, the definition of an avant-garde urbanism, the importance of form beyond its aesthetic value, and whether architecture can directly influence the social world. The State of Architecture brings together manifestos, musings, and meditations to capture the key polemics raised by this extraordinary convocation of thinkers.

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Publishers Weekly Review

As its ambitious title suggests, this collection of some 60 essays, manifestos and ruminations covers a lot of ground, but-as is often the case with such an assemblage of voices-that ground, writing-wise, is bumpier in some areas than others. The pieces come from talks presented at a Columbia University architecture conference, and in general, the most successful ones offer concrete solutions or sum up current architectural issues. For instance, architect Robert A.M. Stern's "Urbanism Is About Human Life" is wonderfully succinct, down-to-earth and ego-free look at urban renewal ("Yes, we have junk space, but we don't need architects to theorize it"). Frank Gehry's consideration of "Architecture and Intuition" is frank and reassuring ("It's wonderful to search your psyche and comb your life for meaning-for the meaning of the universe. But you're asking more than is humanly possible of yourself"). Less successful works tend to be show-offy, or ponder more esoteric topics, such as architectural writer Sylvia Lavin's essay "How Architecture Stopped Being the 97-Pound Weakling and Became Cool," in which she posits that a "cool person can make an uncool object cool, but an uncool person may or may not be cooled up by a cool object." Editors Tschumi and Cheng don't struggle to unify the disparate voices, instead letting them stand as separate and sometime contradictory sides of architecture's ongoing debates. There's much food for thought here, but the pieces, by and large, are too brief to provide more than a snapshot of their illustrious contributors' ideas. 80 illustrations. (Mar.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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Bernard Tschumi is the former dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and the principal of Bernard Tschumi Architects in Paris and New York. He is also the author of Event Cities and Architecture and Disjunction .