Part of:

Fonds: Anyone Corporation fonds, 1990-2001

People:

Anyone Corporation (creator)
Anyone Corporation (archive creator)

Title:

Anyone Corporation fonds

Date:

1990-2001

Form:
textual records
born digital
archives

Level of archival description:
Fonds

Extent and medium:

2244 photographs
1185 files
204 audiocassettes
199 videocassettes
91 publications
86 posters
60 reprographic copies
43 floppy disks
27 slides
15 compact discs
10 books
13 textual records
8 ephemera
3 dummies
3 hard disks
1 sketch
1 print
0.46 l.m. textual records
0.1 l.m. photographic materials

Scope and content:
The Anyone Corporation fonds is comprised of textual documents, a substantial collection of over 4,300 photographs (some in files), and non-print material such as 199 video recordings, 204 audio recordings, numerous electronic documents, and a several publicity-related objects. The contents range in date from 1990-2001, with the bulk of the material falling within the years 1992-2000.

Each of the five series of the archive's inventory contains voluminous textual documents. In AP116.S1, which is concerned with administrative and financial records, the documents relate to the founding and operation of Anyone, and includes board reports, correspondence, budgets, bank statements, and tax and investment records. Other papers are concerned with funding activities such as grant applications and contacts with major supporters like the Shimizu Corporation of Japan, and Adventa in Germany. A large group of documents are related to the sales and distribution of publications. There are also personnel files which include the curriculum vitaes of a number of ANY's editorial staff.

In AP116.S2, AP116.S3, AP116.S4, general files of documents describe the planning, organizing and production of ANY's conferences, magazine and books respectively. These files include correspondence between participants and ANY directors and editors, schedules, various lists and proposals, budgets, research documents, publicity and press reviews. Documents directly concerned to editorial and publication production consist of essay papers, submitted manuscripts, transcripts of discussions and interviews, correspondence and graphics like illustrations and galley proofs. Off-the-record correspondence with participants in the form of letters, faxes, postcards, etc. is of particular interest. Also of note are a number of unsolicited manuscripts and unpublished essays - for example, an unrealized issue of Any magazine includes amongst its articles the compiled correspondence between architects J.J.P. Oud and Philip Johnson between the 1930s and 1950s.

The archive's considerable photographic material takes the form of black & white and colour prints, contact sheets, transparencies, film negatives and electronic images on computer zip disks and CD-ROMs. Taken by professionals and amateur photographers, these documents provide visual evidence of the conferences and symposium events, mostly involving individual and group portraits of the participants. Other images were utilized as illustrations for the publications, such as cartoons, diagrams, graphics, press and science photos, views of buildings and architectural drawings. In this regard there are over one thousand images collected in documentation files arranged by artists, architects, and by theme for use in the ANY magazines and journals.

The video and audio recordings in the archive are primarily of the proceedings and presentations at the Anyone conferences and In Any Event seminars. Since many of the conference videos were shot outside of North America, the tapes exist in two VHS formats, as copies in the NTSC and PAL standards. Excerpts of presentations from all the conferences exist in a set of four videocassettes called Eavesdropping on Architecture, that were displayed in conjunction with the final Anything Conference. The videos are complimented by audiocassette recordings of the same events, but there are also many audiocassettes of conducted interviews that were transcribed into ANY magazine. These recordings include sessions with philosopher Jacques Derrida (in conversation with Peter Eisenman), and architects John Hejduk (on Proust), Robert Stern (on Seaside), Frank Gehry, and Jacques Herzog, amongst others.

The archive also contains electronic files. These include computer diskettes, zip disks and CD-ROMs that can hold submitted texts, various photographic images or research information. Especially significant are three Macintosh computer hard drive cartridges which contain hundreds of Anyone files (some of which may not exist in hard copy) related to all aspects of the Corporation's activities, programs and history.

Lastly, in AP116.S5, the archive holds miscellaneous printed material related to publicity and graphic design, such as press releases, logos, posters, stationary and brochures. In this regard there are also documents relating to an article on ANY published in Lotus International magazine. Finally, various objects include conference tee-shirts, buttons and identification badges.

Reference number:

AP116

Arrangement:
The Anyone Corporation fonds is arranged into five series according to the types of activities and projects produced by the Anyone Corporation. For the most part, the documents listed in the inventory are described at the file level using the titles assigned by their Anyone creators. These include the identifying titles written on the video and audio cassettes and many of the electronic documents.

Administrative history:

The Anyone Corporation (ANY) was a non-profit organization founded in December 1990 by architect Peter Eisenman, editor Cynthia Davidson, architect Arata Isozaki, and architect-educator Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió. The aim of the Corporation was to advance the knowledge and understanding of architecture in relation to general culture, and thus stimulate a new theoretical discourse in the post-modernist, post-structuralist era at the dawn of the Third Millennium. Based in New York City, New York, ANY was planned to exist for one decade, between 1991-2001. During this time it staged ten international conferences, held public seminars, and produced a variety of publications that included conference journals, a theory-driven magazine and a series of short books on architecture.

Anyone Corporation's first Board of Directors was comprised of Peter Eisenman (president), architect Philip Johnson (vice-president), Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubio (secretary), Cynthia Davidson (treasurer), Arata Isozaki, philosopher Gianfranco Monacelli, and Jeffrey Kipnis, a professor of architecture at Ohio State University. Others who would serve on the Board included philosopher John Rajchman, and architects Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and Phyllis Lambert, who was then director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

The word "ANY" (acronym for Architecture New York) was chosen for the Corporation's name because of its meaning as "undecidability". The idea was meant to reflect the open-ended questioning of ANY's multi-disciplinary, broadly cross-cultural discourse. To ensure this approach, many nationalities and a variety of professions were invited to contribute to ANY's projects. Apart from professionals of architecture, design and planning, other disciplines represented by participants included academic criticism and theory in art, architecture, literature and culture, the sciences of physics, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, as well as the fields of philosophy, religion, law, economics, and politics.

The names and themes of the annual ANY conferences were derived from the ten compound words formed by any that are found in the English dictionary. For example, the first conference, held at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in 1991, was called Anyone, and it focused on "the individual, the author and the signature." The second was Anywhere, held the following year in Yufuin, Japan, and it examined the concept of site and locus, and so on. The other eight were Anyway, held in Barcelona, Spain (1993), Anyplace in Montreal, Canada (1994), Anywise in Seoul, Korea (1995), Anybody in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1996), Anyhow in Rotterdam, the Netherlands (1997), Anytime in Ankara, Turkey (1998), Anymore in Paris, France (1999), and lastly, Anything in New York City (2000).

The proceedings of all the conferences were recorded on video and audio tapes, and an illustrated journal of between 230-280 pages. Each journal followed a format that consisted of transcriptions of the presentation essays and panel discussions, and concluded with follow-up letters from participants sharing their thoughts on the experience. The first three journals were designed by Massimo Vignelli and published by Rizolli International. In a successful effort to improve marketing and sales, the last seven books, beginning with Anyplace, were done by New York design firm 2 X 4 and published in co-operation with MIT Press. Each of the Any conference journals were translated into a Japanese language edition about one year later.

Any magazine was launched in May 1993 and aimed to fill a niche between academic journals and architectural trade magazines. The intellectual periodical was constantly considered a financial risk as it produced so little revenue for the Corporation, yet it was also regarded as essential for raising the profile of ANY in the public eye. At first the tabloid-size magazine appeared bi-monthly, but as the decade progressed it came out less frequently. Each of the 26 published issues featured a guest editor and a selected theme. The content varied from theory to tributes to individual architects (James Stirling, Charles Gwathmey, Philip Johnson), or took their themes from the work of others (Rem Koolhaas, Tadao Ando, Colin Rowe, Buckminster Fuller). Some issues focused on architectural criticism (Writing on Architecture, How the Critic Sees, and a homage to critic / historian Manfredo Tafuri). Still others discussed concerns more directly related to architecture (Seaside and the Real World: A Debate on American Urbanism, Electrotecture: Architecture and the Electronic Future), or revolved around abstract concepts (Lightness, the Feminine in Architecture, Whiteness, Play, Public Fear, Memory). The final Any Magazine, which explored the existential conundrum of Being and Nothingness, was published in September 2000.

A number of Any magazine issues were prepared for by staging In Any Event seminars, sponsored by the Guggenheim Museum and held at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City. The only exception was the Virtual House symposium presented in Berlin in March 1997, which was sponsored by the German design company FSB and included virtual house projects commissioned from six architectural firms. These seminar events were intended to draw general attention to Anyone's activities and to increase the readership of Any magazine.

In the fall of 1995, MIT Press published the first of ANY's "Writing Architecture" series of small paperback books. These volumes of less than 200 pages were basically extended essays on architecture by new and established authors, and varied from highly theoretical (Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Numer, Money by Kojin Karatani) to poetic (Such Places as Memory: Poems 1953-1996 by John Hedjuk). Thirty books were projected at the outset, but only nine were published by the spring of 2001, with six other titles in preparation. The editorial board consisted of Cynthia Davidson, Sylvie Lavin, Robert Somol, Michael Speaks, and Sarah Whiting.

Over the course of the decade several hundred participants and contributors took part in ANY's activities and publications. To name a few (aside from those mentioned above) they included architects Jacques Herzog, Charles Jencks, Rafael Moneo, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, Robert Stern, Ben van Berkel, Henry Cobb, and Alejandro Zaera-Polo; critics Rosalind Krauss, Francesco Dal Co, Anthony Vidler, Herbert Muschamp and Alberto Pérez-Gómez; philosophers Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo; economist Akira Asada; artist David Salle, graphic artist Bruce Mau, artist-architect Melvin Charney; and fiction writer William Gibson.

Conditions governing access:

Digital material can only be accessed on-site. Please contact Reference at ref@cca.qc.ca for more information. Access by appointment only.

Immediate source of acquisition or transfer:

The Anyone Corporation fonds was purchased by the Archives Department of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in January 2001 (ARCON:2001:0011) and November 2001 (ARCON:2001:0091). The archive was purchased from the Anyone Corporation with funds from the CCA Acquisition Fund.

Custodial history:

The archives of the Anyone Corporation were purchased by the CCA and transferred in 2001.

Archivist's note:

The Anyone Corporation fonds was originally processed and described by David Rose in 2002. In 2008, the original finding aid was modified, by Vanessa Sparks, in order to conform to updated documentation procedures. A copy of the original finding aid is available in print from the CCA Collection Division. A consultation copy of the Anyone Corporation website, as it existed in 2001, is also available with the original finding aid. In 2022, the fonds was cleaned up by Nina Patterson with a focus on the audiovisual records.

Language of material:

Documents are in English, with some in French, Korean, Japanese, Turkish,

Related units of description:

Other records relating to the professional activities of Peter Eisenman can be found in the Peter Eisenman fonds (AP143) and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies fonds (AP057) in the CCA Collection.