Peter Cook: enthusiasm and originality characterise architectural education at the Pratt Institute and Columbia. Enjoy.

The old charm or innuendo of 'Bon Appetit' is now replaced by something sounding more like an instruction: 'Enjoy' says the bearer of the fusion dish, seeming not to slow down in the circuit back to the kitchen. Nonchalantly, we take little notice as we continue to gaze round the restaurant checking out whether it is the place to be that night. How far we have come from the childhood wilfulness (or was it honesty), when we said, 'Don't like milk', 'Want more peas', 'Churches gloomy', 'Wood tacky' ... and then we grew up. In some parts of the world there was little chance to be architecturally fussy, since wood was all there was and you would be lucky to see milk. Elsewhere we have become nervous about liking peas because they're fattening and we have to like wood because it's more ecological/sustainable/gentle and employs more semi-trained workers--or whatever. (Even if it's often a bit tacky.)

In New York to finish off the semester at Columbia, I suitably braced myself for the role of Old European Stager who has, from time to time, expressed boredom and frustration in the face of pea-eyed digi-surfers, incanting software jargon and following the path of the algorithm with a piety uncannily similar to the religious with their catechisms. But I was surprised--it was not boring after all. OK, I had a soft landing at nearby Pratt Institute, where Bill MacDonald threatens his old school by being more-Columbia-than-Columbia (taking me back 16 years to a similar situation in Bloomsbury, London). Taking advantage of being the underdog and giving the floor to a clutch of eager-eyed but hardly famous teachers who are highly committed: urging, tweaking (and, I suspect, spending far too many hours over there in Brooklyn) towards the new architecture.

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What I began to see were bits and pieces of original, idiosyncratic and interpreted design, with chirpy, chatty kids on board; the beginnings of deformations and small-scale parti that can take the place of windows, edges, nooks, crannies. Perhaps the new architecture can chatter as well as incant. Perhaps it is nearly ready to take on the world.

Back at Columbia, I was lucky enough to sit on the crit for Hernan Diaz Alonso's studio. Here, amid a school culture that has nearly every current hero passing through its doors in any month, where the patent had been taken out on the 'paperless studio' years ago, the most diligent (and, intriguingly, the most typically American) students had electronically morphed their way in and out of an old museum building. Alonso dared them to have fun. Dared them to be meretricious, glossy, glitchy, sexy, fuzzy, buzzy. Threw a wobbly at them with a jury that included this Stager and another from Ohio--one Jeffrey Kipnis. He was full of wisecracks and anecdotes but also enough of an old pro critic to catch the tricks and inconsistencies. We had a good time--even avoiding the bait of notions such as '... to actualise the effect of the inscrutable' coming from a Harvard voice, or an impassioned cry for (I think he meant) 'Purity' from Karl Chu. In an adjoining room, his former protege Alisa Andrasek tried to interest some less metropolitan students in what must be the child of D'Arey Thompson's Growth and Form so as to weave their way up onto the surface of the oncoming Global Flood.

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Make no mistake, they are all still caught up in the heroic phase of the Movement. Some time ago we all got the point that digitalisation was more than just an issue of documentation and communication, and that the computer could generate growth, form and metamorphosis. That it could also sense nuances, phenomena, criteria--perhaps even Issues. The implication was that you just had to Immerse, treat it all ever so Seriously. As much as anything else, you had to Believe. I'm sure that there were parallel entreaties a century or so before, when plate glass offered a new world, or a century before that when the Machine took hold.

Sure as hell, these disciples are on to a far more apocryphal pursuit than the whispering brickwork boys. They're on the cusp of a set of tactics and forms that have even more potential than many of them realise. Two Venice Biennales ago (the 'rollover' one), some wrung their hands, sensing that it was a bit of a coterie event. A necessary celebration. But like all religious movements it attracts those who are attracted by the battle cry--and would have cheered Modernism, Marxism, Minimalism or whatever. The same types who will insist upon Truth, Method, Consistency.

Perhaps in Europe, London particularly, we have been kept away by such a Congregation. The repetitious and insistently black-and-white trace-outs, the landscapes of weave and waft that we see in exhibitions had not prepared me for the sheer exuberance of the New York work. 'Enjoy!' it cries out, smiling at you while you take in the first, and maybe the second mouthful.

I suspect it might also have something to do with the fact that Sulan Kolatan and Bill MacDonald and, of course, Hernan Diaz Alonso are creatively, artistically, inventively, among the best in the business. They are buzzy, jolly people who don't want to look at pious printouts either.

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