As an architect, writer, educator, and theorist, Peter Eisenman has consistently striven to reveal the critical function of architecture. His commitment to maintaining architecture as a critical practice has led him to adopt the role of architectural impresario, inciting, supporting, and publishing the research and production of subsequent generations of architects. Eisenman’s writings, most notably “Notes on Conceptual Architecture: Towards a Definition” (1971), “The Futility of Objects” (1984), and “The End of the Classical, the End of the Beginning, the End of the End” (1984), have become seminal texts within architectural theory.

Eisenman was the founder and director of the architectural think tank the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS; 1967–82). At the IAUS, Eisenman was also one of the founders and editors of Oppositions, a seminal and influential journal of architectural criticism. It was during this period as well that a 1969 CASE meeting and exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, cited Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hedjuk, and Richard Meier as “The New York Five.” The Five, also known as “the Whites” (because of their penchant for using pure white forms) shared an interest in formal abstraction.

Studying under Colin Rowe at Cambridge University, Eisenman wrote a doctoral dissertation (“The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture,” 1963) that reflects Rowe’s influence; it also reveals how early it was that Eisenman expanded formal analysis beyond the purely compositional to explore the structural possibility of architecture. He contributed to the broadening of the discipline of architecture by turning to linguistics, philosophy, and art theory; namely, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Deconstruc-tivism, and other approaches including the writings of French philosophers Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.

Between 1967 and 1980, Eisenman designed a series of houses that focused on revealing the process of performing architectural abstraction. These houses, numbered rather than named and documented with scientifically precise serial axonometrics, represented research into the generation, transformation, and decomposition of architectural form. The first four houses—House I (1967–68) in Princeton, New Jersey; House II (1969–70) in Hardwick, Vermont; House III (1969–71) in Lakeville, Connecticut; and House IV (1971, unbuilt)—examined within architecture what Noam Chomsky called “deep structure”: a self-referential language devoid of semantic content. Beginning with House VI (1975) in Cornwall, Connecticut, Eisenman moved away from the compositional, transformative formalism of the early houses in favor of what he called a “decompositional” approach, a strategy that focused more on relations and process than on the formal qualities of the final object.

On founding his practice in 1980, Eisenman turned from the domestic to the urban scale. The interest in the structure of the grid that had marked his houses was translated into a horizontal-generating device in the Cannaregio Town Square housing competition entry (1978) in Venice and the acclaimed Berlin Housing project (1982–86) in Berlin. Eisenman’s first significant public building in the United States was the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts (1983–89) at Ohio State University, which was the first project to actively engage the ground plane. The Wexner can be understood as a constructed fiction: a fragmented and reordered reconstruction of an armory tells one version of the story, whereas another version is revealed by the gridded spine, which registers the discrepancy between the campus and urban grids. The University Art Museum (1986, unbuilt) for Long Beach, California, and the Choral Works/Parc de la Villette project (1986) in Paris, designed with French philosopher Jacques Derrida, all illustrate an archaeological approach by which historic or existing forms were taken from a site and then scaled according to a fictive scenario.

If the transition from the houses to the artificial excavation projects can be understood as a move from object to site, Eisenman’s subsequent career shift represented a turn from Cartesian geometries to supple geometries. This transition, facilitated by computer-aided design, was initiated with a series of projects that engaged the Deleuzian concept of folding. In these works, most notably the Rebstock Park Master Plan (1991) in Frankfurt, Germany, attention is still paid to the site, but the design solution is one of folding the ground plane rather than extruding it. Here, the architecture and the site fold into each other, creating a continuous sequence across the site, which throws into question distinctions between horizontal and vertical. This manipulation of the existing site grew even more complex with subsequent projects, such as the Arnoff Center for Design and Art (1988–96) at the University of Cincinnati, which employed a dynamic, nonlinear mathematical operation to produce a sinuous, torqued curve that, when juxtaposed with the repeated Cartesian geometry of the existing building, creates what theorist Sanford Kwinter has referred to as a “Piranesi-effect of unforeseeable complexity” (p. 13).

Recent projects, most notably the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences (1997– present) in New York City and the Galicia City of Culture (2000–present) in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, continue this Piranesian propensity. Derived from complex computer technologies, the generated geometries are fluid and smooth, creating extremely graceful, innovative forms. Although the computer has been instrumental in aiding Eisenman’s generation of complex forms, it is even more significant for its role in shifting his intellectual focus. If the early houses sought the critical within the performance of the process, this highly complex current work cites the critical within possibilities of performance; that is, within any aspect of the work, any possibility inherent to the work. As he describes the Galicia City of Culture design, “[It] produces a new kind of center, one in which the coding of Santiago’s medieval past appears not as a form of representational nostalgia but as an active present found in a tactile, pulsating new form—a fluid shell.”

Eisenman’s work continues to challenge the limits of architectural form and the boundaries of architecture, landscape, and urbanism; meanwhile, Eisenman the impresario continues to further the intellectual project of architecture through his writings, lectures, and provocations.

SARAH WHITING

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.1 (A-F).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.

12 August 1932 Born in Newark, New Jersey, USA;

1955 received Bachelor’s degree, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York ;

1960 Master’s degree in architecture, Columbia University, New York ;

1960–1963 taught at Cambridge University, England ;

1963 M.A. and Ph.D. from Cambridge University, Cambridge, England ;

1963–67 Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey;

1967 Irwin S.Chanin Distinguished Professorship, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York City ;

1980 Established Eisenman/Robertson Architects with Jaquelin Robertson .

Bédard, Jean-François, Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978–1988, Montreal: Centre Canadien d’Architecture and New York: Rizzoli, 1994

Kwinter, Stanford, The Eisenman Wave, in Eisenman Architects Selected and Current Works. Mulgrave, Australia: Images Publishing Group, 1995

Krauss, Rosalind, “Death of a Hermeneutic Phantom: Materialisation of the Sign in the Work of Peter Eisenman,” A+U (January 1980)

Selected Publications

Houses of Cards, New York: Oxford, 1987 “Extra Edition: Peter Eisenman,” A+U (1988)

Unfolding Frankfurt, Berlin: Ernst & Sohn Verlag, 1991

Re:working Eisenman, London: Academy Editions, 1993

Eisenman Architects, Mulgrave, Australia: The Images Publishing Group, 1995

Diagram Diaries, London: Thames and Hudson, 1999

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