Eisenman, Peter

Bio Sketch

Peter Eisenman (b. 1932) is an American architect and architectural theorist, a central figure of the Deconstructivist turn, founder of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, editor of the critical magazine Oppositions, and author of theoretical works including House of Cards and Virtual House. In the mid-1960s he was a member of the "New York Five" (with Richard Meier, John Hejduk, Charles Gwathmey, and Michael Graves), who drew on the theory of Le Corbusier. He collaborated with Jacques Derrida and participated in the 1988 MoMA "Deconstructivist Architecture" exhibition (curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley). His built work is associated with disorienting, formally autonomous compositions that "never represent anything."

Key Works

• Cidade da Cultura de Galicia, Santiago de Compostela (2009/2011) — a monumental cultural complex whose construction was interrupted for financial reasons in 2013; selected over Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Jean Nouvel and Dominique Perrault in international competition.
• House of Cards, Virtual House — theoretical writings.
• Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies / Oppositions (editorial and institutional work).

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Unnatural Nature
• Star Architecture
• Iconic Architecture
• Architectural Object
• Authorship

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Eisenman is relevant to Geoffrey's spectacle & iconic architecture, postmodernism & critique, and authorship areas. His Cidade da Cultura exemplifies the star-architecture economy — a signature building commissioned for symbolic/iconic value whose costs ballooned while its region faced crisis (see the "Bilbao effect" and star-architecture). His stated method ("traces" of the site, "unnatural nature") and his claim that "the next big paradigm shift in architecture will be driven by economics" give a first-person counterpoint to critical and financial readings of the object, connecting Geoffrey's interests in critique, the everyday, and the financialization of architecture.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• Spain Halts Eisenman's City of Culture in Santiago
• Troubled Culture (Ulloa 2012) — austerity cuts and the fragility of the Cidade da Cultura's cultural institutions
• Changes are Coming: Interview with Peter Eisenman
• Proposta para a Cidade da Cultura
• Coda to a Career: Eisenman's City of Culture
• The Meta-Project, Eisenman, and Capital
• Compostela's City of Culture to Be Left Unfinished
• Spain's Extravagant City of Culture Opens Amid Criticism (Tremlett 2011)
• The Architecture of the City (in the Age of its Financial Reproducibility)
• Peter Eisenman's Cidade da Cultura Buzzes Back to Life
• Derrida for Architects (Coyne 2011) — addresses Eisenman's collaboration with Derrida on the Parc de la Villette project and the architectural deconstructivism movement.
• Event-space: A performance model for spatial design (Hannah 2018) — "Unfolding Events" (1992) received and historicized: "the new architectural object is an objectile because it involves 'a temporal modulation that implies a continual variation of matter'" (pp. 424, 422–427) — but "such a temporalization of space and form is not so new; it was played out by the historical and second-wave avant-garde who focused on the dynamic event, rather than the autonomous object. Eisenman's architecture of unfolding events announces a tardy embrace of the evental by architectural discourse." The chapter's note also preserves Eisenman's own frame: the shift from "placebound" mechanical-age architecture to an "evental" architecture for the mediated world — "a new type of environment, comprised of light, sound, movement, an event-structure in which architecture does not simply stand against media, but is consumed by it." See objectile, event-space.
• Topology and interiority: Folding space inside (Voordouw 2018) — the folding reception: Eisenman's original position "defined 'folding' as a process – not a product – that induced a notion of movement and continual variation" (via Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm, pp. 87–89), and he is named (with Cache and Lynn) as the mediator who "brought Deleuze's book to a broader architectural audience in the mid-1990s" through Architectural Design. Voordouw's critique measures the fold's spatial yield: on the topological surface "it gains a form but not a 'space'" — the process-folding's spatial accounting. See objectile, topology.