Feints

by Peter / Cassara Eisenman

Impregnated with "culture" in the broadest sense, oozing from the work of Peter Eisenman is the imposing mass of projects conducted for decades on the meaning and sense of design work. Architecture understood as History, as Philosophy, as Art, as Mathematics, as Literature; Architecture understood-as it should be-as the rigor of a discipline that intends to reappropriate its own operational spheres, delimiting with extreme exactness the bounds and possibilities of a profession that is continually measuring itself against destabilizing visual systems and technological apparatuses. In History and outside of History precisely in order to continue it, in Tradition and outside of Tradition so as not to become barren, the architecture of Peter Eisenman does not intend to offer comfort with the simple suggestion of a hard-to-define aesthetics or the illuision of an evanescent technique. Yet, paradoxically, with both. The unpredictability of his design work anchors it to the identification and clarification of his own objectives, specifying the value of the sign understood as fundamental conceptual expression and not as simple formal mystification. The validity of the formidable theoretical apparatus aiming to bring a renewed and personal linguistic system into the territories of architecture is confirmed by the comparison with an ever broader territorial system, as is testified to by the projects on a territorial scale of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial and the Cultural Center of Galicia, the most recent, and well represented in the present volume, evidence of the vitality of a design system that is continually self-renewing.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 2008