Eisenman Architects: Selected and Current Works

by Peter Eisenman, Sanford Kwinter (Introduction), Stephen Dobney (Editor)

It is difficult to say which is the more impressive career to have generated an endlessly renewed trail of agitative hypotheses over a 30-year period, or to have eschewed nearly all the comforts of consolidation - and the inevitable complacencies - afforded by conventional, repeatable "successes" such as the production of "great" buildings or the development of a signature style. In both these respects, Peter Eisenman differs not only from other architechts of his own generation, but from nearly all other architects working today.
When Eisenman's work began in the early sixties, it was, and remains to this day, a primarily tactical its force from the outset was drafted from that of the enemy - classicism - but was also turned aggressively against it... Eisenman's task has been to develop a practice that, to borrow an expression from Foucault and Nietzsche, would come from outside... There is not now, nor has there ever been, a fixable Eisenmanian alternative architecture; tactical space after all is made up of a series of seized "occasions," so that the momentary triumphs that punctuate its unfolding campaign are never - indeed cannot be - stored. Eisenman's practice is assembled and articulated in movement and in the spirit of movement; it operates through invasion, disruption, and the release of temporarily trapped forces into free motion and recombination.

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 2001

About the author

Peter Eisenman is an American architect. Eisenman's professional work is often referred to as formalist, deconstructive, late avant-garde, late or high modernist, etc. A certain fragmenting of forms visible in some of Eisenman's projects has been identified as characteristic of an eclectic group of architects that were (self-)labeled as deconstructivists, and who were featured in an exhibition by the same name at the Museum of Modern Art. The heading also refers to the storied relationship and collaborations between Peter Eisenman and post-structuralist thinker Jacques Derrida.