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Eisenman Inside Out: Selected Writings, 1963-1988
Peter Eisenman has been an innovative presence in the field of architecture and architectural theory for more than thirty years. Architect, educator, founder and director of the Institute for Architecture and Urbanism, he has given definition to the principal debates on the architecture of our past, present, and future. In this remarkable collection, nineteen of his most important essays are presented together for the first time. Generously illustrated and with a new introduction by the author, these writings assemble the ideas that both set and provoked contemporary architectural practice and theory. This collection ranges from comprehensive theoretical analyses to close readings of Eisenman's own work and that of such architects as Andrea Palladio, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling, Philip Johnson, and John Hedjuk. Providing new perspectives on these architects and on Eisenman's own methodologies, these writings present an insider's appraisal of the polemics that have defined architecture over the past half century and that continue as one of the major ongoing forces in the discourse today.
- GenresArchitecture
264 pages, Paperback
First published May 10, 2004
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About the author
Peter Eisenman
93 books51 followersPeter 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.
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January 24, 2023
Peter Eisenman set himself the goal of redefining architecture completely. In these nineteen essays from the 25 years 1963-88, with a major new introduction summarising where he had got to by that point, he suggests that whilst we must admit that modern architecture (as we knew it) is dead, this simply means we need another revolution.
Exploring a wide area ranging from classical mythology to the Renaissance, and alluding to Freud and Derrida, his investigations cover studies of Renaissance palaces, James Stirling’s 1963 Leicester Engineering Building, Philip Johnson, Aldo Rossi’s thinking about the city, Eisenman's own house projects, and many other subjects analysed with an incisiveness that refreshes and challenges.
Always polemical and contentious - in the good sense of those terms - he starts and ends with the problem of history, which he sees as central to our condition. Architectural history began (he says) when in fifteenth century Florence, Leon Battista Alberti began to apply Roman structural elements (columns and arches) on to the authentically structural built mass behind. At that point architecture became an artifice: a representation of itself. Then in the 1920s Le Corbusier and others rejected that approach, and went on to develop the pure abstract architecture of modernism. But after 1945 a rebellious younger generation - Team X, Stirling, the Smithsons, Aldo Rossi and others - started making allusions again, in their work, to historical paradigms; in “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” (1976) Colin Rowe argued that architecture could never escape from history anyway and from that point on, says Eisenman “this inability of modern architecture to realise its own utopia had become the primary condition confronting architects”.
Exploring the prospect of finding some alternative to that, Eisenman allows many arguments to overlap and intersect. Despite their complexity, his clear writing makes them easy to follow. One thematic strand explores how architects like Stirling designed by alluding to other architectures, located elsewhere in space/time, resulting in projects that “decomposed” their own antecedents. Philip Johnson is another example; his obsession with “the corner” (says Eisenman) made him a “surrogate” for Mies van der Rohe. The Smithsons, in their now sadly demolished 1972 Robin Hood Gardens housing project, took the Georgian terrace as a paradigm and “uncoupled” it.
Eisenman scolds these architects for having rebelled against modernism and for returning to an historicist attitude (albeit a new one) without ever having “fully understood what made Le Corbusier’s work truly modernist”: its existence as a pure “architecture about architecture”. And that, Eisenman contends, is what architecture needs to look at again. To do it, we should no longer apprehend architecture in terms of its graphical representations - plans, elevations, sections - or its physical components - floors, columns, and walls. Alluding to the linguistic analyses of Ferdinand de Saussure, he asserts that our fascination with components “tends to divide a conceptual spectrum in arbitrary and specific ways”. Instead, architecture must be left alone in this conceptual spectrum, at what he postulates is its pure state.
Now that we are in the digital age, he says, many ways present themselves of seeing architecture anew. The theoretical paradigms that have defined architecture until now “need to be reconsidered, in order to accommodate many possible previously untheorized and unauthorised futures, as well as many possible revisions of the past.” Out of this reconsideration, memory can “imagine and construct a future time of fantasy”. The failure of the modernist utopia is therefore not a tragedy but a liberation. It means that now we can “turn away from the traditional paradigms of architecture and attempt to describe its interior condition through a paradigm considered as outside of architecture, that is, the linguistic paradigm”.
Eisenman has set himself the task of laying bare and understanding this “interiority of architecture” , and it “remains the work of future essays”. One of its many paradoxes is that he is unable to work on it without referring to historical examples. From Giuseppe Terragni to Palladio, with Talmudic meticulousness he “decomposes” numerous examples, trying to bring out the essential elements of an authentic universal language hidden underneath. He does it by analysing the internal dissonances to be found within architectural compositions, investigating how architects tend to depart from stylistic norms and disrupt conventional modes. With an assiduousness that at times becomes fetishistic, he tries to show that there is a “base condition” underlying all architecture, whatever its location in historical time or geographical space; “an autonomy as universal as the classical or the modern - part of a different universe - a new naturalness, now in an unnatural state”.
It’s possible this particular line of inquiry may turn out to be a false hope, but Eisenman's lucid analytical method, and his fundamental optimism, have won him many followers. At some point, some of them may discover the alternative possibilities to which Eisenman alludes. His own inspiration is the great Italian historian and critic Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994) who, acknowledging the crisis of modernism, called for “a silent and outdated purity, form without utopia, a return to pure architecture, in the best cases, sublime uselessness”.
Exploring a wide area ranging from classical mythology to the Renaissance, and alluding to Freud and Derrida, his investigations cover studies of Renaissance palaces, James Stirling’s 1963 Leicester Engineering Building, Philip Johnson, Aldo Rossi’s thinking about the city, Eisenman's own house projects, and many other subjects analysed with an incisiveness that refreshes and challenges.
Always polemical and contentious - in the good sense of those terms - he starts and ends with the problem of history, which he sees as central to our condition. Architectural history began (he says) when in fifteenth century Florence, Leon Battista Alberti began to apply Roman structural elements (columns and arches) on to the authentically structural built mass behind. At that point architecture became an artifice: a representation of itself. Then in the 1920s Le Corbusier and others rejected that approach, and went on to develop the pure abstract architecture of modernism. But after 1945 a rebellious younger generation - Team X, Stirling, the Smithsons, Aldo Rossi and others - started making allusions again, in their work, to historical paradigms; in “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” (1976) Colin Rowe argued that architecture could never escape from history anyway and from that point on, says Eisenman “this inability of modern architecture to realise its own utopia had become the primary condition confronting architects”.
Exploring the prospect of finding some alternative to that, Eisenman allows many arguments to overlap and intersect. Despite their complexity, his clear writing makes them easy to follow. One thematic strand explores how architects like Stirling designed by alluding to other architectures, located elsewhere in space/time, resulting in projects that “decomposed” their own antecedents. Philip Johnson is another example; his obsession with “the corner” (says Eisenman) made him a “surrogate” for Mies van der Rohe. The Smithsons, in their now sadly demolished 1972 Robin Hood Gardens housing project, took the Georgian terrace as a paradigm and “uncoupled” it.
Eisenman scolds these architects for having rebelled against modernism and for returning to an historicist attitude (albeit a new one) without ever having “fully understood what made Le Corbusier’s work truly modernist”: its existence as a pure “architecture about architecture”. And that, Eisenman contends, is what architecture needs to look at again. To do it, we should no longer apprehend architecture in terms of its graphical representations - plans, elevations, sections - or its physical components - floors, columns, and walls. Alluding to the linguistic analyses of Ferdinand de Saussure, he asserts that our fascination with components “tends to divide a conceptual spectrum in arbitrary and specific ways”. Instead, architecture must be left alone in this conceptual spectrum, at what he postulates is its pure state.
Now that we are in the digital age, he says, many ways present themselves of seeing architecture anew. The theoretical paradigms that have defined architecture until now “need to be reconsidered, in order to accommodate many possible previously untheorized and unauthorised futures, as well as many possible revisions of the past.” Out of this reconsideration, memory can “imagine and construct a future time of fantasy”. The failure of the modernist utopia is therefore not a tragedy but a liberation. It means that now we can “turn away from the traditional paradigms of architecture and attempt to describe its interior condition through a paradigm considered as outside of architecture, that is, the linguistic paradigm”.
Eisenman has set himself the task of laying bare and understanding this “interiority of architecture” , and it “remains the work of future essays”. One of its many paradoxes is that he is unable to work on it without referring to historical examples. From Giuseppe Terragni to Palladio, with Talmudic meticulousness he “decomposes” numerous examples, trying to bring out the essential elements of an authentic universal language hidden underneath. He does it by analysing the internal dissonances to be found within architectural compositions, investigating how architects tend to depart from stylistic norms and disrupt conventional modes. With an assiduousness that at times becomes fetishistic, he tries to show that there is a “base condition” underlying all architecture, whatever its location in historical time or geographical space; “an autonomy as universal as the classical or the modern - part of a different universe - a new naturalness, now in an unnatural state”.
It’s possible this particular line of inquiry may turn out to be a false hope, but Eisenman's lucid analytical method, and his fundamental optimism, have won him many followers. At some point, some of them may discover the alternative possibilities to which Eisenman alludes. His own inspiration is the great Italian historian and critic Manfredo Tafuri (1935-1994) who, acknowledging the crisis of modernism, called for “a silent and outdated purity, form without utopia, a return to pure architecture, in the best cases, sublime uselessness”.
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