Eisenman 👍

Holocaust Memorial - Peter Eisenman

                            

This is the first time I have read anything by Peter Eisenman and I have gained a deep appreciation for him that was previously prevented by the continual criticism that is poured out on architecture's bastard child. 

I was always given the impression that Eisenman was this impersonal mad man driven to split beds and serve as the cautionary tale of the architect's ego run riot. In reading his work, instead I have found a very deep humanist who mercilessly believes in the power of architecture.  

But back up a step, in an interview by him he summarizes his perspective. 

"The whole idea of my architecture is about stopping any communication and placing within architecture itself a device that causes you to react emotionally, physically, and intellectually. Without representation. My architecture means nothing."

This confirms my previous assumptions. Eisenman's cynical architecture was one of form alone; architecture is meaningless. However, in reading, "Post-Functionalism" I understand more clearly Eisenman's position. He outlines the chronology of form and function, from the humanist era, into the functionalist era (Modernism), and into the post-functionalist era where he stands. In the humanist era, form and function were equal poles. The form of buildings and structures were inspired by the proportions of the human body. In the functionalist era, form follows function. Structures have a form that is tailored to the function/ program. However, as Eisenman critiques, this function/ program comes from human needs and patterns - and so really is an extension of humanism. 

He goes on to write that this shift that occurred in modernism proved that the relationship between form and function is cultural. There is this constructed relationship that is important, but keeps both equal. Therefore, we need to evolve both form and function in unison.

So Eisenman isn't prioritizing form alone, but trying to conceive of new methods of relating the two together. Eisenman is still part of that humanist tradition and crucially trying to deepen the human experience. As he says, "being alive is being somewhere. To me the idea of architecture is to inhibit the routine nature of being, to introduce a new space and time to disrupt the routine of being."

This is further shown as he talks about the intended experience for the Holocaust memorial. 

"It is about walking in that space and you get strange physical sensations such as undulation, tilting, leaning, and you feel perplexity, isolation, disorientation; you never know where you are. It is not about “…oh, I got the meaning, I understand.” It is about not understanding the meaning. There is no iconic representation in either Santiago or Berlin. The idea is to create a particular experience in the space by being in that space. Both of these projects have strong experiential qualities of intensely vibrating spaces and they are very different from my early work, which is more conceptual."

Eisenman doesn't care what meaning you take from the stacks of stones; he wants to give you an experience and deepen your relationship to the world.

"This is what architecture does; it makes us more fully aware of being in the world both mentally and physically. We, architects do it in space and time, and this is what any art form tries to do – literature, film, painting, sculpture, poetry, music – it is about trying to make more conscious, more fully aware of being in time and space, and in the world."

----

In that same interview Eisenman said this about Bjarke Ingles,

"They are stars. The writer David Foster Wallace said, “Art must be different from entertainment.” Stars entertain; they don’t make art."

This leads me to think of hot and cool media, as talked about by Somol and Whiting. As a simplification, I feel like hot media is art, cool isn't. The street goer is more likely to call a Libeskind building, with all its ugliness and contradictions, "art" and pass over a BIG building. 

It may be that the critical approach talked about the Somol and Whiting is needed to create "art."

Somol and Whiting (and by extension Koolhaas) write about the functionalism of architecture. They adopt a hyper-functionalism that is incredibly successful. In line with this is Bjarke Ingles lecture at SXSW 2019, he talks about praising the ordinary - elevating it to make it extraordinary. A point of his success is remixing and recombining the ordinary, creating new programs and imbuing everything with meaning. This is brilliant design work. I think this is partly why we start to see Bjarke's validity start to fall apart when he presents his half-baked utopian ideals of colonies and man-made island cities. He is a brilliant designer of the ordinary.

Tafuri was too complicated to understand and so he will be a "mute object" for now. He might prefer that actually. 

Interview with Peter Eisenman: "I Am Not Convinced That I Have a Style" | ArchDaily