Copout or genius?

    Since I have known about him and his mentality around design, I have always thought that Peter Eisenman’s ‘autonomous and indexical’ architecture was a copout. A copout in that only caring about the form of the building is much simpler design-wise than caring about both the final form AND its function, as well as the human conditions surrounding the project. Sometimes in architecture school I have wished that this could be a satisfactory route to a concept but all past professors have disagreed. Maybe their distain comes from their ingrained understanding of Clemson’s theories for design. They deemed this anti-functionalistic design as not complex enough. Is this true? Then how does Eisenman get away with using this for all of his projects? AND how is he deemed a great designer and scholar of architecture?

    I think that Eisenman and thus his ‘theory’ were only meant to ever be cardboard architecture. In fact, the architect was extremely pleased when a photograph of his ‘House II’ project in a French magazine was mistaken for an image of a model – the cardboard architecture that would result from his indexing.