Peter Eisenman Concepts

From Bauhaus to Our House

by Tom Wolfe · 2 Jan 1981 · 98pp · 29,610 words

1972, a new compound, known as the Whites, or the New York Five, made its bid with a book entitled Five Architects, the five being Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, John Hejduk, Richard Meier, and Charles Gwathmey. They played Anselm or Abelard to Venturi’s Roscellinus. In their bid to appear original without

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to the 1920s and Corbu’s early phase, with R & R at Gerrit Rietveld’s. Peter Eisenman, House II. Richard Meier, Douglas House. Charles Gwathmey, Bridgehampton residence. Corbu was a pane of glass compared to, say, Peter Eisenman, an architect who ran the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, which put

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams

by Michael Pollan · 15 Jan 1997 · 317pp · 107,653 words

basic, boring necessity of keeping the rain off your client’s head. (Not that it always succeeded at that.) Architect/theorists like Robert Venturi and Peter Eisenman held the microphone, and they were arguing in all sincerity that a building was in fact no different than a poem, that the conventions of

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. Charlie had studied under a number of eminent contemporary architects—Charles Moore, at UCLA, where he went to architecture school in the late seventies; and Peter Eisenman, at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Design in New York—and his father, a former head of the architecture department at MIT, was himself

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carp, a ray, and a sea slug. Called Beached Houses, they were intended as artists’ housing in Jamaica. A prospective Tokyo office building designed by Peter Eisenman looked like a conventional glass-walled tower that had somehow been folded over and over again until it resembled an origami construction—a dizzying collage

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made, and the best ones were probably sailing over my head, since they were aimed primarily at other architects and architecture critics. I seriously doubt Peter Eisenman chuckled about origami when he presented his office building scheme to his Japanese patrons. Or that the designer of the carp, ray, and sea slug

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great stroke of luck for me, since, as a former English major, I knew slightly more about these subjects than I did about building. Take Peter Eisenman’s Tokyo office tower. What had baffled me as a building, or model, began to make a certain amount of sense once I’d read

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syllabus was not deconstruction but semiotics—which happens to be the predecessor of deconstruction in the parade of postwar continental philosophies. A quarter century before Peter Eisenman imported deconstruction to American architecture from Paris, Robert Venturi had imported semiotics, also from Paris. In Learning from Las Vegas, the immensely influential manifesto the

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might be architectural history, but it could just as easily be Boolean algebra, Chomskyan linguistics, inside jokes, conceptualism, cubism, pop culture, and, of course, deconstruction. Peter Eisenman, whose own career describes an arc passing through a succession of these isms, is largely responsible for bringing this last and supposedly most subversive intellectual

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) who appear to have done more than their fair share for the glory of contemporary architecture. Suzanne has written an illuminating book about the house, Peter Eisenman’s House VI: The Client’s Response, that details both the satisfactions and the trials of living in a work of art. The book recounts

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a language than a body part or camouflage device that, far from being arbitrary, exhibits a specific fitness to its environment. Even Robert Venturi and Peter Eisenman would grant this much to nature: Architecture’s roofs should not leak. Oh yes, and one other thing: gravity—architecture has got to stand up

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listed: one you’ve heard of, and another you probably haven’t. For example, on the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, perhaps Peter Eisenman’s most famous actually constructed building, he shares credit with an obscure local firm by the name of Richard Trott & Partners. The famous architect’s

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upon buildings and chart the rise and fall of architects’ careers. Building buildings is no longer even a prerequisite to a successful architectural career, as Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Robert Venturi, and a great many other current and former paper architects can testify. (Eisenman is probably right to suggest, as he once

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as standing up, of withstanding gravity, and of the trees that supported the roofs of our first homes on earth. It’s not uninteresting when Peter Eisenman takes such a column and suspends it from the roof of a house so that it doesn’t quite reach down to the ground, but

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as a column. It allows us to walk away from the cartoon opposition of nature and culture that has bewitched all builders of primitive huts, Peter Eisenman included. The human needs and the natural materials that go into the process of generating an architectural form are different from time to time and

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) and, with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972). For an introduction to the architecture and writing of Peter Eisenman see Re: Working Eisenman (London: Academy Editions, 1993). Be sure to read his correspondence with Jacques Derrida. You can also find his writings in almost

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place in the library as up on the roof. Here’s a partial list of my readings on roofness and architectural theory: Alexander, Christopher, and Peter Eisenman. “Contrasting Concepts of Harmony: A Debate” in Lotus International (1983). This is the text of a fascinating, and heated, public debate held at the Harvard

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: MIT Press, 1996). Frampton, Kenneth. Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). Frank, Suzanne. Peter Eisenman’s House VI: The Client’s Response (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1994). Hildebrand, Grant. The Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd

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for Venturi himself, he often seemed shocked and dismayed by some of the architecture his revolution had spawned, occasionally playing the role of Danton to Peter Eisenman’s Robespierre. “If you’re lucky,” he recently wrote, “you live long enough to see the bad results of your good ideas.” He has described

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--And Their Architects--Shape the World

by Deyan Sudjic · 27 Nov 2006 · 441pp · 135,176 words

of the seven plans to rebuild the World Trade Center, revealed in New York in the same week that the story appeared. Richard Meier and Peter Eisenman designed a tower 1,111 feet high, presumably on the basis that a mere 911 feet would have been too short to attract enough attention

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lead toy soldiers set the mood. Hitler would lead expeditions of dinner guests with flash lights across the garden of the Chancellery – occupied today by Peter Eisenman’s holocaust memorial – and through a specially built rear entrance to the studio to see it late at night. There were more detailed models of

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to the history of architecture as a reminder of his importance to the cult of fame. Frank Gehry sits on one side of Johnson, alongside Peter Eisenman. Arata Isozaki has flown in from Tokyo, Rem Koolhaas from Rotterdam and Zaha Hadid from London. Their presence seems to suggest not just a tribute

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to China. He is, however, still busy in Germany, where he worked on Leipzig’s unsuccessful bid for the 2012 Olympics, surrealistically in partnership with Peter Eisenman, architect of Berlin’s holocaust memorial. ‘What I always try to do is to find a politician who will take my plans, look at them

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millennium with Richard Meier’s Dio Padre Misericordioso jubilee church in suburban Rome, after an international competition in which other architects, including Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman, were also asked to compete, or in the monks of Novy Dvur in the Czech Republic, who commissioned John Pawson to build Eastern Europe’s

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made on a blotter. And next to it is wallpaper by William Morris. The other tradition from which the museum springs is best represented by Peter Eisenman’s prodigious City of Culture taking shape on the outskirts of the Galician city of Santiago de Compostela. An opera house, a library, a museum

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architects, deciding whether or not to take part in the Protetch show wasn’t easy either. Zaha Hadid and Will Alsop both said yes, but Peter Eisenman, the New York architect who designed Berlin’s monument to the Jewish victims of the Nazis, declined. So did Richard Meier. It was too soon

Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays

by Witold Rybczynski · 7 Sep 2015 · 342pp · 90,734 words

intricacy of the windows: there were half a dozen different shapes and sizes. The modest house was hardly in a league with Frank Gehry or Peter Eisenman, but it was busy. I realized that I had to say something more substantive, but I wasn’t sure where to start. I believe that

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Charles Moore’s weekend cottage in Orinda, California. Then there’s Richard Meier’s Smith House, Frank Gehry’s own house in Santa Monica, and Peter Eisenman’s House VI. There have been so many significant houses that it would be easy to compile a convincing history of twentieth-century architecture illustrated

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Americanness an issue in the work of what passes for the avant-garde today. Not only is the outlook of architects like Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman international, like their practices, but if deconstructivism has any roots—other, that is, than in the Euro-American world of high fashion—it’s probably

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby · 22 Nov 2013 · 165pp · 45,397 words

only with architectural theory, is rarely intended to ever be built. One of the most interesting examples to cross over from idea to reality is Peter Eisenman's famous House VI (1975), which prioritized formalist concerns over practicalities to an extreme extent. The client later wrote about the many practical problems it

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with conceptual objects and more with imaginary worlds. We will return to this subject later in chapter 5. Peter Eisenman, House VI, east facade, 1975. Photograph by Dick Frank. Photograph courtesy of Eisenman Architects. Peter Eisenman, House VI, 1975, axonometric drawings. Drawings courtesy of Eisenman Architects. COMMODIFIED IMAGINATIONS In the fields of applied arts

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(Berlin: Die Gestalten Verlag, 2007); and Gareth Williams, Telling Tales: Fantasy and Fear in Contemporary Design (London: V&A Publishing, 2009). 17. See Suzanne Frank, Peter Eisenman's House VI: The Client's Response (New York: Watson-Guptil Publications, 1994). 18. For a detailed discussion of device art see Machiko Kusahara, "Device

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

by Adam Greenfield · 29 May 2017 · 410pp · 119,823 words

,711 concrete slabs at the corner of Ebertstrasse and Hannah-Arendt-Strasse. This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, devised by architect Peter Eisenman, with early conceptual help from the great sculptor Richard Serra. Formally, the grim array is the best thing Eisenman has ever set his hand to

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

by Lizabeth Cohen · 30 Sep 2019

alternative to the much-maligned high-rise public housing. In 1973, the UDC’s own inside designers Liebman and Pangaro joined Michael Kirkland, Kenneth Frampton, Peter Eisenman, Arthur Baker, Lee Taliaferro, and Peter Wolf of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), a recently founded nonprofit organization of theoretically inclined young

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Village in Brooklyn. Here Logue is discussing a housing prototype with the UDC architects Ted Liebman (left) and Tony Pangaro (next to Logue), and with Peter Eisenman (farther right) and Kenneth Frampton (not in photo) from the nonprofit Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, contracted by the UDC to design Marcus Garvey

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(May 1974); “Scattered Site Hill Town,” PA 54, no. 5 (May 1973): 64–71. 152. Logue, interview, Steen, January 6, 1991, Boston, MA, 35–36; Peter Eisenman, conversation with Lizabeth Cohen, January 23, 2009, New Haven, CT. 153. Huxtable, “Quality Design with Amenities.” 154. Chloethiel Woodard Smith was based in Washington, DC

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Campbell, James Cannon, Carmen and Rafael Ceballo, Harry Cobb, Josephine Cohn and Preston Keusch, Stephen Coyle, Robert Dahl, Frank Del Vecchio, Stephen Diamond, Larry DiCara, Peter Eisenman, Robert Esnard, Gordon Fellman, Janet Bowler Fitzgibbons, Herbert Gans, Alexander Garvin, Robert Geddes, Herbert Gleason, Lawrence Goldman, Robert Goodman, Karolyn Gould, Harold Grabino, Linda Greenhouse

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson · 14 Sep 2020 · 470pp · 137,882 words

the concentration camps. Since 2005, the memorial has borne mute witness to anyone who wishes to come, day or night. The designer of the memorial, Peter Eisenman, a New York architect, chose not to explain the meaning of the number 2,711, or very much else about the installation. “I wanted people

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Monuments Preservation Bill,” Alabama Live, May 19, 2017, https://www.al.com/news/2017/05/house_passes_monuments_preserv.html. “I wanted people to have”: Peter Eisenman, in “How Long Does One Feel Guilty?” Der Spiegel, May 9, 2005, https://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel-interview-with-holocaust-monument-architect

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-peter-eisenman-how-long-does-one-feel-guilty-a-355252.html. This is where Hitler spent: Joachim Fest, Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the

Lonely Planet Pocket Berlin

by Lonely Planet and Andrea Schulte-Peevers · 31 Aug 2012 · 277pp · 41,815 words

trapped east of the Berlin Wall and now a symbol of reunited Germany. DAVID PEEVERS/LONELY PLANET IMAGES © Berlin Top Sights Holocaust Memorial (Click here) Peter Eisenman poignantly captures the horror of the Nazi- inflicted Jewish mass murder with this vast undulating maze of tomblike concrete plinths. PAOLO CORDELLI/LONELY PLANET IMAGES

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Germany’s central memorial to the Nazi-planned genocide during the Third Reich. For a space the size of a football field, New York architect Peter Eisenman created 2711 sarcophagi-like stelae rising up in sombre silence from undulating ground. You’re free to access this labyrinth at any point and make

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your individual journey through it. IMAGEBROKER/THOMAS FREY © Don’t Miss Field of Stelae At first, Peter Eisenman’s massive grid of concrete columns of equal size but various heights may seem austere and unemotional, but take time to feel the coolness of

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life

by Colin Ellard · 14 May 2015 · 313pp · 92,053 words

from each other, and the occasional visual penetration by the long unoccluded pathways produced a powerful set of feelings: fear, anxiety, sadness, and loneliness. What Peter Eisenman, the designer of the monument had managed to do was to build a structure that resonated with small but potent echoes of many of the