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Peter Eisenman’s cardboard

architecture
November 17, 2014

Frank House (House VI) | Cornwall, Connecticut | 1973 | Tape, ink, and zipatone,
20×24″ | Courtesy of Peter Eisenman Architects

In Peter Eisenman’s professional activity, architectural criticism and theory

have been integral with the production of built form. In the 1960s he
developed a theory of architecture antithetical to most modernist theory.
Initially published in a cohesive manner in Five Architects of 1972,

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Peter Eisenman's cardboard architecture - The Architectural League of... https://archleague.org/article/200-years-peter-eisenman/

Eisenman’s writing and polemical buildings have placed him in the forefront
of the architectural dialogue of the last decade.

Eisenman has developed an architectural theory that divorces the building

and its conceptualization from traditional cultural and pragmatic concerns.
He is interested in exploring the inherent nature of architecture divorced
from the specificity of program. The nature of plane, line or column, and
volume is of primary concern, as is the relationship among these elements.
This relationship is organized by a rule system, which Eisenman, to borrow
an analog from linguistic theory, has called “deep structure.” Eisenman,
profoundly influenced by linguistic theory, has vigorously maintained that
architecture is a language whose surface variations, as those in language,
are dominated by an underlying structure.

Eisenman’s explorations are dependent on 20th-century technology, in

which non-load-bearing walls free the architect from formal limitations
imposed by physical requirements. He has explained this and his consistent
use of a structural grid: “…modern technology provided architecture with a
new means for conceiving space…in a sense, space was no longer
necessarily limited or defined by structure, and this was especially true with
respect to the use of the load-bearing wall; the column became both the
primary structural and the primary formal element. With a diminishing of
these structural constants, it was possible to examine the column and the
wall in a capacity other than in the solution of pragmatic problems…Le
Corbusier’s Maison Domino was paradigmatic in this respect.”

To concentrate attention on his formal investigations, Eisenman has

adapted a revision of the International Style that he calls “cardboard
architecture.” The modernist work of the 1920s and 1930s of Le Corbusier
(1887–1965) and Giuseppe Terragni (1904–1942) have been inspirational in
the development of Eisenman’s formal vocabulary. His buildings, white or
white and gray with the addition of a limited use of primary colors more
recently, have the feeling of cardboard models. This results not only from
their color but more importantly from the visual suppression of all structural
detailing, the uniform texture of the walls, and shallow interior space.
Eisenman has written that “cardboard is connotative of less mass, less
texture, less color, and ultimately less concern for these. It is closest to the
abstract idea of plan.” It is Eisenman’s intention that the “deep structure,”
although not explicitly apparent, would be apprehended by the viewer,

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Peter Eisenman's cardboard architecture - The Architectural League of... https://archleague.org/article/200-years-peter-eisenman/

thereby intensifying the viewer’s understanding of architectural space.

Peter Eisenman’s houses are numbered consecutively to eliminate cultural

associations and stress the abstract concerns of the architect. The Frank
House, built for an architectural historian and her husband in Cornwall,
Connecticut, is House VI and was completed in 1976. Of essential
importance to Eisenman is the process by which the final form of the house
is arrived at. The building, or final design, is but a by-product of a
conceptualization that is developed in conjunction with writing and large
number of complicated drawings. His means of representation, other than
the small study sketch, is the axonometric perspective. The four
axonometrics illustrated here are part of a 15-unit sequence that explicates
the generative ideas of the house. The form of the house is organized
around two grids of unequal size formulated by a module. They are locked
together by a double cruciform defined by cross planes. The arms of the
cross are shifted from their normal configuration, resulting in the
phenomenon of “sheer.” Terms such as “sheer” or “compression” and
“tension,” also important in Eisenman’s work, are used by him as abstract
conceptualizations of statics. An overriding concern that informs the
structure is that of dialectic. The dialectic is established between such
notions as inside and outside or up and down. The latter is most explicitly
stated by the stairway situated beneath an upside-down stairway. To
emphasize this dialectic the upside-down stairway is painted the primary
color red, while the real stairway is painted its complement.

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