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Architectural Possibilities in the Work

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Architectural Possibilities in the
Work of Eisenman

This book examines the central decades of Peter Eisenman’s work through
a formal and thematic analysis of key architectural projects and writings,
revealing underlying characteristics and arguing for their productive conti-
nuity and transformative role.
The book explores Eisenman’s approach to architectural form generation
and thinking. It does this through a thematic and formal analysis of projects
and writings from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Following an introduc-
tory chapter addressing the theme of potentialities, the book is organised
in two parts. The first part focuses on key period writings of Eisenman,
framing the close reading around a practice of resistance, the architect’s
approach to history as analysis, and the transformative conceptualisation of
time. In the second part, the book undertakes an analysis of select projects
from the 1980s and 1990s. Three formal preoccupations and concep-
tual orientations – ground manipulations, figuration, and spatial events –
organise this part of the book. Previously unpublished material from the
Peter Eisenman fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, pro-
vides primary source material. A concluding chapter addresses Eisenman’s
teaching, its relation to his larger project, and possible legacies for educa-
tors, practitioners, scholars, and theorists.

Michael Jasper is Professor of Architecture in the Faculty of Arts and Design


at the University of Canberra. A former Visiting Scholar at Columbia Uni-
versity Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, and for-
mer Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, he is the author of
Architectural Aesthetic Speculations, and Deleuze on Art: The Problem of
Aesthetic Constructions.
Series: Research in Architecture
Routledge Research in Architecture

The Routledge Research in Architecture series provides the reader with the
latest scholarship in the field of architecture. The series publishes research
from across the globe and covers areas as diverse as architectural history
and theory, technology, digital architecture, structures, materials, details,
design, monographs of architects, interior design, and much more. By mak-
ing these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series
aims to promote quality architectural research.

Architecture of Threshold Spaces


A Critique of the Ideologies of Hyperconnectivity and Segregation in the
Socio-Political Context
Laurence Kimmel

Pyrotechnic Cities
Architecture, Fire-Safety and Standardisation
Liam Ross

Architecture and the Housing Question


Edited by Can Bilsel and Juliana Maxim

Architecture and the Housing Question


Edited by Can Bilsel and Juliana Maxim

Mies at Home
From Am Karlsbad to the Tugendhat House
Xiangnan Xiong

The Philadelphia School and the Future of Architecture


John Lobell

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.


com/Routledge-Research-in-Architecture/book-series/RRARCH
Architectural Possibilities in
the Work of Eisenman

Michael Jasper
Credit Line: Eisenman/Robertson Architects. Site plan for University
Art Museum, Long Beach, California, 1986-1988, graphite on
translucent paper, 105 × 101 cm, DR1987:0859:302. Peter Eisenman
fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 Michael Jasper
The right of Michael Jasper to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jasper, Michael (Professor of architecture), author.
Title: Architectural possibilities in the work of Eisenman /
Michael Jasper.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Research in
architecture series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022029272 (print) | LCCN 2022029273 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367181833 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032379555 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780429059964 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Eisenman, Peter, 1932---Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC NA737.E33 J37 2023 (print) | LCC NA737.E33
(ebook) | DDC 720.92--dc23/eng/20220720
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029272
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029273
ISBN: 978-0-367-18183-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-37955-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-05996-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429059964
Typeset in Sabon LT Std
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents

List of Figures vi
List of Tables ix
Acknowledgements x

Endless Possibilities 1

PART I 21

1 Practicing Resistance 23
2 History 38
3 Time When 57

PART II 73

4 Ground 75
5 Figures 95
6 Event 113

Teaching Displacement 134

Index 152
Figures

Part I Eisenman/Robertson Architects. Perspective for University


Art Museum, Long Beach, California, 1986–1988, ink
on paper, 83 × 61 cm, DR1987:0859:374. Peter Eisenman
fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture21
Part II Peter D. Eisenman, Architect. Site plan for International
Seminary of Design in the Area of Cannaregio-West, Venice,
Italy 1978-1980. DR1991:0017:050. Peter Eisenman fonds.
Canadian Centre for Architecture73
4.1 Approaches to urban planning developed during
the Cannaregio Town Square project, 1978–1980.
Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
(Peter D. Eisenman, Architect. Notes and sketches about
urban planning for International Seminary of Design in the
Area of Cannaregio-West, Venice, Italy 1978–1980, black
and pink ink on vellum paper, 42 × 29.6, DR1991:
0017:063)78
4.2 Destabilisations in Romeo and Juliet. Peter Eisenman fonds.
Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman/Robertson
Architects. Axonometric for Moving Arrows, Eros, and
Other Errors 1985, reprographic copies with coloured
adhesive, acrylic sheets, paper sheet 92 × 61 × 2 cm,
DR1994:0148:249)81
4.3 Diagrams of scaling and superpositioning in Romeo and
Juliet. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for
Architecture (Eisenman/Robertson Architects. Site plans for
Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors 1985,
reprographic copies with ink,
acrylic sheets, paper sheet, panel: 61 × 61 × 2)82
4.4 Topographic survey for University Art Museum.
Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
(Eisenman/Robertson Architects., Long Beach, California
1986-1988, 28 × 22 cm, DR1987:0859:277)85
Figures vii
4.5 Sketch plan for Monte Paschi Bank Competition.
Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
(Eisenman Architects Renato Rizzi. Plan for Monte dei Paschi
Bank International Competition for the Design of Piazza
Matteotti, Sienna, Italy circa 1988, ink on yellow paper,
61 × 76 cm, DR1999:0040:006:028)88
5.1 Manuscript sheet with notes on Tokyo Opera House
Competition. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for
Architecture (Eisenman/Robertson Architects. Sketch and
notes for Tokyo Opera House Competition, Tokyo,
Japan 1985, reprographic copy, 28 × 43.2 cm,
DR1999:0200:003)100
5.2 Sketch for Tokyo Opera House Competition.
Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
(Eisenman/Robertson Architects. Perspective for Tokyo
Opera House Competition, Tokyo, Japan 1985,
reprographic copy with pencil, 61 × 92 cm, DR1999:
0202.014)101
5.3 Site plan sketch of registrations for Banyoles Olympic Hotel.
Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
(Eisenman Architects. Sketch for Banyoles Olympic Hotel,
Banyoles, Spain 1989-1990, coloured ink on paper,
38.6 × 91.8 cm, DR1999:0045:002:029)104
5.4 Sketch section, Banyoles Olympic Hotel, indicating process
registrations. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for
Architecture (Eisenman Architects. Sketch for Banyoles
Olympic Hotel, Banyoles, Spain 1989, pencil and coloured
ink on paper, 44.7 × 91.8 cm, DR1999:0045:003.041)108
6.1 Process sketch, Atocha 123 Hotel. Peter Eisenman fonds.
Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman Architects.
Sketch perspective for Atocha 123 Hotel, Madrid, Spain
1989-1993, pencil on translucent paper, 46 × 75.5 cm,
DR1999:0053:002:001)122
6.2 Process sketch, corner detail, Atocha 123 Hotel.
Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
(Eisenman Architects. Corner detail for Atocha 123 Hotel,
Madrid, Spain 1989-1993, pencil on translucent paper,
61 × 66 cm, DR1999:0053:002:002)122
6.3 Process sketches, Yokohama International Port
Competition. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for
Architecture (Eisenman Architects. Sketches for Yokohama
International Port Terminal Design Competition, Yokohama,
Japan 1994, pencil and coloured ink on paper, 22 × 28 cm,
DR1999:0073:001:001)124
viii Figures
6.4 Process axonometric sketch, Yokohama International Port
Competition. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for
Architecture (Eisenman Architects. Axonometric for
Yokohama International Port Terminal Design Competition,
Yokohama, Japan 1994, reprographic copy with ink,
22 × 28 cm, DR1999:0073:001:010)125
6.5 Process diagram, The New National Museum of Korea.
Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
(Eisenman Architects. Isometric for The New National
Museum of Korea, Seoul, South Korea 1995, reprographic
copy, 22.8 × 32.6 cm, DR1999:0074.001.001)126
6.6 Progress presentation panel, The New National Museum
of Korea. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for
Architecture (Eisenman Architects. Plan and perspective
for The New National Museum of Korea, Seoul, South
Korea 1995, collage on translucent paper, 81.8 × 116.3 cm,
DR1999:0074:005:007)127
Tables

2.1 Comparative mapping of elements across four historical


writings52
4.1 Set out of architectural aspects examined in three projects
by Peter Eisenman: Cannaregio Town Square (Venice, 1978),
Romeo and Juliet (Verona, 1985), University Art Museum
(Long Beach, 1986)91
6.1 Aspects of event in period writing of Peter Eisenman128
6.2 Comparison of event in Atocha 123 Hotel and
Yokomana Port Competition projects by Peter Eisenman129
7.1 Matrix of terms in four of Peter Eisenman’s advanced
architecture studios 145
Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks to my students. Since 2012 in studios and advanced


seminars, they have questioned and reframed early formulations and as
a consequence added energy to the research endeavour behind, and tra-
jectory of, this book. To my colleagues both academic and professional
in Canberra and around Australia in particular whose passion for archi-
tecture has maintained the momentum. This was especially important
over 2020–2022 amid COVID-19 disruptions. To the executive staff at the
University of Canberra who encouraged the research and provided material
support at key moments including Faculty of Arts and Design Executive
Dean and Professors Lyndon Anderson, Sally Burford, and Jason Bainbridge
and Heads of School Associate Professor Andrew Mackenzie and Professor
Charles Lemckert. I benefitted from the collegial and financial support of
the University of Canberra’s Centre for Creative and Cultural Research and
acknowledge my debts.
The final stages of the book’s drafting and production were undertaken
while on sabbatical. The leave from teaching and administration respon-
sibilities and the financial support for securing image reproduction rights
in particular were invaluable. I thank the University of Canberra Offices
of the Vice Chancellor, Deputy Vice Chancellor Research and Innovation,
and Deputy Vice Chancellor Academic for their commitment to the aca-
demic mission and for supporting my sabbatical.
My thinking about Eisenman has been sharpened over the decades by
many others as is recorded in chapter bibliographies. Preliminary versions
of some material in this book were given as conference presentations and
I thank the many organising committees for the opportunity to develop,
present, and hone the in-progress ideas and to the respective peer reviewers
for their critical and thoughtful suggestions.
I benefitted from periods of archival research in 2015 and again in
2019 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montréal. The dis-
ruptions of COVID didn’t allow my return in 2021 as planned to further
push the archival research and it is due to the enthusiasm, professional
care, and efforts of CCA staff that the final selection and preparation of
Acknowledgements xi
image files was made possible. I thank all those at the CCA who provided
advice and support on the ground in Montréal and when working remotely
and acknowledge Renata Guttman, Tim Klähn, Shira Atkinson, Caroline
Dagbert, and their colleagues.
This book would not have been possible without the generous and stim-
ulating hospitality provided by many institutions over the ten years of its
gestation and I acknowledge the individuals who made those institutional
opportunities happen. My thanks to all for periods as visiting scholar
at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning &
Preservation, American Academy in Rome, and University of New South
Wales City Futures Research Centre.
I am indebted to Taylor & Francis for the enthusiasm with which the ini-
tial proposal for this project was received, the engagement from the Editor
and reviewers who make detailed suggestions that contributed to shaping
the direction of the book, and the editorial staff who have accompanied
the development and production phases over the years. My special thanks
to Editor Grace Harrison who was there at the beginning, Senior Publisher
Francesca Ford, Senior Editorial Assistant Trudy Varcianna, and Editorial
Assistants Aoife McGrath, Julia Pollacco, and Sophie Robinson.
Commissioning Editor Caroline Church and Senior Editorial Assistant
Varun Gopal at Taylor & Francis, along with their colleagues Neelu Sahu
and Nancy Rebecca, saw it through the final production stages supported by
a large team I did not meet directly but to whom I send my sincere thanks.
My warm thanks to Jodette Kotz who sustained my efforts during the
many years of academic prevarications and provocations and to whom this
book is dedicated.
Endless Possibilities

I
Something happened in the mid 1980s, during some occasion or other: not
all at once but over a period of years as Eisenman’s extraordinary House
series came to a natural resolution. This is the series running from House I
(1967) through House El Even Odd (1980) to Fin d’Ou T Hou S (1983) and
Guardiola House (1988). Or perhaps external conditions combined in ever
diverse configurations to lead or pull Eisenman towards a set of architec-
tural considerations different from those considered in the Houses.
Of the many curiosities that provoked the chapters in this book, there is
this sense that Eisenman sought in these years to consistently approach the
very conditions of architecture’s possibility. Three opening clues in support
of this observation can be claimed. Though I found the phrase late in writ-
ing this book, Sanford Kwinter articulates this idea of work on the concep-
tual grounds of the discipline. In attempting to reflect on what it is that is
going on in the completed Aronoff Center for Design and Art in Cincinnati,
Kwinter suggests that it is another instance of Eisenman working to create
‘the very possibility of architecture.’1 Kwinter goes on to elaborate on this
suggestion without substantial expansion. Kwinter does this in part by ref-
erencing an unpublished lecture by Eisenman from that same year. In this
lecture, Eisenman talks about building ‘… the possibility of building.’2
Towards the end of the period under review, and to turn to a second
clue, Eisenman provides a succinct description of this underlying ambition.
It occurs in an interview with Frédéric Levrat that appears in a special
dossier published by L’architecture d’aujourd’hui in 1992. The dossier is
illustrated by, though the text is largely without explicit reference to, period
projects including the Olympic Hotel Banyoles, the Tokyo Opera House
Competition entry, Alteka Office Building Tokyo, and a dedicated section
on the then in-progress design for the Aronoff Center.
In the interview with Levrat, Eisenman responds to a question about
how he positions his project. Eisenman states: ‘There are always architects
who are on the edge. I am trying to insert the possibility of what the edge
means: disruption, dislocation, transposition, refiguration and re-establish

DOI: 10.4324/9780429059964-1
2 Endless Possibilities
it in the center.’3 We come back in the following sections in more detail to
some of the variations and different manifestations this singular architec-
ture might take, but for the moment it is worth highlighting certain of the
terms involved as evoked or used in the interview. These include groundless
figures and what he later characterises as figure-figure urbanism as distinct
from a figure/ground urbanism. The idea of an architecture capable of hold-
ing certain terms in suspension is also evoked. This idea of a figure-figure
urbanism, for instance, occupies Eisenman over many years and returns as
an affirmation of the persistence of the notion in a 2012 presentation by the
architect at a conference delivered under the banner of resistance.4
A third clue to support the use of the lens of possibilities in approaching
Eisenman’s thinking comes in another interview. An inkling of what is at
stake in the mid 1980s can be found in an interview between Jeffrey Kipnis
and Eisenman. It is published in 1990 in an issue of A+U (Architecture
and Urbanism) devoted to recent work of the office. Alongside essays by
Tadao Ando, Kurt Forster, Ignasi de Solà-Morales, and Kipnis, the journal
issue includes material on Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus
Convention Center, Banyoles Olympic Hotel competition entry, and College
of Design Architecture Art and Planning, University of Cincinnati. In the
interview, Kipnis posits that the Wexner Center project, over the course
of the project’s transformation from competition to construction, reveals
a shift in Eisenman’s preoccupations from process to design. The former,
Kipnis argues, is aligned with the House series, the latter triggered by pro-
jects from Cannaregio Town Square (Venice, 1978) and IBA Social Housing
(Berlin, 1981–1985) onward. In response to this suggestion, Eisenman sets
out another way to frame this period. It is worth citing at length this part
of the interview and then work to unpack the various threads. In response
to Kipnis, Eisenman states:

… my work [since Berlin] has moved from process to aesthetic. At a


certain point there was a crossover from a concern with the process to
a concern with the object. The initial reason for the interest in process
was the dislocation of the creative subject. Process was a way of saying
that the tradition of the creative subject must be displaced. And so I
worked with supposedly autonomous processes. Now I am more inter-
ested in the dislocation of the architectural object. Though it is true
that my projects seem more “designed” now, it must also be said that
the process in its manifestation as text continues to play an essential
role in the work.5

Eisenman thus argues against design as the emergent aim. In its stead he
reinforces a number of tactics to maintain or open heretofore repressed
possibilities. These possibilities include a tactic of displacing the subject
and dislocating the object in favour of the process per se. The indenture of
the aesthetic is argued against. According to Eisenman, the beautiful does
Endless Possibilities 3
not cause one to think. The absence of a force causing one to pause is for
Eisenman a critical failure or at minimum a disadvantage.
Within the frame of the possible and possibilities, one can also include
reference to what Eisenman formulated at various times as an architec-
ture that renders or pushes into the realm of the non-dialectical a range of
conditions that otherwise might be considered on the side of the classical,
the modern, or the postmodern. Discussed below in relation to Eisenman’s
essay ‘The End of the Classical,’ these include uncovering other kinds of
situations that escape or abandon limits. These limits, in turn, are claimed
by Eisenman to constrain architecture’s activities and ideas. These com-
prise limits imposed by the very process of classical/modern composition
assumed to be bound to hierarchies and polarities including figure/ground
and form/function. These in turn open up a series of questions that are
approached in Eisenman’s writing, the projects of the office, and the stu-
dent work emerging out of his university teaching. The exegetical task for
the reader then becomes one of establishing the conditions of possibility of,
for example, and taking Eisenman at his word, a ‘non-dialectical relation-
ship between figure and ground, the possibility of producing groundless
figures, of spacing as opposed to forming.’6
As he notes reflecting on certain of the consequences of such a stance,
they include moving from description to creation. In this realm, it is
a move from a solely analytic to constituting what Eisenman elsewhere
calls a template of possibilities. In discussing the mechanisms explored in
Rebstockpark, for instance, Eisenman characterises the reframing as a ‘dis-
placement possibility.’7
To take another tack, Eisenman elsewhere describes his approach, or per-
haps more accurately the consequences of his approach to architecture cul-
ture, as an unveiling. This occurs in a 1997 interview. In discussion with
Alejandro Zaera-Polo and reflecting on recent work, Eisenman suggests that
his projects ‘attempt to uncover what was previously repressed in the conven-
tions of architecture…’; and a few pages later he reiterates this point, stating:
‘I do not think my projects are negative … Rather, they attempt to uncover
what is repressed by the conventions or norms at any one time.’8 This project
of revealing otherwise hidden or covered facets in turn can be claimed to lead
to an opening up the architect’s practice to different conditions.
Elsewhere, in ruminating on the twists and turns of the previous decade,
Eisenman provides another description of what is at stake. In a discussion
of the idea of anteriority, he writes: ‘Criticality evolves out of the possibility
of both repetitions, to know what has gone before, and difference, to be
able to change that history.’9 The ambition thus can also be said to track
along by working on the origin and very conditions that establish architec-
ture: conditions that may lead to change architecture’s anteriority: to open,
that is, heretofore unimagined architectural qualities.
A longer citation provides additional material to begin to suggest the rel-
evance of possibilities as an interpretive frame for these concepts touched
4 Endless Possibilities
on already including anteriority, repetition, and their differences. Eisenman
continues in this same text, picking up the charge of ‘changing that history’
which requires precisely a more complex understanding of, and capacity to
suspend, form generation decisions. If the idea of suspending form decisions
is too extreme a characterisation, we can at least situate the stance on such
decisions in the context of larger disciplinary concerns at the time. Eisenman
continues to react to the moment: ‘Modelling blobs on the computer or ran-
dom shapes by hand is flawed in that it does not take into account this ante-
riority.’ This is the necessary obligation for Eisenman of recognising and thus
potentially impacting architecture’s past. He continues: ‘What these methods
[computer generation, random hand generation] produce is a form of indi-
vidual expression which on occasion has power to move, to motivate, and
even to be critical, but which is a unique rather than a singular expression.
Individual expression may always be different but it involves no repetition.’10
This necessary repetition, in hindsight, may also be about justifying the
endless returns made in these years. To start to give some sense to this, let
us turn to Kenneth Frampton, a key period protagonist.

II Decomposition and Timelessness


In an essay published in 1982, Frampton transcribes a sentiment not only
in the air but also revealed in the work of architecture schools and on the
boards in offices at the time. This is a period that describes itself as in crisis
or at best outside the comforts of disciplinary and professional stabilities.
Ruminating on what he characterises as a lost or vitiated vitality, Frampton
arrives at a turn of phrase that resonates at this distance of some 40 years,
a brooding reflection that captures a mood of disenchantment with modern
architecture’s ability to deliver on the goods. To deliver, that is, on its social,
technological, and eschatological premises. These, in turn, gathered ideas
and devices that convention, according to one trajectory, locates in the wake
of movements such as avant-gardism, neoplasticism, and rationalism.
In developing his argument, Frampton turns to the work of Eisenman as
providing a singular response to this state of affairs, discerning the latter’s
period projects and writing a stance that is able to resist or at minimum
repel the pull of a decomposing modernity. A modernity, for a despondent
Frampton, that is literally becoming limp and in the process of turning liq-
uid. This resistance force occurs at the level of the building as well as at the
level of city ideas therein revealed. Frampton writes of paired lines accom-
panying Eisenman’s work. Not at all theoretical, for Frampton what stands
out is Eisenman’s ability to simultaneously repel ‘to an equal degree, the
deliquescence of a vulgar modernity and [at the same time] the recurrent,
naïve nostalgia’11 for a supposed ideal future.
To state differently Frampton’s suggestion, Eisenman’s project is deemed
distinctive in its capacity to deny the seduction of stable architectures in
favour of building propositions that demand multiple readings. At the
Endless Possibilities 5
same time, for Frampton, Eisenman’s work favours an equally ambiguous
urban realm, without claiming that Eisenman has an idea of the city per se,
though I’ll briefly reference later in this chapter one foray in that direction
through studio teaching in those years. Eisenman allows, that is, for the
possibility of urban scale speculations never achieving, let alone even want-
ing to imagine, the possibility of an urban totality.
Specifically referencing Eisenman’s contemporary projects and writing
at this key point of his argument, Frampton cites at length in support of
his assessments an essay of Eisenman’s from 1980 dealing with the latter’s
House XIa. Frampton here refers to Eisenman’s ‘Sandboxes: House XIa’
essay. Out of this essay, Frampton focuses on a statement of Eisenman’s
suggesting that it is no longer possible at this present time to return to a
belief in any ‘original totality’ or ‘unity.’12 The present age rather is one of
partial fragments, that is, fragments that have no trace of a beginning point
or hope of an original whole. Eisenman’s idea of partial objects continues
to accompany him for the next 20 years, finding one manifestation around
the question of the partial figure, a question returned to in Chapter 5.
Frampton finds therein ‘a kind of perpetual “emancipation of disso-
nance” executed within the fissures of history.’13 What might be seen as
another turn to aesthetic suspension, this emancipation, this freedom found
in instabilities and positive ambiguities, will a few years later see Frampton
sidling up to and siding with, Eisenman’s call for what the latter charac-
terises as a not-classical architecture. As discussed in the closing section of
this chapter, this later moment will find Eisenman and Frampton paired up
at a 1984 conference specifically around these issues.
The temperament discerned by Frampton, along with the clues proffered
above to the frame of possibilities, can serve as an introduction and working
place holder to the following reflections on concerns underlying Eisenman’s
thinking over the period in the review of the mid 1970s to mid 1990s. With
Frampton, whom one senses is particularly close to those fading lines of
early twentieth century avant-gardism, there is a palpable feeling of being
betrayed, already unmoored and awash, abandoned to the dangers opened
up in the gapping ground rent by a history no longer linear and with no
hope of retreat or recovery. Perhaps to counter this state, Frampton appeals
to Eisenman as a contemporary witness, one uniquely placed to take up a
different stance, and perhaps – returning to an underlying conjecture in
this chapter – provide elements of a response to certain perceived crises in
architecture and at the same time while equally and more essentially reveal-
ing still-to-be-realised possibilities.
Taking Frampton at his word, that Eisenman provides one way forward,
let us examine a pair of contemporary essays by Eisenman and see what
if any evidence there is of such a resistance temperament. Both published
in 1984, the essays are ‘The Futility of Objects: Decomposition and the
Processes of Difference’14 and ‘The End of the Classical: the End of the
Beginning, the End of the End,’15
6 Endless Possibilities
While different points of view could be adopted, for our purposes two
hypotheses can organise the analysis. The first hypothesis: that there are
elements in each of the essays that support Frampton’s claim to see at play
in Eisenman an architectural stance that effectively and perpetually resists
the crutch of beginnings and ends, of a logic of a before and an after as
symptoms of what Frampton calls vulgar modernity. As we’ll see, Eisenman
acknowledges the difficulty of maintaining such a stance, referring to the
tidal pull of ruptures in his own thinking and work, and for the discipline
more generally. The second hypothesis: that this stance is predicated on a
certain relationship to the past.
In order to approach these hypotheses, the following questions pro-
vide a further lens for our analysis: By what means and in what forms is
Eisenman’s thinking about architecture’s past – whether 18th-c Venetian
palazzi, Charles Berry’s 19th-c proposal for the Houses of Parliament, or
the impact of mid twentieth century existential crises precipitated by World
War II – rendered in these essays? How might such processes for interrogat-
ing works from architecture’s past, and adoption of a position of what will
be characterised as one of perpetual displacement, contribute to how one
might think about the act of architecture today?
It can be argued that Eisenman uses the phrase ‘the act of architecture’ to
signal a whole program of activity including a critical rereading of the past,
and an engagement with the ruptures that come with the different ‘sensibil-
ity’ announced in ‘The Futility of Objects.’16 This includes the realization
around 1945 of the ‘potential extinction of the entire civilisation’ by means
of nuclear conflict which for Eisenman shatters irrevocably ‘the classical
and triadic condition of past, present, and future time.’17
For Eisenman in these years, if one can claim a state of crisis, it is one
marked by ruptures: ruptures that Eisenman links to history and changing
sensibilities.18 History, he asserts, is no longer continuous. In other words,
writes Eisenman, ‘the objects and processes of the classical/modern conti-
nuity [running from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries] are no longer
sustained by the present sensibility.’19 The fiction of stable histories is dis-
rupted, and architecture is thus asked to seek out techniques appropriate to
that condition: formal-spatial devices, and stances that embrace the condi-
tions of possibility opened in those self-same ruptures. Such acts connote a
condition of impossible return, as much for what they demarcate as to what
they ‘invent.’ Turning to the art of invention is to reread Eisenman’s use of
the term: to invent a space for architecture when confronted with the end of
history. This includes hypothesising architecture as a system of differences.
This is what Eisenman and others qualify as architecture as text, as distinct
from architecture as image. 20
Different from a position that springs from a logic of moving beyond,
and thus of beginnings and ends, Eisenman offers a counter practice
outside of or different from such a beginnings-and-ends-dependent posi-
tion. This is to adopt a state of perpetual freedom characterised by what
Endless Possibilities 7
Frampton describes, as noted earlier, an ‘emancipation [generated out] of
dissonance.’21 This is a kind of freedom from those biases that Eisenman
claims create limits in a classical/modernist – and by extension postmod-
ernist – sensibility, limits that rely on a fiction of a time beyond and of a
system of differences dependent on a logic of linear time that progresses
or regresses relative to ends or beginnings. By way of difference, Eisenman
advocates in ‘The End of the Classical’ essay for a logic situated in what he
called a ‘time beyond history.’22
In order to more pointedly explore these claims, let us now look at the
two essays.

II.i Decomposition or Techniques of Form Finding


‘The Futility of Objects,’ published in Harvard Architecture Review, is cast
in the shadows of a period marked by multiple crises, or to use Eisenman’s
term as noted above, of rupture. 23 What is at work behind or underneath
the formulation of decomposition and the launch of a polemic towards a
not-classical/not-modern architecture? What characterises such an archi-
tecture and what might that say about Eisenman’s attitude towards history?
Raphael Moneo, in addition to taking up the challenge of elaborating
on Frampton’s claims reviewed at the beginning of this chapter, provides
another motivation for reading ‘The Futility of Objects.’ Moneo saw at
the time in Eisenman’s text an ‘ambitious, brilliant, attractive program.’24
The comments are made in Moneo’s chapter on Eisenman in the former’s
Theoretical Anxiety and specifically concern the notion of decomposition.
Eisenman’s text provides an account of architectural conditions giving
birth to their possibilities, staging the potential for architectural qualities
and effects little considered or realised or articulated heretofore. As an
explicit aspect of the architectural efforts under consideration, this finds
a form of expression in Eisenman’s analysis of the differences between
the floor plans of Palladio and Scamozzi. The combined consequence can
be characterised as an apparatus that permits the architect to coordinate
ensembles of formal effects into increasingly ambitious and complex texts,
manifest in the writings as well as in the drawings and models.
Henry Cobb, Chair of Architecture at the GSD in those same years
(1983–1986), in thinking about that period some two and a half decades
later described his intent to create disruptions. Perhaps that is another part
of the origin story alongside Eisenman’s own claims to disrupt, displace, and
uncouple the discipline from the fictions constraining its potential freedoms.
Under the banner of decomposition, Eisenman sets out as a mode of read-
ing the past that opens the conditions of possibility for new relationships
of objects and processes more congruent with ‘the present … sensibility.’25
Eisenman describes, to this end, the key aim of the essay as ‘an attempt to
sketch certain aspects of the negative of classical composition by decon-
structing a series of buildings which are used as heuristic approximations
8 Endless Possibilities
of [the current] sensibility.’26 Taking that statement at face value pushes one
to ask what the present sensibility looks like. This in turn leads Eisenman
to propose architectural categories that he associates with the not-classical
and describe and provide examples of architectures that manifest this or that
category. The categories are the pre-compositional, the composite, and the
extra-compositional. Within the thematic focus of this chapter, I emphasise
this latter category, that of the extra-compositional, which occupies, along
with a set of diagrammatic analyses, key parts of Eisenman’s essay.
The extra-compositional is distinguished for Eisenman by a number of
qualities. These include the following six qualities or aspects that together
can be claimed to contribute to bracketing techniques of what Moneo saw
as decomposition’s ambitious program. They also might realise Cobb’s ret-
rospectively stated ambition to support and even provoke disruptions.
The qualities of the extra-compositional include the following: (a) There
is no recourse to an originating type. See Eisenman’s reading of the plans
of Palazzo Surian and Fabrica Fino. 27 (b) There is no stable hierarchy
of formal-spatial relationships. See again his analysis of Palazzo Surian.
(c) There is no logic of fragments that might imply an ideal but absent whole
or an originary ‘completeness,’ rather there is a condition of partial frag-
ments. 28 (d) This not-classical order encourages the simply sequential (one
after the other) or successional conditions that suspend or resist progres-
sive time (see Eisenman’s analysis of the plan of Scamozzi’s Fabrica Fino
compared to Palladio’s plan for Palazzo della Torre). 29 (e) Certain archi-
tectural works are multivalent, creating fluctuations in reading of implied
and actual volume such that no single reading dominates. See, for exam-
ple, Eisenman’s reading of the north façade of Giuseppe Terragni’s Giuliani
Figerio Apartment Block and variances between planar and volumetric
qualities.30 (f) There are other qualities described by Eisenman, ones whose
interpretation cannot be reconciled by recourse to stable polarities such as
symmetry/asymmetry or plane/volume. These qualities are distinguished
by an oscillation native to the work, ones that Eisenman will later in his
career refer to as states of blurring.31
The ambition throughout the essay, to take up a more recent synthetic
phrase by Eisenman, could be claimed to ‘reawaken history.’32 It is to
reawaken architecture’s past with the intent specifically not to arrive at any
stable, decidable interpretation but instead to accompany what Eisenman
calls the act of the architect as one of perpetual resistance to temptations of
hierarchy, centrality, and closure, all with an aim to introduce instability,
multivalence, and openness.

II.ii Timeless, Objectless, Arbitrary: Conditions


of a Not-Classical Architecture
In the same year as ‘The Futility of Objects’ appears, Eisenman publishes
‘The End of the Classical’ in Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal.
The title of the essay says it all. Or does it? The subtitle does tell a bit more:
Endless Possibilities 9
‘the End of the Beginning, the End of the End.’ The resistance to what
Eisenman at the time calls centrisms preoccupies him in these years and
this essay works through a group of centrisms or fictions.
In a similar manner but different from ‘The Futility of Objects’ essay,
‘The End of the Classical’ also starts with remarks about the problem of
continuity, another sign of the predicament at hand. Writing some years
later, Jeffrey Kipnis senses Eisenman’s interest in engaging the problem of
continuity. In an interview with Eisenman published in 1990, the two dis-
cuss a range of continuities that Eisenman works to destabilise or dislocate
with the consequent outcome of opening up or revealing different archi-
tectural conditions. In discussing the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts
and Fine Arts Library, for example, Kipnis suggests Eisenman’s project has
an effect of distracting or turning away from what he calls a ‘nostalgia
of place’ such that the project opens up ‘the open-ended possibilities of
place.’33 Place, in other words, is not stable and knowable. This question of
nostalgia for place or context will come back, alongside a critical attitude
towards nostalgias of meaning and use.
Returning to ‘The End of the Classical,’ in the essay Eisenman suggests
that there are three continuities that together demarcate the state of what he
calls ‘the classical’ and that a specific stance on each in relation to thinking
architecture differently needs to be adopted. By the classical, he refers to an
abstract system of relations in place since the sixteenth century and demar-
cated by certain continuities or fictions. According to Eisenman, the three
fictions are representation, reason, and history. He further characterises the
classical as that which is distinguished by several conditions, including a
logic of origins, of ends, and ‘the process of composition’ itself.34
Eisenman then goes on to refer to the qualities that might distinguish
what he calls a ‘not-classical’ architecture. The dialectic being staged calls
for a temperament different from a succession of styles such as ‘classicism,
neoclassicism, romanticism, modernism, postmodernism.’35 An underlying
proposition is that beyond stylistic differences, one is better off thinking
about architectural culture as ‘a system of relations’ that are beyond style.
For the purposes of our focus on possibilities, key aspects of a not-
classical architecture can be identified. Such factors include the following:
(a) Modification replaces composition and transformation.36 (b) Invention
of a ‘non-dialectical, non-directional, non-goal oriented process’ such that
architectural form is imagined such that it is not ‘a strictly practical device’
but by some means is itself a place of invention. (c) The architect-historian is
positioned to read the architectural object as text.37 To frame the work dif-
ferently, in this essay Eisenman proposes to conceptualise as well as set out
markers for work on ‘the act of architecture’ per se. Within the act of archi-
tecture, he continues: ‘Architecture becomes text rather than object when
it is conceived and presented as a system of differences rather than as an
image or a dialectical presence.’38 (d) Finally, Eisenman claims the purpose
of the ‘Futility of Objects’ essay includes transposing a number of ideas –
graft, motivation, decomposition – ‘from a purely analytic framework to
10 Endless Possibilities
a program for work.’39 This is a further demonstration of an appeal to a
whole program of work, the underlying plane of work on architecture’s
conditions of possibility.
Eisenman concludes ‘The End of the Classical’ by suggesting that the
architect’s aim is to invent the conditions for a perpetual present, one with-
out obligation or burden towards either an ‘idealised past’ or maintaining
endless naïve hope in a never-to-arrive future. In this, Eisenman falls into
Frampton’s positive trap of resisting repeating what the latter identified as
that naïve nostalgia as discussed earlier. In nostalgia’s place, Eisenman’s
project aims to open what he characterises as ‘an other “timeless” space
of invention.’40 The space of invention to be opened is one that contains
a relation to certain past architectures. Needing to find forms and spaces,
however, calls up the problem of design technique. In an essay discussed
below, Eisenman suggests a not-classical architecture as one that no longer
manifests history, reason, or the present/the contemporary and rather may
appropriately be described as an ‘architecture as is.’ I return to this below.
From a certain point of view, then, Eisenman’s position is radically
opposed to ‘the ideology of the zeitgeist.’41 In that light, his position adds a
terrible burden on the architect that is also a terrible freedom: the luxury of
believing one is released from the past as well as released from the compact
of a future time. For Eisenman, the classical, modern, and postmodern
alike are ‘trapped in the illusion of the eternity of their own time.’42
Eisenman’s attitude, whether leading or following Frampton, is exactly
one of resistance to the ‘illusion’ of being trapped in one’s own time. In this
regard, ‘The Futility of Objects’ essay can also be claimed to perform ulti-
mately a kind of work on ‘the ideology of the zeitgeist.’ From this point of
view, and to return to Frampton’s contemporaneous sense, Eisenman pro-
vides a way to keep things open endlessly, witnessing events as they unfolded.

II.iii
‘I have had trouble coming to terms with writing about Eisenman’s work.’
Thus begins an essay by Robin Evans which appeared in print shortly after
a 1985 exhibition on Eisenman’s Fin d’Ou T Hou S at the Architectural
Association.43 A rare secondary source on the two essays touched on above,
it is appropriate to refer to Evans as a way into some final observations
before returning to the hypotheses that opened this chapter.
Evans is not complimentary, to say the least, at least as regards the object
of the exhibition. Evans describes the Fin d’Ou T Hou S project as ‘dis-
appointing.’44 His disappointment resides initially around the apparent
exhaustion of the techniques, or perhaps positive fulfilment of the ideas
trialled in the Houses. Evans briefly discusses ‘The Futility of Objects’
and ‘The End of the Classical’ essays in getting there, without however
expanding on their impact or reach.45 In his comments on the two essays,
he supports a primary interpretation that sees in the two Eisenman essays
Endless Possibilities 11
evidence of a singular stance. Both essays, writes Evans, ‘involve the con-
struction and maintenance of positions, the determining of a stance.’46
In this way, the essay provides further justification to a reading of Eisenman
in these years as all about positioning, opening, and catalysing. In this sense,
given the extent and depth of that moment of ruptures, a larger study should
necessarily reveal additional lines of influence and attraction to the theme of
possibilities. Three lines stand out and concern relationships to Eisenman’s
teaching, to period work of his office, and to Aldo Rossi.
As regards the relationship to teaching, while Eisenman is writing and
publishing the ‘Decomposition’ article, he is in the middle of a three-year
visiting professorship from 1983 to 1985 at Harvard’s Graduate School of
Design.47 Some student work arising out of period studios is the object of a
public exhibition and included in a monograph. Is there evidence of a pre-
occupation with possibilities in the teaching materials and student work?
These questions are returned to in the closing chapter of this book.
As regards the relationship to the office, while the two essays that have
been the target of reflections in his chapter are under development and even-
tual publication, a number of projects are in parallel underway in the office.
These include IBA Social Housing (Berlin, 1981–1985), Wexner Center for
the Visual Arts and Fine Arts Library (Columbus, 1983–1989), Fin d’Ou T
Hou S (1983), and Romeo and Juliet (Verona, 1984–1985). Is there evidence
of Eisenman’s conceptual preoccupations on display in period projects, com-
pleted variously by Eisenman/Robertson or Eisenman Architects?
To start to respond to the question, two projects could be examined to see
if there is any relation – complimentary, antagonistic, neutral - to the preoc-
cupations discussed above. Tokyo Opera House and Fin D’Ou T Hou S in
their claimed resistance to stabilities might lead this inquiry: the former via
its deployment of scaling and tracing as form-space generation techniques
and the latter via a further variation of the cube investigations. A number
of factors that would inform a review include the following: (a) a consider-
ation of Eisenman’s use of partial figures; (b) the emphatic or unapologetic
embrace of discontinuities. Is that what he was thinking in ‘The End of the
Classical’ essay by the term ‘arbitrary’?48 On this factor, Eisenman puts on
notice interpretive responses that might look to turn to the comfort of the
evocation of an architecture with qualities of timelessness (without ends or
beginnings), one that is non-representational (objects are futile) and artifi-
cial. (c) Evans provides a clue to all this. In his investigation of Fin d’Ou T
Hou S, Evans believes he finds evidence that Eisenman has insinuated ideas
of movement ‘into the speechless immobility of the object … [and that such
ideas of movement] give it an unworldly animation that takes the place of
the meaning he [Eisenman] made such efforts to evict all those years ago.’49
The suggestion that animation supplants meaning is only one of several
ideas worth tracking here.
Finally, as regards the relationship to Aldo Rossi, evidence both circum-
stantial and direct suggests it is appropriate to explore Eisenman’s relation
12 Endless Possibilities
to Rossi to further understand what is at stake in framing the analysis
in terms of the trope of possibilities. In these same years, for example,
Eisenman publishes his Editor’s Introduction to the English language ver-
sion of Rossi’s, The Architecture of the City. Under the title ‘The Houses of
Memory: The Text of Analogue,’ Eisenman’s essay is at least on the surface
worth a close reading in its own right.50 Topics fall more on the side of the
autobiographical, of temperament and sensibility, and of the architect-
historian’s stance than on the side of the project. One should interrogate
the nature of the influence and/or impact of Rossi on Eisenman at this
moment of swerves in his office and his teaching.

II.iv
To wrap this section up, let’s consider another episode in that eventful year.
It is still 1984 and Ricardo Bofill, Eisenman, Frampton, and Edward Jones
are brought together at a conference in Canada. The conference is Banff
Session ‘84, a meeting that itself sought to confront different positions
to see what might be created out of their coming together. In addition to
separate presentations, an abbreviated transcript of discussions between
the four along with audience comments is published as ‘The Transcripts.’
Echoing sentiments Frampton already made in 1982 referenced at the open-
ing of this chapter, in ‘The Transcripts’ Frampton refers to the time as ‘a
dark period’ with specific reference to the shadows cast in the prospect of
nuclear conflict. Describing his own mood as ‘pessimistic,’ Frampton states
that what he thinks is needed in such a context ‘is to create sensibility and
strong nerves [in order] to continue with the possibility of cultivating the
species [referring here to the profession of architecture] under very adverse
conditions.’51 If we take this seriously, Frampton ties his hope on someone
with a specific sensibility and nerve.
Frampton goes on to articulate a difference which might be useful for
providing another point of clarification to close off these meditations.
While discussing the ‘Ohio State building’ – Eisenman’s office has recently
been announced as the 1983 competition winners for what will become the
Wexner Center – Frampton states: ‘I often feel that one of the differences
that divides Peter and myself is the degree to which I am concerned or
I have become more concerned with the capacity of certain architects to
build in a significant way, whereas Peter is more concerned with the con-
ceptual ground of the act [of the architect] in the first place.’52
Accepting Frampton’s claim that Eisenman’s contribution is at the level
of conceptual grounds, the architect’s stance rendered in ‘The Futility of
Objects’ and ‘The End of the Classical’ essays might be heralded as con-
taining a program of endless possibilities. To call out Eisenman’s position
as demonstrating ‘strong nerves’ and sufficiently focused on the side of con-
ceptual grounds is perhaps a not unreasonable place to position oneself in
times of rupture.
Endless Possibilities 13
That this program is marked by a desirable or at minimum intentional
indeterminacy is provisionally found in at least two planes of activity that
correspond to the key terms that can be taken as abbreviations of the for-
mal and theoretical preoccupations in the two essays: decomposition, time-
lessness. On the one hand, it is about a plane of form generation or space
discovery; on the other hand, it concerns a plane that functions to position
one’s thinking outside of, and different to, ideas of beginnings and ends,
outside and different from time as continuous. The one can be claimed to
be revealed through what Eisenman called on as an open process of decom-
position. The other plane might then be located through a temperament
that gladly embraces constant imbalance, disruption, and dislocation given
the rupture of history. This other plane of activity might be rendered by a
state of perpetual resistance that is intended to maintain a ‘timeless’ space
of invention or discovery, one that requires a radical engagement with the
present. This is to contribute to opening up the conditions of possibility
for architecture’s capacity to resist that state of dissipation that so shook
Frampton in 1982: a capacity which favours the multivalent, the blurred,
the positively ambivalent. Together, these work to repel the many nostal-
gias Frampton sets up, including nostalgia for meaning, for a place, and his
plea to Eisenman to stand as a counter witness.
In ‘The Transcripts,’ the following is attributed to Eisenman as a sum-
mary of a not-classical architecture and can serve appropriately as the last
word in this section. Eisenman states: ‘It is no longer a certification of
experience, a simulation of history, reason or reality in the present. Instead,
it [a not-classical architecture] may more appropriately be described as an
architecture as is - … a representation of itself… [an] architecture as a pro-
cess of inventing an artificial past and futureless present.’53
At that moment in the mid 1980s, and perhaps still today, Eisenman’s
activity can be claimed to provide one version of a practice of resistance,
a practice capable of repelling architecture’s vulgar capacity to imagine
something like a non-linear time, or a critique of its inability to imagine
something different from a linear time. Instead, we are left with an insistent
plea for the present, and an architecture as is with all its possibilities, a rare
and perhaps one of the few viable acts of architecture that remain. This
idea of a practice of resistance is further considered in Chapter 1.

III The Paradox of Continuity54

III.i
Before moving to some closing observations and then to a description of what
follows in the remainder of the book, we turn to Enric Miralles. In a kind of
prose poem reflection published in 1997, Miralles Eisenman’s key contribu-
tion to the discipline of architecture is the latter’s ‘search for the place where
his works are possible.’55 By this qualification, one senses that for Miralles,
14 Endless Possibilities
Eisenman is enamoured not with appearance and image but rather with ‘the
project that makes them appear.’56 Thus, one task is to respect the singularity
or logic of each text and each project in order to begin to understand the
aspects of the logics that contribute to their appearance.
There is no paradox in Eisenman’s head-on take up of the topic of con-
tinuity in the mid 1980s. It is a premonition of things to come: of shifts in
focus and interest.
In part, the foregoing attempts to contribute to revealing certain ideas
and architectural devices that may be claimed to resist ‘a metaphysic of
embodiment at any cost,’ to reference a phrase of Jeffrey Kipnis.57 Such an
ambition is made in order to be in a position to found a counter position.
This counter position is intended to at least in spirit find or found a plane
where an other architecture is possible. This is perhaps an aspect of the love
that Miralles describes.
Kipnis’ plea to resist a metaphysic of embodiment, to return to our ear-
lier appraisal, appears in an essay that considers the consequence of certain
actions of Eisenman as distinct from other speculative architectural prac-
tices. In this optic, the task is to isolate any number of architectural effects,
sensitive to their freedom from an outside narrative of ends and beginnings.
The set of actions released in the writings, lectures, drawings, models, built
objects, and settings together create a momentum that contributes to (re)
constituting lines of force. These lines of force are so conceived and con-
stituted that architectural matters can be allowed to move in unknown
directions in a motion situated in the wake of other recognisable responses.
This is a motion that at the same time opens up heretofore unknown states.
This interpretation accepts the unconsolidated swirl of ‘agitative hypoth-
eses’ that the following chapters touch on. It is to Kwinter that one owes
this qualification of the Eisenmanian project, a project that sees Kwinter in
a retrospective glance back at the first 30 years of Eisenman’s production
as if from no distance at all.58

III.ii
This chapter examines the specific sensibility at work and the utility
ascribed to, and deployed towards, specific instances of what Eisenman
calls in ‘The Futility of Objects’ an extra compositional approach, one dif-
ferent from approaches aligned with classicism and modernism. The terms
decomposition and timeless architecture provide a shorthand for mapping
the thinking at work and may prove of resonance in considering the mate-
rials in the subsequent chapters.
A constant effort is made when considering the writing and design pro-
jects of the period to identify and follow shifts in attention, all the while
acknowledging they won’t be tied to a single trajectory but many. Such
shifts, or swerves in focus, in turn can be claimed to result in redirections
in architectural energies, assuming such redirections spring from or be led
Endless Possibilities 15
by pivots in attention. Alternatively, a change in space generation strategies
or design techniques could be equally claimed to be influential in shaping
the object of focus. These in turn can be said to delimit the potential impact
on practice, on theory, and on education. The various chapters that follow
then can be said to touch on one or more of these trajectories.
This book attempts to illuminate and illustrate conceptual and formal
activities on display in, and at work through, Eisenman’s writing and pro-
jects between 1975 and 1995. Some reference is made that said to materi-
als both primary and secondary outside these neat chronological limits.
In Chapter 3, for example, some of the material prepared for the Anytime
conference (held 1997, published 1998) is used. The closing chapter, a sort
of afterword which considers aspects of Eisenman’s studio teaching, exam-
ines materials from the early 2010s.
In terms of structure, following this opening chapter that addresses the
broad theme of possibilities, the book is organised into two main parts.
The first examines a limited range of thematic frames – resistance, history,
time – in a focused look at the writings of Eisenman from the period and
secondary commentary. This first part of the book begins with a chapter
that identifies early concerns, from Eisenman’s dissertation to the House
series of projects read through the notion of resistance. Then there is an
examination of the architectural thinking of Eisenman with an analysis in
the following chapters of two key concerns that occupied him in the mid-
dle period (1980s, 1990s): the idea and practice of history as analysis; and
the question of architecture’s relation to time rendered through a series of
notions including presence, absence, figure and ground, the interstitial, and
partial figure. An overarching trope of temporality specific to the modern-
ist project is argued to describe the period.
The second part of the book contains three chapters organised chronologi-
cally according to major thematic concerns and formal investigations found
in Eisenman’s work from the 1980s and 1990s. The chapters individually
and together propose to amplify the arguments set out in Part I and exam-
ine projects that cross parallel preoccupations clustered around the terms
ground, figure, and event. A final chapter considers aspects of Eisenman’s
studio teaching and a sensibility that favours positive displacement.
Individual chapters in the online version of the book open with an
abstract to aid readers in identifying specific themes and references. A bib-
liography is provided at the end of each chapter in a similar spirit of sup-
porting focused reading around areas of specific interest.

Notes
1 Sandford Kwinter, “Can One Go Beyond Piranesi? (Liner Notes for a Build-
ing Revisited),” in Twelve Authors in Search of a Building. The Aronoff
Center for Design and Art at the University of Cincinnati, ed. Cynthia D
Davidson (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1996), 155.
16 Endless Possibilities
2 Peter Eisenman, a lecture at Rice University in February 1996 cited by Kwin-
ter, “Can One Go Beyond Piranesi?,” 156.
3 Peter Eisenman, “Entretien: Du processus à la presence [Interview: from pro-
cess to presence],” with Frédéric Levrat, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui 279
(February 1992): 105.
4 For a reference to figure figure urbanism, see Eisenman’s contribution to the 2012
symposium held at the Princeton School of Architecture on 9 November 2012.
A video recording of the day’s events can be found at: accessed 06-08-2021,
https://vimeo.com/channels/petereisenmansymposium/videos. A reference to
the ambition to contribute to a figure figure urbanism can be found in Part 1
of 4 vimeo recordings, about an hour into the session recording.
5 Peter Eisenman and Jeffrey Kipnis, “Interview: Peter Eisenman with Jeff
Kipnis”, A+U (Architecture and Urbanism) 232 (January 1990): 173.
6 Peter Eisenman, “A Conversation with Peter Eisenman,” with Alejandro
Zaera-Polo, El Croquis Peter Eisenman 1990-1997 83 (1997): 20.
7 Peter Eisenman, “Unfolding Events. Frankfurt Rebstockpark and the Pos-
sibility of a New Urbanism,” in Written into the Void: Selected Writings,
1990-2004 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 15.
8 Eisenman, “A Conversation with Peter Eisenman,” 9, 15.
9 Peter Eisenman, “Diagrams of Anteriority,” in Diagram Diaries (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1999), 37.
10 Eisenman, “Diagrams of Anteriority,” 37.
11 Kenneth Frampton, “Formation and Transformation,” in De Stijl: 1917-1931,
Visions of Utopia, ed. Mildred Friedman (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982), 120.
Cambridge Dictionary provides the following definition for deliques-
cence: noun. 1. the process of becoming liquid as a result of absorb-
ing moisture from the air; 2. The process of melting or turning liquid.
Accessed 02-07-2021, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/
deliquescence
12 Peter Eisenman, “Sandboxes: House XIa,” A+U (Architecture and Urban-
ism): Special Issue Peter Eisenman 112 (January 1980): 223.
13 Frampton, “Formation and Transformation,” 123.
14 Peter Eisenman, “The Futility of Objects: Decomposition and the Processes
of Difference,” Harvard Architecture Review, no. 3 (Winter 1984). The essay
is reprised in Peter Eisenman, Inside Out Selected Writings 1964-1988 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 169–187. The original version published
in Harvard Architecture Review is referenced in these notes.
15 Peter Eisenman, “The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the
End of the End,” Perspecta. The Yale Architectural Journal, no. 21 (1984).
The essay is reprinted in a slightly different format and without the origi-
nal illustrations in Peter Eisenman, Inside Out Selected Writings 1964-1988
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 152–168. The original version
published in Perspecta is referenced in these notes.
16 Eisenman, “The Futility of Objects,” 65.
17 Eisenman, “The Futility of Objects,” 65, 66.
18 Eisenman, “The Futility of Objects,” see page 81, note 8 for a discussion
of a rupture in sensibility that occurred relative to the presumed continu-
ity embracing classicism and modernism from the sixteenth to the twentieth
century.
19 Eisenman, “The Futility of Objects,” 67.
20 A different study should track the notion of text in Eisenman’s writing in
these years.
21 Frampton, “Formation and Transformation,” 123.
22 Peter Eisenman, “End of the Classical,” 169.
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