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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 Previously unpublished material from the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.
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.
Pyrotechnic Cities
Architecture, Fire-Safety and Standardisation
Liam Ross
Mies at Home
From Am Karlsbad to the Tugendhat House
Xiangnan Xiong
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
Index 152
Figures
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:
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.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.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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