ABSTRACT
WHETHER ONE AGREES OR DISAGREES with what he has built and written,
the fact remains that Peter Eisenman has secured for himself an important
position in contemporary architecture. His work has opened and left behind
many formal and theoretical territories. From his engagement with the New
York Five Architects, to his recent projects, Eisenman has relentlessly and
uncompromisingly pursued the tradition of modern formalism. With its huge
investment in intellectualism, his work, ironically, does not touch on the basic
premises of the project of the historical avant-garde. Instead of challenging
institutions or wanting to integrate architecture with the life-world, Eisenman
cultivates the progressive fruits of humanism; a discourse initially formulated
by Andrea Palladio, then given a radical twist by the work of Piranesi,1 and
later institutionalized in the Neoplasticism of the De Stijl Group and the
Elementarist Constructivism of the early twentieth-century avant-garde
movements. If this is a plausible theoretical window through which to look into
Eisenman’s work, then one should also consider two other vectors of his work.
First, like Roland Barthes in Writing in Degree Zero, Eisenman has launched
