ABSTRACT
Architecture is usually not the paradigm used by philosophers when dealing with artworks. As was the case for Kant, Ruskin and Loos among others, this probably stems from architecture’s role in commonplace life, its questionable status as a pure artwork, its position as hybrid. Unlike the Bacchic festivals or the novels and paintings of contemporary life, architecture in a sense is not merely aberration, a deviance from the everyday that we visit but from which we easily extract ourselves. Wherever architecture is it is enmeshed in forms of life rather than juxtaposed to it. Such a condition simultaneously makes resistance to the hierarchical values of architecture all the more difficult and its overcoming all the more important. Where we no longer ask for feelings of comfort and soothing ideas in other artworks, it still seems reasonable to question the need for an architecture that may leave our daily satisfactions shaken or disoriented. But there is also, I suspect, a feeling that architecture lacks a certain philosophical depth that paintings and novels do not. Some recent, important work in architecture, Eisenman’s among it, should change all that. In any case, Eisenman’s architecture is inseparable from philosophical thinking, for example, thinking about the possibilities of self.
