ABSTRACT
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, existentialist thought has centered around the anxious relationship of freedom and determination. In the primal scene of modernism—repeated by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus—the human subject, numbed by social conventions, is seized by a vertiginous realization of his existential freedom from such determinations. Modernist aesthetics has played out a mirrored theme through the concept of autonomy: the artwork that strives to be free from external determination must confront the dilemma of self-determination. In what follows I want to suggest that exactly these issues—at the level of the dwelling subject and of the architectural object—propelled the seminal first decade of Peter Eisenman’s writing and practice.
