ABSTRACT
This chapter presents that what the author believe is the role of ecstasis in recent architectural practice, specifically in the work of the American architect Peter Eisenman and to show to what extent the metaphor of ventriloquism is pertinent. Peter Eisenman's architecture recognizes and reflects a paradox regarding the architectural self: that the architect creates institutions, e.g. the home, the city; but as an inventive force, the architect also must resist the very process of institutionalizing what he/she is commissioned to do. The chapter presents an architectural scenario with ingredients the author think of as ventriloqual, Eisenman's issue is one that artists often face and have faced, not only in periods of modernism where originality is stressed, but at times when expressionism is undervalued. Eisenman's work constitutes an architecture that is somehow removed from an unreinvented architectural milieu, one requiring an architect who will break with architecture's own hierarchical presuppositions.
