ABSTRACT
The early work of Peter Eisenman, another of the New York Five architects, is characterised by his use of axonometric drawing as a practical tool for design and as a theoretical instrument. Eisenman's work has many of the postmodernist concerns with the linguistic analogy in architecture, leading him to many novel uses of drawing and tightly argued assertions about the nature of architecture.
Works such as House X by Eisenman explore architecture from fundamental concepts upwards. Informed by his examinations of Terragni (2003) and other architects, Eisenman puts the axonometric drawing through its paces, designing architecture from a series of reductive ‘el/L’ shapes, rotating and transforming as a series of operations which prefigure much of today's parametric design.
This archaeology of parametricism demonstrates something about Eisenman's thinking which can be traced into his later work, achieved through computational methods rather than manually. The use of axonometric can be argued to form the foundation of this work, however, despite the apparent distance between these two geometries, it is a difference of degree rather than a difference in kind.
Eisenman uses axonometric projection to explore what architecture can be, and exploits its qualities to produce a graphic philosophy of space.
