From Formalism to Weak Form: The Architecture and Philosophy of Peter Eisenman

Stefano Corbo

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317132301
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Architektur
• Thema: Architektur Essays & Monographien

Peter Eisenman is one of the most controversial protagonists of the architectural scene, who is known as much for his theoretical essays as he is for his architecture. While much has been written about his built works and his philosophies, most books focus on one or the other aspect. By structuring this volume around the concept of form, Stefano Corbo links together Eisenman's architecture with his theory. From Formalism to Weak Form: The Architecture and Philosophy of Peter Eisenman argues that form is the sphere of mediation between our body, our inner world and the exterior world and, as such, it enables connections to be made between philosophy and architecture. From the start of his career on, Eisenman has been deeply interested in the problem of form in architecture and has constantly challenged the classical concept of it. For him, form is not simply a cognitive tool that determines a physical structure, which discriminates all that is active from what is passive, what is inside from what is outside. He has always tried to connect his own work with the cultural manifestations of the time: firstly under the influence of Colin Rowe and his formalist studies; secondly, by re-interpreting Chomsky's linguistic theories; in the 80's, by collaborating with Derrida and his de-constructivist approach; more recently, by discovering Henri Bergson's idea of Time. These different moments underline different phases, different projects, different programmatic manifestos; and above all, an evolving notion of form. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach based on the intersections between architecture and philosophy, this book investigates all these definitions and, in doing so, provides new insights into and a deeper understanding of the complexity of Eisenman's work.

1

Basis

Colin Rowe taught me how to see what was not present in a building. Rowe did not want me to describe what I could actually see. Rather, Rowe wanted me to see what ideas were implied by what was physically present.¹

Peter Eisenman

Peter Eisenman’s first contact with the Formal Basis of architecture dates to the summer of 1961, when Professor Colin Rowe led his students on a Grand Tour through Europe. Eisenman, a student based in Cambridge, had the chance to encounter for the first time the work of Giuseppe Terragni in Como, and Andrea Palladio in Vicenza.

Rowe and Eisenman visited the Netherlands, France, Germany and Switzerland. But in Italy, Palladio and Vignola offered Rowe the occasion to focus on the kind of architectural analysis he was developing at that time, clearly influenced by Rudolf Wittkower’s approach, and based on proportional systems and diagrammatic schemes.

By applying Wittkower’s work to modern architecture, Colin Rowe became one of the most influential teachers of the 1960s, and his formal studies influenced an entire generation of architects. Actually, Rowe’s strategy aimed to compare Vignola with the recent American skyscrapers, or Palladio with Le Corbusier, according to a vision of history based on continuity. His analyses were liberated from any consideration about structure, function, or political context: what made these comparisons possible was that Rowe was just interested in formal configurations. Just by superposition, Rowe compared, for example, the plan of Palladio’s Malcontenta with that of Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein.

The young Eisenman was interested in this kind of approach, but at the same time felt the necessity of overcoming Rowe’s method. In 1961, admiration for Terragni and his geometrical patterns encouraged him to work on a systematic analysis of modern architecture, especially the 1930s Italian avant-garde. Whereas Rowe preferred two-dimensional representations for his research, Eisenman began to study and de-compose some modernist projects through the use of axonometrics, as they permitted him to describe the articulation of the internal mechanisms that compose architecture. Gradually Eisenman displaced his axonometric representations from the analysis to the design of his first projects. At the same time, for Eisenman the architecture of Terragni was capable of being continuously transformed thanks to many possible displacements: a finite original scheme can produce infinite configurations.

So, Casa del Fascio (and then Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino) became for Eisenman a constant reference for his first works. The Como project, in fact, contains in its interior all the latent transformations it could achieve: its apparently classical configuration is totally contaminated by irregularities, incomplete symmetries and inverse correspondences. If traditional architecture could be understood as a sequence of homogeneous elements, the architecture of Terragni represented a turning point, because his work was readable as a series of incoherent fragments that questioned the millenary relationship between object and subject: instead of being a direct and unidirectional reading, the experience of the subject became disorienting, dispersive, and most of all, active. Through decomposition, Eisenman turned architecture inside out, trying to analyse obsessively every piece of the compositive apparatus, in order to discover the deep structure that had generated modernism (even though he had not yet discovered Chomsky’s generative grammar). Against any figurative or representative temptation, Eisenman found in geometry an alternative to the image. Like his mentor Colin Rowe, Eisenman still worked in a Cartesian world, an abstract set of coordinates dominated by the idea of the grid. Only in the 1980s would he begin to explore the possibility of non-Euclidean geometries for his projects. Through the exploration of discontinuities and displacements, Eisenman built his own methodology. The fascination for Terragni became his doctoral thesis (1963), and at the same time influenced his first projects, such as the House Series.

In 2003, with the book Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critique, Eisenman updated his studies on the Italian architect, by introducing his idea of architectural text. Once again, Eisenman focused on both Casa del Fascio and Casa Giuliani Frigerio. His analytical descriptions were aimed only partially at describing the processuality of these projects: Eisenman also wanted to shift his investigations from the category of formal to textual. While the formal describes architecture in terms of its internal logic (or deep structure), without any reference to aesthetics, meaning or function, the term textual, derived from Derrida’s Of Grammatology, suggests that a text is not a linear narrative, but is discontinuous and multi-directional. Architecture is not formulaic and results from varying and unpredictable forces. Casa Giuliani Frigerio, for example, is now defined as an architecture that is not just the result of a coherent and linear process, begun with a simple geometric scheme; on the contrary, the project is characterized by a kind of process of decomposition that generates instability and asymmetry. So it is not possible to apply to Casa Giuliani Frigerio a unique reading; rather we can only recognize its fragmented and articulated nature.

1.1 Giuseppe Terragni, Casa del Fascio, Como.

Courtesy of Hagen Stier Architektur + Fotografie. http://hagenstier.polychroma.de/

The influence of Derrida was also present in many articles published between 1970 and 1980. In Oppositions n. 15, for example, Eisenman presented his analysis of Casa del Girasole, designed by the Italian architect Luigi Moretti. By defining the building as a neo-realist episode, Eisenman seemed to describe his distance from a kind of research he called formal (maybe referring to Colin Rowe), and displayed his interest in a textual analysis in which the traditional dialectics between figure and ground, form and function, or public and private, are not valid anymore. If the formal analysis starts from an internal logic based on the diagram, the textual analysis is based on multiple diagrams and narrations; there is no hierarchy as the text is a set of traces. If formalism was based on the recognizability of structure, in post-modernism the fragment became the basic metric of architecture.

By recognizing such a dichotomy, Eisenman seemed to preannounce a shift in his trajectory; now he was ready to venture into a new dimension: exteriority.

Fascination with Terragni is only the epiphenomenon of a more general preoccupation for modernism and its legacy that both Rowe and Eisenman developed in their studies. From here, directly or indirectly, other common interests were derived: Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino, Palladio, Nolli and Piranesi. All of them contributed not only to defining Eisenman’s relationship with Rowe, but also to the conceptual basis of his entire trajectory. Eisenman inherited from Colin Rowe the indifference towards the ideological Marxist substratum that accompanied modern architecture in its early manifestations, and, as Colin Rowe himself wrote in his introduction to Five Architects (1972), the measure of architecture, especially the one imported to America from Europe, does not lie in the possibility of prefiguring a better world, but rather, in the achievement of meeting the demands of the flesh, without referring to social or political visions.

For Rowe, and for many American architects, modern architecture was depurated of its social and political content in order to penetrate the American context. Progressively modern architecture and international style became two synonyms (also thanks to Philip Johnson, who may be regarded as one of the authors of such an ideological operation), in the sense that they appeared as a real American product, capable of satisfying and representing the capitalist desire for celebration.

Colin Rowe was convinced that modernism failed in its programme to create a more egalitarian society, turning sometimes into a dangerous and anti-democratic message: that is why in architecture modernism could exist only if liberated from its political preconditions. Before his anti-modernist theories exploded with all their impetus in Collage City (1978), Rowe’s stance on modernism was quite ambiguous, as his studies on Mies or Le Corbusier have proved. At the same time, because of his effort to rewrite modernism according to the use of history, Rowe has often been considered as a founder of post-modernism in architecture.

If at first Rowe’s stance towards the architecture of the modern movement was ambivalent, later he began to feel repulsion for a strategy based on replacing classic models using the metaphor of machine. Separation and abstraction represented the two basic principles of modernity, and technical innovations were its intellectual and material fuel. However, Rowe couldn’t share the technological infatuation of Reyner Banham’s environmentalism and so he gradually became a strong opponent of modern paradigms but the core of his theoretical discourse, from the outset, was nevertheless the conviction that history is a linear process based on the immanence of latent forms that in a precise moment in time emerge to shape reality.

It is clear that Colin Rowe’s mission – connecting the cultural premises of modernism to history – was influenced not only by Wittkower and his formal analysis, but also by Emil Kaufmann. The Austrian historian was, in fact, one of the first to link the origins of modernism to the Enlightenment. For him, the generation of Ledoux and Boullée anticipated the message of modernism and influenced many of the architects of the twentieth century. The keyword for Kaufmann was autonomy. Autonomy described the rationalism and the pure efficiency of modern architecture, and opened up a new, interesting field for exploration, so Rowe, who in 1947 began his studies on the relationship between modernism and mannerism, was very interested in Kaufmann’s contributions.

In England, the post-war period coincided with the revival of interest in the so-called new Palladianism, well represented by Rudolf Wittkower’s studies on Palladio and Alberti. These studies (especially the book Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism) had a huge impact on a generation of students of architecture. Somehow, for a decade at least (until 1955), Palladianism represented a central influence for modern British architecture: James Stirling, Alan Colquhoun and even Alison and Peter Smithson had to deal with this kind of architectural revival.

If Wittkower’s contributions did not imply or suggest any direct connection with modern architecture, Colin Rowe made a further leap forward, by absorbing some of the principles of his maestro, and projecting them onto the present. As described by Anthony Vidler (2012), Colin Rowe basically re-interpreted from Wittkower’s studies the idea that all Palladian architectures contained the same generative matrix, based on a clear functional layout. Wittkower detected at least 11 villas that were designed with the same generative plan. They represented a kind of archetype and were variations on a shared originary scheme. In fact, this idea of type, as described by Wittkower in his analysis of Palladio’s villas, was partially inspired by Goethe and his concept of an abstract formative principle.

Colin Rowe, as Goethe had done, considered type as an active element, capable of generating modifications and formal transformations. Thanks to Wittkower, Rowe pointed out the importance of geometry and proportion in reading architecture. Both Wittkower and Rowe were convinced that architecture is based on a systematic model or, better still, on a set of schematic principles that can generate different results (an involuntary analogy with Le Corbusier’s five points?).

The potential offered by a generative matrix to introduce infinite modifications, starting from a fixed efficient configuration, inspired first Rowe (for his formal analysis), and then Peter Eisenman, whose doctoral thesis was basically permeated by such an interest in internal displacements.

In 1947, with The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, Rowe inaugurated a new method based on the comparison, through analogy or difference, of different architectures. Through the study on Palladio, Colin Rowe elaborated his idea of modern Palladianism. For Colin Rowe, modernism could be considered as derived from Palladianism for two reasons: the presence of a leading figure, who condensed in his work their basic principles (Palladio and Le Corbusier), and the production of a key text, or manual, that propagated their message (Le Corbusier’s Towards an Architecture and Palladio’s Quattro Libri). Le Corbusier used illustrated books in the same way as Palladio: they constituted a didactic model or an operative device through which to define their own architecture.

For Rowe the next step consisted of comparing two important projects: Palladio’s Villa Malcontenta and Le Corbusier’s Villa at Garches. The comparison is possible thanks to the use of geometric and proportional studies, aimed at demonstrating how architecture is based on mathematics. Rowe uses here the term diagrammatic comparison in order to unveil the fundamental relationships between Malcontenta and Garches. Eisenman was to borrow from Rowe (and indirectly from Wittkower) the use of such diagrammatic structure, even though Rowe’s diagram differed from Wittkower’s: as explained by Guido Zuliani, the diagram in Wittkower is mainly an explanatory instrument to reinforce his textual description; for Rowe however, the diagram reveals the transformations and discontinuities of modernist plans compared to the classic plan. That is why Eisenman was so interested in this kind of formal analysis. Even though, many years later, he would criticize the use of the diagram in Rowe, it was the British architect who allowed him to discover the importance of this instrument in detecting those transformations that the young American student was searching for in Terragni.

The continuity between modernism and mannerism would constitute the framework of Rowe’s entire career. In 1950, he published Mannerism and Modern Architecture, which appeared as usual in The Architectural Review. Here again, Rowe compared Vignola with Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier with Michelangelo. His work aimed to demonstrate how mannerism and modernism were each contradistinguished by ambiguities, exaggerations and contradictions. Mannerism and modernism represented a moment of crisis.

At the same time, like many of his generation, Rowe was convinced that the first phase of modern avant-gardes was historically complete, and that his task should be to reconstruct a theoretical discourse starting from the architectural tradition of the Renaissance. Some years later, commenting on the 1959 exhibition on Le Corbusier at the Building Centre, Rowe argued that modern architecture was now an official art. The exhibition demonstrated that the success of any revolution is also its failure. So even Le Corbusier’s poetics became, for Rowe, pure mannerism.

Whereas Rowe theorized a geometrical continuity between modernism and classicism, Eisenman borrowed from him the same formal approach (and partly the same instruments, such as the square grid), but his work was aimed at disengaging (to paraphrase Tafuri) modern architecture from its humanist tradition. Eisenman read history according to the categories of discontinuities and fragmentation, and from that starting point began to construct his own worldview. He followed Foucault’s statement that the purpose of history is not to discover the roots of our identity (in Eisenman’s case, the modern roots), but for history to commit itself to its dissipation. Eisenman shared with Rowe the idea that modernism as a universal message had failed, but focused his attention on the disciplinary consequences of that, by looking at modern heroes in order to find the original message of modernity, free from any other kind of contamination. Thus humanism and functionalism became the evident manifestations of a misunderstanding.

To some extent, pessimism fed both Rowe’s and Eisenman’s investigations: indeed, one may say that Eisenman absorbed from Rowe such a conviction. But whereas Rowe announced the failure of modernism after a historical excursus, Eisenman was convinced that modernism was betrayed by humanism and functionalism. There was no need to search history for the origins of the present. Like Colin Rowe, Eisenman looked at modernism without any social or ideological intention, and even history and context were discarded in favour of an architecture based on internal rules.

Rowe also maintained a neutral position towards Eisenman’s first projects and his experience with Five Architects. In the introduction to Five Architects (1972), Colin Rowe reiterated his convictions: modern architecture, especially in its American manifestation, lacked the ideological and revolutionary fervour that animated the early avant-garde. Even if he did not say it clearly, the work of the Five Architects seems focused neither on the body of architecture, nor on its ethics, to paraphrase Anthony Vidler.

By underlining the bourgeois character of the Five Architects’ work, Rowe indirectly positioned their work away from the authentic spirit of modernism.

Under the effects of a Palladian revival, partially fuelled by Wittkower and Colin Rowe’s studies, Eisenman discovered the radical potential of Palladio’s architecture: for Eisenman, Palladio’s use of perspective was aimed not at representing space, but rather at displaying the inner logic of architecture – its values. On the naturality of a process that tried to imitate reality, Palladio imposed his artificial intentions: in his architecture, image turned into a symbol that needed to be deciphered. If perspective was no longer a mediator between man and nature, even the subjec...