Introduction

Eisenman, Peter

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Introduction

Peter Eisenman

Eisenman Inside Out: Selected Writings, 1963–1988

Many critics complain that my work reflects two cultural problems: one, an unregenerate internalized formalism; and two, the proliferation of models from outside of architecture. They either argue that in no way should an internal theory of form or of formalism be used as a possible explanation of architecture, or they argue that architecture should rely...

Author

Peter Eisenman

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31614

Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

Introduction

Many critics complain that my work reflects two cultural problems: one, an unregenerate internalized formalism; and two, the proliferation of models from outside of architecture. They either argue that in no way should an internal theory of form or of formalism be used as a possible explanation of architecture, or they argue that architecture should rely on its own theoretical and historical formulations for its discourse, and that if perchance it should wander outside these limits, these wanderings should be in-depth, focused investigations, rather than a cursory gloss of current intellectual fashion. This book, presenting some of my major writings over the course of twenty-five years, proposes contrary to these two positions that the work is a continuous unremitting vector, probing into the heart of architecture by an architect, not a historian or an academic theoretician, in an attempt to explain its interior discourse, its inside, as something other than a study of essences or dialectical strategies. What emerges is a discourse on the interiority of architecture and its manifold conditions presented in a way that has rarely been formulated by either architect or critic. Beginning with my doctoral dissertation in 1963, this discourse has been an attempt to analogize architecture’s previously unarticulated interiority through a variety of seemingly external cultural models, from linguistics, art history, philosophy, mathematics, and science. My ideas concerning this “interiority” have gone by many different names over the years—deep structure, immanence, formal basis, among them. But for me, these external models clearly enrich the architectural discourse and its possibilities, which would otherwise have been smothered in the claustrophobic rhetoric of a so-called natural or classical language of architecture.

Since the 1970’s there has been an ongoing critical discussion in French literary circles that, while involving many themes, fundamentally concerns the nature of a discourse’s interiority in relation to conditions exterior to that discourse. Much of the debate between Michel Foucault’s structuralism and Maurice Blanchot’s questioning of structure has focused on this difference. In this context, architecture’s internal discursive condition has never been explicitly formulated in terms of such an interiority, perhaps because of a possible confusion between its “actual” interiority, its real enclosed space. Certainly there are enough references to what architecture is or concerns itself to be, and to what it could or should be, to lead one to the possibility that architecture too has such an interior discursive formulation.

In fact, the need for an explanation of something which might be called the “nature” of architecture became important in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Up until that time, both the physical and the natural world were explained as the result of some sort of divine manifestation. Plants and animals were not thought of as independent entities—there was no theory of the origin of the species. The Bible and biblical interpretation explained all; these and similar theological interpretations were what could be considered at that time the interiority of all things, animate and inanimate. When, in the fourteenth century, there was a shift in the triadic relationship between God, man, and nature—wherein man assumed a centric role in the cosmology—and thus a new explanation for this changed relationship had to be found, man as a subject, and his objects, had to have a history. This history began in science and mathematics in a manner that attempted to give so-called rational explanations for natural phenomena. The question of the reasonableness of the argument became of primary interest in the natural sciences as well as in aspects of social life. But the reasonableness of the Renaissance must be distinguished from the domain of reason that had previously existed in the Greek classical period. The Renaissance was articulated by the inclusion of a reasoning subject, and thus manifested a new explanation by the reasoning subject concerning the natural world.

Thus architecture, if it was to be detached from its supposedly divine origins, had to also be given a history, and the question of the context of that history became critical to what could be called any idea of its interiority. These histories as they evolved were formulated as a series of elements and rules for the use of these elements that could be stated as historically derived explanatory principles, usually in functional terms. Thus Alberti’s history, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, was modeled as a critique of Vitruvius’s Ten Books of Architecture. When Vitruvius wrote in the first century, his explanation was not seen as a history, but rather as a somewhat factual explanation of conditions as they seemed “proper” to use, site, and structural materials. Unlike Alberti, Vitruvius did not describe architecture as a representation of something else, although clearly his idea of propriety implied some form of representation. Vitruvius’s work was an attempt to give a complete account of what he saw around him, as it existed within some properly authorized conception of what was structurally sound, useful, and beautiful.

In the fifteenth century, such a factual catalogue was no longer sufficient. In order to explain art and architecture, Alberti required an istoria, literally a history or a narrative. As was to be expected, this history was quite different in art than in architecture. For art, the narrative conventions had been established over the centuries; in architecture, these historical conventions were just being formulated. Alberti’s creation of a history was also the beginning of a new idea of representation, the past as an explanation of the present, of how things got to be the way they were. If Vitruvius can be said to be concerned with commodity, firmness, and delight, when this is repeated in Alberti fifteen centuries later, it becomes not merely commodity itself but also a necessary representation of commodity. Architecture was not merely sound, functional, and beautiful; it was also the representation of its soundness, its function, and its beauty. As science invented a history for itself in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in a similar fashion architecture constructed a parallel history, and in so doing, gave history itself a priority. If the architecture of the present was made according to man’s intervention in imperial Rome, construction could be explained not in terms of the divine, but in terms of this prior condition. This history, or more appropriately in this context, this anteriority, became part of architecture’s first conscious interiority. While previously Vitruvius had specified the appropriate rules for the different orders and their uses, for Alberti the very use of the orders, above and beyond the orders themselves, invoked this anteriority.

Yet in spite of these differences, the dominant style of architectural texts from Vitruvius and Alberti and into the seventeenth century was in the form of categorical treatises that presupposed a universal and fixed body of knowledge, an immutable category of being grounded in the final and unchangeable truths, such as that of mathematics and musical proportions. It was assumed that ends were known and that the only possible disagreement could exist as regards to means. The direction of these works was toward the nature of the entity which was assumed to be conceptually clear. Equally it was assumed that the primary aspect of “architecture’s interiority” evolved from a set of classical principles—immutable rules or immutable essences that could be broken down into immutable elemental parts. These categories, despite all conditions of change and invention, once having been invented were seen as unchanging.

All of this began to change, however, when, in the seventeenth century, there was a debate in France which would affect the immediate nature of architecture. This debate, between Jacques-François Blondel and Claude Perrault, involved two opposing ideas of what now could be called architecture’s interiority. While Blondel proposed a theory of historical precedent (of anteriority as interiority) similar to those of the previous centuries, Perrault argued that the explanation for what is done today should no longer be based on the past, but by what we consider to be normal in the present, what the eye had come to expect at any given time—interiority thus should no longer be solely anteriority. Thus Perrault broke with the classical conception that certain orders were, a priori, beautiful. His alternative was radical for the time: he declared that proportions that follow “the rules of architecture” were agreeable for no other reason than that we are used to them. This idea expanded the conception of architectural interiority, which began to see the present as a normative condition.

This change suggested a certain contingency concerning time relative to interiority; that what we are used to, that what is seen to be normal at any given time, could be constantly changing yet, at any particular time, be related to an unchanging normative perception. In Perrault’s conception there is a shift in emphasis from a supposed objective truth of the building to the subjective truth of the perceiving individual, from immutable essences to contingent truths. In this shift, the subject, instead of being ideal and objective, becomes real and psychological. The idea of what is “seen to be normal” or “what we are used to” establishes the presence of the subjective “I” at the center of the discourse. Guarino Guarini’s contemporaneous use of the phrase “in the eye of the beholder” was a clear indication of such a shift. Thus the self-consciousness of the twentieth-century subject was already being prepared for in this shift from the immutable object to an object that might be constituted in the eye of the beholder.

In the eighteenth century “the normal” was divided into two strains: the rational and the picturesque. The rational would return to a neo-classicism, and the picturesque would develop in the Romanticism of personal expression, and from there into the modernism of our recent past. The idea of personal expression led to a further self-consciousness of the humanist subject, as put forward in the work of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, a subject aware of its own genesis, which clearly changed forever the nature and possibility of an architectural object deriving from internal conditions of structure in terms of rules and essences. Thus, for the first time, interiority became grounded in a different history than that of the past. It was now the historicity of the present: of the social, the political, and even the psychological. It will be seen that it is this very historicity that prompted my early search for an interiority outside of this historicity, hence the desire for some condition of autonomy.

In the twentieth century, this new social and psychological self-consciousness is reflected in a different format for writing about architecture which, while it attempted a break from the past, nevertheless placed theoretical ideas into a historical context of the present. History, now understood as both a critical and empowering agent of the present, became an important factor in an attempt to mediate between this new subject and the classical object of architectural discourse. Statements such as Mies van der Rohe’s “architecture is the will of the epoch translated into steel and glass,” or Le Corbusier’s “a house is a machine to live in,” are manifestations of such an empowerment by a zeitgeist that is no longer seen as a neutral agent of the present but rather as a predictive mechanism for what should be in the future. While this notion is problematic in terms of what was the supposedly neutral taste and style of the zeitgeist, it was such a climate that set the tone for the essays of architects such as Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier. These essays speculated on topical concerns ranging from fashion to pre-fabricated housing. No longer was the style of these essays in the form of the earlier architectural treatises categorizing immutable essences, nor were these new writings solely critiques of current norms, rather they were polemical essays arrayed either for or against a zeitgeist as a concept of a historicist present that suggested some form of inevitable momentum toward a progressivist future.

It is within such a background that the essays gathered in this book, while neither academic, historical, nor even philosophical, differ in substance and style from those of my predecessors, Loos and Le Corbusier, as architects who both built and wrote.1In this context, perhaps a more contemporary comparison might be made with two other architects, Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry, whose major works are more or less contemporaneous with my own. In brief, Koolhaas’s writing deals with the relationship of the culture to architecture; there is a belief that architecture can manifest the myriad social, economic, and political problematics at any given time. Gehry, on the one hand, even though he has no explicit body of written theory and whose work is largely concerned with a personal expression, would argue that architecture can manifest the aesthetic sensibility of a culture at any particular moment in its history. My writing, on the other hand, is the revealing of deep belief and ideology to show the structuring of architecture as cultural commentary or aesthetic sensibility at work—the idea that architecture can manifest its own evolving interiority. My essays are not about how architecture can change the future but rather, with the arrival of the digital age of information, how the theoretical paradigms that have defined the interiority of architecture until now may need to be reconsidered in order to accommodate many possible previously untheorized and unauthorized futures, as well as many possible revisions of the past.

In this context, my work on interiority must also be differentiated from the writings of Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi. Rossi and Venturi wanted to turn back what they saw as the progressive tendencies of modernist polemics. In doing so, they focused on different historical aspects of architecture’s classical conventions. Rossi was concerned with recurring types, and Venturi adumbrated the nuances—the complexity and contradictions—of such types. Both assumed that architecture functioned as a language that was known, Rossi focusing on the norms of that language, Venturi on its deviations. In this sense their texts were parallel to the split between Blondel and Perrault: Rossi arguing for immutable types, and Venturi for an understanding of customary usage. Both forms of theory, however, similar to many nineteenth-century theories, were more concerned with a revision of the progressivist polemics of the modern and a return to history as an informing discourse in architecture than they were with a possible autonomous interiority, which parallel to historical imperative, might have informed these norms or types; the role of such an imperative was somehow taken for granted and was to remain unexamined in their writing and their architecture as well. The questioning of the structure and the possible autonomy that may differentiate architecture’s interiority from other discourses and from historicizing imperatives requires a more detailed discussion than is possible in the context of this essay. It is enough to say that the issue here concerns whether an architectural autonomy is already social, or whether such an autonomy can be teased out from the social. In either case, an architectural autonomy must be seen as a singular phenomenon by the fact that in order to be made palpable it must both be and mean in the same presence, and therefore in order to construct a repetition of difference, it must displace both its being and its meaning. It is in this displacement that architecture’s singularity and thus its autonomy appears.2Singular here refers to a specific usage as opposed to unique or individual. Within this context singular defines a repetition of difference as opposed to a repetition of the same or an individual expression. In this sense it is necessary to define an autonomy in order to articulate the singularity of an architectural interiority.

It is within such a discussion that the essays which follow in this publication, particularly those of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, take a position with respect to the operative conditions of history different from both Rossi and Venturi as well as the dominant histories of Colin Rowe and Manfredo Tafuri. While there is no question that history is considered an informing agent, it is only one of many such agents. Within these essays, history is not viewed in either an imperative or nostalgic sense, but rather as a condition which is one aspect of a normative and stable interiority which, it is argued, must always be addressed and transgressed if architecture is to continue to be a critical discourse. It could be argued that these essays are an attempt to open up a position between Rowe and Tafuri. While there is no question that there is a distance between them, my work places interiority in a context distinct from Tafuri’s historicity, without embracing Rowe’s antagonism for the zeitgeist. Equally, it rejects Rowe’s formalism, without accepting Tafuri’s position that all forms of making are complicitous within the productive cycles of capital. In fact, I argue here and elsewhere that architecture, in order to exist in a critical context, must always transgress the zeitgeist.

Any study of architecture’s interiority, in addition to the questioning of the historicity of its autonomy, and the role of criticality in such a historicity, also requires at the very least a contextualizing of the relationship of history to the theoretical condition of the subject in interiority. While any transgression is in itself critical of any historical imperative, whether progressive or operative, the zeitgeist, particularly as it informs the idea of what is considered normative at any specific time, remains one of the problematic issues for any thinking about interiority. Yet the zeitgeist as such will be seen to be peripheral to the central thesis of the essays which follow. What emerges from these essays, rather, revolves around the questioning of the nature of those thought-to-be normative conditions of type and the anterior historicity that presumes upon architecture’s autonomy. Whether these assumed conditions are unchanging, as in the classical paradigm, or whether they are seen as modified by current tastes or beliefs, the argument will focus on how these conditions become active in any work of architecture, to claim some kind of contingent autonomy, which displaces both being as a contingent condition and being as an a priori condition.

The first questions that must be asked in such an investigation are how do we know that there are such preexistent or latent conditions in architecture such as an interiority, and how do they effect the architectural object and our perception of it? As has been cited above, there are many instances in the history of architecture that sustain different interpretations of these supposed interior conditions. Most recently, two explanatory paradigms have gained currency: one is the persistent paradigm in which the expectancy of the normal has replaced rules of composition, and the other paradigm might be most easily described as a linguistic analogy.

Even when an avowed modern architect such as Le Corbusier says that architecture occurs when a window is either too large or too small for a room or a façade, there is the a priori assumption of some classical or normative rule. Or when Colin Rowe says that the blank panel in the center of the façade of Le Corbusier’s Villa Schwob at La Chaux de Fonds creates a tension in that façade, he presumes a prior state, some normal condition of less tension that could either be a classical tenet or one given by conventional understanding. In each case, both examples point to some form of interior condition of architecture, something which informs being, that gives an idea of some innate order to any real structure.

However, when the anteriority of interiority is no longer certain, that is, when precedence, in terms of origins and genesis, is questioned and even transgressed—as was the case between the Baroque and the Renaissance and between the neo-classical and the picturesque—then clearly architecture’s interiority is also open to question. And it is within such a questioning that the following essays have unfolded. They begin to demonstrate that the nature of these so-called normative, stable relationships in architecture are traditionally inventions of an imagined interiority defined in formal and geometric terms that inform the specific forms themselves. In one sense, normative conditions are abstractions or at least reductions of real being into some kind of type—form, usually conceived of as object presences—not as walls, columns, floors, and the like, but rather as the more abstract dimensions of plans, sections, and elevations. But as is the case with most transgressions and displacements of a norm (either the classical or the modern), these transgressions soon become incorporated into a new condition of normalcy and thus a revised definition of interiority. Thus the history and theory of architecture at any given time can be said to be contained in two quite limited categories: either in the context of classical rules of composition based on proportion, harmony, and the like, or as the expected normative relationships of openings to surface, columns to wall. Classical relationships have assumed over time the status of the natural. Normative relationships, through continued and progressive historicizing, perhaps as well as through unquestioned use, also assume the status of the natural, but in a very different sense. The normative, as opposed to the conventional or the natural, speaks of a relationship of windows to wall, in terms of size and relative location, which seems appropriate or even correct at any particular moment in history it is what one has come to expect, rather than the classical, which is assumed to be timeless, that is, good for all time. Both the classical and the normative have their object or ground in a series of anterior or prior relationships which are conceptualized as stable and static. In this sense, classical composition and modern functionalism may be seen to be similar. The classical paradigm, whatever its particular style, attempted to give one form of provenance to such normative precedence, while the modern attempted another. This provenance was always thought to be what constituted the sum total of architecture’s interiority.

What my work has uncovered is that the main characteristics that the classical and the modern share—geometricity, stability, and normalcy—repress other possibilities for an interiority of architecture. While the study of these unconscious repressions has formed the basis of critical theory since the nineteenth century, these studies have rarely included architecture. It is within such a critical context that it seemed possible for me to turn away from the traditional paradigms of architecture and attempt to describe its interior condition through a paradigm considered as outside of architecture, that is, the linguistic paradigm.

Whenever the terms interiority or anteriority had been brought up previously in the context of architecture, it was presumed that they were concerned with the possibility of communicating, in some way, the relationship of that interiority to the architectural object. In this sense, all architecture was seen as embodied, that it already contained the possibility of its own representation. In this sense, architecture was like a language, and indeed within the classical ideal architecture was considered as a stable lexicon which would always lead to some stable form of embodiment. The use of a linguistic paradigm challenged the embodiment inherent in the classical architectural paradigm in order to return meaning, figuration, and representation to modern architecture without classical architecture’s inherent nostalgia for rules and essences. The possibility for such a return would come not from a classical repertoire of styles, but rather from a linguistic or semiotic repertoire of signs. And although architecture has always been a weak sign system—since there is no agreed upon definitive language and no agreed upon definitive system of meaningful signs—this does not mean that the relationship between sign and signified could not become more active in determining the form and space of building. However, unlike other references to an architectural language or an architecture parlante, my use of the linguistic paradigm as a possible alternative model for an architectural interiority was not a literal one. Rather, it assumed that by approaching architecture’s interior from the outside one could open up the unconscious repressions underpinning the classical and modern paradigms.

Hence these ideas concerning sign, process, and reading tended to move interiority from a classical architectural paradigm to a linguistic paradigm. But, what could not have been known at the time of the early essays of this volume was that like these earlier architectural paradigms, the linguistic paradigm was also predicated on the same stable conceptions of structural relationships. In fact, this semiotic paradigm turned out to be as stabilizing as the classical one. As Jacques Derrida has said, spatial or architectural metaphors cannot be found in a definitive manner in literary ideality, so too linguistic metaphors may not be definitively found in architecture’s interiority. This then raises the issue of what value is the supposed difference between architecture and language, in particular the difference between a linguistic sign and an architectural sign, when both are based on similar conceptions of structure.

Thus, in the essays that follow there is the beginning of a discussion of an architectural interiority that is related neither as a reductive analogy to language nor to a classical paradigm. Rather, language is used to open up the interiority of architecture to something different than either a linguistic analogy or a classical lexicon. Here, then, is a break from an idea of an architecture as either historically or semiotically based. With this break, other definitions of architectural interiority become possible. Thus, the interiority of architecture as it developed through the course of the essays in this volume became a vehicle to escape the limitations of the old definitions of the formal and formalism so characteristic of my earlier texts. At the same time the belief that some ur-formalism, which was also considered an autonomy that could be opened up through the use of linguistic analogies, is also abandoned.

Following Ferdinand de Saussure, Derrida has argued that there can be no preferred relationship between a signifier in language and its signified.3Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 44. Originally published De la Grammatologie (Paris: Les Editions Minuit, 1968). Therefore, there should be no transcendental signifier, no sign that comes before all other signs, and therefore no valued sign function in any interiority. This clearly has important implications for architecture, where the sign and the signified are always already present—that is, the column and the sign of the column’s function are always present—but in this presence, of the column literally holding something up, there are two somewhat conflicting messages. One is the actual condition of holding something up and the other is the symbolic sign of holding something up. In fact, to the average viewer, the architectural column as a sign is perhaps as obvious as its function of holding a building up. Between its fact and its fiction as a representation of something holding something else up, no viewer, except for a few professionals, really knows exactly what and when a column is holding up and when it is not. While there is the normative assumption in our collective vision of a column’s structuring function, which is unique to architecture, because of the presence of its sign and its reality, the column is always already embodied with meaning and is thus mediated as an object differently from other manmade objects.

Thus we return to Alberti’s critical re-reading of the Vitruvian triad of commodity, firmness, and delight, to the moment when architecture first faced this question of its representation and thus the question of the sign. For Alberti did not interpret Vitruvius to mean that architecture should stand up (firmness), since to be architecture it must already stand up and resist gravity, but rather that architecture must look like it stands up. Thus architecture was for Alberti both being and a representation of that being, both the embodiment and the necessary representation of this embodiment, the sign and the signified. The displacement of any anteriority and their traditional modes of representation, then, became two of the major thematics of my work on the interiority of architecture, in the sense that architecture’s interiority may not be defined, as is usually thought, in the necessity of meaning, function, and aesthetics, nor in their corresponding representations. This begins to define its singularity. Thus, how architecture signifies and represents, given the recent developments in philosophy and linguistics, despite all recent calls for the irrelevance of linguistic analogies, must become central to any rethinking of architecture’s interiority. What this means and how this affects both the subject and object of architecture is part of the work that I have undertaken in the essays that follow.

This introductory essay then is a critical exploration of the possibility of architecture’s autonomy—as an aspect of any critical discourse to open up its own singular interiority. Ten years ago it would not have been possible for me to articulate these ideas in this fashion, but in looking back over these essays, they present some ideas that I am still working on today. Already in these essays, ten or fifteen years ago, the seeds for my present work were planted. It remains the work of future essays to elaborate such future projects.

1 In this context, perhaps a more contemporary comparison might be made with two other architects, Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry, whose major works are more or less contemporaneous with my own. In brief, Koolhaas’s writing deals with the relationship of the culture to architecture; there is a belief that architecture can manifest the myriad social, economic, and political problematics at any given time. Gehry, on the one hand, even though he has no explicit body of written theory and whose work is largely concerned with a personal expression, would argue that architecture can manifest the aesthetic sensibility of a culture at any particular moment in its history. My writing, on the other hand, is the revealing of deep belief and ideology to show the structuring of architecture as cultural commentary or aesthetic sensibility at work—the idea that architecture can manifest its own evolving interiority. »

2 Singular here refers to a specific usage as opposed to unique or individual. Within this context singular defines a repetition of difference as opposed to a repetition of the same or an individual expression. In this sense it is necessary to define an autonomy in order to articulate the singularity of an architectural interiority. »

3 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 44. Originally published De la Grammatologie (Paris: Les Editions Minuit, 1968). »

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