PETER EISENMAN
Peter Eisenman (born August 11, 1932) is an
American architect. He first rose to prominence as a member of the New
York Five
August 11, 1932 (age 81)
THE NEW YORK FIVE
The New York Five refers to a group of five New
York City architects (Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey,
John Hejduk and Richard Meier) whose photographed work was the
subject of a CASE (Committee of Architects for the Study of the
Environment) meeting at the Museum of Modern Art, organized by Arthur
Drexler and Colin Rowe in 1969, and featured in the subsequent book Five
Architects, published by Wittenborn in 1972, then more famously by Oxford
Press in 1975
These five had a common allegiance to a pure form
of architectural modernism, harkening back to the work of Le Corbusier in
the 1920s and 1930s, although on closer examination their work was far
more individual. The grouping may have had more to do with social and
academic allegiances, particularly the mentoring role of Philip Johnson
His professional work is often referred to
as formalist, deconstructive, late avant-garde, late or high
modernist, etc. A certain fragmenting of forms visible in some of his
projects has been identified as characteristic of an eclectic group of
architects that were (self-)labeled as deconstructivists, and who were
featured in an exhibition by the same name at the Museum of Modern
Art. The heading also refers to the storied relationship and
collaborations between Peter Eisenman and post-structuralist thinker
Jacques Derrida.
His writings have pursued topics including
comparative formal analyses; the emancipation and autonomization of
the discipline; and histories of Architects including: Giuseppe Terragni,
Andrea Palladio, Le Corbusier and James Stirling. While he has been
referred to as a polarizing figure,such antagonistic associations are
likely prompted by Colin Rowe's 1972 criticism that the work pursues
physique form of European modernism rather than the utopian social
agendas or more recent accusations that Eisenman's work is "post-
humanist. While his apathy towards the recent "green" movement is
considered polarizing or "out-of-touch", this architect-artist was also an
early advocate of computer aided design
He has also embarked on a larger series of
building projects in his career, including the recently completed Memorial to
the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the new University of
Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. His largest project to date is the
City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. He is
featured in wide print and many films, including the 30 minute 2008 film
Peter Eisenman: University of Phoenix Stadium for the Arizona Cardinals
where he provides a tour of his recent construction. In 2001, he won the
National Design Award for Architecture from the Cooper-Hewitt National
Design Museum.
His focus on "liberating" architectural form
was notable from an academic and theoretical standpoint but resulted in
structures that were both badly built and hostile to users. The Wexner
Center, hotly anticipated as the first major public deconstructivist building,
has required extensive and expensive retrofitting because of elementary
design flaws (such as incompetent material specifications, and fine art
exhibition space exposed to direct sunlight). It was frequently repeated that
the Wexner's colliding planes tended to make its users disoriented to the
point of physical nausea; in 1997 researcher Michael Pollan tracked the
source of this rumor back to Eisenman himself. In the words of Andrew
Ballantyne, "By some scale of values he was actually enhancing the
reputation of his building by letting it be known that it was hostile to
humanity."
His House VI, designed for clients
Richard and Suzanne Frank in the mid 1970s, confounds expectations of
structure and function. Suzanne Frank was initially sympathetic and patient
with Eisenman's theories and demands. But after years of fixes to the badly
specified and misbegotten House VI (which had first broken the Franks'
budget then consumed their life savings), Suzanne Frank was prompted to
strike back with Peter Eisenman's House VI: The Client's Response, in which
she admitted both the problems of the building, as much as its virtues.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe also known as the Holocaust Memorial, is a memorial in Berlin
to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, designed by architect Peter
Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold. It consists of a 19,000 m2 (4.7-
acre) site covered with 2,711 concrete
slabs or "stelae", arranged in a grid
pattern on a sloping field. The stelae
are 2.38 m (7 ft 10 in) long, 0.95 m
(3 ft 1 in) wide and vary in height from
0.2 to 4.8 m (7.9 in to 15 ft 9 in).
According to Eisenman's project text,
the stelae are designed to produce an
uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and
the whole sculpture aims to represent
a supposedly ordered system that has
lost touch with human reason.
2005 copy of the Foundation for the Memorial's official
English tourist pamphlet, however, states that the design represents a
radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, partly because
Eisenman did not use any symbolism. However, observers have noted the
memorial's resemblance to a cemetery. An attached underground "Place of
Information" holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims,
obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.
Building began on April 1, 2003 and was finished on
December 15, 2004. It was inaugurated on May
10, 2005, sixty years after the end of World War II,
and opened to the public two days later. It is
located one block south of the Brandenburg Gate,
in the Friedrichstadt neighborhood. The cost of
construction was approximately 25 million.
The memorial is controversial,
and was described by Ignatz Bubis, the then
leader of the German Jewish community, as
unnecessary.
Aerial photo of the Memorial site
On December 15, 2004, the memorial was
finished. It was dedicated on May 10, 2005, as part of the celebration of the
60th anniversary of V-E Day and opened to the public two days later.
Holocaust survivor Sabina Wolanski was chosen to speak on behalf of the
six million dead. In her speech she noted that although the Holocaust had
taken everything she valued, it had also taught her that hatred and
discrimination are doomed to fail. She also emphasised that the children of
the perpetrators of the Holocaust are not responsible for the actions of their
parents.
The Wexner Center for the Arts is The Ohio State Universitys
multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and
advancement of contemporary art.
The Wexner
Center was the
first major public
building to be
designed by
Eisenman,
previously known
primarily as a
teacher and
theorist.
The design includes a large, white metal grid meant to
suggest scaffolding, to give the building a sense of incompleteness in tune
with the architect's deconstructivist tastes. Eisenman also took note of the
mismatched street grids of the OSU campus and
the city of
Columbus, which
vary by 12.25
degrees, and
designed the
Wexner Center
to alternate which
grids it followed.
The result was a
building of
sometimes
questionable
functionality,
but admitted
architectural
interest.
House VI, or the Frank Residence, is a significant
building designed by Peter Eisenman, completed in 1975. His second built
work, the getaway house, located on Great Hollow Road near Bird's Eye
Brook in Cornwall, Connecticut (across from Mohawk Mountain Ski Area)
has become famous for both its revolutionary definition of a house as
much as for the physical problems of design and difficulty of use. At the
time of construction, the architect was known almost exclusively as a
theorist and "paper architect,
" promulgating a highly
formalist approach to
architecture he calls
"postfunctionalism." Rather
than form following function
or an aesthetic design, the
design emerged from a
conceptual process, and
remains pinned to that
conceptual framework.
Unfortunately, Eisenman's limited construction
experience meant that the entire building was poorly detailed. The tiny
building took 3 years to build, went completely over budget, and finally had
to be reconstructed in 1987, leaving only the basic structure original. The
Franks, in Peter Eisenman's House VI: The Client's Response, claim that
they nonetheless love living in
such a poetic structure, which
they inhabit with their children.
Also on the property is a barn
for guests and supplies that do
not fit in the kitchen.
The building is meant to be a "record of
design process," where the structure that results is the methodical
manipulation of a grid. To start, Eisenman created a form from the
intersection of four planes, subsequently manipulating the structures
again and again, until coherent spaces began to emerge. In this way, the
fragmented slabs and columns lack a traditional purpose, or even a
conventional modernist one. The envelope and structure of the building
are just a manifestation of the changed elements of the original four
slabs, with some limited modifications. The purely conceptual design
meant that the architecture is strictly plastic, bearing no relationship to
construction techniques or purely ornamental form.
Consequently, the use of
the building was intentionally
ignored - not fought against.
Eisenman grudgingly permitted
a handful of compromises, such
as a bathroom, but the staircase
lacks a handrail, there is a
column abutting the kitchen
table, and a glass strip originally
divided the bedroom, preventing the installation of a double bed.
It is fitting that this house was completed
just before the publication of Charles Jencks's influential survey, The
Language of Post -Modern Architecture (1977), for if anything presaged
the advent of postmodernism it is surely the Frank House, numbered by
the architect as part of a didactic series. Coming into being after nearly
four decades of the functionalist modern movement, when the ideas of
the European avant-garde were disseminated in the United States,
House VI was part of an effort to bring this tradition to closure by self-
consciously departing from
the socially ameliorative
and liberative promise of
the original movement
toward a more formal,
post-humanist attitude.
Built in 1969 for a Princeton Professor by renowned
architect Peter Eisenman one of the famous New York Five architects
know for a pure form of architectural modernism. House II is one of ten
modern home designs of which only four were constructed. The
analytical design concepts and theory represented by House II continues
to be studied by architectural students and the international architectural
community.
An axonometric drawing of Eisenmans House
II, (1975)
The real architecture
only exists in the drawings. The real
building exists outside the drawings.
The difference here is that
architecture and building are not the
same.
-Peter Eisenman
The City of Culture of Galicia is a complex of
cultural buildings in Santiago de Compostela, A Corua, Galicia, Spain,
designed by a group of architects led by Peter Eisenman. Construction
is challenging and expensive as the design of the buildings involves
high degree contours, meant to make the buildings look like rolling hills.
Nearly every window of the thousands that are part of the external
faade has its own custom shape. In 2013 it was announced that after
more than a decade,
construction of the
project would be halted.
In February 1999 the Parliament of Galicia held
an international design competition for a cultural center on Mount Gais.
The entrants were Ricardo Bofill, Manuel Gallego Jorreto, Annette Gigon
and Mike Guyer, Steven Holl, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Juan
Navarro Baldeweg, Jean Nouvel, Dominique Perrault, Cesar Portela,
Santiago Calatrava, who later withdrew his proposal, and Eisenman,
whose proposal was selected for both conceptual uniqueness and
exceptional harmony with the place.
The concept of the project is a new peak on
Monte Gais, made up of a stony crust reminiscent of an archaeological
site divided by natural breaks that resemble scallops, the traditional
symbol of Compostela.
The project has more than doubled its original
budget and has not attracted significant numbers of visitors.
Construction of the final two planned buildings was stopped in 2012 and
terminated definitively in March 2013 due to the high cost overruns.
For further study please follow the link:
[Link]
galicia
Robert Charles Venturi, Jr. (born June 25, 1925)
is an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown
and Associates, and one of the major architectural figures in the twentieth
century. Together with his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, he helped
to shape the way that architects, planners and students experience and
think about architecture and the American built environment. Their
buildings, planning, theoretical writings
and teaching have contributed to the
expansion of discourse about
architecture.
Venturi was awarded the
Pritzker Prize in Architecture in 1991;
the prize was awarded to him alone
despite a request to include his equal
partner Denise Scott Brown. A group
of women architects attempted to get
her name added retroactively to the
prize, but the Pritzker Prize jury
declined to do so. Robert is also
known for coining the maxim "Less is
a bore" a postmodern antidote to
Mies van der Rohe's famous
modernist dictum "Less is more".
2008 in Rome
The architecture of Robert Venturi,
although perhaps not as familiar today as his books, helped redirect
American architecture away from a widely practiced, often banal,
modernism in the 1960s to a more exploratory design approach that
openly drew lessons from architectural history and responded to the
everyday context of the American city. Venturi's buildings typically
juxtapose architectural systems, elements and aims, to acknowledge the
conflicts often inherent in a project or site.
This "inclusive" approach contrasted
with the typical modernist effort to resolve and unify all factors in a
complete and rigidly structuredand possibly less functional and more
simplisticwork of art. The diverse range of buildings of Venturi's early
career offered surprising alternatives to then current architectural
practice, with "impure" forms (such as the North Penn Visiting Nurses
Headquarters), apparently casual asymmetries (as at the Vanna Venturi
House), and pop-style supergraphics and geometries (for instance, the
Lieb House).
Venturi's architecture has had world-wide
influence, beginning in the late 1960s with the dissemination of the
broken-gable roof of the Vanna Venturi House and the segmentally
arched window and interrupted string courses of Guild House.
The playful variations on vernacular house
types seen in the Trubeck and Wislocki Houses offered a new way to
embrace, but transform, familiar forms. The facade patterning of the
Oberlin Art Museum and the laboratory buildings demonstrated a
treatment of the vertical surfaces of buildings that is both decorative
and abstract, drawing from vernacular and historic architecture while
still being modern. Venturi's work arguably provided a key influence at
important times in the careers of architects Robert A. M. Stern, Philip
Johnson, Michael Graves, Graham Gund and James Stirling, among
others.
The architecture of Robert Venturi, although
perhaps not as familiar today as his books, helped redirect American
architecture away from a widely practiced, often banal, modernism in the
1960s to a more exploratory design approach that openly drew lessons
from architectural history and responded to the everyday context of the
American city. Venturi's buildings typically juxtapose architectural
systems, elements and aims, to acknowledge the conflicts often inherent
in a project or site. This "inclusive" approach contrasted with the typical
modernist effort to resolve and unify all factors in a complete and rigidly
structuredand possibly less functional and more simplisticwork of art.
The diverse range of buildings of Venturi's
early career offered surprising alternatives to then current architectural
practice, with "impure" forms (such as the North Penn Visiting Nurses
Headquarters), apparently casual asymmetries (as at the Vanna Venturi
House), and pop-style supergraphics and geometries (for instance, the
Lieb House).
Guild House is a residential building in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, which is an important and influential work of 20th-century
architecture and was the first major work by Robert Venturi. Along with the
Vanna Venturi House it is considered to be one of the earliest expressions of
Postmodern architecture, and helped establish Venturi as one of the leading
architects of the 20th century.
The building, which houses apartments for low-income
senior citizens, was commissioned by a local Quaker organization and
completed in 1963. Employing a combination of nondescript commercial
architecture and ironic historical
references, Guild House
represented a conscious rejection
of Modernist ideals and was widely
cited in the subsequent
development of the Postmodern
movement.
South elevation, 2011
The building's architecture combines historical
forms with "banal" 20th-century commercialism, hiding a "slyly intellectual
agenda" behind its "apparent ordinariness". As Venturi wrote, "Economy
dictated not 'advanced' architectural elements, but 'conventional' ones.
We did not resist this." The architects used red clay brick and "inelegant"
double-hung windows to recall existing public housing projects and
express "kinship with neighboring inner-city structures", along with a
subtle use of ironic ornamental details "intended in some way to express
the lives of the elderly.
Guild House is a six-story building with a
symmetrical facade that steps outward to a monumental, classically
ordered entrance pavilion. The facade is anchored by a thick column of
polished black granite and crowned with a large arched window opening
onto the building's upstairs common area. The ground floor entrance is
highlighted with white glazed brick, while a "perfunctory" string course in
the middle of the fifth floor terminates the facade. According to Venturi, the
combination of the latter two elements "sets up a new and larger scale of
three stories, juxtaposed on the other smaller scale of six stories
demarked by the layer of windows."A large block-letter sign above the
entrance spells the name of the building, while the roof was originally
crowned with an oversize, nonfunctional television antenna serving as
both an abstract sculptural element and a literal representation of the
inhabitants' chief pastime.
Venturi later explained the architecture of Guild
House in the context of his "decorated shed" philosophy:
In Guild House the ornamental-symbolic elements are more or less
literally appliqu ... The symbolism of the decoration happens to be
ugly and ordinary with a dash of ironic heroic and original, and the
shed is straight ugly and ordinary, though in its brick and windows it
is symbolic too.
The building contains 91 apartment units. The
stepped organization of the facade allowed most of the units to have
south-, east-, or west-facing windows, giving the inhabitants sunlight
and a view of the street below. Winding interior corridors were
intended to create a more intimate and informal space.
A controversial critic of the blithely functionalist and
symbolically vacuous architecture of corporate modernism during the
1950s, Venturi has been considered a counterrevolutionary. He published
his "gentle manifesto, "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture" in
1966, described in the introduction by Vincent Scully to be "probably the
most important writing on the making of architecture since Le Corbusier's
'Vers Une Architecture', of 1923."
Immediately hailed as a theorist and
designer with radical ideas, Venturi went to teach a series of studios at
the Yale School of Architecture in the mid-1960s. The most famous of
these was a studio in 1968 in which Venturi and Scott Brown, together
with Steven Izenour, led a team of students to document and analyze the
Las Vegas Strip, perhaps the least likely subject for a serious research
project imaginable. In 1972, Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour published
the folio, A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las
Vegas later revised in 1977 as Learning from Las Vegas: the Forgotten
Symbolism of Architectural Form using the student work as a foil for new
theory.
This second manifesto was an even
more stinging rebuke to orthodox modernism and elite architectural
tastes. The book coined the terms "Duck" and "Decorated Shed"--
descriptions of the two predominant ways of embodying iconography in
buildings. The work of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown adopted the latter
strategy, producing formally simple "decorated sheds" with rich, complex
and often shocking ornamental flourishes.
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