Eisenman’s sophisticated
methods and processes of form generation should be understood as the
presentation and performance of architecture, rather than form as
representation. Therefore, representation is under question. According to
Panofsky, the space of representation has been striating modern space since the
Renaissance. Perspective measures distance and collapses it in the surface of
representation: as a conceptual Kantian structure that organizes space and
interrupts the perceptual iconographic perspective cone. Panofsky presents other
structuralist analyses as interfaces that create matrices between problems, such
as Perspective as Symbolic Form or his History of the Theory of Human
Proportions. But in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, he demonstrates the
relationship between the Gothic floor plan and Thomas Aquinas’s Theological
Summa, which share a structural organization. While the Gothic plan is formed
by
autonomous and repetitive spaces that are related in a top-down organization, as
an analogy, the Summa proposes,
in terms of hierarchy and subordinated titles, a discriminated organization of
thoughts. On the other hand, Andrea Palladio, also concerned with problems of
structure, was part of the North Italian Humanists of the Cinquecento and openly
resisted perspective and representation.
Palladio’s Chiericatti Palace
(1565) forces the frontal view to resist perspective by interrupting the
“perspective cone effect.”
The space is structured by the movement of compressed layered sequential spaces
in a disproportioned nine square grid. Once one enters the loggia space through
a stair, two columns meeting at a 45 angle index the overlapping of a portico
space;
at that point one recognizes that the previous space of the stairs was actually
the space of an implied portico displaced into the loggia. These formal problems
become performative: once one continues to enter the first interior space, it
reads as a vestibule, but once in the following space on the same central axis,
one is outside again in the back loggia-portico. This means that the vestibule
was in fact the central space of the palace, compressing and distorting an
originally circular space,
the center of the nine square grid. Therefore, the series of
preliminary optic based -perceptual- readings of an ideal organization are
negated by a haptic experience and a consequential conceptual interpretation.
The spaces present a physical compression against the main circulation axis; but
also an accumulation of memory that somatically (psychological memory at the
level of the organ) projects bodily affection in the transition between spaces,
overlapping alternatively real and implied spatial organizations. These series
of unconscious somatic experiences produce
involuntary inertias that are projected between rooms by a
psychological expectancy that is deceived by the unanticipated compression of
the series of spaces. These displacements demand a mental re-composition of the
spatial organization enhancing affect and implying a metaphysical condition.
Palladio’s strategy reinforces a logic of the whole underlying a projection of
man’s applied reason as a meta-structure. We may relate this case to the
Humanists’
conceptions of logic of the time, as Panofsky’s analogy between Gothic space and
the Theological Summa.
The temporal and institutional
links between Wittkower’s Palladian villas diagram, Rowe’s Palladio–Le
Corbusier diagram, Hejduk’s Texas Houses and Eisenman’s Houses series, may
provide an axis of reference that engages deep structure and suspends the
problematic icon-(o)-graphic stylistic trend of deconstructivism. Eisenman’s use
of Wittkower’s Palladio diagrams can be read as a strategy that redefines
post-structuralism as a continuity of structuralism, yet his concern with the
metaphysical project, and his shift from reading Derrida to Blanchot,
separates him from other contemporary radical formalists. His resistance to the
perceptual in exchange for the conceptual is manifested in the Holocaust
Memorial in Berlin, his World Trade Center sketch,
or even his MAK solo exhibition
in Vienna. But the conceptual is even more determinant and
important in his formal sophistications,
such as the Hamburg Domplatz, by unmotivating architecture signs; the Church of
the Year 2000
for Rome motivating the void and activating affect and haptic
experience; or the Max Reinhardt Haus for Berlin, transforming a type. Therefore
he brings deep structure to the foreground being critical of the mediums within
which he works. Eisenman presents a different extended definition of form
according to the set of problems that his projects propose, suspending
representation in favor of presentation, and proposing processes and
methodologies also questioning metaphysics of presence to the deepest and most
stable canons of architecture.
Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa is an
Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union School of Architecture. He is an
architect based in New York and Buenos Aires and he is interested in conceptual
problems, deep structure, formal structure and instability as a resistance to
the perceptual. He is currently working on a book of Eisenman’s installations to
be published in 2008.
