“Are you going to do a number on me?” Peter Eisenman inquires when I phone to arrange this interview. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Ivy League architect-academics is to veil their rapturous delight in publicity with feigned outrage at the mere prospect; Eisenman is perhaps the archetype of the genus.
A master of double-talk, even his firm’s Manhattan office is not exactly where it purports to be. The Eisenman/Robertson practice, designated at 560 Fifth Avenue, is actually entered on Forty-Sixth Street, under a dingy canopy proclaiming Lazar Brothers tailors. When I finally arrive at the correct floor, Eisenman says we’ll go next door to talk. I already know to expect that this will not be a straightforward matter.
I follow the shock of white hair back to the elevator, down to the lobby, through the revolving doors, outside to the neighbouring entrance, into another lobby, up another elevator, and along to a grey door down a corridor lined with grey doors. This circuitous preamble is but a foretaste of the interview to come. Talking to Peter Eisenman, I frequently feel like Alice down the burrow, confronting characters with a logic all their own. Substitute a pipe for the hookah, and a chair for the large mushroom, and he could be the Caterpillar. When he succeeds in leading his questioner up some intellectual impasse, he grins like the Cheshire Cat; but the gap in his front teeth and the round metal spectacles give him an overgrown-schoolboy look which reminds irresistibly of Tweedledum or, “Contrariwise . . .”—as when he does a volte-face in mid-sentence—of Tweedledee.
Behind the grey door I recognise the somewhat scruffy space in which I had previously interviewed Eisenman, on the tenth anniversary of Five Architects in 1982—the publication which established him and his fellow Fivers, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey, and John Hejduk.
Like most of his colleagues (though perhaps less conspicuously than Graves or 1984 Pritzker Prize–winner Meier), Eisenman has moved on to bigger things than the numbered series of private houses with which he was engaged at the time of the book. He resigned the directorship of New York’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in 1982 in order to concentrate on teaching at Harvard University, and on architectural practice in partnership with Jaquelin Robertson, who is also dean of the architecture department at the University of Virginia. One of the practice’s major successes was to beat Graves to the commission for the Visual Arts Center at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, in a limited competition held in 1983, a large-scale model of which takes up the table in the room in which we are talking.
This project forms one focus of the conversation, which constitutes a free-associative ramble through such divine and cosmic topics as theology, geometry, Star Wars, psychoanalysis, metaphysics, Léon Krier, and The End of the World—not necessarily in that order.
Krier is clearly the “absent presence” throughout, the intended target for Eisenman’s meditations on such ostensibly nonarchitectural phenomena as the Torah and the mathematics of Chaos. “Léon Krier, I’ve decided, is the person who most epitomises the problem for me in architecture,” says Eisenman. “What I can’t understand is why no one in England takes him on. Krier says that the main line of English thought now is Quinlan Terry, Léon Krier, and Prince Charles.”
(When theNew York Times finally reported on that speech by Prince Charles and its aftermath—not relayed across the Atlantic until October last year—its London correspondent quoted Quinlan Terry’s belief that the Classical orders are God-given as evidence of Britain’s increasingly reactionary architectural climate. Peter Eisenman has apparently taken this story as The Writing on the Wall.)
If you’re wondering what Judaic scriptures have to do with architecture, all will be revealed in the five-thousand-word Open Letter that Eisenman is currently preparing for a forthcoming issue of the revamped AD magazine (L. Krier, D. Porphyrios, and C. Jencks, editors; Eisenman declined an invitation to join this illustrious board). If, however, you tend to sympathise with Krier’s contention (interview with P. Eisenman, Skyline, February 1983) that “the problems of Jewish intellectuals are of no interest to architecture as a fine art,” then you should probably skip the next few paragraphs.
What seems to be happening is that Peter Eisenman has been “discovering my roots,” largely as a consequence of his psychoanalysis, and of his recent first visit to Israel, of which more in a moment. He’s also been doing “a lot of reading in first-century literature,” presumably as a change from the Deconstructionist lit crit that has been in vogue among aspiring architectes parlants in recent semesters. Derrida is de rigueur, and no drawing board is properly equipped these days without well-thumbed copies of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations, Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, and sundry sexy texts by literary critics of the Yale School.
In case you hadn’t noticed, architecture is no longer a question of mere buildings. Architecture, according to the gospel of St. Peter, is now “about Text.” Indeed, “It is the Archi-text. The ARCH-Text, if you want.” Furthermore, lest you be misled by the excesses of PoMo, it is not about making images either. “The Image is not an Hebraic notion,” instructs Eisenman, adding, sotto voce: “‘Build Unto Me No Graven Images.’”
The two things that most interest him right now are Texts, and Misreading. Ah, but tread carefully here. For Eisenman, misreading is not the duplicitous activity it might sound. “Misreading doesn’t have any negative connotations. You see,” he explains, in supremely Looking-Glass fashion, “error to me is as truthful as truth. But there’s a difference between Error and Lying.”
So what makes it error? “Error is dealing with misreading. Error is not negative. Error is a provisionality on the way toward Not-Truth.”
Eisenman finds authority for this pursuit of misreading in his Jewish heritage, particularly in the “structure of interpretation” which he sees manifested in the interpretive relationship between the Talmud (the compilation of Jewish Oral Laws) and the Torah (the written scriptures). “And then comes the Kabala, which is the Interpretation of the Interpretation. That is, the her-meneutic Reading Between the Lines of the Torah.”
Eisenman is categorically not interested in the Torah per se, and sees no conflict in restricting his attentions to the meta-linguistic levels of debate constituted by the Talmud and the Kabala. “Since there is no Jesus figure and no resurrection in Judaism, the word comes before Nature and before God. And if the word comes first, then playing with the word—rather than with Nature or reincarnation or whatever symbols come out of Graeco-Christian tradition—is very important.”
Eisenman thus seeks to stake a claim for the Text as “a Jewish homeland,” citing George Steiner’s essay “Our Homeland, the Text” as supporting evidence. The target, once again, seems to be Léon Krier, who, says Eisenman, “goes on about the need for the expression of homeland in architecture.”
The tone of the discussion is beginning to suggest that he has missed his vocation. Shouldn’t he be studying to become a rabbi? Plenty of texts to get one’s teeth into as a rabbi. “That’s where you miss the point. I’m not a religious Jew. I’m a cultural Jew.” He identifies with Walter Benjamin, “someone for whom Jewishness was a state of mind, somehow outside the reality of religion.”
If this sounds rather remote from the normal domain of architectural discourse, there is cold comfort. “You don’t just have to be Jewish to understand the position that I’m talking about. Though many of the people who are working in this area, like [Jacques] Derrida, probably happen to understand Jewish thought, since they’re Jewish.”
A supremacist tone is creeping in. Doesn’t that give the Jew a privileged position in this discussion?
“The Jew has always had the privileged position. According to my psychoanalyst.”
Prepare, O Reader, to depart at this juncture for an excursion into the uncharted terrain of Eisenman’s unconscious. It is not fair to assume, as many English people do, that all Americans are in psychoanalysis, but in Eisenman’s case, it seems pivotal to his intellectual operations. He has not one but two (“only two”) shrinks. Woody Allen might think this greedy, but . . . well, Eisenman’s a complex kind of guy. Besides, he only sees one of them in the flesh; the other one he talks to by phone, in Los Angeles.
“I think of the mind as a kind of fog. My shrinks are beacons on opposite shores.”
Why does he need two shrinks?
“Well, because there are two shores.”
Really?
“I’m convinced there are two shores.”
Isn’t that a problem he ought to speak to one of them about?
“I don’t want to steer a course with only one. When bomber pilots used to fly, they used to intersect the radar beams to understand where they were going . . .”
Back on dry land, or at least on one of the shores, we’re into a discussion of theology again, this time, in relation to the Ohio State University project—currently at working drawings stage, and destined to start $35 million construction in the spring for completion in 1987. Eisenman contends that the OSU project is “about an architecture which attempts to stand outside the Graeco-Christian tradition.” Which is to say, “It’s not concerned with Origins or Metaphysics. I’m interested in theology, because it talks about the condition of Diaspora, of wandering. Not necessarily with a need to return to Origins.”
Paradoxically, Origins are a subject to which Eisenman cannot help returning at periodic intervals throughout the conversation. “Origins could be first principles, or could be a place. I think this Visual Arts Center at Ohio is placeless.”
I point out that the previous sentence is a contradiction in terms.
“Placeless, in the classical sense: it does not deal with a realm of geometry which confirms place and root. If you were to examine OSU, one vector is a skewed line which could be plotted by Euclidean geometry, and one is an asymptote, which cannot be. Therefore, their crossing is a collision of two non-placemaking geometries.”
But, given that he’s building this project, doesn’t that make these things somewhat academic?
“Yeah. Building. But we’re talking about its conception. There’s always a difference. Hopefully there’s the manifestation of a conception in all architecture. That’s what symbolism is about.” He draws a distinction here between Architecture, and “Just Building,” gesturing around him to the office as an example of the lesser breed, which “doesn’t manifest a conception because it doesn’t have one.”
The OSU building “is about its idea: the breakdown of Classical, hierarchical, ordered, closed, Euclidean space . . . which has been the traditional means of conferring and representing Graeco-Christian thought in architecture.” Eisenman anticipates that anyone—whether architect or layman—who enters the OSU building will feel “a very tangible anxiety, due to the lack of contact with traditional spatial integers which allow him or her to understand their environment.” He patently takes some delight in this prospect. Why is it his objective to suspend people into anxiety?
“Because that causes them to question. All works attempt to set up and control reactions. I’m interested in redefining the programme which the audience comes with. That’s what I believe art has always been about. Once you’ve felt anxiety, you’ll be able to say: ‘Wow. I know that this is comfort, and this is anxiety.’ It’s not a bad thing. After all, people go to horror films to be made anxious.”
He recalls having sat “riveted”—much to his own surprise— through the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera Einstein on the Beach at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This he regards as “four and a half hours of controlled anxiety. There was an incredible amount of risk-taking in an era of New Romanticism.”
On the subject of modern music, Eisenman says he listens to “early David Bowie . . . Kraftwerk . . . Joy Division . . . New Order,” and John Zorn, whose Locus Solus piece will be the soundtrack to Eisenman’s upcoming work in the Milan Triennale (February 22 until mid-May).
“They asked twenty-one architects from around the world to do an environment, with furniture—it was sponsored by Italian furniture manufacturers. The title of the show is Elective Affinities. We were given a space where the room had an upper level, and the lower level was supposed to be the origin of the piece: how it was conceptualised. Twenty of the architects designed furniture, because they were very smart and consumption-oriented, and realised they could make money.”
Who are these twenty?
“Oh . . . Michael Graves, [Arata] Isozaki, [Hans] Hollein, Superstudio . . . You know, the usual lumberjacks of architecture. As Claude Rains said in the last line of Casablanca: ‘Round up the usual suspects.’”
So what did Eisenman do?
“A box. An inaccessible void. You look through the top, and see L-shaped fragments spinning in space. Then you look through the bottom and realise that you’re seeing through mirrors.”
Thus, mirrors. which are normally the agents of illusion, reveal that the assumed reality (above) is no such thing. The L-shaped fragments turn out to be pieces of the Fin d’Ou T Hou S, broken up for this subsequent project in an act of architectural cannibalism. They don’t literally spin in space: they are, rather, seen sequentially through peepholes in the twelve-by-twelve-foot volume.
The Fin d’Ou T Hou S, which is the subject of Eisenman’s one-man show at the Architectural Association, was first displayed at the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan during late 1983, as part of the group show Follies. The project was presented via the familiar series of arcane transformational diagrams—here described as “decompositions.” A cursory glance at these drawings prompted in this viewer the kind of sinking feeling which would be induced by a request to perform three-dimensional computer-programming in one’s head.
Perhaps it is the process, rather than the physical object that it ostensibly describes, which is what this architecture is about: challenging the viewer to master certain geometric rules, manipulate them from step to step in the sequence, and not end up with a brainful of unrelated parts. Eisenman’s work is concerned with the elaboration of strategies that demand a certain competence—“literacy,” one might say—on the part of the audience; the reward for such tenacity is membership of the Masonic elite of initiates who can follow it.
What sticks in my mind (for I must confess not to have devoted sufficient time to the accompanying wall of dense-packed verbiage) was the palette of pink and green in which the project was rendered.
([A discussion of this particular colour combination engenders an amusing spat over who was first to use it in their projects; the same kind of teasing altercation erupts at another point in the interview over John Hejduk’s alleged influence on Frank Gehry’s latest buildings. Such a concern for precedent, for establishing lines of genealogy, takes on a disproportionate intensity in conversation with Eisenman. He is, above all, an agent provocateur: it is not so much the “right answer” which he is after, but the fun of the quarry, the sheer sport of dialectic. He likes to enmesh the questioner in an hermetic argument; arbitrarily declares most logical escapes as out-of-court; and having thus closed off all retreats, performs rhetorical loop-the-loops around would-be contenders.)
“The reason I chose pink and green,” says Eisenman, “is because they talk about a neutral axis of grey. I started with red and green in House VI: it signified that there was a topological geometry at work as opposed to Euclidean.”
There follows a deft interweaving of hands, which would do a sushi-master proud. This serves to demonstrate that the pair of stairs in House VI (only one of which is functional, as you recall) is built in such a way as to confirm and deny, respectively, these two types of symmetry. The L-shape which figures in the Fin d’Ou T Hou S, is apparently “the one economical move” which has this geometric bivalency.
“An L-shape, a cube with an octant cut out of it, is topologically symmetrical and produces Euclidean asymmetry. It’s as simple as that. What looks to be an unstable and open form is in fact topologically a closed form. If we carry around an expectancy of seeing things in a Euclidean way, then when we see something non-Euclidean, it’s anxious-making. Whereas the topological geometer, looking at my work, thinks it’s very conventional.”
Curious to know the hidden meaning behind the project’s cryptic notation, I ask Eisenman to write out the title in my notebook. He explains that there are nine possible interpretations, but, pencil in hand, falters after six:
Find Out Hou (find out how)
Fin D out (find out)
Fin D’ Aout (end of August, the month he designed it)
Fin D’Où (end of where)
Fin D’Ou . . . ou (end of either . . . or)
Fondue (this one for gourmets!)
Anyone thinking of a trip to the Architectural Association in Bedford Square might pause to peruse a sample from the abridged version of the Fin d’Ou T Hou S user manual, as published in the Follies catalogue: “The Fin d’Ou T Hou S . . . is not projected from a known or classical origin. Rather it presumes that its own origins are unknowable and then guesses at or approximates these origins in order to decompose an object from them . . . Thus suspended between substantiation and ephemeralness, the condition of the object is part presence, part absence. It is an object-in-process which began nowhere and ends nowhere, existing in a present of absence and presence, suspended between reason and madness, between art and folly.”
The computer-programming metaphor which this project brought to mind turns out to be not so far from its source of inspiration. The Fin d’Ou T Hou S was “the beginning of an investigation into fractal geometry,” a relatively recent branch of mathematics/physics, which finds application in diverse fields, from esoteric hi-sci, to populist sci-fi. Thus, Eisenman endorses his latest enthusiasm by citing, in one breath, the mathematical plotting of chaos—spearheaded by the young Cornell mathematician Mitchell Feigenbaum—and the animation techniques of Star Wars—pioneered by George Lucas’s Lucasfilm computer graphics department.
The real motive for his interest in fractal geometry lies in the possibility that it might undermine critical assumptions underlying classical theory. “It is in direct opposition to Léon Krier’s notion that classical geometry is the geometry of nature. In fact it’s the reductive geometry of nature, because most of nature cannot be plotted by Euclidean geometry.”
Fractal geometry, says Eisenman, is also used to plot Brownian motion—the constant random zigzagging of microscopic particles—showing “where a point has been and where it will be, but never anything more than that. So it produces a geometry of ‘were’ and ‘will be’ within a present.”
This brings us, in a roundabout manner, to questions of Past and Future, of Presence and Absence, especially the absence of the verb to be in the present tense in Hebrew—not to mention the Zeitgeist.
For those who last heard Eisenman when he gave the 1980 John Dennys Memorial Lecture at the Architectural Association, rest assured that the threat of nuclear apocalypse has temporarily abated—at least for the purposes of the Eisenman public lecture circuit. (One must always have a fresh message up one’s sleeve for such contingencies.) Apparently, the “post-Hiroshima” scenario no longer governs his outlook.
“Why am I not interested in The End of the World? Well, because that’s a kind of Zeitgeist argument. I’ve decided it’s as much a Zeitgeist argument as Not-the-End-of-the-World! I’ve no care where the Zeitgeist is any more.”
So what is he interested in? (Da Capo al Fine.)
“Misreading. And Texts. That have nothing to do with Geists at all. Timeless concerns.”
He cites his essay-in-progress, “The End of the Classical,” of which pirate editions have leaked from his enclave at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. This essay dwells upon certain ideas culled from our old French friend Michel Foucault, and our newer French friend Jean Baudrillard, and takes great pains to distinguish The Classic, The Classical, and Classicism.
“In this article, I articulate the Truthful, the Meaningful, and the Timeless as states of the Classic. That is, when buildings were, as opposed to buildings being messages about things that were. I’m interested in turning my architecture into a state of ‘were-ness.’”
Until recently, as witness the (pirate) transcripts of his Harvard studio seminars, Eisenman has been promoting something called “As Is” architecture. I inquire as to its demise.
“‘As Is’ has gone. ‘As Were.’”
Surely that’s just in the past? It’s the same.
“No. Is is a verb which does not exist in Hebrew. Were and Will Be exist.”
Why should its presence or absence in Hebrew have anything to do with it? If he could find a verb that was missing from, say, Sanskrit, wouldn’t that be just as good?
“No. I’m interested in Hebraic thought. Why the word takes its dominion the way it does. The fact that Hebrew has no verb to be in the present tense starts to key the difference between these two conceptions. There is no presence; only absence.”
Well, no: there’s past and future.
“That’s absence, in the present sense. Since we live in the present.”
Surely we live suspended between past and future?
“OK. I’ll take that. That’s good. A suspended position between ‘As Were’ and ‘As Will Be.’”
Eisenman is busy with a new project in Jerusalem (suitably enough) which is/will be “a non-place from which you can view the Were and the Will Be.” Standing on the hill next to the former British High Commissioner’s headquarters (looking down over both the Old City and the Dead Sea), this edifice is entitled Gateway to Destiny, “though it’s not a gate in the traditional Triumphal Arch sense of a gate.”
The desire for simultaneous dual vantage—having it both ways, so to speak—seems to be a recurrent theme with Eisenman; in the last interview, he told me he was writing a retrospective of his oeuvre to be called Eisenman-Amnesie, using the last letter of his name as the fulcrum, on the spine of the book. (Like his long-awaited monograph on Giuseppe Terragni, this has yet to materialise.)
In a similar vein, his project for the Berlin International Building Exhibition (IBA), The City of Artificial Excavation, constitutes a simulacrum of past history. Eisenman builds anew a grid of catwalks the same height as the Berlin Wall, and thereby “reveals” courtyards in which “emerge” the (newly constructed) foundation of the historic Friedrichstrasse grid. This “Open Art Surgery” carves through layers of the urban flesh, exposing a war wound—not by digging in, but by superimposing embodiments of topographical notations. The latest word is that all but one “corner” of this project will now be built.
The question remains. What exactly is As Were architecture? Or for that matter, As Will Be architecture? And how does Eisenman approach these problems on a pragmatic, day-to-day basis, over the drawing board, with contractors baying at him?
“That’s what I’m working on.”
Eisenman gestures vaguely toward the OSU project next to where he is sitting, twiddling a thin, transparent cane which is no doubt destined to be chopped up into “absent” columns in some future scheme. The OSU model looks—by the knock-kneed angle of its lattice-grid walkway—to have undergone some sort of failure testing.
“There it is,” he says. “I don’t know.”