Peter Eisenman is known internationally for his innovative and provocative architecture and writings. One of the "New York Five," he has been a leading figure in the architectural community for many years, as teacher, as founder and former director of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, and as builder. This long-awaited book is a rich and complex investigation of his first six houses, which he calls "Houses of Cards" and specifically about House IV and House VI. In these houses, Eisenman has tried to strip architecture of its traditional meanings and associations, making the planes, walls, and elements of the houses as valueless as an arrangement of playing cards. This book contains the architect's own texts on House IV and House VI, which he wrote in 1974, and 1976, as they were being designed, as well as an overview in which he places these houses in the context of his work as a whole. In his essay Manfredo Tafuri offers a psychological perspective; in hers Rosalind Krauss provides cultural and historical contexts. The book is profusely illustrated with sketches, diagrams, and photographs. In some ways, the book itself becomes a new project--somewhat of a metaphor for Eisenman's new approach to architecture--layered with "absences and presences," a complex fiction.

Houses of Cards

Religion & Spirituality

Eisenman, Peter

Christian Books & Bibles

Oxford University Press

Five architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier

Five Architects, originally published in 1975, grew out of a meeting of the CASE group (Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment) held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969. The purpose of this gathering was to exhibit and criticize the work of five architects--Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, and Meier--who constituted a New York school, and who are now among the most influential architects working today. The buildings shown here have more diversity than one might expect from a school, but share certain properties of form, scale, and treatment of material. Collectively, their work makes a modest claim: it is only architecture, not the salvation of man and the redemption of the earth. No matter how varied their individual theories and visions, all five architects simply share a passion for the art of architecture. Providing complete drawings and photographic documentation, this collection also includes a comparative critique by Kenneth Frampton, an Introduction by Colin Rowe that suggests a still broader context for the work as a whole, and two short texts in which individual positions are outlined. Now back in print, Five Architects serves as a reference to the early work of some of America's most important architects and provides us with a glimpse back at the direction of architecture as they saw it twenty years ago.

Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier

Literature & Fiction

Graves, Michael

HEJDUK, John

Meier, Richard

Gwathmey, Charles

United States

A long-awaited reassessment of Andrea Palladio’s canonical villas that challenges widely accepted interpretations of the Renaissance architect’s work Many historians of architecture have viewed the villas of Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) as physical manifestations of the classical architectural principles described in his treatise The Four Books of Architecture (I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura). Written toward the end of his life, The Four Books illustrate Palladio’s built work, redrawn the way he wanted it to be. In this groundbreaking new study, American architect and educator Peter Eisenman analyzes twenty of Palladio’s villas, offering a radical interpretation of the Renaissance master’s work. Working from an architect’s perspective, Eisenman, with Matt Roman, shows the evolution of Palladio’s villas from those that exhibit classical symmetrical volumetric bodies to others that exhibit no bodies at all, just fragments in a landscape. This conclusion stands in stark contrast to studies that emphasize principles of ideal symmetry and proportion in Palladio’s work. Featuring more than 300 new analytic drawings and models, this handsome book is an important addition to the corpus of Palladian studies and a testament to Palladio’s lasting place in contemporary architectural thought.

Palladio Virtuel

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

It has been said that Peter Eisenman considers architecture a form of shock therapy: whatever his intent, he has created one of the most controversial bodies of work of any contemporary American architect. This test is an exposition of Peter Eisenman's design philosophy, illustrating his groundbreaking contributions to 20th-century American design. Eisenman's own essays and illustrations explain his diagram-based approach to design, whereby sites and structures can be manipulated in diagram form. The book showcases his work to date - from his earliest house designs to the heralded Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, and on to commissions such as the Memorial for the Victims of the Holocaust in Vienna.

PETER EISENMAN DIAGRAM DIARIES /ANGLAIS

Thames&Hudson

A provocative case for historical ambiguity in architecture by one of the field's leading theorists Conceptions of modernity in architecture are often expressed in the idea of the zeitgeist, or "spirit of the age," an attitude toward architectural form that is embedded in a belief in progressive time. Lateness explores how architecture can work against these linear currents in startling and compelling ways. In this incisive book, internationally renowned architect Peter Eisenman, with Elisa Iturbe, proposes a different perspective on form and time in architecture, one that circumvents the temporal constraints on style that require it to be "of the times"--lateness. He focuses on three twentieth-century architects who exhibited the qualities of lateness in their designs: Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk. Drawing on the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and his study of Beethoven's final works, Eisenman shows how the architecture of these canonical figures was temporally out of sync with conventions and expectations, and how lateness can serve as a form of release from the restraints of the moment. Bringing together architecture, music, and philosophy, and drawing on illuminating examples from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, Lateness demonstrates how today's architecture can use the concept of lateness to break free of stylistic limitations, expand architecture's critical capacity, and provide a new mode of analysis.

Lateness (POINT: Essays on Architecture)

Iturbe, Elisa

Princeton University Press

It has been said that Peter Eisenman considers architecture a form of shock therapy; whatever his intent, Peter Eisenman has indeed created one of the most controversial bodies of work of any contemporary American architect. Eisenman's architecture, along with the complex, genre-straddling theories upon which it is built, is active and polemical, and his buildings--whether executed or not--are ingenious essays on the way humans and inert materials occupy and control space. Eisenman combines a theoretical background and a remarkable academic pedigree with a bold, uncompromising design sensibility that places him along the country's most revered architects. Diagram Diaries is an unprecedented illustrated chronicle that showcases Eisenman's work to date from his earliest house designs to the heralded Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, through current commissions such as the Memorial for the Victims of the Holocaust in Vienna. This volume is more than a straightforward survey of the architect's work, however; it is by its very nature an engaging exploration of the process of design. Essays and detailed descriptions are built along a central axis tracing Eisenman's career. Project profiles are organized according to their generating motif: the inside of architecture, or projects generated by the internal forces of shapes and forms; and the outside of architecture, projects governed by external forces such as site and scientific process. Through Eisenman's own essays and through extensive illustration, readers come to understand Eisenman's diagram-based approach to design whereby sites and structures can be manipulated in diagram form. Diagram Diaries offers readers a succinct, totally up-to-date exposition of Peter Eisenman's design philosophy and a meticulously illustrated presentation of this architect's groundbreaking contributions to twentieth-century American design.

Peter Eisenman: Diagram Diaries (Universe Architecture Series)

Architecture

Universe

Uses the architectural design of a house to show the principles of structuralism and a possible reaction against traditional functionalism

House X

Rizzoli

Guiseppe Terragni: Transformation, Decompositions, Critiques

Rizzoli Intl Pubns

Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques

Forty years in the making, "Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques" documents and investigates two of Italian rationalist architect Giuseppe Terragni's masterworks: the Casa del Fascio (1933-36) and the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio (1939-40), both in Como. This far-reaching study -- illustrated with more than five hundred original architectural diagrams and archival photographs -- employs what Eisenman calls critical and textual reading of both buildings. He attempts to broaden the definition of the formal from a narrow aesthetic and compositional view to include first the conceptual and then the textual. It is through this idea of the textual that Eisenman begins to define an idea of the critical in architecture. Eisenman's methodology is wholly removed from traditional approaches -- social, historical, aesthetic, functional. Instead, the various articulations and openings on the facades constitute a set of marks, notations that provide the basis for his analysis. In the Casa del Fascio, for example, each of the four sequential design schemes records the previous state, encoding the process of transformation in the final building. In the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio it is instead the process of decomposition that generates the facades. Also included in the book are an essay by Terragni and a critique by Manfredo Tafuri. In the end, it is the dual protagonists -- the architect and the author -- who together establish a new theoretical and analytical framework.

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