Customer Reviews

Code X

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Peter Eisenman's site-less houses (I - X) of the 1970's would occasionally land in someone's yard, confirming the modernist ideology of architecture's independence from anything. In the 80's and into the 90's he performed a series of transpositions of possibly related (but not too much) diagrams in a state of collision to generate what he wanted - namely, pure presence, not "humanist representation", which he didn't do.

Now, in the City of Culture project in Spain, he dares to appropriate form shapers from the site itself, and from its mythical and secular history (i.e. what we normal architects call site responsive architecture). CodeX employs the remains of his "disenchanted" rhetoric to document an enchanted approach to architecture.

At least that's what I hope it is; I'm weary of his Adorno-esque "we can no longer..etc," and say, Yes we can! The first and last sections of the document take us to the site via some low-flying GoogleEarth, and we are treated to something that I have called on another occasion "An Architecture of Geographic Transformation". The drawings held between these site-brackets are as exhilarating as any that Eisenman has produced, although one misses the sequential build-up of his earlier generative diagrams.

For a project generated by site forms, CodeX might have given us a diagrammatic palimpsest history of the Santiago de Compostella site - a real place with real generative powers. Instead, Eisenman draws page after page of space ships - very pretty, but ungrounded, and possibly still ungrounded. Go to Eisenman's website to see buildings IN, ON, and ABOVE the ground. The nice, normal architect would give us many SITE PLANS and SITE SECTIONS to prove how gloriously the City of Culture engages the site, creating a lived experience of being-in-the-world.

But Eisenman's waste basket is full of Heidegger waiting to be read. He clings to his post-everything mixture of not-humanism, not-embodied, not-of-this-world-which-is-too-horrible, etc, to show how tough yet politically sentimental a NY guy he is. In his text (or should one say TEXT) he slips for a moment (on page 33) to suggest that "cosmological ley lines" (sic) generate an occult order. Oh boy! Umberto Eco, author of The Aesthetics of Chaosmos (1962), finally has his revenge on Peter's sarcasm. And Foucault's Pendulum swings across a hill in Spain, slicing a City of Culture.

With affection,
Eugene Kupper Architect
Professor Emeritus UCLA