Peter Eisenman, The Formal Basis of

Modern Architecture

Translator's Preface: Dilemma and

Reveal
Luo Xuan

can only understand when deliberately looking back, a work is really the product of its era.

- John Hayduk, "The Mask of Medusa " (John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa )

So, at the other end of our world, there may be a culture in which it is obsessed with the order of space,
but But the things that exist in thousands are attributed to the category we cannot name, cannot speak, or
think.

- Michel Foucault, "words and things" (Michel Foucault, at The the Order of Things )

2016 In the summer, Peter Eisenman in the studio finishing time, inadvertently found a forty letter
dusty A letter from Colin Rowe. These letters were written in 1963, when Eisenman was writing a
doctoral thesis on the Formal Basis of Modern Architecture at the University of Cambridge, England, and
the content of the letter was the feedback from Luo. In one of the letters, Luo asked Eisenman a
seemingly simple question: "Do you mean that the 'principle' is not universally applicable, so why should
you emphasize 'modern' alone?" However , the words of the instructor Colin Roe, through the typewriter
font of the prestigious "Prestige Elite", are still three points and no face. Essenman’s final paper, while
answering this question, challenged his teacher quietly.

In 2005, fourty-two years after the completion of the thesis, this "formal basis of modern
architecture" was finally printed for the first time in the form of a German translation. The following year,
the English original was published in the original photocopying format, and its format and content were
completely loyal to the original typeface. Since it has never been published before, this paper has become
quite mysterious in this for more than 40 years. Eisenman himself recalled the past and thought that this
early writing but late is the most important and most decisive book he has ever written. The book can be
roughly divided into two parts. The first part is based on textual explanations and lays out a theoretical
framework. It includes three chapters, including the introduction and “forms on architecture”, “property
of general architectural forms”, and “formal systems development”. The second part is a formal analysis
of eight cases in combination with text and illustrations from four modern architects: Frank Lloyd Wright,
Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier and Giuseppe Petra Trani.

Choosing these four architects is undoubtedly a reflection of the author's inner struggles. The two
options, Wright and Aalto, can be said to be a difficult compromise by Eisenman to his official mentor,
Sir Leslie Martin. According to Jeffery Kipnis, as a staunch advocate of modernist style, Martin tried to
“push Essenman's doctoral thesis to the direction of lyrical/humanist” . [1] On the other hand, both
Corbusier and Trani reflect the influence of formalism from Colin Rowe. It was the experience of
traveling to Europe with Luo in the summer of 1961, and Essenman learned to see the “invisible” in the
building through “intensive reading”. [2]His doctoral thesis can be said to be the product of two different
wrestling of ideas - humanism or formalism? The former becomes the object of criticism, while the latter
becomes the method of criticism. However, because Luo's formalism is still inseparable from a
prescriptive, irrefutable humanistic idealistic tendency, his formalism is not thorough enough for
Eisenman. Although Luo's influence is extremely far-reaching, Eisenman has begun to question whether
his theory is enough to help him understand, analyze and structure the fundamental problems of
architecture.

Question about Luo - Since the principle is universal, why should we talk about "modern"
architecture alone? - Eisenman responded in the introduction to the paper: "The word 'modern' appearing
in the paper as a qualifier is merely an allegation for the selected case; the 'principle' discussed in the text
should be understood as universally applicable. Sexual." [3] This sentence seems to express the
recognition of Luo, but his plausible tone makes people read and grow a little doubt. He emphasized the
grammatical function of "modern" as an adjective, indicating that it is only a label for a group of cases,
and that's it. This sentence deliberately and categorically simplifies the more complex meaning that the
word "modern" should have. His words imply a reservation, even an evasive attitude. There are more
questions in the white space: What kind of commonality (style, period, ideology or other?) makes a series
of buildings in the same category in the name of "modern" ? What are the intrinsic characteristics of the
specific concept of “modernity” that make it an example of building “general” architectural
principles? The most important thing is, what kind of conditions make the concept of “modernity” itself
questionable?

The thesis was written in the early 1960s. At this time, the decoration of the ideal and the
declaration was falling from the pale wall of modernism. The vision of the utopian ideal society was
about to collapse. With the historical split of the bones, the intellectuals came from The collective illusion
is drawn away: Western society is generally experiencing an "epistemological turn". Cultural production
and social change reached a decisive stage in 1968, and many books later discussed the particularities of
this period. [4]K. Michael Hays wrote in his " Architectural Theory since 1968 "
( Architecture|Theory|Since 1968 ): "Since 1968...culture - as a kind of What belongs to the individual
and is owned by the individual, as a sediment that makes everything in the field become saturated from
top to bottom, as the boundary between legitimacy and anti-authority - will no longer be as we expect So
spontaneously emerged, and will no longer be the inevitable result of social processes. It must now be
constantly constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed through more conscious theoretical
processes.” [5] Essenman’s paper in 1963 was apparently The same theoretical vocabulary is shared with
many academic projects in the West at the same time. Between 1963-1968 that just five years, theory
books have sprung up, and these include symbols and linguistic research - such as Roland Barthes'
semiotic principle "(Roland Barthes, É Lé ments de S émiologie , 1964 And Chomsky's "Some Issues of
the Theory of Syntax " (Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax , 1965); Marxist Critical Theory
- such as Althusser's "Defense Marx" (Louis Althusser, Pour Marx , 1965), Adorno's "Theodor W.
Adorno, Negative Dialektik (1966)" and Guy Debord, La Soci étéDu spectacle , 1967); psychoanalytic
discourse - such as Lacan's "The Collection" (Jacques Lacan, É crits , 1966); post-structuralist criticism -
such as Foucault's "Word and Objects" (Michel Foucault, Les mots Les choses et , 1966) and Derrida's
"Grammatology" (Jacques Derrida, De La grammatologie , 1967); Finally, the impact of architectural
theory later writings - Aldo · Rossi's "urban architecture" (Aldo Rossi , L'architettura della citt à , 1966),
Venturi's "Building Complex and Contradiction in Architecture " ( 1966) and Tafry 's Theory and History
of Architecture (Manfredo Tafuri, Teoria e storia dell'architettura , 1968) were also introduced during
this period. Before all these works were published, Eisenman completed the "formal basis of modern
architecture". It can be said that his paper foresaw the arrival of a new architectural theory.
 As far as the development of Western academic thoughts is concerned, the historical period of the
1960s was not only a logical passage of time, but a deeper "crisis" moment. Eisenman's "principle", that
is, a series of irreducible logical relationships between forms, is the product of this crisis. The sudden rise
of structuralism and post-structuralism is a set of thought models that attempt to understand the
complexity and uncertainty of human knowledge. It can be seen that
Eisenman's concept of "modernity" is an introverted theoretical construction based on structuralism and
post-structuralism. The architecture he advocates is aimed at a structural transformation of this particular
historical moment, and his architectural theory is also a response to the above-mentioned knowledge
gap. In this sense, Essenman's theoretical work at the same time as other structuralist and post-
structuralist intellectuals is the same.

In the introductory part of the whole thesis, Eisenman opened the righteousness: the primary problem to
be dealt with in the thesis is the complicated situation of the confusing "modern" concept in the
history, that is , the reflection on the relationship between "modern" and history. The full text begins
with a discussion of the essentials of Carl Becker (1873-1945) The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-
Century Philosophers (1932). On the scholarly approach and style Becker is a typical "American"
historian, but thought he was a pioneer in Europe in the same period, such as Emile Kaufman (Emil
Kaufmann) and Heinrich · Wall Heinrich Wölfflin and others also resonate. In this short talk, Becker sees
the European Enlightenment as " the original source of the illusions of modernity." [6]When Essenman
invoked Becker, he mistyped his name "Carl" into the German-style "Karl", as if his interpretation had
unconsciously merged into the inheritance from Colin Roe. German formalism.

Eisenman writes: "In Becker's description, the modern 'climate of opinion' is based on factual
rather than rational: the whole environment is full of the actual content, So the theoretical content is easily
neglected. For Becker, history—that is, the facts and how they relate to each other—has replaced
reasoning and logic—the question of 'why'. " [7]

" ideological climate "is a 17th century term, Becker will be analogous to the" world view
"( Weltanschauung ) of the word, referring imposed on the world," a particular way and the use of
intellectual Some special type of logic." [8] The definition itself has doubts about the inclusion of the so-
called "history of scientific objectivity", which is the " knowledge-based" ( episteme ) This concept is
quite similar. By Becker's argument, Eisenman lists three sets of opposing concepts about "modern
thinking climate": "experience" and "rational", "real" and "theoretical", "history" (ie " What is the
problem" and "reasoning and logic" (ie "why" question). At first glance, Eisenman's argumentative
framework can just be incorporated into the sharp opposition between 'rationalists' and 'historians' as
described by Hayes. [9]However, as described below, these three sets of statements may be more
complicated than they seem. In response to the dialectical relationship between "modern" and history,
Eisenman has quietly rewritten Becker just enough to bring his personal views. By comparing Essman's
rewritten paragraphs with Becker's original words, this article has three observations and correspondingly
derived three "principles".

Let's look at the first one first. Becker pointed out that there are two tendencies in history. The first is the
so-called "neo-Rankean" historiography, which is manipulated by scientific historical positivism
and advocates cold objective facts; on the contrary, it is a tendency of historical relativism. - Becker holds
this historical concept. He believes that the facts are by no means self-evident, and the facts themselves
are not enough to explain the problem. The best summary is his famous words:. "Everyone is his own
historian," Eisenman in his rewriting of this group did not hesitate to repeat the opposition, with Jean -
Oxman In the words of Joan Ockman, he distinguishes between “as a true history” and “as a history
of concept ”. [10] Although we can argue that modernity is a social situation induced by a series of
historical events with some objectivity (as Leopold von Ranke, the father of modern history) [Leopold
von Ranke [Leopold von Ranke] ] defended that), but on the other hand, with different modernity,
modernism but for a certain idea of modernity in specific response to the artistic level - on modernism,
the real (at the real) never AllUnreachable. According to Eisenman's assumption, the only way for
modernism to point to certain aspects of truth is conceptual framing. In this way, we can draw the first
principle of Eisenman's modernism: Modernism is a theory of history.

Second, according to Becker's original words, the world seems to "always evolving and has been in an
unfinished state." [11] In contrast, Eisenman's retelling of Becker is like this: "He sees the world as a
constant time series... never ending." [12] Becker's words implied It is a purposeful history. In him, the
ultimate goal of history needs to be realized. When it came to Eisenman, he stole a history that was
endless, and eliminated the teleology of history. Years later, Eisenman in his 1984 article "The End of
Classical: starting end, the end of the end" ( at The End of at The Classical: at The at The End of
Beginning, at The End of at The End ) in the back of this The question clearly criticizes the historical
teleological hypothesis. He pointed out that the fallacy of the grand narrative of modernism lies in the fact
that "modern people... have got an illusion in their minds, that is, they believe that their own time is
eternal." [13] Modern people rely on this plausible sense of eternality to give legitimacy to their
architecture. In this way, in order to break this illusion, modernism must re-establish itself on an open
historical framework. Thus, we have come to the second principle: the history of modernism is forward-
looking.

Third, Becker said that the world can be observed from a historical perspective or from a scientific
perspective. However, in both of these, Eisenman omitted one of them, but only retained history, a
perspective that explains the world. According to Becker's statement, the scientific perspective views the
world in a utilitarian or functionalist way. Eisenman puts science under history, and the implication is that
the opposition between science and history (and thus the opposition between "rationalists"
and "historians" ) may not be so "sharp". This concealed hypothesis can also be found at Becker: "The
rise of both history and science is just two outcomes under the same cause; modern ideas have a tendency
to avoid over-exacting facts. Rationalization tends to examine the fact itself in a more rigorous and
neutral way, and history and science are the two sides of this trend." [14] In this way, according to
Becker's argument, modern science Both modern history and modernism are the product of the same
positivist tendencies. Later, Eisenman criticized functionalism as "based on some kind of scientific and
technical pragmatism" in the article "The End of Classicality " . [15] Compared with that teleological
historicalism, to a large extent, this seemingly self-evident empirical functionalism plays the same role,
that is, both are still limited by a humanism. The ambiguity of the idealistic tendency of the two styles is
nothing more than a set of "ethical methods of shaping." [16] So we came to the third principle:
Modernism is the rejection of idealization.

Now, we have integrated Essenman's three principles—modernism is a theory of history, modernist

history is forward-looking, and modernism is a rejection of idealistic tendencies—it can be drawn:
modernism It is a forward-looking historical theory that rejects the idealization tendency. Thus, for
Romania above question - "Since the 'universal' why 'modern'?" -Eisenman reversed the question itself
and responded with a question: "Since 'modern', why is 'universal'?" must reject the universal and
humanistic idealistic tendency, and it is inevitable to do so. It leads to a cast of the inherent logic of the
object itself—in short, the formal logic of architecture. However, although Eisenman refused to be
universal, he did not completely disregard his mentor's views. After all, he insisted that he should agree
with the "universal validity" of the formal rules proposed in the Formal Basis. Eisenman still recognizes
the necessity of universality. Although the concept of universality has various problems due to its
humanistic ideology, in order to fantasize a new theoretical foundation, universality is essential.
of. Likewise, for "provide the basis for a valid form of identification" purposes, [17] Eisenman also had to
temporarily accept the universal perception of Gestalt psychology, law, even though he "first in geometric
shapes or Plato body "that is " humanist theory of residues " . [18] The
above-mentioned internal paradox about universality reflects Mario Gandelsonas's “internal
contradictions in current architectural ideology” and the highly fictionality of the disciplines of
architecture itself. . [19] Architecture is both the construction of architecture and the construction of
concepts – this is not a matter of social, aesthetic, technical or ethical, but only through theoretical re
Architecture or re-foundation, architecture can be such a manifestation of itself. By understanding
the concept of "modernity" under the epistemological crisis of this particular historical moment ,
Eisenman has come up with a solution that belongs to architecture, which attempts to break away from
the shackles of humanistic ideals and thus exempt from power. The burden of ideological
tools. Eisenmann conceived a form theory that is self-sufficient in modernity and found concrete and
precise ways to reveal its own "constructedness". This is the answer he gave to Luo. The basis of his form
is translated into architecture.

So, what are some of the architectural discourses that are worth translating into China? Those who know
Essman's work know that to understand his formal theory and not to become a superficial formalist
superficial article, he must be familiar with the formal context of the entire Western architectural history
and its internal logic. From Vitruvius to Alberti, from Claude Perrault to Piranesi, from Ledu to Le
Corbusier. In this case, for us who live in the "other end of the world" (as Foucault said) [20] , Eisenman's
theory project based entirely on Western classics is how to be our own architecture. Bringing benefits?

Perhaps Essenman's doctoral thesis does not help us to answer this question, but what it does is to appeal
to us to shift our focus from the use of theory as a tool to the theory itself. If we only think of theory as a
tool to solve practical problems, then in most cases, the theory is inevitably ruined by external factors,
manipulated by embarrassment, and served as a historical narrative controlled by a particular
ideology. For example , in the discussion of Gederson , the concept of “universality” is used to obscure an
obvious and important fact that architecture knowledge has always been under certain historical
conditions, and the privileged class in mainstream culture. Owned, produced, and graded. If this fact is
circumvented, it is very likely that the form concept of Eisenman will simply be transplanted and re-
encoded, and thus only in the "form", without realizing that in this process, Chinese architecture itself has
long been In a certain discourse, you are in a position of inferiority. As Gade Sandas pointed out in the
article " La logique chinoise " by the Chinese philosopher Zhang Dongxuan , the only fact revealed by
this "low-level" state is the lack of conceptual systems. . [twenty one]What Eisenman's doctoral thesis
demonstrates is a possibility to overcome this lack of state. By questioning the concept of universality
from the inside, Eisenman's paper exposes the fundamental apocalypse of modern architecture, which in
turn forces readers to focus on the obvious content and start to focus on the image. The building's exterior
is deeper and deeper into the building. Reading a building like reading a text, even if it is inevitably
accompanied by jealousy and ignorance, complexity and omission, grievance and poor word, is
undoubtedly the first step in critically breaking the old and conceptually and intellectually. The hidden
dialogue between Eisenman and Luo runs through the entire chapter of his doctoral thesis. He gradually
found a position far from the core. In this connection, although we are traditionally considered to be an
outsider of Western architecture, it is precisely because of this that we are benefiting from the identity of
the onlookers and are expected to exert the same level of critical power – not just from the outside of
Western architecture. It is even inside the Chinese architecture. Eisenman wrote this article at the dawn of
the epistemological break, and at this moment we are also carrying an equally urgent task. In view of this,
when we read this book today, Bing has a sense of responsibility.

1
Jeffery Kipnis, “By Other Means,” in By Other Means: Notes, Projects, and Ephemera From the Miscellany of Peter Eisenman , ed. Mathew Ford
(Leiden: Global Art Affairs Publishing, 2016), 19.

2
Peter Eisenman, “ Introduction,” in The Formal Basis of M odern Architecture (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2006), 19.
3 the
same as

4
years, there have been a number of mass movements in the world, mainly students and workers. In general, this It is the result of the increasingly
intensified social class contradictions in the West and the irreconcilable relationship between the people and the institutional authority. It is also a
representation of the political status quo filled with contradictions and irrationality during the Cold War. When most people begin to admit that modernism
can no longer carry the social ideals it promises, literature and art retreat from the outward fantasy to the inner reflection. However, the specific ages and
events are a sign in historical narrative. The various causes of this period and their manifestations in various academic fields are far beyond the limits of
this article. A self-certifying result.

5
K. Michael Hays, “Introduction,” in Architecture|Theory|Since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), x.

6
Johnson Kent Wright, “The Pre-Postmodernism of Carl Becker,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 25, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 323.

7
Eisenman, The Formal Basis, 11.

8
Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of The Eighteenth-Century P hilosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), 5.

9
Hays, Architecture Theory , x.

10
See Lucia Allais , "The Real and the Theoretical, 1968," Perspecta 42 (2010): 32. See also Allais's references to Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture
Culture 1943–1968(New York: Rizzoli, 1993) and Joan Ockman, “Talking with Bernard Tschumi,” Log 13/14 Aftershocks: Generation(s) since 1968 (Fall
2008): 159–170.

11
Becker, The Heavenly City , 27.

12
Eisenman, The Formal Basis , 11.

13
Peter Eisenman, “The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End,” Perspecta 21 (1984): 163.

14
Becker, The Heavenly City , 20.

15
Eisenman, The End of the Classical , 157.

16
Peter Eisenman, “Post-Functionalism,” in Architecture | Theory | Since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 237.

17
Eisenman, The Formal Basis , 17.

18
Eisenman, Post-Functionalism , 239.

19
Mario Gandelsonas, “Linguistics in Architecture,” in Architecture | |Since 1968 , ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 121.

20
Michel Foucault, “Preface,” in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971) , xix.

21
Mario Gandelsonas, Linguistics in Architecture , 121.
By Other Means
Jeffrey Kipnis / 2016

“The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the
shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence
on the multitudes.” George Bataille – “Architecture”

“War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Carl von Clauswitz – ON WAR

Part I. The curatorial assertion

“By Other Means" embraces the provocation of Alejandro Aravena, Director of the 15th International
Architecture Exhibition, that "there are several battles that need to be won and several frontiers that need
to be expanded in order to improve the quality of the built environment and consequently people's quality
of life." But complex battles must always be fought on many frontiers.

Undertaking a direct responsibility for the broad quality of everyday life is architecture’s newest frontier,
though certainly today its most pressing. However, for better and worse, the preponderance of
architecture’s capacity to produce its prodigious range of physical feats, organizational sophistications
and psychological, social, intellectual and artistic effects derives almost entirely from its 5000-year
history of complicity with and service to entrenched power and wealth. The value of these extraordinary
skills remains inestimable and will largely determine our abilities to succeed on the new fronts towards
which Aravena redirects our attention.

At the same time we cannot retreat from old fronts, we must continue to contest them. Civic,
cultural, political and other edifices of power, authority and concentrated wealth will be built. These will
continue to exercise powerful functional and symbolic significance and affective and existential force on
people and peoples. Thus, the architectural traits of these constructions are as instrumental to our
everyday lives as those of ordinary architecture, and thus these traits must be debated as fiercely as any
other, if architecture’s concern for the overall quality of life is to be pursued at every level, from material
to social to intellectual to existential to spiritual.

More than anything else, one frontier of architectural work cannot be pitted against another as if they
were “enemies.” Such bad faith posturing is the essence of ressentiment, the psychosociology of petty-
hostility-become-counterfeit-morals first analyzed by Kierkegaard. The crippling effects
of ressentiment on all disciplinary practices and their higher ambitions have been developed continuously
since Kierkegaard’s work by philosophers, economists, psychologists and others from Nietzsche through
Weber to Scheler to DeLeuze.

Thus do Matt Ford and Jeffrey Kipnis, curators of this exhibition, assert that any architecture that contests
the traditional allegiance between the discipline and entrenched power and wealth, whether by refocusing
the disciplines’ attention toward a direct engagement with society’s immediate material needs or by
challenging the familiar design conventions of bourgeois, class or institutional entitlement pursues a bona
fide project of activism.

Peter Eisenman’s Struggle Against the Humanist tradition: a case study

Peter Eisenman’s architecture has become synonymous with a single-minded insistence on a conceptual
critique of bourgeois architectural conventions by exploiting the reserve potential of architecture’s
intrinsic rhetorical structures – formalist, linguistic, and textual - by suspending the de jure status of the
discipline’s traditional, humanist value. Though his design research is widely regarded today as a
disengaged academic conceit, his project has always and continues to entail a political conjecture:
architecture can only assist the empowered to exercise insidious control over the suborned if the latter are
not paying close attention to the architecture itself. Only then can a palace or a courthouse or museum or a
cathedral or a library or a villa induce submissiveness. The very qualities we most admire in great works
of architecture – intimacy, repose, spirituality, transcendence, stateliness, majesty, awe - while not in and
of themselves to be despised, are nevertheless also the very architectural instruments that authority uses to
belittle, to subject. Whenever a work of architecture demands close attention, close reading, it’s palette
of effects cannot but change in character from the emotive to the intellectual, and it can no longer serve so
easily the ends of power.

If well reasoned, it is, however, just a conjecture, one that joins a large body of similarly motivated work
in 20th century art, literature and music still waiting for a final assessment of its actual instrumentalities.
But at a personal level, where the architect has pursued this aim for more than half a century, a close
examination of the record suggests he has not found it easy to adhere to its principles with rigor and
dispassion. Rather, Peter Eisenman’s architecture suggests a prolonged internal struggle with his own
impulse toward architecture’s humanist tradition.

Part II – A Rove by any other name

“By Other Means” tries to touch, if not tackle, two basic concerns of architectural discourse. The first,
discussed in Part I, raises questions about the nature of architectural activism itself and thus the bona fides
of any particular mode of practice to claim for itself the identity “activist” and the ethical imperative that
attends it over against any other. The second, perhaps less timely but no less fundamental, considers the
perennial debate among architectural theorists and historians concerning the relative status of biography,
autobiography, and the vicissitudes of dissemination of architecture as cultural discourse.

However we express the two issues now, both arose from our wandering through the material exhibited in
Venice and published here, little more than a hodgepodge of scattered bits of biographical remains related
to Peter Eisenman’s career, gathered less for its precise contribution to a predetermined theme than for its
convenient accessibility potential interest it may hold for certain select audiences. As any such historical
scattering of historical will do, the flotsam and jetsam here suggested many thematic paths. The
circumstance of the Biennale, of course, weighed in to determine part 1, but the second theme shimmied
out of its chrysalis with a bit more difficulty, as the title of Part II describes. Only three items were
added by us at the last minute as external curatorial glue to bind originalia we found in the
DavidsonEisenman home, or in boxes, files, nooks and crannies around the office: copies of his birth
certificate as a frontispiece, the email he sent yesterday containing his surprising answer to how and when
he first became aware of Colin Rowe’s existence, and the draft material outlining his ideas for the
“Harlem Project,” his proposed educational collaboration between the radical new Institute for
Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) and the venerable civil rights organization, The Urban
League1. This late entry provided the necessary hinge to join Part I to Part II. Thus, though to do so will
take you and us ahead of ourselves in a chronological sense, we must discuss it first.

Conceived in 1968, the Harlem Project reveals the architect’s most explicit ambition to bring his own
theoretical and design work and the institute’s commitment to critical architecture into overt contact with
political activism, though it never came to fruition. Scene of the illustrious Harlem Renaissance and seat
of the New Negro movement in the 20’s and 30’s and the city of New York’s largest concentration of
African-Americans by the 50’s, Harlem by the mid 60’s had sunk into steep economic decline and
consequent despair. The crisis of education quality alone had made national news in 1964-5 with a series
of much publicized school boycotts. Meanwhile, the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King kindled
race riots around the country. And then May ‘68 in Paris. And then the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
That year in Harlem itself, Livingston Wingate, named in Eisenman charts, took the helm of the New
York chapter Urban League. As a footnote, in 1968, Eisenman finished the construction of House I,
putting forth in fact, no longer just in theory, a compelling test, if not quite yet a proof of concept of his
ideas.

What did the 36 year-old Eisenman have in mind with a teaching extension of the institute in

Harlem to educate African-American students in contemporary critical architecture theory and design, or
should one ask, what did he have up his sleeve? Now well-weaned from his education and his legendary
mentorship with Colin Rowe, his new intellectual project for a denatured formalist architecture free of
cultural, historical and political baggage had just been summarily rejected by Princeton in the form of
denied tenure in 1967. That same year he formed in New York, with key colleagues and benefactors, the
independent IAUS, or “The Institute.”

But as bold as the formation of The Institute itself was, the Harlem Project was a breathtaking act of
chutzpah, intellectual confidence and courage, one might credit as much to his army experience as to his
own fervor and creative ferment. But then, in the US and the world at large, 1963-69 was a breathtaking
period. What do the few pages of diagrams and captions of the Harlem Project show us? A momentary
Brainstorm? An act of Cunning? Naivete’? Conviction? An impassioned moment of altruism and
purpose catalyzed by the intensity of the local and international upheavals? A desperate funding ploy,
perhaps? A publicity stunt? What message did he imagine the recurring subtitle shown in the diagrams
for the project, “YOU INTELLECTUALS” would convey and to whom? Who knows? All of these and
none will always be the answers provided by the biographical/autobiographical debate. “Did he ever
actually act in good faith on the inspiration” will be the instinctive question, the wrong question, first
asked by those who call us to action, but only in the terms they mean, understand and value. The record
shows he did present the idea to Wingate, but nothing substantial came of it. Many will find these few
facsimiles the most unexpected, fascinating, and perplexing on the walls and in these pages, the ones that
raise the most questions. Though a door in the middle, they are, without doubt, the portal to the
exhibition that the title and this essay constructs, and the crux that that joins its issues together.

What if Peter Eisenman’s Synagogue for a Newark Suburb (1955) had been built?

His undergraduate thesis project at Cornell, the scheme rings as one might expect with devotion to the
lyrical tendencies of a new generation of modernists then prevalent in the academy, as the American
practices of Saarinen, Aalto, Kahn and their followers harkened back to the Wright school to imbue the
modernist project with a greater, more poetic sensitivity to context, meaning and locality in general in
reaction to the perceived shortcomings of first generation internationalists. Eisenman’s project also
shows the keen interest in the burgeoning modernist synagogue movement then well under way in the US,
part and parcel of the lyrical wave of modernism, which would have been impossible for any aspiring
young Jewish architect at the time to ignore.

It is important to emphasize here that though both his parents were Jewish, Eisenman’s family never
practiced any religion. He had no religious training, and, as the children of many nonpracticing Jewish
families in the states at that time did and still do today, he and his older brother lived the childhood of
secular Jews, enjoying for example the presence of a Christmas tree and the attendant gifts each
December so as to insure that they not feel marginalized from the lives led by their friends.

Nearly a century of such assimilating practices in the US have led to generations of secular Jews, of
which Eisenman is a prime example, who form strong attachments to august American traditions and
institutions– universities, fraternities, sororities, merit clubs and societies, even sports – that were often
Christian in their origins. Indentified in recent ethnic sociological literature as “inside/outsiders” or
“insider/outsiders,” these secular jews, paralleling many such structural outliers, are often uncomfortable
when called upon to assert their ethnicity or to identify with issues of Jewish Identity such as Israel or the
Holocaust.

Secular jews are a concern to the activist American Jewry for many reasons, not least of which is their
similarity to the Jewish community in early 30’s Berlin, whose passivity in the face of the dire realities of
their circumstance is by some authors considered to have contributed to the ultimate success of the Nazi
extermination project, and is attributed in large part to their sense of total assimilation inside Weimar
society as Germans. In today’s US, when confronted with the manifestations of discrimination these
secular Jews inevitably continue to face, personal and/or institutional, aggressive or iniquitous, they are
likely to feel more shame and guilt than ill-treatment, and react psychologically to internalize and
sublimate rather than to respond socially to seek understanding and redress.

But for those of us more interested in the project’s architectural content, the acuity of hindsight notes that
the project materials of this student work show an early anticipation Eisenman’s later obsession with the
power of project materials as such over the edifice toward which such materials were presumably
destined. Today, of course, it would be difficult to contest that Eisenman’s archive of project materials
in its totality - from sketches notes and letters to the drawings and models to the writings - constitute
the corpus ipsum of his contribution to architecture, while his buildings form something more like
a corpus mensa, though many argue the corpus dilecti.

The pages of the accomplished but otherwise typical period drawings of the synagogue proposal, for
example, are “numbered” with Hebrew letters rather than Arabic numerals. A conceit more than a
concept to be sure, the gesture among other things clearly notifies the non-Jewish faculty committee of
Cornell who the best evaluators of the work would actually be, the congregation of the synagogue itself,
for they would instantly recognize the traditional use of these letters on certain documents. But the more
interesting tidbit is to found in his two page handwritten draft of the program. On the second page, under
“character,” the only section in which the cross-outs show any signs of struggle of expressed intention
whatsoever, we find:

“There are so many areas of individual personality served here, that it would be impossible to give a
definite character to the whole, but rather a relation of different feelings to the whole. The Sanctuary
should give one a feeling of quiet yet at the same time a feeling of awe and inspiration. A very intangible
feeling of the spirit of Judaism – difficult at best to express in any words or group of words.

The school and the social areas should be pleasant and intimate rather than institutional. It is the
combining of these elements into a harmony of design that will determinethe final characterof the
entire composition.” [emph. added]

No doubt, the aforementioned dilectites will, should they ever learn of these caring remarks, lament the
fading of his youthful promise, and to be sure, his unabashed embrace of such genteel values does give
pause to any who knows of his work today. It will not be until one half-century passes that Eisenman
again turns his attention to the design of a construction related to Judaism. How might he design the New
Jersey Synagogue today, one wonders?

In any case, continuing to relish the magical connections that a random walk through an incomplete
archive always solicit, one cannot help but also notice the patent coincidence: “character and
composition” in the draft of his thesis text. So, Colin Rowe completed his essay “Character and
Composition” to deliver as one of his first lectures at UT Austin in 1953, two years before the synagogue
thesis project. Rowe had moved to Texas to take up a teaching position after leaving his first teaching
post in Liverpool, where he tutored his first and most important protégé, James Stirling. However, it
would have been impossible for Eisenman to have known know of that text, since it was not published
until 1971.2 Eisenman did not even become aware of Rowe until a chance dinner in 1959, Eisenman’s
last year in the M-Arch program at Columbia, when a rising young architect star named James Stirling
recommended he seek out his former teacher, telling Eisenman, “you are a fine, designer, but you
absolutely nothing about architecture. You need to go study with Colin Rowe.” Nevertheless, the intuitive
claim of Eisenman’s single remark aligns well with the direction of Rowe’s probing analysis of the
relation between the two qualities as they arise in 19th century architecture.

It is not as though he had remained a naïf after graduating Cornell, sequestered somewhere in upper
middle class advantage during the interim between his first and second Ivy League setting at Columbia,
where he pursued his an M-Arch. To the contrary, immediately after graduating Cornell, he entered the
army as an ROTC lieutenant and volunteered for front line duty in Korea as a battery commander in
charge of 150 men. In Korea, he design and built his first work, an army officers club. He served for two
years before returning to the states, where he headed, as a mule with blinders, straight toward professional
practice.

Landing what he believed to be a dream-come-true position in the office of the legendary Walter Gropius,
and set off for Cambridge, Massachusetts. But while the privileged environs and community of architects
around Harvard were very much to his liking, the office itself was very much not. To say the least he
found the crass commercialism that determined each and every design decision dispiriting, a
disenchantment much magnified when personally advocated by one of the Great Modernist Heroes –
Founder of the Bauhaus, after all. Six months into the position, after detailing three buildings into dismal
banality, he left the office, returned to Columbia to discuss his situation with Percival Goodman, Head of
School; he entered the Columbia M-Arch program.

Two years pass, and for his graduating M-Arch thesis from Columbia under Goodman’s supervision,
Eisenman submits a proposal to an important international competition for a cathedral for Liverpool, UK.
His design, though stronger, more mature and original than his undergraduate thesis, remains steadfast in
its allegiance to lyrical modernist tendencies. His entry places 7th, and as the highest ranking “modern”
design attracts much attention in the US and UK.

Still, as the Liverpool Cathedral and the other competition proposals of the Columbia period indicate, as
dislocating as the battlefield experience and as disillusioning as the exposure to Gropius’ office had been,
and notwithstanding the increasing sophistication of his architectural knowledge with graduate study,
nothing suggest the slightest hint of any change in his bourgeois values and goals of architecture. Nothing
that might forecast his break with the humanist tradition of architecture that would in just a few years
begin to send shock waves from Cambridge, UK.

Immediately after graduating, Goodman helped him secured a Fulbright scholarship to study French
Gothic in Paris for a year, a topic of particular interest to the graduate at the time, To prepare, Eisenman
enrolled in an emersion class in French at Columbia. 6 Months, 8 hours per day; avoid English as much as
possible, even when away from class – those were the instructions. At the end of the term, he spoke
French, better than functional – he felt fluent. Two weeks on a French ocean liner speaking only French
only without the slightest gaff, he makes his way to Paris.

Gets in his first taxi, says to the driver “Je voudrais aller à la gare de l'est, s'il vous plaît“ to which the
driver replies,“ you would be far better off speaking English, buddy.” “Buddy.” Spat out at him by the
hack with as much disdain for foreign French as the Parisian stereotype could conjure. Whether outlier
syndrome or just thin-skinned, who knows: but mortified, immediately, that very moment, as he tells the
story, he abandoned his plans to study in Paris and determined to heed Stirling’s advice and head for
Cambridge, UK to work with Colin Rowe for his year on Scholarship. Rowe had left the States to take up
a teaching position at Cambridge in 1958.

To have a chance to work closely with Rowe, Eisenman did not just need a host institution in the UK to
accept the Scholarship transfer, but it had to be Cambridge, no small task; actually, if you asked anyone
today, impossible. In the end, though, somehow he managed it. Eisenman’s success in the Liverpool
competition proved one of the deciding factors, along with considerable entreating to induce famed
English modernist Leslie Martin, Head of School, to accepting his late, incomplete and non-standard
application for the transfer of a Fulbright position. So, in 1960 the Rowe and Eisenman would meet for
the first time.

Eisenman was set to work as a first year teacher, having in the interview “not quite understood” when
Martin asked if he could teach an introductory studio. Eisenman, confident he had the ability, replied yes.
He just had not quite understood at the moment that Martin also meant by the question to ask if he had
any experience teaching at all, which he had not. Rowe, now his colleague, taught second year.
Nevertheless, the year went sufficiently well that Martin asked him to stay on as a teacher beyond the end
of the scholarship, and the only way that could be arranged was to enter him into the school’s Ph.D.
program. Until then, a doctorate had never even crossed Eisenman’s mind;Nor had a life as an academic
or a theorist.

Though only at Cambridge for two years when Eisenman arrived, Rowe had already grown disaffected
with the school, his ideas and intellectual style not at all well received by his faculty
colleagues. Nevertheless the spark between the two ignited almost immediately and the mentorship
began – including the trips together to Italy to visit and analyze architecture old and new that have today
reached fabled status. Two years later Rowe left for Cornell, inviting Eisenman to move into his flat for
his final year at school to could complete his dissertation. In 1963, Dr. Eisenman, moved on to his first
teaching position at Princeton.

Our hypothetical "what if.." question is only reinforced by the Liverpool Cathedral project for both of
these works show a still developing architect striving for confidence, identity and purpose, desiring to
build more than theorize. And one who, when given to thought at all, instinctively turned to the most
basic of humanist values architecture might address - community, spirituality, and tradition as if these
were self-evident, even as he sought to embrace the language of modernism in his work.

Clearly ambitious, intelligent and talented, yet up to and until his graduation from Columbia, the evidence
on the wall shows Eisenman also comfortably upper-middle class and suggests a desire to move up that
particular ladder of success, his aptitude protean rather than shaped by strong convictions. Nothing points
toward an innate intellectual hunger, a deeper curiosity about architecture as such, nor any dissatisfaction
with the status quo. Had he built early, successfully and attracted the attention he had and has always
yearned for, it seems possible, even likely, that he would have continued along a professional path and
just as likely that his career might have paralleled that of his close friend and early partner, Michael
McKinnell, or even that of his cousin, Richard Meier.

What happened at Cambridge that neither Cornell nor Korea nor Columbia could catalyze? Well, the
answer to that question which we have already so clearly pronounced, and will find in some sense easy to
explain, turns out not quite so easy to explicate as it may at first seem.

So, we need to sketch Colin Rowe quickly, which means inadequately. Let us just note that beginning
mid-century, Rowe began to sing siren-songs to English and American architecture that enthralled for
more than 40 years. Though as learned as any architectural historian of his day, his penchant was far more
for the story teller than the scholar3. Willing to speculate, to imagine, even to make stuff up to forward a
desired narrative, he intoxicated students, audiences and readers with his brilliant capacity to discern
unanticipated, yet unforgettable relationships in his analyses. He saw things in architecture that no one
had seen before, that no one understood could be seen, and that indeed could not be seen as such without
eyes and mind attuned to his ways of understanding. His mind went many places no wiser scholar would
dare: Like reaching across four centuries to reveal compelling equivalences that were obvious in
retrospect, but only in retrospect, between a Palladian and a Corbusian Villa, for example.

As mentioned, his disregard for restraint, period integrity, and other scholarly conventions brought him
into disfavor among English academics, hence his problems at Cambridge. However, the power of his
thought and analyses liberated generations of architects and architectural thinkers still loyal to the
language and aims of modernism but chafing under its strictures. Meticulously yet with wit and
sophistication, he discredited the ideological taboos the early modernists set in place in the guise of linear
models of historical progress to protect the present and the future from the past. In their stead, he knit a
single fabric history and the present with its projections of possible futures.

However brilliant his analyses may have been, Rowe’s intellectual self-indulgences violated the creed of
academicism and his colleagues at Cambridge marginalized him cruelly for his sins. Perhaps Rowe’s
disaffected status and Eisenman’s outsider inside as the secular Jew provided the unconscious scaffolding
for their personal relationship; in any case, the conscious basis is more obvious. From Rowe, Eisenman
discovered power, the disciplinary power of an intellection distinct from traditional scholarship and
history in architecture, a power he had until then no idea existed, one that he quickly came to realize had
as great a potential for the architect as for the academic, as he would begin to demonstrate immediately
upon leaving Cambridge. More importantly, he learned from his tutor to wield expertly the instruments
perfected to wield that power, close-reading and diagrammatic formal analysis, which in his dissertation
and after he would take to extremes Rowe never conceived and later disparaged.

The extraordinary correspondence between the two, long thought lost was found by accident during the
office dumpster diving for this exhibition. Some 40-odd handwritten letters from Rowe to Eisenman
secreted in an nondescript folder containing mostly lecture announcements turned up, all written to
Eisenman during his stay in Rowe’s flat. Most responded to his protégé’s outreach for comment on his
ongoing work.

Though only half the story, one can ken most of Eisenman’s questions and remarks from Rowe’s fulsome
responses, from his fine detailed suggestions regarding the evolving thought, to such wrist slaps as –
“Peter my dear, you ask me no longer to comment on your grammar, but….” Rowe, was not only
brilliant and generous and biting and extraordinarily insightful in his replies, but he was always intimate,
and almost as constantly hilarious. And also quite petty and vain and puckish and covetous; as much as
half of the total content of the letters deals with the irritations and triumphs of his own personal life at
Cornell!

Speaking personally, the presence on the wall of a selection of these letters in concert with a selection of
original preliminary drawings and of original final drawings from the thesis fills one of a certain
personal/historical ilk such as Matt Ford and myself with the mysteries of aura that only an exhibition can
profice. It is difficult to describe the feeling of reading even a few passages of the letters as one looks at
the originals that might well have been on the table when the letters arrived.

The tensions, conflicts, struggles, and hysterical efforts to formulate and demonstrate the thesis are
palpable in the fragmented selection presented. But a much closer study in detail of the complete record
of the three bodies of the letters, studies, and final drawings reveal something else: Eisenman’s difficulty
negotiating the demands of Leslie Martin, his official dissertation advisor, who strove, in alignment with
Eisenman’s expressed professional desires and pre-Cambridge attitude - to push the dissertation in the
lyrical/humanist direction for modernism advocated at the school at that time. One sees this influence in
the selection of architects – the presence of Wright and Aalto, for example – as well as in the selection of
particular buildings and the issues the sketches and studies show Eisenman attempting to analyze. As
against the influence of Rowe’s disposition vis-à-vis his newly conceived formalist intellectualism –
evident in the selection and treatment of Le Corbusier and Terragni. What is clearly evident, particularly
in the obscure complexities and variegations of the analytic line work of the sketches and studies, is that
by the dissertation he is not only leaving behind lyrical modernism and its loyalties to humanism, but well
on his way to leaving behind Rowe’s agenda as well.

What is well-known and well-understood today is that the crowd of influential mid- to late 20th century
architects, Stirling, Rossi, Meier, Hejduk, Ungers, Graves, Krier, Venturi and Brown, Moore, Hollein,
whether white or grey, Marxist or structuralist, whether at the time they were inscribed more as followers
of Scully or Tafuri than Rowe, all at least owed some debt to Rowe. And the reason is
straightforward: all sought to imbue the modern architectural language with greater sensitivity to
humanist values, to locality and context, to material and spatial poetry, to meaning and memory. Rowe’s
writings, far more than those of Scully or Tafuri, suggested more than just motives, but means, clues to
technique. But while the other architects shared Rowe’s values and reveled in the access his thought
afforded to a vast palette of historicist and populist devices, Eisenman responded differently. More
strongly attached to modernism’s palette of abstraction, the strength he garnered derived from the depth
and power of the analytic methods and conjugate materials themselves.

On their famous trips, as Eisenman often repeats. Rowe taught his young protégé to “see architecture for
the first time, hat is to see what is there but not visible.” But, in fact, one need look no further than
Rowe’s 1947 essay “Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” to find a clue the to the unique nature of the
immeasurable impact of Rowe’s thought on the architect, and then to the more seminal “Phenomenal and
Literal Transparency” (1955-6) written with Robert Slutzky to discover the roots of the peculiar and
decidedly different transmogrification it effected upon him his other colleagues. The title of
“Mathematics… is enough to reveal what would become the most important point of departure for
Eisenman from Rowe, his rejection of presumed the self-evident value of ideality. Form in Rowe’s essay
takes the stage as the stable cube, which in turn becomes the source of the equivalence of the Palladio and
the Le Corbusier and the presence of the golden section/Fibonacci ratio in each, the source of their
common ideality.

In “Literal and Phenomenal,” drawing a relation between cubist painting and Le Corbusier’s architecture
at Garche, however, there are no idealities, but rather dynamic formal relations, shifts and shears, that set
form and its elements into motion and threaten to destabilize it, prompting Rowe later to remark on their
essay “as dangerous and explosive.” Is it the creative potential of formal dynamics rather than formal
stability, the political power of destabization over ideality that Eisenman drinks in like Hyde’s potion?
Probably not yet, though these will soon come to dominate.

As one reads the dissertation and the theoretical that follow soon after, on gets the distinct impression
from the intensity of argument that what has transformed Eisenman is his sense of conviction. It is as if he
is certain of a discovery not just of a formal basis of modern architecture, but a formal basis of
architecture as such, Architecture, to be sure in the specific, Rowian sense as the set of those rare
buildings that have come through historical, intellectual, cultural and aesthetic knowledge come to have
imbued in their manifest formal relations, such powers that they cannot but exercise a determining or
transforming effect upon us for generations. Such works no more belong to the same class of the generic
functional building as an art painting belongs to the class of a decorative wall treatments, or a sonnet to
nursery rhymes. That through Rowe, he has truly come to understand exactly what Stirling meant when
he said “you are a very good designer, but you know nothing of Architecture.” But even more, he had
come upon a, a means to understand and generate architecture relations no longer dependent on
particulars: of structure, of these or those synchronic forces of politics or economics or available
materials, no longer requiring even the intentions of the architect his or herself. Though all these, of
course, the stuff of Architectural History, were valuable variables to the total picture. And the only thing
that had blinded Rowe from seeing it the fullness of this generative structure first was his parochial fealty
to ideality and humanist ideals.

Action

Arriving at Princeton in 1963, Eisenman discovered to his surprise Michael Graves, a friendly
acquaintance from his brief stint in Boston, and now like him, a newly hired assistant professor. The two
began to collaborate on a series of projects based largely on the dissertation, expanded from building
to urban scale. Most were published and attracted attention, particularly the “Jersey Corridor Linear
City” a mile-wide, 20-mile long megastructure which made its way to the pages of Life Magazine, though
uncredited. In any case, that work in particular prompted Arthur Drexler, curator of architecture at the
Museum of Modern Art, NY to stage a visions of urban renewal exhibition for New York, “New
City,” and commissioned the pair, one of four teams, to design a study, the “Project for the Manhattan
Waterfront.” The show opened January, 1967; that same month Princeton tenured Graves largely on
basis of the portfolio of their designs and the theoretical account of the work written by Eisenman, but
denied tenure to Eisenman. To this day he will not discuss the decision.

Though invited to remain and reapply for tenure again two years later, Eisenman left the school
immediately. Encouraged by the reception of the “Jersey Corridor” project and the “Manhattan
Waterfront” study in particular, he proposed the formation of an independent teaching and research
Institute in New York to continue the line of intellectually ambitious architectural activism the exhibition
showcased and Eisenman sought further to pursue. With the assistance and participation of Arthur
Drexler, along with Robert Gutman, a sociologist specializing in architectural practice, Colin Rowe, and
Robert Slutzky, the painter and co-author with Rowe of “Literal and Phenomenal Transparency,” he
formed the IAUS, With the exception of Rowe, an insider/outsider in his own terms, all the founders of
the Institute were secular Jews.

In its first few years the activities of the IAUS were characterized by such direct engagement
speculations, along with the sorts of lectures, seminars and other activities one would expect to support
them. In this context, The Harlem Project proposal, made the year after the Institute opened its doors, was
not at all out of character; rather, it was even typical. It would not be until a few years later, around 1971,
when Mario Gandelsonas and others began to introduce continental structuralist and poststructuralist
discourse into the conversational mix of the Institute’s gatherings and classes that things changed, and
soon the IAUS mutated into the conceptual/theoretical incubator that became rose to international
prominence. In 1971, MIT Press releases Rowe’s collected essays containing, at long last, “Character and
Composition” in print for the first time.

At that time, while Eisenman’s ambitions to build and build significantly remained resolute, his own
thoughts, writings and designs already show his approach to architecture moving inexorably away from
that of a crusading late-modernist seeking an entitled insider’s position at the center of action, toward a
more marginal questioning of how architecture actually might matter in a deeper sense. Within the short
span of those few years, marked by the shift from polemic mega-structural proposals and bold
institutional actions to concept-driven houses and challenging theoretical thought-pieces, he would
transform himself, in parallel with the Institute, into the discipline’s first arch-outlier theorist.

Never in any sense did that change suggest any awakening to a relation to his Judaism or to Jewish
thought whatsoever; his stood with the same defiantly unreconstructed secular posture then as he does
today. Nonetheless, his work began to marshal intellectual resources well beyond Rowe’s horizons,
leading him into active dialogue with renowned secular Jewish intellectuals including, to name only a
few, Manfredo Tafuri the Italian Marxist architectural historian and theorist, Rosalind Krauss, the New
York art critic and editor of the influential journal, October. And Jacques Derrida, French intellectual
extraordinaire and progenitor of deconstructive critiques and processes, though, of course, these processes
had always already long been underway before he gave them a name, as he so forcefully demonstrated.

What the work each of these and the many others writers and artists who attracted Eisenman’s interest
had in common was the degree to which it interrogated the means, methods and motives that underwrote
(apparently) self-evident values, such as ideality or humanism in architecture. If some of these thinkers
were inclined toward to prosecute the status quo more militantly than others, all set out to oblige that the
status quo presents its bona fides. No value stood entitled as an a priori, a first principle, a metaphysical
Truth – such became Eisenman’s operating premise. For architecture in particular, that meant that neither
tradition, convention, custom, taste, nor comfort could any longer stand as justified on its own terms, The
time had come for an architectural critique and for a critical architecture.

Why is why the earliest of the Houses drew first on the most powerful theorist and the most militant
prosecutor of the secular Jewish outliers. Noam Chomsky.

The year is 1967, House I has just completed construction. Outspoken anti-war activist, Noam Chomsky
publishes his famous essay in the New York Review of Books, “The Responsibilities of Intellectuals”
wherein he, like Aravena today, calls upon all of his colleagues to turn their attention toward political
truth and to use their power and influence to stop injustice. Before then, Chomsky had been one of the
most honored analytic structural linguists in history, and he continues to do important work in that area to
this day. After 1967, his outspoken left-wing political activism and total defense of almost all speech as
free speech has mired his life in continuous controversy, a hero to some, a villain to other, overshadowing
his linguistics research achievements to all but those entrenched in the discipline.

For Eisenman, Chomsky’s linguistic theories of deep structure and transformative grammar 1955-1966
were crucial; after 1967 the work of the outspoken activist all but ceases to exist for the architect except
as a memory.

Chomsky’s linguistic research provided solid mathematical foundation, a “deep structure,” for the
contested supposition of the pre-existence of a mechanism for language acquisition in general in all
human beings. It included an aptitude for syntax acquisition and for transformative-generative branching
of the syntax into surface relations, or sentences, answering the question of how language can make
infinite variation out of finite means. So the aptitude of any baby to acquire the grammar, diction and
idiomatic forms of any specific language is the same for all babies and present at birth.

Eisenman, began House l just before leaving Princeton, still flush with the conviction that the analytic
powers set forth in his dissertation constituted a “discovery,” and feeling equally that in concert with
those analytic techniques, the design processes he developed from them showed startling resonances with
Chomsky’s linguistic deep structures and transformative grammars, suggesting the existence of a pre-
existing architectural aptitude as much as there was a preexisting linguistic aptitude.

He sets out to demonstrate the plausibility of that conjecture in the early houses, and initially restricts his
palette to the abstract, planar forms generated when his processes operate on basic geometries related to
the cube. At that state he avoided semantic elements, that is, avoided architectural equivalent to
meaningful words that belong to any particular architectural language. These would have to wait until the
“baby came,” to draw the analogy with Chomsky’s concept “surface structures.” At first he needed just
to show the power of his processes to generate architectural syntax.

But why then, is there a fireplace in House I, the Barenholtz Pavilion in Princeton, New Jersey. The
scissor form of staircase is a formal necessity, and one can see in the process drawings some early effort
to generate the form. The interior ware, kitchen appliances and such do not fall into the question of the
architectural discourse of the house as semantics; they are nonarchitectural after-effects of occupancy
even if present in the final drawings. But a fireplace? Present In the process drawings from the beginning,
though not intrinsic to the cubic primitive, and not produced by the generating process, it is, what a
biologist would call, a pre-formed entity in an otherwise epigenetic production. And its presence is all the
more curious in that regard since the “house” was never intended as a house but as a small display
museum for toys from the owner’s business, Creative Playthings.

So, was it a regression of some kind to hearth and home? If so, it is not some unconscious slip, since in
the drawings shown here for the first time and in sketches elsewhere, one can follow him confront several
challenges raised by its presence, formal and technical, throughout the development of the design and the
construction of the pavilion, as if he never once asked how it came to be there but, having for some reason
stipulated its presence, he had to figure out what the hell to do with it. Actually, though there is no
evidence in the official “architect’s cut” of the project material, an interesting fact in its own right, the
fireplace is present because it was part of the client’s program, museum or not.

In retrospect, if House II at the moment of its conception arose as an elaborate correction, a more
thoughtful effort to test the relationship between Chomsky’s work and his own, it stands today as the
seminal leap of originality Eisenman’s of oeuvre not only clarified once and for all that his designs were
never destined to evidence “deep-structure,” but rather would take the stage as a critical architecture in
the sense already described. If one were to draw an analogy between House VI and Beethoven’s 5th
symphony simply on the basis the respective renown of each, then House II would have to claim the 3rd
as its analogy on the basis of the respective recognition within the two discipline’s of each as the defining
moment in emergence of an original voice.

None of the strategy, tactics and devices deployed in House II were new to Eisenman’s work: a client
with a stated program that in the houses will never play a major role in the formulation of the
architecture, a conceptual polemic that advances a formal premise intended to challenge a established
value; a formal procedure applied to a cubic primitive to generate the transformation drawings that lead
to the final design; an approach to realizing the design as a building with its own conceptual critique that
entailed a distinct status of the construction and construction details from the design process drawings,
and, finally, a set of independent but associated after-the-fact declarations and writings.

A simple example: For House II the client, Falk, an intellectual who held a strong interest in Chomsky,
approached Eisenman for their shared interested and commissioned a conventional 2 bedroom house with
minimal additional program. To make the possibility of examining the relation of his generative
technique to Chomsky’s thought more precise, he posited that walls and columns/beams constituted
minimal elements of an architectural syntax, noting shared, innate abilities to determine both space and
act as structure and to be further differentiated into semantic elements such as windows, stairs, rails, etc.
The analogy to Kandinsky’s theoretical treatment of lines and planes in painting would not be in serious
error.

To this, he adds the conceptual polemic, which in retrospect is the moment he swerves the work away
from a structuralist investigation toward a critical one, with the observation: “Since architecture, like
language, consists of a grammar and a set of signs, a column in architecture is not just deployed for
structure but also as the sign of structure, which is why there are different designs of columns for different
architectures.” The transformative process doubles, shifts on a diagonal and intersects the initial set piece
of walls columns and beams according to a set of established steps and rules that result in erasures and
duplications. In the end wall, column and beam reverberate into structure and the sign of structure while
each also differentiating each into semantic elements, such as a windows or grids, or notational/
ornamental elements that strongly allude to these. QED.

Next, he determines to build the building in plywood, so that it would appear, particularly in photography,
to be a model, or if understood as a building rendering it scale-less and vulnerable to the elements. He
goes to some lengths to confirm this effect in the photographs he produces and distributes, and one
French magazine does indeed publish one of these, captioned as a model of the building. Finally he writes
the essay, Cardboard architecture, incorporating both House I and House II now into the critical
argument. While “deep structure” is mentioned in the description of each house, it is only as an aesthetic
effect and Chomsky’s name is nowhere to be found. Last but not least, soon after, and increasingly after
the two houses are shown at MOMA in the Five Architects show and the catalogue is published, he
begins to declare that the “real architecture is in the drawings [by which he means the generative
drawings, not the construction drawings]; the house itself is a representation of them.”

Thus House II intertwines all three of the conceptual/discursive voices of his design process, the
generative drawings, construction as concept and ex post facto discursive polemics, so forcefully and so
imaginatively that it set out the terms of a novel understanding of “the architectural project” as such. One
must take care not to view this counterpoint as harmonic; to the contrary, it was and remains to this day
utterly anharmonic, rich with irreconcilable discord and internal contradiction. Even more important
however, one should never imagine that this incongruence among his design processes, writing and verbal
polemics, and his expert if unorthodox approach to conceptual building is a fault to be repaired, as many,
many have thought and tried. Though it is unlikely a result of intellectual insight and therefore intent,
nevertheless it is clear he has long been fully aware of it by effect and repetition. Eisenman intuited early
the mistake of subordinating any one of the three domains to the other, allowing each to produce an
architectural critique in its own right and in its own terms in an incongruent but coherent collaboration of
critique.

One of the telling aspects of House ll’s importance is that it is from it that the myth of Eisenman’s
inability build or lack of interesting in construction quality arises. To this day, urban legend, repeated by
friend and foe alike, holds that he built it as if a child, without any knowledge of flashing or other basic
construction requirements, though the published construction details, not to mention the actual state of the
building today, clearly evidence the contrary. The house, abandoned by its owner after three years,
remained unpainted and in need of some repair for more than 15 years. But over that period, it was often
photographed in such a way as to make it appear to be in total decay. That was because the polemic he put
forward, Cardboard Architecture, combined the photos intended to make it look like it was made of
cardboard like a model, struck to one of the deepest-seated values in architecture’s psyche –
firmitas. Firmitas, Vitruvius insistence that the rectitude, stability and sheer longevity of a building is a
first principle of the discipline, how can anyone challenge that notion, subject it to critical reflection that
is not just self-indulgent cynicism. Yet as an ideal how can we be so sure that it is not an ego-ideal, a
psychoanalytic pathology more than a ethos. Why should, after all, a work of architecture seek in its
essence to outlive its original raison d’etre, and be required to justify doing so? More importantly, that a
work of architecture should stand for 1000 years, does that not have a familiar ring to the relationship
between architecture and undesired power?

So, you are in Berlin and have just walked through the Monument for the Murdered Jews, if lucky on a
drizzly day. Marveling at the solemn, mute concrete stellae of varying heights, you wondered, perhaps, if
the height differences might somehow represent the differing heights of each individual person, or if their
number might mean something Talmudic maybe. You see children playing hide and seek, at first irritating
you with their irreverence then understanding that they and their games, too, are intrinsic to the profound
opera you experienced.
How do you feel when you find out at some point, perhaps just now, that you missed the entire point of
the project and the construction? That, in fact, the only way you, or anyone, can understand,
and viscerally know the design is not to be there inside it, but to see it from afar and above, or in a
photograph or preferably to see and comprehend the arbitrariness of the determination of the heights of
each slab, as evidenced on the wrinkled sheet of numbers exhibited on the wall in Venice and printed in
this catalogue.

For only then can you realize and feel and see what cannot be seen until you understand what must be
seen, that the slab tops forms a palpable, obvious new conceptual “ground.” It is easy to see, easy to
understand. It is exactly on grade with the old Tiergarten of Berlin. It is a ground that no one can march
down, no one can own, no one can call their fatherland, as if it were there forever and gods guaranteed it
for its true inhabitants for eternity, or at least for 1000 years.

And then you will realize that all grounds are conceptual grounds, as are all boundaries. This fact does not
make them bad or good, it just makes the ground always already political, never metaphysical, and
therefore not just open to critique demanding and deserving it so that no one can claim absolute authority
over it.

Finally, how do you feel when you realize that Eisenman in all honestly has a great deal of interest in
history, particularly in the history of world war II, but hold very little personal outrage about the
holocaust or particular empathy for its victims because of his heritage, beyond any decent human being
would for any and all such victims of any holocaust. And that he, at least, is convinced that only because
of his life-long dedication to his formalist project and his remove from a traditional narrative of
memorialization that the monument as it stands today, interrupting the day to day traffic in the middle of
Berlin as the city’s constant irritation, would be conceivable.

Now, back to the exhibition or the catalog, take one last moment to look at the drawing in 1942 by a nine
year of a p-47 flying over a football stadium. On its back is a non-existent high school in period brick
high-school gothic style. The “drawing” is an imaginary program for a game between two non-existent
high-school football teams, selling for $.05. Why did he keep this one drawing for 75 years, the only one.
And no family photos, very little record of his early life at all till a bit shows up at Cornell and in the
Army. Seems hard to connect the two, but somehow even harder not to.

In the end, the strangest aspect of this exhibition and this essay has been the necessity to delve so deeply
into Eisenman’s biography to discern the depth of his commitment to activism in his architecture and for
architecture as such. And in so doing bring the two theoretical linesw of inquiry into some kind of
relationship. All the more, because the first two values he subjected to critique in his dissertation the
status of intent, the autobiographical account of the architecture by the architect, as well as the synchronic
archive, the effect on the architecture of the historical situation in which the work arose. Only by
suspending the self-evidency of these profound influences on a work could he show the operations of his
diagrammatic formalist principles, the very ones that began a the new chapter of architectural activism he
has authored.
1
provided in facsimile by the Canadian Center for Architecture. I am indebted to Lucia Allais for making me aware of this material. Her essay
considering its significance is “The Real and the Theoretical 1968”, published in Perspecta 42

2
Rowe’s only publication at that time were “Mathematics of the ideal Villa” (1947) and “Mannerism and Modern Architecture” (1950), both in the
Architectural Review UK.

3
[i] Rowe's MA thesis in Architecture History for no one less than Rudolf Wittkower at the prestigious Warburg institute positing a lost architectural
treatise by Inigo Jones contained not a single shred of factual evidence. His considered argument drew entirely upon close readings of a set of Jones’
drawings and plates, Jones own two volumes of extensive notes on Palladio’s four books, inference and speculation. Wittkower, though a rigorous
historian and demanding tutor not only understood the situation but apparently encouraged Rowe’s undertaking, recognizing the value of his rare gifts. For
further on the topic, see Histories of the Immediate Present, Anthony Vidler, MIT Press 2008
Palladio Virtuel
Peter Eisenman / 2015 / Preface

This book is a critical work by an architect, not a historian or a critic. Its approach is little interested in the
accepted narrative or recorded historical facts about Andrea Palladio. Nor is this book concerned with the
current architectural fashions of big data, crowdsourcing, or parametrics. Rather, through what can be
called close reading of architectural traces, the book uncovers certain similarities between architecture in
our time and the time of Palladio by focusing on a moment of architectural shifts, from 1520 to 1575 in
Northern Italy.

Walter Benjamin argued that in order to understand any form of paradigm shift, it is necessary, in a sense,
to reawaken history. This is what this book attempts to do—to awaken a historical period that shares
certain conditions with the present. Many philosophers define their work through a discursive relation to a
historical figure: for example, Jacques Derrida in relation to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze to
Kant, Spinoza, Bergson, and others. Although not as a philosopher, it is in that tradition that I write about
Palladio, in order to elaborate my own approach to architecture.

The shift that is the focus of this book has been discussed by many important voices. Among others,
Rudolf Wittkower, Colin Rowe, Manfredo Tafuri, and, more recently, Pier Vittorio Aureli all have drawn
from this period to propose theoretical matrices from which to view architecture, but none has taken the
same approach as presented here. Of these, Rowe looms largest over this book. During my time at the
University of Cambridge from 1960 to 1963, he gave a series of lectures titled “From Bramante to
Vignola.” He included in these lectures the work of Donato Bramante, Michelangelo, Palladio, Baldassare
Peruzzi, Raphael, Giulio Romano, Giuliano da Sangallo, Michele Sanmicheli, Sebastiano Serlio, and
Giacomo Barozzi Vignola. Then, for a solid three months in each of two summers, Rowe was my guide to
visiting this work, for which there were then no guidebooks, nor even road signs, to help us reach the
buildings. For Rowe, Bramante was the pivotal figure for architecture (hence the title of his course), but
for me it was Palladio who provided a unique theoretical matrix that seemed to transcend his own time,
although both Bramante and Palladio owe much to the figure of Leon Battista Alberti.

The argument being made in this book begins with Alberti’s implication of homogeneous space in his De
Re Aedificatoria (On the Art of Building, 1452), which originated the discourse about space and how to
conceptualize it. And after Bramante, much of what is known as architectural mannerism—which
historians date to Bramante’s successors, including Palladio—is in fact a questioning of Albertian spatial
principles. However, it is only when Palladio’s work is examined that new strains of this questioning
arise, an important aspect of which is the shift from the Albertian idea of homogeneous space to what
might be called, in Palladio’s work, heterogeneous space, and thus from Cartesian geometry to topology.
This phenomenon takes several distinct forms. For example, the articulated architectural elements—
portico, transition space, and central space, which are given letter (A, B, or C) and color (white, gray, or
black) notations in the following analysis—become dislocated from their supposed normative location as
well as their meaning and become noniconic spatial inscriptions. These inscriptions often produce
conditions where two or more notations become overlaid in a single space. The resultant space no longer
has a simple or singular conceptual valence, as in homogeneous space, but rather takes on indeterminate
characteristics. These characteristics are not necessarily “visible” in any one space, but their
indeterminate qualities can be revealed through a close reading of the relationships among these
notations. Nonetheless, the overlay of these notations causes the space to be “different” or “other” in its
effect on both reading and experience. This difference—the evident conceptual transformation from
homogeneous to hetereogeneous space—is variously referred to in this book as the dissipation or
disaggregation of supposed “ideal” toward “virtual” spatial conditions, as well as the movement from a
geometric analysis to a topological one.

No longer either one condition or another—for example, dense or sparse space, but rather “both/and”—
the proposed topological relationships between the ideal and the virtual are critical to the notations and
analyses developed in this book. For example, the architectural ideal refers to an organization of form—
nine-squares or biaxial symmetry. The virtual refers to architectural relationships that are implied by a
condition of presence but that exist beyond the literal or the ideal. This could be considered a first
definition of the virtual. By identifying moments of tension between ideal and virtual conditions in
Palladio’s work, the analysis uncovers—or invents—the underlying architectural strategies, inscriptions,
and notations in the works.

-------

An architect sees differently than does an art historian or critic. Architects look less for dates, patrons, or
pedigree than for how buildings teach them to see through their facture. Two conditions are particular to
the ways that architects see architecture, which makes the process of seeing both similar to and different
from the ways musicians hear music, the ways writers read literature, or artists see sculpture or painting,
for example; that is, to how those who work within a creative discipline see their own discipline. One of
these conditions is that people who are not architects often think they know architecture in a way different
than people who are not musicians or artists think they know music or painting. People are more familiar
with architecture: they live in it, work in it, learn in it, play in it, and pray in it. This familiarity makes it
more difficult for the architect to open architecture to investigations that promote change from the status
quo, the expected, and what will be called here, the normal.

A second condition of difference derives out of the first. People assume that what is seen is in fact what
is. Often, particularly in work that separates architecture from building, what is seen is only part of what
is. One of my first lessons in architecture occurred in the summer of 1961 while traveling with Rowe in
Italy. Coming upon our first Palladian villa, he said to me, “Look at that facade and tell me something
about it that cannot be seen.” I did not know what to do. But over time, I have learned that architectural
seeing involves this capacity to see the unseen, what could be described as a form of close reading.

A part of seeing in this way makes it necessary to separate—as did poststructuralism for language—the
signifier from the signified. It has been assumed that in architecture there is little differentiation between
the signifier and the signified: a column is simply a column. However, a column can be thought of as both
a structural element—the object—and the sign of that structural element. This collapsing of sign,
meaning, and object leads to conditions where the distinctions between form (signified) and space
(signifier) are blurred. While architecture fills up space, at the same time it also creates space outside and
inside of its walls. Seeing architecture, therefore, means to see, for example, the doubled columns in the
portico of the Palazzo Chiericati as an imprint of a spatial syntax, of a topological or relational condition
as opposed to a geometric one.

The idea of a spatial syntax goes beyond simple function. While there is no architecture without the
external surfaces that shelter and enclose, the architectural membrane—that is, the vertical surface—is not
just functional, it is also representational. While both horizontal and vertical membranes convey
information in one way or another, Rowe has argued that the vertical surface manifests character while
the plan is the source of composition. By contrast, this book argues that the vertical surface records
something other than character, as the plan records something other than composition. That “other” is a
defining characteristic of architecture: not the literal, material scale or proportion of building parts or
spaces, but the latent, immaterial possibility of multiple readings of the same space through topological
conditions such as adjacency, overlap, or superposition—all manifestations of architectural relationships
as opposed to geometric coordinates.

Recognizing the “other” as an important part of the discipline, Le Corbusier suggested that when a
window is too large or too small for a room—that is, when it is not as it is expected to be—it signifies the
presence of architecture. In these terms, architecture is characterized by excess—too much or too little of
something that may or may not be present. If Le Corbusier is correct, the idea of the normative is
therefore a baseline definition, which helps organize the basic elements of architecture—openings, rooms,
and relationships between interior and exterior—in an attempt to typify and make generally accessible
what is, in fact, different from one moment in time to another. Most design acknowledges such norms,
and thereby repeats the past, striving to make the subject feel “at home.”

If the normative describes those conditions that are external to the discipline of architecture—cultural or
social norms that found their way into ideas of proportion, scale, symmetry, etc.—this book proposes a
slightly different concept, called here the “ideal,” which describes those conditions that are internal to or
that define the discipline. In any discussion about seeing in architecture, for example, there is a
relationship of what can be seen to what cannot; there is a literal physicality of presence but also a
condition of that which is not present but can be implied as other or excessive to that which is literally
present. A niche, for example, has a literal presence in relation to the surface of a wall. But it could also
be “seen” or read as the imprint or inscription of an absent positive element—a column, pier, or another
wall perhaps. So a niche, or another element, could be simultaneously literally present and imply
something other. As noted earlier, these implied conditions beyond the literal can be called the virtual,
hence the title of this book, Palladio Virtuel. In one sense, the normative is itself a “virtual” condition in
that it never really exists but is only a hypothetical “ideal” condition that erases difference (in other
words, it homogenizes). In another sense, the virtual is an excessive condition in that it is “too large” or
“too small” to conform to a normative standard. Thus, the virtual is both an excessive and a normative
condition, because it too can be considered only a hypothetical version of something. This could be said
to be a second condition of the virtual. This contradiction is important to the analyses presented in this
book, seen in the movement of Palladio’s work both toward and away from an ideal type, in this case, the
villa.

Another definition of the normative considers the idea that architecture’s function is usually thought of in
relation to enclosure, comfort, and shelter—those conditions connected to presence. In fact, architecture
has been called a sine qua non of the metaphysics of presence. No attempt is made here to completely
disregard a metaphysics of presence, however, because it is a discourse that will always have currency in
regard to architecture. However, shifts in thinking about the relationship between signifier and signified in
language, among other things, signal a loosening of the dominant discourses connected to presence. This
would explain the effect of Derrida on this book. Although it is sometimes assumed that the only function
of architecture is to solve or accommodate social, political, and economic problems, in fact, architecture
can also be engaged in the loosening of the supposed normative one-to-one relationship between sign and
signified. And in this sense, architecture has the potential to open up these problems to their own internal
constructions and contradictions.

The layering of the column bays of Santo Spirito [c. 1430] by Brunelleschi, the façade of Sant’Andrea [c.
1465] by Alberti, and the space of Bramante’s plans each in their own way constitutes a different aspect
of architecture’s capacity to loosen—to dissipate—the relationship between sign and signified. Bramante
was a key figure in this regard. He seized on the shift in cosmology that placed the human subject at the
center of his world and produced a new kind of church exemplified in the centralized plan for St. Peter’s
[c. 1506] and the Tempietto [c. 1510]. While Brunelleschi had previously brought an idea of science into
architecture, and Alberti collaged ideas and references from the history of architecture, Bramante could be
considered the first architect to have seen and conceptualized an idea that originated from within
architecture itself—that is, to consider architecture as a self-contained organism.

Learning from Bramante, Palladio continues to place the Albertian notion of presence and homogeneous
space in question, and, as this book contends, he is the first architect to work with the possibility of the
inscription of a spatial syntax and the corresponding denial of overt symbols. In Palladio, for the first
time, there exists what will later be called by Le Corbusier a promenade architecturale, for example,
where space is understood not merely from a frontalized picture plane, as suggested by architectural
historian James Ackerman, or through an understood set of proportional geometric relationships in space,
but rather as unfolding in different ways through space, in en suite progressions without corridors, servant
or served spaces. Instead there emerges a new typology: a villa plan in which the abstract geometry of the
nine-square diagram gradually dissipates, replaced by a sense of topological relationships; it loses its
volumetric discreteness, revealing spaces that are superposed over one another or transposed from some
unstable base condition, which is no longer Platonic and ideal, but rather involves a series of potentially
disarticulated and disaggregated relations of some presumed normative state.

It could be argued that Palladio’s consciousness of a spatial syntax is made evident in his I Quattro Libri
dell’Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), published in 1570, ten years before his death. In I
Quattro Libri, Palladio redrew his buildings not as they had actually been built, but as he wanted them to
be known. The reality of Palladio’s work therefore exists between the drawings and the buildings
themselves, as a virtual Palladio; this is a third condition of the virtual. Bertotti Scamozzi, Heinrich
Wöfflin, Paul Frankl, Wittkower, Rowe, and Ackerman are some of the many architects and historians
who, since the seventeenth century, have both drawn from and literally redrawn Palladio’s own
redrawings. The substance of fact, one could say, is a very elusive one. Most of Palladio’s buildings have
been changed or refurbished, and some have been destroyed. Many previous interpretations are based on
Scamozzi’s drawings, which have little to do with Palladio’s intentions in the Four Books. Had Palladio
not written and drawn the Four Books as a theoretical treatise following Vitruvius and Alberti, it is
possible that very few architects would have studied so keenly or gone to see his buildings, as opposed to
the many other country villas constructed at the time.

It is clear that this book is also engaged in an act of revision. Working from readings of English versions
of the primary sources, this revision is therefore not a revision of the primary sources themselves as much
as it is a revision of secondary material. Thus, the reading of Palladio that follows is not exactly a revision
of Palladio, but a revision of nineteenth- and twentieth-century readings of his work through the lens of an
Anglo/American theoretical context as it evolved out of a German art historical tradition in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Two questions must be asked about the work that follows: why Palladio today, and why this particular
method of analysis?

To attempt to answer these questions, this work considers history as a template for the possible multiple
interpretations and transformations of any project that are reflections of a dynamic culture. In the past,
Palladio’s work has been seen as a master example of critical introspection in the first wave of modernity,
a moment in history that once had a poignancy and a clarity necessary to illuminate contemporary
architecture. But in the rush to embrace new technologies beginning in the late twentieth century, ideas
changed radically, and the potential in the transformation of historical precedent was almost forgotten.

The late nineteenth century “Kunstgeschichte” idea of Palladio as a model of Renaissance reason,
proportion, and mathematics became part of the detritus of such rapid technological growth. Overlooked
in most previous readings of Palladio were the nuances and inconsistencies that appear in Palladio’s own
drawings, which have been passed over as unimportant to the prevailing interpretation. Beginning from
the idea that what Palladio drew might be necessary to explore, not because of its inconsistencies but
rather as evidence of an alternative model, might help resuscitate Palladio as well as the historical project.
This new work exposes Palladio to a completely different interpretation than what has been previously
available in an Anglo/American context. The interpretation in this book eschews and denies previous
claims of an ideal and static geometry in Palladio’s villas. Instead, it develops a sequential tripartite
typology, which traces the breakdown of unitary villa volumes into a series of partial villa elements and
their important positioning in the landscape by comparing the possibility of two states: first, the
relationship in space of potentially ideal organizations; and second, the possibility of virtual topological
conditions that arise out of the subtleties of a close reading of each villa. It is this close reading that in
turn animates the discussion of each villa, producing a new theoretical trajectory from a previously
thought static geometric volume to a dynamic topology of partial figures.The analysis presented here does
not go against or refute technology; on the contrary, it shows that technology itself is grounded in history,
made more pliable and dynamic by close reading. This work attempts to redirect attention away from the
formal components of an architecture typically conceived in static geometric terms toward a supple
topology similar to the output of today’s digital algorithms. By casting Palladio in this light, this reading
introduces a critical complexity of heterogeneous, as opposed to homogenous, space-making, which
breaks the bounds of the centuries-old humanist and enlightenment project. The results are a series of
processes engendered by intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, movement, which reanimates the idea of close
reading of history, now as a dynamic process. It is the critical reassessment of a formal logic, rather than
the static formal project itself, that can become a necessary part of our culture of architecture today.