Dan Turkel!

Reading Response #5!

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Intro to Architecture
Eisenman

Peter Eisenman sees architecture as the medium that has been left behind in a greater cultural

shift. He feels that it is time to update architecture to better fit this new world. However, when
discussing Eisenman, it is important to establish some of his key vocabulary. Eisenman writes of weak
form and strong form. He lays the dichotomy out fairly clearly: weak forms do not have a clear link
between the meaning and the resulting form, strong forms are the opposite. Architecture has
traditionally been a strong form discipline. This is usually taken to mean that there is a one-to-one
correlation between meaning and function, meaning and structure, meaning and form (Noever,
Haslinger, Eisenman, 32). This is to say that strong forms put little abstraction between the meaning and
the medium. This is dicult for architects because there is not always a perfect language for expressing
meaning with respect to buildings like there is for the written and spoken wordas a result, the message
and the medium become one. Architectural motifs take on philosophical meaning and intellectual ideals
become typically portrayed as certain structures in buildings.
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However, Eisenman feels that the strong form of architecture is out of place in the modern era.

He feels that reality (and the culture that imitates it) has become mediated. He does not explicitly lay out
a definition for mediated culture or mediated reality but the idea is one of content being turned into
media. The media does not bring you content, it is content. So, Eisenman says, One has to pull apart the
one-to-one relationship between structure, form, meaning, content, symbolism, etc. so that it is possible
to make many meanings. This pulling apart is what I call a displacement (34). The building is the media
and its architects original intent has to to step aside to allow for interpretation. This allows for a dynamic
recontextualization and a constant relevancy. If it was bold for modernists to make something timeless by
clearly breaking with precedent, it is even bolder for deconstructionists to separate not only the past but
even the architects own philosophical and ideological intent from the end-product form of the building.
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Eisenman says that architecture had always been the ultimate condition of reality, because it

dealt with physical facts...It was a physical place, the fundamental condition of reality (34). But the
environment changed and the rooting in reality is no longer appropriate. The current cosmology is one

Dan Turkel!
Reading Response #5!

Intro to Architecture
Eisenman

of media and architecture cannot be left behind as every other form of expression changes to best fit this
new era. Medias depiction of reality is now what we accept as true reality. This is a dramatic change in
the interaction between people and the events of the worldthere is a middleman in between that is
drastically changing the story. If architecture is such a direct translation of reality, it needs to reflect this
media interference. Just as media takes the core of an idea, changes it as it pleases, and spits out a
soundbite short enough for our attention span (regardless of whether or not it is what the speaker meant
to say), architecture must allow for this separation of what the consumer experiences and what the
architect thought. This is where the previously mentioned displacement comes into play.
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A building no longer needs to be so obvious. It used to be the meaning, philosophy and function

were shown right on the facadenext they were shown in the structure, then in how people interacted
with it and even how it aected society, but now it does not have to show its meaning at all. What I am
suggesting is that, yes, a building has to function, but it does not have to look like it functions. Yes, a
building has to stand up, but it does not have to look like it stands up. And when it does not look like it
stands up, or it does not look like it functions, then it functions and stands dierently (39). Eisenman is a
transgressivehis architecture is supposed to defy expectations not only of what a building should look
like but of what buildings should do: they should not be backgrounds but front-pieces; they should not
accommodate other pieces but be pieces of their own.
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Architecture has become used. People inhabit buildings and this means that they are used to them

and architects need to make buildings that challenge this hierarchy of people above the building, art
above the building. The building needs to make itself noticed (philosophically, not through some baroque
ornamentation). Eisenman never mentions specific architectural aesthetic or structural ideas that he
thinks architects should follow because his thesis is that we should not follow each others, especially not
our teachers. Precedent is not progress. Disagreeing and doing something new, something wrong is how
architecture will create new beauty.

Dan Turkel!
Reading Response #5!
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Intro to Architecture
Eisenman

One especially radical shift Eisenman has is the fact that structure and function are not as

important as they have been made out to be. He can sketch a building as nonsensical-looking as he likes
and someone else will figure out how to make it structurally sound. And as long as someone tells him the
basic template for the program of the institution, he will fit the function but take as much liberty as
possible without becoming counterproductive to the purpose the building should have. So the architect
(the artist) can let his imagination run wild and some other people will make sure that the building is
physically possible and productively plausible. This stems from Eisenmans frustration at architecture
being used. Eisenman wants architecture to be accommodated, not to accommodate everything else.
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Eisenman is very much unlike both Vitruvius and Alberti because appearance is not of much

importance to Eisenman. The appearance of a building is whatever the architect wants and meaning can
be assigned by the viewer. On the other hand, Le Corbusier cared too much about the utility of things.
Eisenman disregards that the program of a building could have any major aect on his work as the
architect. Eisenman is, perhaps, most like Hugo because both felt architecture needed a sea change to
progress. Hugo felt architecture had fallen to literature and needed to follow the laws of literature to
regain relevancy. Eisenman felt architecture should follow the rules of nothing and no one but the
architect and this is how architecture will become truly artwork of its own. There is this sense of jealousy
of traditional visual art in his writing and this is where his thesis begins to fall apart.
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Eisenmans views are extremely important to architecture yet while it is important to take

precedent with a grain of salt and question teachings, the blind disapproval of program and structure
seems to be taking his ideals a step too far. Architecture is not like other art forms because it does have
profound ability to change the way people interact with the world. Disregarding this for fear of
architecture being used means missing out on the opportunity to build something that is not just
artistically pure but helpful, useful, and life-changing. Someone as radical as Eisenman had to come along
to get architects to start making works that were truly dierent, but they ultimately would refine his
philosophy for the sake of architectures utility.

Dan Turkel!
Reading Response #5!

Intro to Architecture
Eisenman
Works Cited

Eisenman, Peter. "Strong Form, Weak Form." Architecture in Transition: Between Deconstruction and New
Modernism. Ed. Peter Noever and Regina Haslinger. Munich: Prestel, 1991. 32-43. Print.