Peter Eisenman Overview

Peter Eisenman was the leader of a loosely knit group of New York architects, called the New York Five (John Hejduk, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, and Richard Meier rounded out the five), who made an effort to introduce a theory and... [more]

Peter Eisenman was the leader of a loosely knit group of New York architects, called the New York Five (John Hejduk, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, and Richard Meier rounded out the five), who made an effort to introduce a theory and artistry of architecture as rigorous as that of the European avant-garde. They were committed to the idea of an autonomous architecture removed from reductive functionalism. The theories behind Eisenman's work are pretty heady, having to do mainly with his attempt to extricate architecture from any sense of context. But when we look at his work, his theories become clear. His buildings exist in their own spaces. The Wexner Center for the Visual Arts slashes diagonally through the campus grid. It disregards what already exists and sets up its own coordinates in the space. Similarly, his renowned Cannaregio proposal for Venice ignored the city itself and was instead based upon an unbuilt Le Corbusier hospital project. Oddly, instead of aligning his proposal with the city's grid, Eisenman arbitrarily linked it to the imaginary hospital, subverting any sense of connection to the real Venice and liberating the architecture from simplistic interpretations based on use or context. Eisenman is truly anti-humanist; his buildings are pure pursuits of form that, in their arbitrary overlay of different grids, gesture towards the arbitrariness of all regimented, predetermined contexts. [show less]