Jean-Francois Bedard (ed), 1994
By Henri Achten
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Review: Cities of Artifical Excavations Jean-Francois Bedard (ed), 1994 By Henri Achten |
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"Cities of Artificial Excavation" was published as the accompanying catalogue
to the exhibition on the work of Peter Eisenman. The title of the book
coincides with the working title for eleven projects
Eisenman undertook through the years 1978-1988. The book discusses four
projects in a less conventional catalogue-manner. Rather than re-presenting the end-results
of the work of Eisenman, it focusses on the actual design process that underlies
these projects. It does so by a careful study of the sketches that record the
evolution of the design. The text section of each project is preceded by the contemporary texts
Eisenman produced in presenting them. After this, the project history, the
site, design strategy, and the drawings are discussed in text. Presentation
drawings precede the sketches in the drawings section. The sketches take up the best part
of each project description.
Throughout the book, essays provide the occassion to discuss the works in a broader context than through the drawings alone. Some of these essays were published earlier, but the majority was written for the occasion. This discussion in retrospect, based on the scrutiny of the process rather than the product, aids in providing a clear insight into the significance of the work. Also included in the book is an interview of Peter Eisenman with some of the essayists. In this way, the subject is viewed from three perspectives: the projects by themselves, the architectural discourse in which they are embedded, and in the more informal setting of a conversation. The choice for the study of the process is inevitable when the work of Peter Eisenman is considered. As is stated regularly, and most explicit in Michael Hays' essay, Eisenman's work raises automatically the question how it is produced when one looks at it. However, with the general inclination to consider only the end-products as things-in-themselves, the approach to study the process is not widely applied. Eisenman's main contribution to architecture of his 'critical practice' lies with the approaches he developes, not the designs he makes. And even in the approaches themselves, where he shifts from "his early work in 'cardboard architecture' in the late 1960s, based loosely on the theories of Noam Chomsky and his concept of 'deep structure', Eisenman has picked up one nuova scienta after another, using devices drawn from fractals (self-similarity, scaling, superposition), from DNA research (his Bio-Centrum project), from Catastrophe Theory (the fold), from rhetoric (catechresis), from Boolean algebra (the hypercube), and from psychoanalysis (too many theories to remember)" (Charles Jencks, The Architecture of the Jumping Universe, 1995) it is not the diversity of the theories he picks up that is important, but the question: 'what can this notion X contribute to understanding architecture'? He then pursues this matter through a number of projects. Although these projects are hardly ever realized, they aim for the potential of being built. The practical constraints of architecture apply, although they are challenged.
"Cities of Artificial Excavation" is a good book for anyone interested in the specific phase of work by Peter Eisenman. It demonstrates the value of approaching his work process-oriented as he himself showed in his sketches and diagrams in 'Houses of Cards'. It is illustrated throughout with sketches of the design processes, and accompanied with critical essays that illuminate the import of Eisenman's work. Projects of "Cities of Artificial Excavation":
Essays in "Cities of Artificial Excavation":
Favourite quote of Jean-Francois Bedard:"These projects - submissions to competitions, theoretical work, and public commissions - are situated between the abstract design methodology, derived from modernism, of Eisenman's earlier houses and his current experiments in complex, three-dimensional geometry. They also constitute a distinct phase in his architectural practice during which he tested theoretical reflections on the nature of the site, architectural representation, and program with specific drawing techniques involving tracing, superposition, and layering. The "architectural topographies" produced and the drawings and models from which they resulted are testimony to Eisenman's rejection of the aesthetic composition of form, an element of architectural theory which had remained unquestioned in architecture since its establishment as an autonomous discipline during the Renaissance. With the Cities of Artifical Excavation, Eisenman echoes the reflections on the nature of the work of art which were taking place at the same time in philosophy, literature, and the visual arts."Favourite quote of Kurt W. Forster:"The City of Artificial Excavation mapped the territory of an ancient fault line in the history of Berlin, probing at once the city's ground and its horizon (fig. 13). Between the layers of past divisions the architect divined lineaments of a future. But the actual events ran a countercourse to our intuitions. Borderlines that had assumed the appearance of fortresses and come to symbolize a divided world, collapsed. They may soon be superseded by new construction and obscured by reconstruction of earlier stages in the urban geography of the city. Had Eisenman's original project - rather than the truncated version of only one of its elements - taken shape, one might imagine it to stand out as a reminder of the early years of the Reagan era, as a stark landmark emblazoned in the black and white of Cold War history. Disavowed by history itself, it might then have become a mere leftover from its passing moment, surviving as a hapless reminder that the power of actual events easily eclipses the figments of imagination. Conversely, I venture to suggest, it might well offer the only site in town where both past and present become transparencies of the future, where a coin of vantage on time itself rises out of the rushing stream of history."Favourite quote of Fredric Jameson:"I take it for granted that some form of allegory has always been implicit in architecture, although in its classical forms perhaps so entangled with the immediacies of perception that its filigrane could not be detected: thus, it is difficult, when it is a question of building along the line of a hill, to distinguish between the physical requirements of the site and a wall or plumbline that necessarily alludes to the ridge, repreating and repreducing its specific orientation. Such difficulties are compounded by the multiple echoes the site leaves within the construct, which must nonetheless, as they grow more numerous and complex, separate themselves from sheer contiguity to become a kind of idea or even a meaning: to lean against a rise is to turn a natural accident into a support and the approach to a mode of dwelling; to multiply such attitudes is to produce a veritable mimesis of leaning that then becomes endowed with a semiautonomous meaning of its own, or at least gradually come to ask for interpretation. I am struck by the omnipresence of these allegorical patterns (often termed "analogy") contemporary architecture and even more by the way in which they are taken for granted as the inevitable fabric of the thing. But if one wanted to resist anthropomorphism and humanism, would this not offer a different but no less dramatic starting point - a principled effort to do away with just such an allegorical infrastructure, and to imagine an architecture capable of doing without such allusions and such geographical mimetisms?"Favourite quote of Yve-Alain Bois:"Eisenman's discourse on memory and antimemory, decentering, displacement, absence, and reinvented history is shrewd but to my taste much too metaphorical. (It is paradoxical that a philosophy coined as an attack on metaphoricity has become, once "applied" to architecture, a vehicle of metaphor.) Certainly deconstruction is tempting as a strategy to envelop any kind of enemy in a paralyzing cocoon - the enemy in Eisenman's case being humanism and its historical fantasies - but I do not think it is of any help to the architect who gets hoisted with his own petard for lack of philosophical training. During the last ten years or so we have seen architectural theory achieve its level of incompetence. It is simply not the case that architects write such good books or that philosophers have such interesting ideas about architecture, and in a sense Eisenman's recent exchange with Jacques Derrida marks a recognition, on both sides, that perhaps it is now time to put an end to the reciprocal trivialization of their own discourses and the flood of gobbledygook than poured out of their sycophants' word processors."Favourite quote of Michael Hays:"We have been taught to think of this as "mere" formalism. But in House I through House VI, Eisenman follows the modernist strategies of distancing, defamiliarization, and deployment of alienation effects to reorient our apprehension of architectural form away from standard perceptual conventions. In a traditional "representational" architecture whose form has its referent in, say, the human body, vernacular environments, or some preformed classical system of meaning, our attention as viewers is drawn not to the act of representing - not to how the particular object has been conceived and constructed, from what kind of position and with what end in view - but simply to what is already there, to the "quoted" referent that stands before and external to the architectural sign. Any traditional or conventional form is likely to have more authority, to engage our assent more readily, than a form that tries to expose the complex matrix of disciplinary procedures and institutional apparatuses through which the object is actually constructed. Part of the power of such a representational architecture lies in its suppression of its modes of production, of how it got to be what it is. Strategies of defamiliarization and estrangement, by contrast, attempt to make the processes of the object's production and the mechanisms of its representation part of its content. The object does not attempt to pass itself off as unquestionable, but rather seeks to lay bare the devices of its own formation so that the viewer will be encouraged to reflect critically on the particular, partial ways in which it is constituted." (Back to: 'As is stated regularly, and most explicit in...')Favourite quote of Alan Balfour:"This outcome raises the question of the relationship between the obvious artistic and compositional nature of the drawings and the realization of the project. Le Corbusier used painting and sculpture to explore compositional and symbolic ideas, not to suggest that painting was a servant of architecture, but that architecture benefited from this exchange. In Aldo Rossi's work, the relationship between painting and realized object seems much more obvious: the painting is used to establish a mythic context which in some palpable way remains an unseen presence in the completed work. In Long Beach, the problem with both the final presentation drawings and, in some sense, the overall process, is that they are caught halfway between self-reference and representation with no obvious benefits to either state from this amb)guity. It would have "een preferable, I would argue, had the process remained wholly self-referential. It would then have forced more complex strategic gains to accommodate the three-dimensional interpretation of the traces. The sectional and spatial consequences would have shared in the deconstruction and juxtaposition of the plan traces with much more disturbance than Eisenman's insertion of the conventional plan, and the resulting occupation would have had a much more unsettling and renewing effect on the institution. But, for all its intelligent manipulation, the process results in a construction whose complexity is demonstrably skin-deep; a construction that has none of the mass or inscribed content that the text promises."Favourite quote of Jean-Louis Cohen:"Unproductive as an effective urban proposal when measured against its own ambitions, the La Villette experience coincides with a consolidation of Peter Eisenman's architectural intentions. It marks his discovery of urban issues associated with the recycling of parts of European cities. It also signals a transition from the self-referential architecture that had been his main concern since the 1960s, toward an architecture based on multiple fictions - beginning with the fiction of the project's development. The impossible passage of the Parisian "thematic garden" to the execution stage reveals, however, some of the impasses of the course that Eisenman has pursued for two decades. He has sought to conduct a "critical practice" in architecture, one opposed to commercial practice not so much in the intensity of its intellectual affinities as in its subversive and critical character. But at the same time Eisenman has never ceased striving after the institutional and media recognition that alone would make it possible for him to build the fragile (and costly) architectural objects he designs. Generally accepted in university and academic circles, the notion of critical practice nonetheless remains difficult to swallow in the sphere of material production, however delicate the proposed feuillete' may be. This is the lesson to be learned from Peter Eisenman's first and, so far, last architectural adventures on the Parisian scene. And it is a lesson that is still valid today."Favourite quote of Arata Isozaki:"Your method in the work that followed was to visualize the memory that is buried in cities; it was applied to Venice, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, and so on, to excavate and then layer the times latent in those cities. In these projects, the procedure of collage as layering stands out. However, to me the visualization of memory carries infinitely more importance than the layering itself, which, after all, is a technique just like that of transformational grammar. I think this is because the cities you worked on were not located in America; they have much longer and more complex histories than those in the United States. For the people who actually live in such cities, nothing is more troublesome than the memory that is buried in them (in terms of their topographies, soils, and localities). It pulls at one's legs: If you acknowledge it as it is, historicism in its most vulgar sense will resurface; if you recognize it as a continuity, you are trapped like a blind believer in the genius loci. It is well known that Heidegger dared to challenge this danger. Yet there may be a way to extract it as Gianni Vattimo's "weak thought." What must be remembered, however, is that the Europeans could devise the idea of making memory relative only after long struggles waged in the powerful gravity field of historical memory. You who are outside this restraining field naturally can take the position of making it relative. Also, remember that you are in a locus, "America," where the past can be easily ignored or cosigned to oblivion without the bother of such a process as critique." |
