PETER EISENMAN
KSHITIZ AGARWAL
B.Arch IV
ABOUT…
• Peter Eisenman was born in Newark, New
Jersey.
• He studied at Cornell and Columbia
Universities .
• Eisenman first rose to prominence as a
member of the New York Five.
• In 2001, Eisenman won the National Design
Award for Architecture from the CooperHewitt National Design Museum.
STYLE
• Eisenman has always sought somewhat
obscure parallels between his architectural
works and philosophical or literary theory.
• His earlier houses were "generated" from a
transformation of forms related to the
tenuous relationship of language to an
underlying structure.
• Eisenman's latter works show a sympathy with
the ideas of deconstructionism.
• He tries to do is to ‘unlink’ the function that
architecture may represent from the
appearance - form - of that same architectural
object.
• Concepts:
– Artificial
excavation
– Tracing
– Layering
– Deformation
• Techniques:
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•
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•
•
Shear
Interference
Intersection
Distortion
Scaling
• Artificial excavation
• Find traces of history.
• Interpret form and meaning.
• Derive new forms and meaning by
layering and deforming.
• Shear
• Skew objects
• Interference
• Study interactions
• Intersection
• Emergent shapes
• Distortion
• Transform shapes
• Scaling
• Rotation
Method
• Historical reading of the site
– Superposition
• Deformation strategy
– Diagrammatic image
• Elaboration
– Design
• Diagrammatic image
– Additional elements
– Outside architecture
– Related to project
– Informing and
deforming
• Diagrammatic image
– Add to superposition
– Deform composition
Model
• Diagrammatic model
• Physical scale model
• Computer model
Deconstructionism
• Characterized by ideas of fragmentation.
• Characterized by a stimulating unpredictability
and a controlled chaos.
Coop Himmelblau
(Wolf Prix), Vienna
IBA Block 2,
Berlin
Works
• House VI(Frank residence), Cornwall, Connecticut.Design:
1972.
• Wexner Centre for the Arts, Ohio State University,Ohio,
1989
• Nunotani Building, Edogawa Tokyo Japan, 1991
• Greater Columbus Convention Centre, Ohio,1993
• Aronoff Centre for Design and Art, University for Cincinnati,
Cincinnati, Ohio, 1996
• City of Culture of Galcia, Santiago de Compostela, Galcia,
Spain, 1999
• Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, 2005
• University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale , Arizona, 2006
House VI
• Located in Cornawall,Connecticut.
• Eisenman created a form from the
intersection of four planes, subsequently
manipulating the structures again and again,
until coherent spaces began to emerge.
• The envelope and structure of the building are
just a manifestation of the changed elements
of the original four slabs, with some limited
modifications.
• The purely conceptual design meant that the
architecture is strictly plastic, bearing no
relationship to construction techniques or
purely ornamental form.
column/beam
intersection at red
staircase
• The use of the red stairs in House VI is
somewhat odd.
• It is an upside down stairs, marked red, which
functions only as to divide the building and
provide the house with symmetry.
Wexner Center for the Arts
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Location : Ohio State University,Ohio
Building Type :University arts center.
Construction System :steel, concrete, glass.
Included in the Wexner Center space are a
film and video theater, a performance space, a
film and video post production studio, a
bookstore, café, and 12,000 square feet (1,100
m²) of galleries.
• The design includes a large, white metal grid
meant to suggest scaffolding, to give the
building a sense of incompleteness.
• The extension of the Columbus street grid
generates a new pedestrian path into the
campus, a ramped east-west axis.
• a major part of the project is not a building
itself, but a 'non-building'.
• Scaffolding traditionally is the most
impermanent part of a building.
• Thus, the primary symbolization of a visual
arts center, which is traditionally that of a
shelter of art, is not figured in this case.
• For although this building shelters, it does not
symbolize that function.
Conclusion
• The architecture of Eisenman had many
different angles and difficulties when
analyzing it and trying to describe it in general
terms.
“forms are no longer a ‘means toward an
end,’ but an end in themselves”
Thank You…