Content area
Full Text
Peter Eisenman talks to Iman Ansari about how the true architecture of his work resides in his drawing of it, and why - despite this - he still feels the imperative to build, in order to be taken seriously
Peter Eisenman is one of the most significant architects and theorists practising today, notable for his involvement with Derrida's Deconstructivist project and his pioneering use of computer-aided design. His major buildings include the Wexner Center in Ohio (1989), the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2006), andhis unfinished City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela (begun 1999). His interviewer, ImanAnsari, is a practising architect, urban designer, and a lecturer in architectural theory at City University of New York.
IMAN AMARI In your career you have sought a space for architecture outside the traditional and conventional realm. You have continually argued that modern architecture was never fully modern as it failed to produce a cognitive reflection about the nature of architecture in a fundamental way. From your early houses, we see a search for a system of architectural meaning and an attempt to establish a linguistic model for architecture: the idea that buildings are not simply physical objects, but artefacts with meaning, or signs dispersed across some larger social text.
But these houses were also part of a larger project that was about the nature of drawing and representation in architecture. You described them as 'cardboard architecture' which neglects the architectural material, scale, function, site, and all semantic associations in favour of architecture as 'syntax': conception of form as an index, a signal or a notation.
So to me, it seems like between the object and the idea of the object, your approach favours the latter. The physical house is merely a medium through which the conception of the virtual or conceptual house becomes possible. In that sense, the real building exists only in. your drawings.
Peter Eisenman The ^eal architecture' only exists in the drawings. The *real building' exists outside the drawings. The difference here is that 'architecture' and 'building' are not the same.
IA So with that in mind, did you ever wish none of your houses was actually built?
PE No. Let me go back because you raised a lot of questions. If there is...