Peter Eisenman – författare

A fresh, groundbreaking analysis of renowned Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti s five built works, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning. Much has been written about Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti s mantra of part-to-whole as one of the continuing conditions of architecture. While this underlying thesis has oft been repeated in the annals of architectural history and theory, architects have rarely questioned the idea. In Rewriting Alberti, architect Peter Eisenman suggests, however, that Alberti provoked a radical discourse beyond the part-to-whole dialogue featured in his Ten Books. Eisenman s in-depth analysis of Alberti s five built works reveals a disjunction between the architect s buildings and theoretical writings, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning based on the fragmentation of homogeneous space. Rewriting Alberti includes contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Mario Carpo, and Daniel Sherer. Carpo, an architectural historian and critic, theorizes that Alberti s work initiated an idea of the discipline as a notational system akin to contemporary computational logics. By way of comparison, Sherer, an architectural historian, reconsiders critic Manfredo Tafuri s readings of Alberti, and architect and theorist Aureli draws on Alberti to propose another idea of the architectural project. Here, in one book are four different discourses (and more than 60 drawings) which look back at the origins of architectural signs and semiology and forward to understand the way that history informs architecture today.

Peter Eisenman—world-famous for his Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005)—confronts historicism with theory and the analysis of form, whose distinguishing features he regards as the foundation of architectural composition. The architect illustrates his observations with numerous, extremely precise hand drawings. Eisenman wrote The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture, his dissertation, in 1963 at the University of Cambridge. The dissertation was first published as a facsimile edition by Lars Müller Publishers in 2006. The original content of the publication is now available again—the book is reprinted in a smaller format.“I knew what I wanted to write,” Eisenman says of the dissertation. “An analytic work that related what I had learned to see, from Palladio to Terragni, from Raphael to Guido Reni, into some theoretical construct that would bear on modern architecture, but from the point of view of a certain autonomy of form.” Hence the title of his research.

A provocative case for historical ambiguity in architecture by one of the field's leading theoristsConceptions of modernity in architecture are often expressed in the idea of the zeitgeist, or "spirit of the age," an attitude toward architectural form that is embedded in a belief in progressive time. Lateness explores how architecture can work against these linear currents in startling and compelling ways. In this incisive book, internationally renowned architect Peter Eisenman, with Elisa Iturbe, proposes a different perspective on form and time in architecture, one that circumvents the temporal constraints on style that require it to be "of the times"—lateness. He focuses on three twentieth-century architects who exhibited the qualities of lateness in their designs: Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk. Drawing on the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and his study of Beethoven's final works, Eisenman shows how the architecture of these canonical figures was temporally out of sync with conventions and expectations, and how lateness can serve as a form of release from the restraints of the moment.Bringing together architecture, music, and philosophy, and drawing on illuminating examples from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, Lateness demonstrates how today's architecture can use the concept of lateness to break free of stylistic limitations, expand architecture's critical capacity, and provide a new mode of analysis.