Interviews|SSUES?

Concerning the Project of Peter Eisenman

On Architectural Education

Edited by: Vladan Djoki & Petar Bojani

EDITORS: Vladan Djoki & Petar Bojani

BOOK TITLE: Interviews: ISSUES? Concerning the Project

of Peter Eisenman / on Architectural Education

PUBLISHER: University of Belgrade - Faculty of Architecture

FOR PUBLISHER: Vladan Djoki, Dean

DESIGN AND LAYOUT: Milica Milojevi & Nataa Jankovi

PROOFREADING: Edward Djordjevi

PHOTO BY: Marija Nii

NUMBER OF COPIES: 500

PRINT: Donat Graf doo

PLACE AND YEAR OF ISSUE: Belgrade, 2015

ISBN 978-86-7924-142-9
Interviews|SSUES?
Concerning the Project of Peter Eisenman
On Architectural Education

Peter Eisenman
Preston Scott Cohen
Sarah Whiting
Emmanuel Petit
Jrg Gleiter
Mario Carpo
Djordje Stojanovi
Gabriele Mastrigli
Manuel Orazi
Kim Frster
John McMorough

Edited by: Vladan Djoki & Petar Bojani

| INTERVIEWS: ISSUES?
Concerning the Project of Peter Eisenman / on Architectural Education

Interview with Peter Eisenman|

Nataa Jankovi &
Aleksandar Kui
University of Belgrade - Faculty of Architecture
June 2014 | Rijeka

P e t e r E i s e n m a n | when the interview took place |

Peter Eisenman is an internationally recognized architect and educator whose
award-winning large-scale housing and urban design projects, innovative
facilities for educational institutions, and series of inventive private houses
attest to a career of excellence in design.
Prior to establishing a full-time architectural practice in 1980, Mr. Eisenman
worked as an independent architect, educator, and theorist. In 1967, he founded
the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), an international think
tank for architecture in New York, and served as its director until 1982.
Mr. Eisenman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among other awards, in 2001
he received the Medal of Honor from the New York Chapter of the American
Institute of Architects, and the Smithsonian Institutions 2001 Cooper-Hewitt
National Design Award in Architecture. He was awarded the Golden Lion for
Lifetime Achievement at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale. Popular
Science magazine named Mr. Eisenman one of the top five innovators of 2006
for the University of Phoenix Stadium for the Arizona Cardinals. In May 2010
Mr. Eisenman was honored with the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts, awarded
in Jerusaleum.

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Currently the Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice at the Yale School of

Architecture, Mr. Eisenmans academic career also includes teaching at
Cambridge, Princeton, Harvard and Ohio State universities. Previously he was
the Irwin S. Chanin Distinguished Professor of Architecture at The Cooper
Union in New York City. He is also an author, whose most recent books include:
Written Into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990-2004 (Yale University Press,
2007) and Ten Canonical Buildings, 1950-2000 (Rizzoli, 2008), which examines
in depth buildings by ten different architects.
Mr. Eisenman holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University,
a Master of Science in Architecture degree from Columbia University, and
M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Cambridge University (U.K). He holds honorary
Doctorates of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois, Chicago, the Pratt
Institute in New York, and Syracuse University. In 2003, he was awarded an
honorary Doctorate in Architecture by the Universit La Sapienza in Rome.

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| INTERVIEWS: ISSUES?
Concerning the Project of Peter Eisenman / on Architectural Education

N. J. & A. K.: To begin with, we would like to ask how you would personally
describe the relation between Europe and America in a decade as crucial for
the history of architecture as the 1960s.

P. E.: I would like to say that 2014 is the centenary of Le Corbusiers diagram
of Maison Dom-Ino. To me the Dom-Ino diagram was the beginning of modern
architecture. I also know that 1964 was fifty years from 1914 and fifty years
from today. I want to talk about what it was like in 1964: both of you were
not alive, I was starting my architectural career. I was teaching at Cambridge
University in England, I had previously gone to Cornell University and Columbia
University and I had worked for Walter Gropius. I became very disillusioned
with architecture after working for him, because he was supposed to be one
of the great Gods we worshiped in the late fifties, early sixties, and I found him
to be not very God-like. So I asked one of my mentor-teachers, what should
I do? And he said, why dont you go back to school, and get an advanced
degree. So I went back to Columbia and got my advanced degree. I also got
my architectural license, which was very important at the time. I was doing
a social housing project in 1960, and I won a Fulbright scholarship to go to
France. The social housing project came in twice over budget, in other words,
the budget was a 1.5 million dollars (in todays terms that would be fifteen
million dollars for someone who had never done anything), and the project
came in at three million. And the client looked at me and I said, here, you
take your project, I am going to Europe. That was the first indication that I was
not going to be a normal, practicing architect. I spent the whole summer of
1960 learning French to be in France. I took a boat to Europe, since there were
very few planes, they were very expensive. I spoke French all the way on the
boat, the SS Flandre. I got on the train to Gare du Nord, I got there, got in a
taxi, and I said to the taxi driver, je voudrais rue de , whatever rue that was I
was going to, and the taxi driver turned around at me and said: hey buddy! in
an American accent, youd be better off speaking English here. And that was
the last time I ever was in Paris. I could not take that, I got out of the taxi, got
back on the boat, went to England, and everything changed in my life. I arrived
in England. I placed eighth out of four hundred and fifty in a competition, got
very high mention, so they asked me to teach, even though I had never taught
in my life; I had never thought of teaching, I did not know what I was doing
teaching. I got done with a year at Cambridge and they asked me to stay, so I
said: look, I want to practice architecture. And they said, you are American, you
cannot, but you can do a PhD. I said ok, but I did not know what I was doing.

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 Interview
Nataa Jankovi & Aleksandar Kui with P e t e r E i s e n m a n |

You may have read my dissertation,1 which has become more interesting as
the years go by. I taught at Cambridge, then I went back to the United States,
and this is where 1964 comes in. In the summer of 64, I came back to Europe,
fifty years ago, not to see the Biennale, because my first Biennale was not until
1976, but in fact to look at the work of Le Corbusier. What I want to say is that
in 64, we were at the end of the Modern Era, from 1914 to 1964. We knew
Le Corbusier like the back of our hands, we taught Le Corbusier, it was all we
knew, but we also knew that it was over. We did not know what that meant,
because we clung desperately to Le Corbusier, but we knew that whatever it
was, it was not going to last much longer. In 68 the revolution came, four years
later, and everything changed. The world of architecture certainly changed:
between 66 and 68 we had books by Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi, Vittorio
Gregotti, Manfredo Tafuri, we had Jacques Derridas first book, we had many,
many important books signaling this change, not only in the social and political
and cultural ambiance of students, but in particular architects. We knew by 68
that Le Corbusier was dead, and we knew that Modernism was dead.

N. J. & A. K.: In 1976 you participated in the Europe-America, centro storico,

suburbia exhibition, at the 37th Biennale di Venezia darte. Lea-Catherine
Szacka, one of the contributors to the Radical Pedagogies research project at
the Princeton University, has defined the exhibition as an experiment and a
radical endeavor, just for its pedagogical aspect. Has the 14th International
Architecture Exhibition, still open in Venice, taught us anything?

P. E.: Who was the Corbu figure for the past fifty years? I would like to argue
that Rem Koolhaas has been the Corbu figure for many of my students, for
many of us. My students live and breathe every word that Rem Koolhaas
says. And Rem Koolhaas was given two years and the extraordinary task of
planning the Biennale, two years to, in fact, say that the present state of
architecture was in really bad shape. He called his thing Fundamentals. And
there were no architects that I could see in the exhibition. There may have
been young architects, but of star architects, there was only one architect
who would become a star curator. The analogy I want to make is, that for me,
Fundamentals was not the beginning of the future, but the end of the past. It
was the end of the past precisely because it showed what had happened to
materials, to floors, to ceilings, to walls, in the postmodern era. We were given
a resume, as it were, of the fundamentals, the elements of postmodernism,

1 Peter Eisenman, The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture (1963; Zurich: Lars Muller,
2006).

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Concerning the Project of Peter Eisenman / on Architectural Education

but not any prediction about the digital 2.0, or 3.0, or anything to do with the
digital, there was not a word about it. And I am not necessarily for the digital,
but I am saying that a lot of people felt that this was a Biennale of the past. I
think that Rem in his very intelligent way, since he is the mythic figure of the
last forty to fifty years, also realized that we can no longer sustain whatever it
was that sustained postmodernism. We cannot sustain postmodernism as an
idea any longer in terms of what we are producing on the ground. Of course,
Rem said that the situation of architecture of his friends, who he could not
really run down, is that they were not really doing things that were appropriate
to our time. We will not name any of those architects, but clearly they were
the star architects: his colleagues were absent, and it was because they were
not doing the kind of architecture that would project into the future. What is
interesting and in a sense positive about this Biennale is, I think, very positive,
that it marked the end. Rem, rather than let someone else write the end, wrote
it for himself: he spent two years writing his epitaph.

Now, where does that leave all of us? Before I went there I had a bad feeling
that I do not know what the future holds. And I do not have the big worry that
you have, since I am a lot older, let us say. What is important to ask is, where
the revolution of 68, that is, 2018 is going to be, how is it going to be, what is
it going to be like? I was in my first Biennale in 1976: the one run by Vittorio
Gregotti, not the so-called first Biennale of Paolo Portoghesi. In 1976, we had
a Biennale called Europa-America: there were eleven European architects and
eleven American architects. And I thought to myself, could one have a Europa-
America today? The answer is no. Because the world has changed. The world
means Croatia, it means Serbia, it means Bosnia, it means Albania, it means
the Far East, it means Africa. We cannot think Euro-centrically or America-
centrically: if the 19th century could be said to be the British and European
century, the 20th century the American century, the 21st century is not going to
be Europe and America. We should realize that one of the reasons that I come
to places like this (I was in Belgrade last year, I went to Tirana in September,
I was supposed to be in Iran two weeks ago) is that I think the future is of
young people who would have been considered on the periphery fifty years
ago when there was the first Biennale. The periphery has now become the
center. I think it is important to make the periphery understand that it is part
of a responsibility to generate the energy that will produce the revolutionary
feeling that is necessary for architecture. Because we cannot have another
Fundamentals Biennale, we cannot have another postmodernism, we need to
have a revolution: an intellectual and cultural revolution that takes place in the
world today.

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 Interview
Nataa Jankovi & Aleksandar Kui with P e t e r E i s e n m a n |

N. J. & A. K.: Does the project of Peter Eisenman have its own fundamentals?

P. E.: I want to say that I speak from a position of what can be called my project,
which is diametrically opposed to Rem Koolhaas project. So, as he goes down,
I go down. Because we are a dialectical pair. What I am saying is that as he
wrote his epitaph, I am writing mine. I think it is important to understand the
dialectic nature of our relationship is not the dominant dialectic of the next
fifty years. In fact, the idea of a dominant dialectic is not going to be sustainable
philosophically, as Petar [Bojani] will tell you, in the next fifty years.

To me, architectural fundamentals are very different than ceilings, floors,

walls, etc. We need to talk about what that is. In 1957, a British historian,
John Summerson, in a speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects, said:
the source of unity in modern architecture lay in the social sphere, that is,
what he called the program. Ever since his student days at the Architectural
Association in the early seventies, architecture for Rem was lodged in the
opposition of form and program, as opposed to the more limited opposition
of form and meaning, or even form and function. My shadow boxing debate
with Rems thinking has always been, from the beginning (when he was
at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in 1973), over the two
issues articulated in Summersons explicit manifesto. One is the program,
but perhaps more important and particular today, the idea of the program
as a source of unity in architecture. My critique, or perhaps my fundamental
question would be, can the program ever be transformative or revolutionary or
radicalize what we know to be, and can it be a critical document? The second
thing is, why a source of unity? Now, what we have to remember is that unity
and the idea of part to whole began in 1462, some six centuries and fifty years
ago, with Albertis De Re Aedificatoria. This was a doctrine that said that good
architecture was about the relationship of the part to the whole, and he gave
the example of a house being a small city, and a city being a large house. My
argument against, not only the idea of unity, but that the program should be
the source of unity, is as follows. There can be no building without a function.
In other words, you cannot design a building and have an empty shell. But
there can be no function, or program, without a building, otherwise there is
no architecture. A function or a program will always suggest some form of built
response. Therefore, it is not a chicken and egg situation, because I can build a
building and have no program, but I cannot have a program without a building.
The building program always comes first, but it always suggests something
that is already known, a precedent. And a program does not suggest an
unknown, otherwise there would be no relation between the program and

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Concerning the Project of Peter Eisenman / on Architectural Education

what it was to produce. Hence the program la prima, cannot in itself be

transformative or critical of the conditions of architecture. Because it always
presumes when we read the program that we know what it is. So what is the
critical or tipping mechanism that we can use to suggest a transformative or
revolutionary attitude in architecture. Certainly, cataloguing fundamentals,
where doors, windows, stairs, etc. already have an a priori form, and they are,
as well, a priori of something like a domesticated space. In other words, when
I say window, you all know that there is a wall and a window, and it is either
a bedroom, a living room, an office room, etc., and it has a certain scale and
relationship to the wall. But certainly a window, as an element, a fundamental,
does not change anything. The domestic and the program, as Summerson says,
are already in the social sphere, they are occupied politically, and have little
trajectory, either in the transformative or the critical. Once domestic programs
become critical or transformative, they lose a priori their value. In other words,
the minute you say domestic program, but it is not what you think it is, then it
no longer has the value necessary. This has been my long-standing argument
with Koolhaas. In fact, I would argue that the value generated by Rem is not in
the social sphere, but rather is a smokescreen for some of his best work, which
is in the critical, formal projects, ones like the Seattle Library, the Bibliotheque
de France, the CCTV, that maybe you can argue is a result of a program and
diagram, but it is the forms themselves that are transformative and not the
program. If therefore, a program, to be a program, is already a priori, not either
critical or transformative, that leaves us with the formal project.

To me you can have all the programs you want, and you can have all the
arguments about the political necessity of domestic space, but unless you
give form, some poetic form to that condition, there is not going to be much
transformation. I want to use a soccer metaphor to tell you what I mean by
the word transformative, and what I mean by the word formal. After the Italy-
Brazil match in 1982, in Barcelona, one of the all time great matches, which
led to Italy eventually winning the Mondial, the headline of the sports journal
Gazzetta Dello Sport the following day read in big, black, block letters: BRASILE
SIAMO NOI. Now, I know what Brasile means, what siamo means, what noi
means. And it is not noi siamo Brasile, that is, we are Brazil, or Brazil we are,
or Brazil are we. Something else is suggested by the organization of the words,
i.e. the syntax. And to me, no matter how well you can articulate a program of
words, a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, a dining room, a childrens play
room, whatever it is how they go together that is important. The thing is,
in all language, in all means of communication, it is how things go together,
not what they are, but how they are in their context. For me, Brasile siamo

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Nataa Jankovi & Aleksandar Kui with P e t e r E i s e n m a n |

noi, is like going to a Biennale of windows, doors, bathrooms my God, what

are you going to do with the bathrooms? I happen to prefer a door, some
people feel differently about bathrooms, but there is no way a bathroom is
going to be revolutionary, I can promise you. There is too much disagreement
about bathrooms for them to be revolutionary. I have always argued, that it
is not the things themselves, but the way they are juxtaposed in and around
space. I would say one of the things that is most important in architecture,
never mentioned at the Biennale, is the word ground. Architecture occupies
the ground. No other discourse occupies ground in the way architecture does.
No other cultural discourse has the necessity to deal with ground. That is,
people stand vertically on ground, ground often is a datum, we measure in
our drawing zero, zero from ground, minus to a basement, plus for the first
and second floor, etc., but there is always the idea of ground, not the literal
ground itself, but the idea of ground. When Alberti wrote his thesis in 1462,
he said that Vitruvius, who was basically a Greek philosopher, talking about
Greek architecture, was wrong about his thesis. He said that when you use the
term firmitas, which means structure or firmness, or something standing, that
Vitruvius did not mean it stands up because all architecture stands up. What
Vitruvius meant was it looks like it stands up. (There was not a single column
at the Biennale). A column, which is very important in the Vitruvian and
Albertian dialogue Vitruvius thinks it is structural, Alberti says columns are
ornamental but what Alberti says Vitruvius meant was that a column must
be both the sign of the column, and the actual function itself. In other words, it
must look like a column. This is the first time that the idea of things being signs
as well as things, became important. There was very little discussion at the
Biennale of the sign/function of these elements. The ground is one of those
issues, because while there is a literal ground, there is also an ideal ground,
a conceptual ground, an abstracted ground if you want, that deals a lot with
what architecture will be about in the future, that is the ground of the urban,
the ground of the rural, the ground of any institution that builds upon this
Earth. Yes, I was reminded there are tree houses, but the tree house is not
the rule of revolution. And how we conceptualize ground has to be one of the
things, as we build this Earth, or build on this Earth, how, in what way, ground
is conceptualized becomes one of the important things.

An anecdote will tell you something more about my relationship to Rem

Koolhaas. In 1972, Rem was a fourth year student at the AA, and at the same
time, in 1972, they were having a change of the head of the school, and there
were two men running for office. One was Kenneth Frampton, the noted British
historian, and the other was Alvin Boyarsky. And Boyarsky had been supported

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Concerning the Project of Peter Eisenman / on Architectural Education

by Peter Cook, Cedric Price, Reyner Banham; Frampton had been supported by
Rem Koolhaas, whom he did not really like very much. But Boyarsky won. And
Rem was faced with a dilemma, because he did not know whether he wanted
to stay at the AA or go on and do something else. He had already done four
years. He wanted to find out what Mr. Boyarskys program was going to be. He
knocked on the door of the new principal. And Mr. Boyarsky, who was a warm
and open gentleman asked this tall, lanky student to come in. Mr. Koolhaas said
to Mr. Boyarsky, you know I am in my fourth year and I really want to find out
what your pedagogical program is, and frankly, I have been here four years and
I have not learned anything in terms of these were the actual words used
fundamentals. I am hoping that next year I am going to get fundamentals. And
Mr. Boyarsky looked at him, very straight, and said, no, Mr. Koolhaas, we will
not be teaching fundamentals, here we only teach architecture.

N. J. & A. K.: Thank you.

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