Peter Eisenman (Newark, NJ, 1932) is one of the grandest theoreticians in the field of architecture that America and the world have spawned in the second half of the late twentieth century. As a thinker, educator, professor, writer and polemicist, Eisenman barely has any rival.
His scarce built work is a different story of appreciation, impact and result.
Part of a certain generation of post-war, "post-modern" architects that drew heavily and wildly in theory, imagination and drawing but rarely actually built, the work of Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid was synonym with challenge and daring in books, admired all as projectists, but criticized whenever an uncommon building of them got built and opened. Theirs was an architecture that did not work, bound to fail for it belonged to the intellect and the written paper, not the constructed matter for the use of the people.
That was and is the thought about and reception of the so-called "Deconstructivists", brilliant thinkers whose wild, inventive architecture looks fantastic and attractive in abstract renderings, but does not always function as a building to be used for the daily routine of living. These "post-modern" "deconstructivists" know and reflect in their plans everything from the writings of Derrida and French Post-structuralism to Greek Philosophy through Anthropology and Cultural Studies, but alas not always know how to put up a bathroom that flushes without making a mess.
Sometimes they might even make it flood on purpose, if they know how to run it, for their position as outsiders is said to be an attack and rejection of society and the needs of mankind (Eisenman is the most famous case of this "aggression to the client", in his highly unlivable houses of the 70's where husband and wife would not be "allowed" to sleep together for a cut separated their beds- and other acts of apparent senseless behavior).
Impressive writings and sketches, overwhelming minds; unbuildable, aggressive designs thought to pester the people. Not your Skidmore, Owings & Merrill type of architect.
Some of the "wild beasts" of post-war (which war? all wars) architecture have, since the 90's, slowly but unstoppably been "absorbed" by the mainstream- Gehry, Libeskind, Koolhas and Hadid are now seeing their fantasies erected in the surface of our cities, aided by computer programs and image generators. Still criticized, their "rebel spirit", if any, has been curbed. They now serve the public (mainly by means of museums) and not their own egos, minds or coffe-table books.
Creativity and functionality, formal exercise and social responsability- the not-long-ago-thought-impossible union of passion and control seem to be working today.
Eisenman and Tschumi remain largely unbuilt, though. And will most likely. Eisenman's handful of built structures in the United States have been eagerly anticipated and brutally criticized, which he probably enjoys. That his world famous Wexner Center for the Arts has required millions of dollars in renovations and adaption to transform it into a "usable" arts center only years after being unveiled should make nobody happy.
I cannot but think in the genial Louis I. Kahn, brilliant architect, thinker, innovator and constructor of livable buildings. His few museums, libraries, universities, laboratories and governmental headquarters achieve the rare combination of functionality, daring, beauty and uniqueness, all without preposterousness, with the calm and monumentality of the ancient monuments.
An arts center that disorients people and allows direct sunlight on the artwork, as the Wexner is reported to suffer from is something I, as an art historian and museum organizer, have to decry. Functionality does not mean boredom SOM-style, it can be combined with inventiveness and a personal touch, as Gehry's Bilbao or Calatrava's Milwaukee have succesfully demonstrated.
Does Eisenman build against the people? Or does he not know how to build correctly, period? That the magazine he founded along the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies was called "Oppositions" should not be a mere coincidence. After all, this is the architect that has been said to laugh at his making people vomit after experiencing the disorientation of his buildings.
He does share a similarity with a master of architecture that would have hated him (or not): Frank Lloyd Wright, perhaps the greatest American architect ever, was a great designer and prolific builder of magnificent structures. But, as Eisenman, his vision did not include practicality of construction and habitability. Only decades in existence, Wright-designed house owners, museum directors, church principals and university officials face costly reparations, renovations, leeks, cracking paint, falling bricks, unstable grounds... He knew what he wanted to build, but perhaps he did not totally command how to live in his idea, with normal stairs, bedrooms, bathrooms? Why is that Frank Lloyd Wright-designed homes look so cozy and intimate yet so uncomfortable and claustrophobic, even old?
Eisenman seems to be more engaged to the common man and woman lately, designing buildings that "work" and can be used without suffering and expanding his practice to Europe, where he built the recently unveiled "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" in Berlin, in colaboration with Richard Serra and tons of his ever-accompanying controversy; and the yet-to-be-opened "Cidade da Cultura" ("City of Culture") of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, the capital of the region where I was born. Projects for a Stadium in Arizona and a Train Station in Naples, Italy indicate that this Eisenman is far, at least in the intention of reaching the masses, from the personal madness of his 70's houses.
But my digression on Eisenman here refers to what is still his only building in New York City, the little-known Firehouse for Engine Company 233, Ladder Company 176 at 20 Rockaway Avenue, Bushwick, Brooklyn (1983-85).
If, as it has been said, Eisenman considers "the physical and cultural archaeologies of sites, not just the buildings's contexts and programs", then the Bushwick Firehouse is built both as a defense from the surrounding ghetto and a laugh at it, with its capricious forms, playful lines and steel columns in a neighborhood of poverty and decaying buildings.
Deconstructivism and post-modernism is present in the Firehouse, but (or so) it looks like a bad, annoying joke, very Eisenman: in one of the most severely depressed slums of New York City, where people are hardly literate, schools fail and drugs make a living for families of ten, lies a firehouse reflecting the writings of Derrida and Nietzsche.
Architecture for the people this is not.
That the City of New York commissioned Eisenman to build the Bushwick Firehouse is admirable, for it goes beyond the corporate-style, indistinguishable architecture of SOM. But I seriously wonder whether the adventurous forms of Peter Eisenman fit in the ghetto, although the fragmentated, broken shape of the Firehouse does imply a communion with or at least an understanding, perhaps indirect and/or involuntary, of the destabilized, disfunctional environment of the authority-created American ghetto.
I recently paid a visit to the building, dragging along a friend after being advised not to go there by myself. Bushwick at the border with East New York is indeed the worst ghetto I've ever seen, and I have ventured into a couple of these all-American creations. Outside, the Firehouse hardly resembles the striking building seen in the rare photos available. Its bold colors are gone; the distinctive, clearly discernible spaces of yore are tough to see due to the dirtiness and continous use, the Firehouse now looking like a bulky mass instead of the "deconstructed", separated spaces once it reflected.
We were lucky enough to get a tour of the inside, gaining then not only access to an important example of contemporary architecture, but to the life inside of a New York City firehouse as well. Nothing indoors could tell we are in an Eisenman-designed space. The rooms and spaces are taken by the firefighters, their duties and lives.
It is up on the roof where the "annoying" Eisenman design makes itself visible. From the street, you can see steel arches framing nothing. Once we're up, the spaces where those arches lie appear inacessible except when sneaking through short windows. Thus, the four corners of the roof of the firehouse, the whole upper space in fact, is unused and unusable.
Placed by the Municipal Art Society of New York City in the "30 Under 30" group of recent architectural landmarks to preserve in the near future, the Eisenman Firehouse has been touted as "a wildly inventive arrangement of interlocking cubes". Inventiveness certainly there is here, but hardly any interlocking, since the Firehouse is a maze of non-connected spaces and unutilized areas.
Upon arriving to the place, we had a brief conversation with two firefighters:
We: "We would like to visit the building, sir, it is a landmark of contemporary architecture and the only building of the architect in New York"
Firefighter 1: "A landmark!? This!? Look at the wasted space there (pointing at the fragmentated spaces in the roof), is this a landmark!?)
Me: "But that's what Eisenman's architecture is about, sir, pissing people off!"
Firefighter 2: "Yeah, but you know that in architecture form should follow function!"
This is an architecture-savvy man, but above all a firefighter that wants a building for doing his work properly. Can we play deconstruction with fire and people's lives?
Up in the roof, a different firefighter that guided our visit told us the building Peter Eisenman concocted for Engine Company 233, Ladder Company 176 works well as a Firehouse.
Indeed, form should follow function, but with a touch of decoration (L. Sullivan),
brains (Kahn) and wildness (Gehry).
Even Peter "Against the World/In my World" Eisenman designs for the people sometimes (and a firefigther in Bushwick cannot be wrong).
"Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies in a twinkling."
(Louis H. Sullivan, 1896)
