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BLURRED ZONES: INVESTIGATIONS OF THE INTERSTITIAL, EISENMAN ARCHITECTS 1988-1998 By Peter Eisenman. New York: The Monacelli Press. 2003 This lavish book with 336 pages in full colour alternates Eisenman’s buildings and projects with a series of short essays by and about him, and there is a yawning gap between the two. The projects are presented mostly in silence with a mixture of drawings, diagrams, plans and photographs often collaged together. This is graphically attractive and some of the buildings look very interesting, but they are hard to read, for although plenty of page space is given, information is insufficient to allow adequate understanding, and captions are not permitted to dirty the pages. Often purposes of rooms remain obscure, sets of plans are incomplete, information on context is scant, and the inspirational material collaged-in (site lines, DNA traces, fractals or whatever) is not explicitly identified. The texts, on the other hand, perform a kind of alibi function, persuading us of the power of Eisenman’s intellect, the range of his cultural references and the number of intellectual friends he can muster to his cause. Loaded with mazes of metaphors and references to trendy philosophers, they seem to suggest that the work provides a powerful commentary on our time and its philosophical conundrums, but the connection hangs in the air. Eisenman’s own essays, for example, deal only glancingly with the work, with vague use of fashionable terms – everything is a ‘trope’ – and jaw-dropping historical generalizations like the idea that at the Renaissance ‘architecture became something more than mere structure and use’ (sic, p287). Suddenly we are informed that his UN Library project was shaped by a neurological trace, but whose, and why, and when? Some might claim that this does not matter, that works of art must be able to stand on their own, speak for themselves, but one can scarcely ignore such a torrent of verbiage. The combination of word and image is hardly innocent or accidental, for the book is no secondary production reporting on buildings that are primary: not only do unbuilt projects survive entirely in its pages, even built ones are known to their main audience through such media rather than through everyday experience. Are they good to inhabit? Who cares. How were they built? How dare you ask such questions! Did the work change when the firm got computers? Get thee behind me Satan! Franco Purini dares to call Eisenman’s work ‘the expression of an imperial culture’, and to point out that ‘the wealthiest country in the world … for some time has resolved the primary problems to which architecture responds [so] the present condition of architecture is superfluous [and] architecture identifies itself directly with art’ (p31). Eisenman’s overriding concern with form is unsurprising given his background, as is his allergy to functionalist readings, though this can be tiresome given the articulations of programme evident in some larger works. He claims to ‘destabilize’ meaning while simultaneously being obsessed with it. This contradiction is overcome by a stance set early in the book that seems simply Surrealist: concern with the subconscious and with the deployment of chance. Chance techniques allow the concern with slippage, the interstitial, the subversive, the irregular, which certainly is the most interesting aspect of the work. It also reflects the widespread discovery that nothing is so boring and oppressive as the monothematic Modernist masterplan, and that most real landscapes are palimpsests recording layers of history and changes of mind. If the conditions of modern building production lead automatically to a kind of monothematic fait accompli, is it not better disturbed by a few random elements? But how random is random? This question Eisenman almost addresses, but wisely he leaves it unanswered, retreating into the blur of the title. This allows him to continue producing his unexpected forms like a conjuror in the dark: shamanism for the twenty-first century. But sooner or later someone will have to write a real history and undertake a real analysis, stripping away the flattering alibis to reveal just how many clothes the emperor really wears.PETER BLUNDELL JONES |