Peter Eisenman

Prominent New York avant-garde critic, architect and theorist. Eisenman studied at Cornell and Columbia Universities and then at Cambridge, England. He taught at Cambridge, Princeton and the Cooper Union in New York, where he was founder director of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, co-coordinating an ambitious programme of lectures, seminars, research and publications.

Until recently he has built little but received critical attention for a series of controversial “anti-houses” which flout practicality in an attempt to create an autonomous abstract architecture. A 1988 MoMa exhibition in New York defined him and other architects as “Deconstructivist”, subverting received ideas about structure and function related to the earlier movement of Constructivism.

Eisenman, however, has always sought somewhat obscure parallels between his work in architecture and philosophical ideas and literary theory. His earlier houses were “generated” from the transformation of forms, as structural linguistics holds that language is related to an underlying structure. Latterly in a number of larger commissions he has taken up some of the metaphysical and “anti-humanist” ideas of Post-structuralism or Deconstructionism.

List of major buildings / works:
House I (Bareholtz Pavilion), Princeton, N J, 1967-8.
House II (Falk House) Hardwick, Conn., 1969-70.
House III (Miller House), Lakesville, Conn., 1969-71.
Apartments, Kochstrasse, Berlin, 1981-7.
Wexner Center for the Visual Arts (extension), Ohio State University, Columbus, 1985-9. Bio-Centre, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1987-9.
Guardiola House, Bay of Cadiz, Spain, 1988.
Convention Center, Ohio, 1989

Bibliography
P Eiseman, House of Cards, New York, 1978.
K. Frampton et al., Five Architects, New York, 1972.
P. Johnson and M. Wigley, Deconstructiost Architecture, New York, 1988.
C. Jencks, The New Moderns, London, 1990.

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