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Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
BOOKWritten into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Peter Eisenman
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31863
A prominent practitioner, an influential theorist, and an esteemed educator, the architect Peter Eisenman commands attention in architectural discourse and debate. This book, a companion volume to Eisenman Inside Out: Selected Writings, 1963–1988, gathers a generous selection of his later writings. In these texts Eisenman undertakes theoretical analyses, close readings of his own works, and innovative assessments of the designs and writings of other architects and critics.

In a major introduction to the volume, Jeffrey Kipnis looks closely at Eisenman’s approach toward language and writing, a practice in which architecture itself becomes a form of written theory, as well as at his context within a critical canon that includes Jacques Derrida and Rosalind Krauss. Presenting the range of Eisenman’s important contributions to architectural theory, this collection of nineteen essays provides insight into the architect’s own understandings and methodologies and offers provocative challenges for his readers.

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Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Print publication date March 2007 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300111118
EISBN 9780300278958
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Illustrations 37
Print Status out of print
Publisher (out of print)
WorldCat
Google Books

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List of illustrations

  • Rebstockpark Competition, concept drawings
  • Alteka Tower, drawings
  • Notre Dame du Haut
  • La Tourette Monastery
  • Wexner Center for the Visual Arts
  • Greater Columbus Convention Center
  • Berlin Block (For Charlie Chaplin)
  • Palazzo Ducale, courtyard
  • S. Maria della Pace, cloister
  • IIT Metallurgy and Chemical Engineering Building, Chicago, perspective sketch for symmetrical corner
  • Resor House project, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, interior perspective of living room and south glass wall
  • Figurine between Two Houses
  • Palladian villas, diagrams
  • Analysis of Le Corbusier's Villa Stein
  • Map of Rome
  • Palazzo Ducale, plan
  • S. Maria della Pace, cloister
  • Palazzo Ducale, intersection of columns at courtyard center
  • Santa Maria della Pace
  • Pazzi Chapel, S. Croce, Cloister courtyard
  • Santa Maria della Pace, courtyard corner
  • Palladian villa, analysis by proportional size of rooms
  • A-B-C-B-A analysis of Palladian virtual villa
  • Palazzo Chiericati
  • Palladio's Palazzo Chiericati, diagrams
  • Altes Museum
  • Altes Museum, plans
  • IBA Social Housing
  • Guardiola House, trace diagrams
  • City of Culture of Galicia, site diagram
  • City of Culture of Galicia, deformation diagrams
  • City of Culture of Galicia, deformation diagrams
  • City of Culture of Galicia, deformation diagrams
  • City of Culture of Galicia, deformation diagrams
  • City of Culture of Galicia, deformation diagrams
  • City of Culture of Galicia, competition model
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Contents
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Contents
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31864
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Introduction: Act Two
Jeffrey Kipnis
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
It is odd to introduce this second volume of writings by Peter Eisenman, since I suspect that most who have come to it are forewarned and forearmed. If, on the other hand, you have picked it as a first introduction to Eisenman’s thought, I fear no preamble can prepare you for what you are about to...
Author
Jeffrey Kipnis
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.vii-xxx
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31865
Chapter subject tags:Eisenman, Peter, 1932-Architectural theory--20th centuryArchitecture, Modern--20th centuryArchitecture, Modern--20th century--Philosophy
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1. Post/El Cards: A Reply to Jacques Derrida
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
After many months I find the time and the calm distance to reply to your extraordinary letter [see appendix, p. 161]. I was pleased that you would take the time to write a letter of such energy and length...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.1-5
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31866
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th centuryArchitecture, Modern--20th century--Philosophy

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2. The Author’s Affect: Passion and the Moment of Architecture
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Throughout its history, architectural theory has concerned itself with the definition of Architecture. Up to now, my own writing also has revolved around this theme. Recently, however, stimulated in part by the topic of the Anyone conference, I have begun to think that we should take up the question, What is an architect? I would like...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.6-11
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31867
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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3. Unfolding Events: Frankfurt Rebstockpark and the Possibility of a New Urbanism
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
In all of the design arts, we are experiencing a paradigm shift from the mechanical to the electronic; from an age of interpretation to an age of mediation. Mechanical reproduction, the photograph, is not the same as electronic reproduction, the facsimile. The former is the essence of reproduction because change can occur from the original; the latter, because there is no change from the original,...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.12-18
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31868
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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4. The Affects of Singularity
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
There are two English words, affect and effect, that sound alike but mean quite different things. Effect is something produced by an agent or cause. In architecture it is the relationship between some object and its function or meaning; it is an idea that has dominated Western architecture for the...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.19-24
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31869
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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5. Folding in Time: The Singularity of Rebstock
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Modern urbanism, which marked a radical change in urban form, was articulated in three different building types: the high-rise or point block; the piloti or the horizontally extruded slab; and the Siedlung. While all three played a dominant role in the development of the city in the twentieth century it was the...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.25-33
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31870
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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6. Vision’s Unfolding: Architecture in the Age of Electronic Media
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
During the fifty years since the Second World War, a paradigm shift has taken place that should have profoundly affected architecture: This was the shift from the mechanical paradigm to the electronic one. This change can be simply understood by comparing the impact of the role of the human subject on such primary modes of...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.34-41
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31871
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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7. Presentness and the Being-Only-Once of Architecture
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
In her book The Optical Unconscious, Rosalind Krauss discusses a Jackson Pollock painting in relationship to its position in space. She contends that when a Pollock painting is placed in a horizontal position, that is, on the floor as it was painted, it is a “savage work.” But the moment the canvas is taken off of...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.42-49
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31872
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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8. Processes of the Interstitial: Notes on Zaera-Polo’s Idea of the Machinic
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
In his essay “The Making of the Machine: Powerless Control as a Critical Strategy,” Alejandro Zaera-Polo suggests that my resistance to what he calls...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.50-71
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31873
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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9. Separate Tricks
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Author’s note. This essay was originally written in 1989. It remains largely intact from that date. The book for which this essay was intended, which supposedly is the actual record of a collaboration involving several different authors, can be seen instead as the trace of a future collaboration, one which does not require the participants to be...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.72-78
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31874
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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10. Written into the Void
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
In his foreword to Spoken Into the Void (Ins Leere Gesprochen), Adolf Loos says of the German language that the “rigid clinging to the practice of capitalizing nouns has as its consequence the return of language to a barbaric state.” This “derives from the abyss...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.79-86
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31875
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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11. Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
As in all periods of supposed change, new icons are thrust forward as beacons of illumination. So it is with the idea of the diagram. While it can be argued that the diagram is as old as architecture itself, many see its initial emergence in Rudolf Wittkower’s use of the nine-square grid in the...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.87-94
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31876
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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12. Autonomy and the Will to the Critical
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Within current debates on architecture, one topic seems to be in question more than ever and that is a concern for the critical. Our understanding of the critical previously rested upon Immanuel Kant’s conviction that the critical represented the possibility of knowledge within knowledge. In other words, the critical...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.95-99
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31877
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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13. Mies and the Figuring of Absence
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Author’s note: The following text is a fragment. It represents two interrelated concerns: the first is my long-standing interest in the permeability of the concepts of figure and ground, and how Mies’s work—in particular the evolution of his column section—can be taken as a symptom of his concern for this problem; second, this text...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.100-107
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31878
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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14. Blurred Zones
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Author’s Note: Since I first conceived of the term blurring in architecture and the concept for a book called Blurred Zones some thirteen years ago, the term has become quite popular—so much so that my editors argued for changing the title of the book. Architects such as Toyo Ito and Diller + Scofidio now use the term, but in an entirely different manner...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.108-112
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31879
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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15. L’Ora Che È Stata
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
It was Alberti who first said that painting’s most important task was to establish a storia, a history that would allow painting to develop. This history required there to be a subject, and from that, a relationship between the subject and the object—how the subject views the object. At this point the object...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.113-119
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31880
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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16. A Matrix in the Jungle
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Several years ago, Fredric Jameson said that the computer would be capable of giving us a new nature; not an unnatural nature but a nature derived directly from computerized algorithms and processes. Such a thought means it would no longer be necessary to look at nature with the same eyes through which Le Corbusier observed the...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.120-125
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31881
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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17. Terragni and the Idea of a Critical Text
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written over the course of more than forty years, Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques is not the book that I would write today. It presents an evolving view of its subject, an amalgam of ideas rather than a consistent point of view. It is also the work of two architects, neither of whom can be...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.126-132
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31882
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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18. Digital Scrambler: From Index to Codex
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
In her two essays “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” first published in October 3 and 4 (spring and fall 1977), Rosalind Krauss articulated an idea for defining the diverse genres and styles of art in the 1970s. Rightly or wrongly, she defined this idea as an index. This placed art in a context first...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.133-150
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31883
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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19. The Wicked Critic
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
In the prologue to Goethe’s Faust, part I, the Devil makes a bet with God that he can seduce any mortal away from his morality. In the first act the Devil then makes a second wager with the known-to-be-moral mortal, Dr. Faust. He offers Faust the opportunity to do anything he wants, to be the master, as it were, of the Devil himself; but in return, when Faust dies he will go to hell,...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Related print edition pages: pp.151-159
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31884
Chapter subject tags:Architectural theory--20th century

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Appendix: Letter from Jacques Derrida to Peter Eisenman
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
I am simultaneously sending this letter with the accompanying cassette to Hillis, who was supposed to join us during this seminar. Since he is also supposed to ‘moderate’ and lead it, but for other reasons as well...
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31885
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Sources
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Sources
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31887
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Index
Peter Eisenman
Description: Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
Index
Author
Peter Eisenman
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2007 by Peter Eisenman
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31888
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Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004
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