I remember there was somebody at Ohio State University

working on a digital 2D fractal sequence for this project at the

same time I was in Peter’s office drafting an adjustable
triangle fractal sequence. That was when FedEx overnight
delivery was starting, so we used to get a FedEx envelope
every morning from Columbus. We would open it up to see
what it was, wondering whether we had gotten further
drafting than the computer that day. I used to say that I felt
like John Henry, if you know the story, who laid railroad ties
faster than the steam-powered machine. We always felt like
we were racing the machine.
— Greg Lynn

John Henry driving on the right side

That steam drill driving on the left
Says, “Fore I let your steam drill beat me down
I’m gonna hammer myself to death, Lord, Lord,
I’ll hammer my fool self to death” . . .
— American Folk Tale
The Biozentrum is a project for an expansion of
Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
In the competition brief, the program of the
complex included biotechnology, molecular biology
and biochemistry research laboratories and support
spaces. In order to achieve three main objectives:
“a maximum interaction between functional areas
and between the people who use them (both within
the departments of the university and between the
university and the city); second, the
accommodation of future institutional growth and
change; and third, the maintenance of the site, as
far as possible, as a green preserve.” The design
process used biological concepts and procedures
to generate the geometrical pattern that establishes
the location, dimension and form of the complex.
The iterations of DNA molecules in the production
of the protein collagen were at the base of the
fractal geometry guiding the project design. These
pairs of figures, with a gap in between them, were
the base forms Eisenman adopted for the individual
laboratories, concentrated in four- and five-storey
blocks. Using a fractal-like technique to duplicate
these figures at varying scales and oblique
orientations when aligned at shared faces, these
shapes became cantilevered spaces for cafeteria,
library and meeting functions, arranged along a
central linear circulation spine.

One of Eisenman’s ambitions was to use a

computer as a procedural modelling tool capable of
drafting predefined figures at varying alignments
and scales in endless sequences based on logical
statements in code. Eventually, eight figures,
borrowed from the chemistry of biology used to
represent genetic sequences, were arrayed in size
and position based on the shared dimension of one
line segment. These fractal-like chains of symbols
were designed by revising coded sequences that
were faxed to an Ohio State University computer
lab daily, where custom software was written and
plots were made. Using the newly available
overnight delivery service of Federal Express, these
plots were later marked-up and revised in the
architect’s New York office, and new codes
transmitted back to Ohio State. Eisenman was
looking for a digital counterpart to his vision for a
rational linguistic tool capable of creating complex
overlapping figures with intricate alignments,
connections and scales scripted using logical
statements that could be revised or repeated
endlessly. The oscillation between written code and
algorithms, between plotted arrays and plans
drafted with adjustable triangles, and the ability to
visualize the ‘spine’ space using layers of objects
based on their iterative generation, was a hybrid
between digital and analog design.

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Peter Eisenman: I think that with Archaeology of the

Digital you are trying to establish a pre-conscious origin for
the digital. Before the digital was the digital. Before it
became inhabited by the phenomenological – which is the
scourge of the digital today. Before parametricism took
hold. Before anybody had any consciousness, before I
knew anything. In the 1980s I was teaching at Ohio State
University, where Chris Yessios was teaching the
computer. I didn’t know what that was, and I don’t think
he knew either, by the way. But I asked him if he could
help us. I remember the conversation: “We don’t have a
way to model the things that we want to build. Considering
that you are interested in 3-dimensional modelling, could
you develop something that we can use on the Wexner?”

Established and directed the Graduate Program in

Computer Aided Architectural Design at Ohio State
University, where he taught from 1973 to 1995. He
founded Automated Design Systems in 1990 with David
Kropp, which produced 3D modeling software FormZ.

Greg Lynn: On the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, not
the Biozentrum in Frankfurt?

PE: Yes, I believe that was when we first used computer

modelling. And that was also, I believe, the beginning of
FormZ.

A software package by AutoDesSys that was launched in

1990. Eisenman used its precursor ARCHIMODOS which
was a CAD (Computer Aided Design) software first
developed in the early 80s. It allowed users to move
seamlessly from 2D to 3D.

GL: Do you remember how you used computer modelling

on the Wexner?

The Wexner Center for the Arts is The Ohio State

University's contemporary art complex. When it opened in
1989 artist Spalding Gray called it the “spaceship that
crash-landed in the Prairies.”

PE: I have no idea. But if we talk about the Biozentrum

project, would you say that the linguistic analogy was
operative then? Because when I think of the work at the
office at that time, I think what we were doing was coding.
Not coding in the sense of a Derridian linguistic, or
Chomsky, or Lévi-Strauss or De Saussure… Linguistics
had not yet hit the table. The Biozentrum used a biological
analogy to make a biology building. It had the DNA
strands. What we were looking at were fractals. That was
Mandelbrot, not linguistics.

Eisenman adopted the notation for protein chains ...

... used by geneticists as paired figures that would generate the ground plan
and massing of the Biozentrum complex. The sequence of these figures had no
particular meaning or association with a particular code but was instead used
for the spatial effect these shapes would have on the oblique spine that runs
between laboratory buildings. Initially, the code was simply a sequence to be
arranged in scale and alignment by the computer, as if it were a new kind of
drafting machine; one that did not simply replicate rote tasks but helped
visualize complex fractal patterns and organizations.

1987. Electrostatic print on paper with pen

notations, 28 × 21.5 cm, DR1999:0644

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GL: In my opinion, the Biozentrum is the first – and last –

project of yours where you could write down instructions,
 for at least the plan, as scripted sentences and be able to
reproduce it. The Biozentrum, more than any other
project, had figures that scaled to it, which I believe was
like a pitch right down the middle of the lane – to the
computer. I mean, that’s how the computer thinks in
terms of parametric design. My thesis is that you invented
the parametric approach to the computer.

PE: But I wouldn’t have known that. I don’t think we even

had a computer in the office.

GL: No, we didn’t. That was the first year of FedEx

overnight delivery, and so every morning a FedEx package
would arrive from OSU containing a plot. You would mark
it up with red, and then we would spend four hours on the
phone saying, “See that line over there? No, not that one,
the other one. Change that one.” It was a FedEx and
telephone game.
The exchange between Eisenman and Chris Yessios dates back to ...
... 1987 when they jointly taught a second-year graduate studio at Ohio State
University: The Fractal Studio. Twenty students who attended the studio
worked primarily on the computer to develop and apply generative
transformations to primitive forms. Much like Eisenman’s analog process of
transforming cubes and grids using projective geometry and axonometrics,
this technique was applied to figures and forms more akin to his palimpsest
drawings, associated with the Long Beach Museum competition and the
Wexner Center for the Arts on the OSU campus, then under construction. With
his team, Yessios developed custom generative algorithms for use in the
studio that were later incorporated in Archimodos and FormZ.

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PE: Yes. And hand-drawing over the plots…

GL: You would give me a list where you had written down:
A, B, B, A, C, D, D, D, and I would sit there with an
adjustable triangle and go around drafting all those
elements. I was afraid that I would get fired by the
computer, so I was drafting like a maniac, trying to beat
the computer every day.
PE: That came from the DNA structures. We used their
coding devices, so no one else would know what it was.
We found an abstract system by using the analogy of the
DNA, that in this case only scientists could read!

GL: They were amino acids.

PE: Right. In that sense the sign system was linguistic,

because each of the forms stood for something, and then
the overall form, in relationship, stood for something. As
each form got bigger, in a fractal sense, it meant different
things. It was so dumbly literal.

It was implicit in the positive and negative shapes of the pairs ...
... of nucleotide figures, adopted from a scientific text, that a complex spine
would emerge. Whether intentional or unconscious, once aligned as laboratory
blocks,a switchback diagonal space populated by cantilevered rooms became
a circulation zone along which the complex could be organized, and later
expand in a linear manner.

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 GL: So, perhaps the most important part of the
Biozentrum process was the coding system put in place
without the computer?

PE: Why did we need the computer? That’s what I’m trying
to figure out – to figure out the moves? How did we use
the computer? What was the computer doing for us at that
time? Couldn’t we have done fractal rotation without the
computer – weren’t we, in fact, doing that? You said these
drawings would come back and I’d mark them up –
nothing to do with computation – either because I didn’t
like the way it “read” or looked.

GL: The computer was iterating for you. You could say,
“Give me this, that or the other” – and it could. The
curious thing about this project is that the computer was
iterating at the speed we were drafting. It was an
interesting moment.

PE: Honestly, it was an incredibly interesting idea for its

time, but I think it only became interesting architecturally
when we designed the Aronoff Center. The Aronoff and
the Carnegie Mellon Research Institute follow on from this
process, and they are much more elaborate and
sophisticated.

“Cheerful, bewildering, generous, controlling,” wrote

Herbert Muschamp in the New York Times when the
building opened in 1996. He also wrote: “It's a neo-
Baroque interior, Piranesi without a pope.”

GL: You never know – because the Biozentrum was just a

competition. I think the space that runs through with the
cantilevered elements could have gone somewhere.
As was the practice at the time, underlying geometric centrelines and ...
... often grids were used as underlays for different plans and sections drawn
on either translucent vellum or mylar. Plans and sections could also be
drafted over one another using aligned translucent drawings. In order to
register these drawings consistently, sheets were punctured with holes that
corresponded to a metal ‘pin bar’ that was taped to a drafting table. At the
time, the geometric shapes in the computer were defined by lines that had no
width, so plan and section cuts yielded either points or lines that would be
plotted on pin-bar punched sheets and then manually drafted over with
material thicknesses for walls, floors and ceilings, and finally dimensioned
from a mixture of the digital underlays and drafted in formation.

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PE: There was a little model here this morning of the

Cannaregio Town Square project, for Venice. What we
were doing with that project was all about composition,
and I’m all about diagrams. So we were asking: “Can we
turn composition into a diagram?” – and into the third
dimension. Piranesi was also interested in stacking and
shielding things through decoration. All of his chimney
pieces are amazingly decorative. But if you ask me,
Cannaregio was really one of the purest – I don’t know if
you want to call it linguistic – but I’m not sure it wasn’t the
beginning of the diagrammatic work.

I’ve been differentiating my work from Colin Rowe, and

this is absolutely where it happens. He wasn’t interested
in the diagram, he was into the parti – the parti was
compositional. I was interested in diagram, which is
something else, and the morphological as opposed to
typological. Of course Rem Koolhaas is interested in the
typological diagram. I’m interested in the morphological
diagram that generates form. And I think this is where
Colin and I split.

A submission for a seminar organized by Università IUAV

di Venezia in which Eisenman used Corbusier’s plan for a
hospital in the Canaregio area of Venice as a starting point
for his design.

GL: Do you think that talking to a computer had anything

to do with that, or not?

PE: I knew enough to tell Chris Yessios: “I cannot model

what I’m thinking about.”

GL: Yes. Because another thing I find interesting about

this project is that the houses establish their own context.
Cannaregio and Wexner and the Art Museum in Long
Beach used context to establish their own tabula rasa, but
they also used figures from the context to make a
palimpsest. The Biozentrum made its own palimpsest – it
was like a palimpsest-generator.

A project for a University Art Museum at California State

University, Long Beach, which Eisenman worked on
between 1986 and 1988. The design is based on using
 shapes from maps of the site’s context to determine which
areas are excavated or built on.

PE: Do you think we could have drawn the spinning and

the iteration without the computer?

GL: I did then! Because the computer wasn’t giving us

what we wanted. The question is whether you could arrive
at the Biozentrum without a computer, without the
process.

The drafting techniques Eisenman used most frequently ...

... at this time were various forms of axonometric projection rather than
perspective. The software was capable of drawing the wireframe geometry of
volumes in perspective as easily as in axonometric so there are more examples
of perspectival images than axonometric.

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PE: As I said earlier, I think our work was pre-conscious of

the computer, pre-conscious of parametrics. We were not
aware that we were breaking any ground at all.
 GL: I think it’s a misconception that the computer showed
up and so people had to figure out what to do with it.
People were already doing things that the computer could
then automate.

PE: But this was not what most people were doing at the
time.

GL: No – you were the computer at this point. I mean, you

were thinking like a computer, with the code and the
iteration and the variables and the repetition.

PE: But I didn’t know I was thinking like a computer!

That’s what I’m trying to say – I’m not being disingenuous.
I was really interested in these diagrammatic processes.
Cannaregio was the first diagram that I made out of
architecture. But it had nothing to do with computation –
it was pure diagram. I took the squares and continued
them, and I put in House 11A. Then I wanted a different
kind of diagram; a diagram that, in a sense, moved and
changed its reading depending on the position of these
elements. In other words, there was no change of reading
if I twisted the blocks in the Cannaregio project. But for
Biozentrum, just moving this thing from here to here was
really a big deal!

An unbuilt project by Eisenman for a residence in Palo

Alto, California, commissioned by historian and theorist
Kurt Forster, determined by a rule-based progression of
above and below-ground formal solids and voids.

GL: Well, that’s the parametric part. You change one

parameter and it has repercussions all the way down the
chain.

PE: Yes, but again, I didn’t know that.

 GL: But you wanted it.

PE: You were the articulator. I would ask for something

and you would articulate what it was. You were trying to
put what I was asking for, what I wanted, into two
dimensions.

GL: I was drawing axons. Neither the plotter nor the

computer could do axons back then.

PE: Really?

GL: We were in fact doing 3D. I think there is an axon with

Pantone transfers made to look like a primitive computer
rendering, and we did the same thing with a model that
we painted a different shade on every face to make it look
like it was in shade. That funny play with the computer
shade was the slickest thing I was ever involved in!
In one instance, a series of three perspective layers was ...
plotted with: a sequence of ‘base figures’ that were the laboratory blocks; a
sequence of large cantilevered rooms at a smaller size; and finally a set of
much smaller figures projecting from these rooms. Each layer of the
perspective corresponded to a fractal iteration of figures on the site. These
layered perspectives were then manually drafted over and modified for the
presentation drawing that was drafted in ink on mylar, contact-printed
photographically from full size negatives and coloured with layers of
burnished Zip-A-Tone™.

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PE: Chris Yessios would also claim that I’d asked for
something to model things in 3D, and that he developed
FormZ for our needs. We had special rights to FormZ for
years. We were the guinea pigs.

GL: So, when you take 250 of these computer variations,

do you see how you invented parametricism?

PE: Thank you. But that’s not what we thought we were

doing – so long as that’s clear.
 GL: But didn’t you want to find a procedure whereby you
could change one point in the figure and have the work
carry itself out?

PE: Yeah, but I didn’t know what that was at the time.

GL: Well, no, whatever name you gave it then would have
probably been better than ‘parametric’. But that approach
to working with the computer… We were actually writing
plain instructions: rotate, start with this plot, rotate 1.2
degrees in Z and 1.2 degrees in × and pum-pum-pum-
pum-pum-pum-pum… then we would get back the plan.

PE: And then we’d say yay or nay.

GL: Yeah. And then we would go try 1.3 degrees and…

PE: …that’s what I liked. If you study the drawings, you’ll

see that there’s movement, and the movement had
meaning. You could do this any number of times with a
computer, without talking about aesthetics. We’re not
saying, “It looks nicer like this” or “It’s more meaningful
like this than like this.” But we could say, “We want X, so
this won’t do.” That was how we were making decisions.

GL: Just out of curiosity, was this happening anywhere

else?

PE: No. I didn’t know of anybody doing this. The people I

saw were Philip Johnson, Harry Cobb, Paul Rudolph,
Richard Meier, Michael Graves – I didn’t see anybody
doing anything like this.

GL: I remember once you presented a project to Michael

Eisner and said it was like Tron (1982) – was there any
cultural valence for you with the computer?
PE: I don’t think so. We weren’t thinking like that then, as I
said. But we were working in a way which we now know
the computer to do, today. We weren’t conscious we were
doing that.

Whatever it was that we were doing, we were doing it. Just

working totally hermetically; we weren’t looking at
anybody. We weren’t saying, “Look at Philip Johnson’s
latest” – we were doing something totally different.

Tron (1982) – A science fiction film about a software

engineer named Kevin Flynn who is beamed into a
mainframe computer and must play games in order to
escape (not the Daft Punk one, the first one).

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Project
Biozentrum, Frankfurt am Main
 Client
Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main

Architects
Eisenman / Robertson Architects,
New York City

Partners
Peter Eisenman, Christopher Glaister

Associate
Thomas Leeser

Project Team
Teri Baker, David Biagi, Kayla Bolasni, Sylvain Boulanger,
Karen Burden, Suzanne Chang, Ian Connolly, James Deane,
Ken Doyno, Judy Geib, Ben Gianni, Frances Hsu, Kevin Kemner,
Associate George Kewin, Jeff Kipnis, Holger Kleine, Christian
Kohl, Sylvia Kolbowski, Greg Lynn, Hiroshi Maruyama, Paula
Marzatico, Carlene Ramus, Wolfgang Rettenmaier, Dana
Robinson, Richard Rosson, Laura Sebald, Julie Smith, Paul
Sorum, Madison Spencer, Sarah Whiting, David Youse

Mechanical Engineer
Jaros Baum Bolles, Augustine Di Giacomo

Structural Engineer
Robert Silman, Associates
Robert Silman

Landscape Architect
Hanna/Olin, Ltd, Laurie Olin
 Colour Consultant
Robert Slutzky

Research Computer Lab

Ohio State University, Chris Yessios

Artist
Michael Heizer

All materials from Peter Eisenman fonds, CCA

Series concept
CCA Publications and Linked by Air

Editor
Greg Lynn

Editorial coordination
Tim Abrahams
Jesse Seegers

Text editing and proofreading

Victoria Bugge Oeye 

Kari Rittenbach 

Katie Moore

Transcription
Christiane Côté
Rights and Reproductions
Marc Pitre

Special thanks to Federal Express Corporation for permission

to use FedEx envelope image.
© FedEx 1981. FedEx and Federal Express are registered
trademarks of Federal Express Corporation.

Design and development

Linked by Air

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founded on the conviction that architecture is a public
concern. Based on its extensive collection, exhibitions,
programs and research opportunities the CCA is a leading
voice in advancing knowledge, promoting public
understanding, and widening thought and debate on
architecture, its history, theory, practice, and role in society
today.

Board of Trustees
Phyllis Lambert, Founding Director Emeritus
Bruce Kuwabara, Chair

Pierre-André Themens, Vice-Chair

Stephen R. Bronfman
Jean-Louis Cohen
Niall Hobhouse
Sylvia Lavin
Frederick Lowy
Charles E. Pierce, Jr.

Tro Piliguian
Robert Rabinovitch
Gerald Sheff
The Oral History project launched by the CCA to document the
different phases of Archaeology of the Digital has been
supported by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown. The CCA would also
like to thank Hydro-Québec, the Ministère de la Culture et des
Communications, the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Conseil des arts de Montréal.

© 2014 Canadian Centre for Architecture

ISBN 978-1-927071-09-0

Published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture

1920 rue Baile

Montréal, Québec

Canada H3H 2S6

www.cca.qc.ca

Archaeology of the Digital
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