3/17/22, 3:51 PM ART/ARCHITECTURE; Who's That Peering Out Of the Grid?

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ART/ARCHITECTURE
ِAlyaa Ahmed

ART/ARCHITECTURE; Who's That Peering Out Of the

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Grid? Alyaa Shemari

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By Herbert Muschamp
March 18, 2001

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THE Wexner Center for the Arts, now 10 years old, marks Peter Eisenman's unofficial
transition from theorist to practicing builder. Eisenman, a New York architect, had built
several small projects before this, including houses and a fire station in Queens, but he was
mainly known as an educator, critic, agitator and éminence noire of the avant-garde. With
the Wexner, the public gained an opportunity to discover how well the theories stood up.
The center's anniversary is an occasion to revisit the building and the issues raised by it.

Things have changed in the decade since it was finished. The Getty Center is completed, the
Guggenheim Bilbao is completed and Michael Graves is riding high on the deserved success
of his Target toasters. Postmodernism's pseudo-history has been driven back to the wealthy
suburbs whence it came. Few of the succeeding generation's talents cared to pick it up.
Deconstructionism is remembered, if at all, as Philip Johnson's exploding cigar. The second
generation of nerd terrorists is now upon us, brimming with digital hopes. Architecture's
relationship to the city has eclipsed issues of style.

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3/17/22, 3:51 PM ART/ARCHITECTURE; Who's That Peering Out Of the Grid? - The New York Times

Nineteen-ninety-one is another world. And indeed the Wexner remains the supreme
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monument to a moment that has passed into architectural
Google history. In the 70's and 80's, many
of our most talented sought inspiration, if not actual guidance, from the field of linguistics. If
that moment has passed, it is not necessarily because theAhmed
ِAlyaa ideas were invalid but because
many of them have been absorbed. Literary deconstruction, semiotic analysis and
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structural linguistics are now optional tools of the trade. No one was ever obliged to use
Alyaa Shemari
them. But contemporary architecture can scarcely be understood without reference to the
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period that witnessed their introduction into architectural discourse.

Ten years ago, it was difficult to judge how well Eisenman's theories stood up, because it
was almost impossible to know precisely what those theories were, or how well the architect
himself understood them. Clearly, we were not dealing with a falsifiable scientific model, like
E=mc2 ; woolly words reflect woolly ideas, and Eisenman's words lacked precision.
Moreover, even a decade ago, some of his theoretical sources had proved unsound. Such was
the case with Noam Chomsky's hypothesis of deep linguistic structure, an inspiration for the
Eisenman drawings now on display at the Wexner Center in ''Suite Fantastique.'' Were
those drawings invalidated by Chomsky's defects?

Today, it's possible to allow that Eisenman is an architect who is stimulated by ideas,
virtually for their own sake. His work was ''theoretical'' mainly in the sense that it was
unbuilt. In this sense, the theory was not unsound because the building helped usher in the
architecture of ideas now taking shape in cities around the world. Moreover, it is easier now
to construct something like a retrospective hypothesis in light of Eisenman's subsequent
work.

A while back I described a recent Eisenman project as establishing a relationship between

the history of places and the history of ideas. The phrase is true as far as it goes. It refers to
the method Eisenman has adopted for many projects since the Wexner. First he creates an
abstract topological map of the existing site. The map may include excavated building ruins,
landscape contours, previous designs for unbuilt projects on the site, adjacent highway
overpasses, or the overlapping wave patterns created by the wakes of ships. Over this map
he lays one or more Cartesian grids. Then he arranges the building's program -- enclosed
spaces, circulation, mechanical equipment within the areas created by extruding the grids
into three dimensions. There are variations on this technique, but this is the basic M.O.

It sounds mechanical, and it is. Eisenman's stated goal is to eliminate self-expression from
the architectural object. This objective is more theoretical than real. An Eisenman building
looks like an Eisenman building. Visual choices have been made. He might argue, however,
that to accuse him of self-expression is to project our subjectivity onto him. For the sake of
argument, we'll allow that point.

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3/17/22, 3:51 PM ART/ARCHITECTURE; Who's That Peering Out Of the Grid? - The New York Times

But why would an architect want to eliminate self-expression? In Eisenman's case, the
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rationale comes primarily from two concepts of Jacques
GoogleDerrida: logocentricism and ''the
death of the author.'' For the benefit of those who came in late, these concepts should be
sketched in. ِAlyaa Ahmed
alolo2025@gmail.com
In the Derridean dispensation, language becomes tantamount to God, a supreme but by no
means wholly benevolent entity that arranges the order Alyaaof things without the consent (or
Shemari
even awareness) of those who use it. We are how wealyaashemari.2020@gmail.com
phrase our descriptions of the world:
that's the logocentric view of self. ''The death of the author'' applies this view to literature. A
piece of writing can be analyzed in such a way as to render it the byproduct of historical and
psychological forces operating outside the full awareness of either the writer or the reader.

Eisenman proposes that architecture also be seen as a language whose hidden workings
should be exposed by the building itself. The Cartesian grid represents the classical,
Western tool for organizing information, including space (as in so many square feet). The
topography stands for the particularities of a given site. The point of exposing these systems
is therapeutic: seeing is disbelieving.

Theoretically, the Wexner design took its form from the overlap of two pre-existing grids:
the street grid of Columbus, and the grid used by the master plan for the Ohio State
University campus. The two grids meet at an angle at the edge of the campus, where the
Wexner is situated.

Eisenman's topography map included plans for a demolished landmark on the site, a state
armory building. A portion of the armory was rebuilt in a semi-abstract form:
deconstruction's version of the fake ruins built in 18th-century gardens. An extruded grid
projects above the building envelope in the form of an open framework of white metal.
Eisenman called this ''the scaffold.''

When you try to reconstruct the building in memory, these are the two features that come
most solidly to mind. The rest appears to dissolve, quite agreeably, into the overlapping
grids. Landscaping -- chiefly tall pampas grass -- further blurs the borders where the
building starts and stops.

The point is: the grids and the topography are givens. The architect declines to accept
authority for the forms that result from them. He presents himself, in effect, as the
embodiment of Derrida's dead author, a figure dissolving into the conventions of time and
place.

Derrida's concepts are analytic tools, not prescriptions for art. Derrida didn't propose that
writers pretend to be dead. Eisenman has chosen to aestheticize structural analysis, and
this is a legitimate operation. If engineering can be aestheticized, as it was by the modern
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3/17/22, 3:51 PM ART/ARCHITECTURE; Who's That Peering Out Of the Grid? - The New York Times

architecture, then why not ideology? Indeed, the modern expression of engineering was
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itself an ideological position. Google

As with Derrida, however, we suspect that something more than linguistic exercise is going
ِAlyaa Ahmed
on. Eisenman and Derrida are both conducting theological operations. In challenging the
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authority of language, they are assaulting the entire idea of external authority predicated on
the existence of God. Alyaa Shemari
alyaashemari.2020@gmail.com
This exercise is not as remote from architecture as it may seem. Until relatively recently, the
forms and meanings of architecture were stabilized by religious authority -- by the
apparatus of religion and the secular sphere that depended from it. This authority was not
seriously challenged until the 18th century. Since then, architects and their clients have
looked toward a variety of sources to take God's place: reason, science, history, nature,
technology or physical comfort. In theory, Eisenman aims not to construct another external
authority but to expose the prevailing authority of language.

This is where we come to the philosophical hazard of Eisenman's work. Proving that God
does not exist is as impossible as proving that he does. Religion is a matter of faith, not of
reason. Those who love language are not going to be put off by knowing that language is all-
pervasive. That knowledge might inspire some to use language with greater passion.

Moreover, in his recourse to grids and maps, not to mention linguistic theory itself,
Eisenman has scarcely forsaken external authority. He has substituted a set of externals for
the notion of self. And it seems to me that the vitality of architecture today does not lie with
the elimination of self. It arises from the power of buildings to renegotiate the boundaries
between objective and subjective space.

But rhetoric can be a delight for its own sake. There's room in the world for rhetorical
buildings. And too much space given over to buildings with nothing to say. The Wexner
Center subtracted the space available for stupid buildings. This in itself was a historical
achievement. Not since Louis Kahn's Salk Institute had an American architect built a more
eloquent temple to the life of the mind. On its own terms, the Wexner succeeds. But those
terms give the heart no quarter.

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