Week 11

Prior to reading the two Eisenman readings, I had my mind pretty much made up about what I thought of his theories in relation to form vs function. Based on the lecture and observing his “House Series,” I had tacked him up to be another Rossi, completely against functionalism. While they do share many similarities, I found Eisenman to be much more pragmatic in his thinking. Rossi had a blatant dislike of function, whereas Eisenman believes in the cohesion between form and function. 

The more I read about Eisenman’s “form first, function last” approach the more I understood his philosophy. It’s not a matter of direct precedence, rather a way to direct one’s thinking away from the traditional functionalist approach. In the intro to Post-Functionalism, it says, “Rather than simply deriving its forms from functional needs, Eisenman sees modernism as ‘work on the language itself…It fundamentally changed the relationship between man and object away from an object whose primary purpose was to speak about man to one which was concerned with its own objecthood.’” Essentially, Eisenman is attempting to get readers to think about objects in a new light. Objects are not defined by their function nor should they even be initially thought of as having a set function. Yet, there is still a recognition that some elements may wind up serving their initial function in the end product.  

It actually reminded me a lot about Khan’s Unmeasurable>Measurable>Unmeasurable theory, except Eisenman is referring to individual forms rather than whole buildings. The way I made sense of it was that objects must first be looked at as abstract forms. Then, the necessary objects can be looked at from a functional standpoint, leaving the remaining objects to be considered simply as forms. 

This is something that I personally was struggling with until I read something that he said in “Cardboard Architecture” when describing his process for House I. Referring to columns, Eisenman states, “While the apparent physical fact is the same whether they are load-bearing or not, their meaning has changed because they are in fact not load bearing, and thus the intention implied in their use in a particular location must now be considered in a different way.” (Cardboard Architecture 30) This made sense to me because so often we as humans observe an object and relate it to something familiar in order to make sense of it. An example of this is how we constantly subconsciously look for a face when we see three triangular dots with a curve below them. Eisenman is saying that if we are able to take that subconscious effort to make sense of objects away, we can start to see everything as a basic form.

Eisenman, Peter. 1967. Cardboard Architecture.

Eisenman, Peter. 1976. Post Functionalism.