Week 11: Eisenman

In an Oppositions essay laying the groundwork for his architectural theory of post-functionalism, Peter Eisenman references a comparison made by Colin Rowe between two contemporaneous 19th century buildings. The two buildings in question are a “French Parisian Hotel, and an English country house, both buildings from the early nineteenth century” (Eisenman 236). This comparison made by Rowe arises in the context of what I found to be the most compelling argument made by Eisenman. Eisenman more or less argues that the “the 500-year-old traditions of humanism” (Eisenman 236) have pigeonholed the past fifty years of architecture in some capacity into “a product of some oversimplified form-follows-function formula” (Eisenman 237). Eisenman’s rhetoric is a refreshing return to the righteous ambitions of Le Corbusier’s brand of architectural theory, in a way that criticizes Le Corbusier’s methods but more or less agrees with his motives. In a sense, Eisenman recover’s Le Corbusier’s dropped torch which was a desire to see architecture–in his own words, “it was still thought that the polemics of of the early Modern Movement could sustain architecture” (Eisenman 237)–the meet the inevitable evolution of social attitudes at a pace that keeps up with the other arts, yet he wasn’t afraid to criticize Le Corbusier’s approach. With regards to the Parisian Hotel and English country house, the comparison is meant to exemplify the opposition “one sees this opposition manifested in the interplay between a concern for an ideal type and a concern for a programmatic statement” (Eisenman 236) which Eisenman argues, or such is my interpretation, slows down the pace of architectural progress.