Berlin, May 10, 2005. A few steps from the Brandenburg Gate, on a site of nearly two hectares that for forty years had been a strip of no man's land between East and West, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe opens to the public. It has no entrance, no fence, no plaque explaining what one is looking at: 2,711 grey concrete blocks, all with the same rectangular base, from a few centimetres to almost five metres tall, laid out on a regular grid over ground that undulates. Its author, Peter Eisenman, has always refused to say what it «means». That is his idea of architecture, cultivated for forty years before he found a subject grave enough to test it.
An architect who writes before he builds
Eisenman was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1932. He studies at Cornell, then Columbia, then Cambridge, where in 1963 he earns a doctorate with a thesis on the formal basis of modern architecture. In 1967 he founds in New York the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, a place where for years architecture is discussed the way one would discuss philosophy or linguistics: with seminars, journals, quarrels. In 1972 he is one of the five architects (with Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk and Meier) gathered in the book Five Architects, and from then on they are called «the New York Five». But while Meier builds white, luminous houses, Eisenman does something that looks stubborn: he starts from an idea drawn from the linguist Noam Chomsky and from reading Giuseppe Terragni, that the syntax of a building can be studied separately from its meaning and its function. A house is first of all a grammar of planes, columns and walls, and the architect's task is to manipulate that grammar.
The most famous test is House VI in Cornwall, Connecticut (1972–75), commissioned by a couple, the Franks, who do not imagine what they are commissioning. A glass slot cuts the bedroom in two, and with it the double bed: whoever sleeps there must sleep in two halves. A red staircase, hung upside down from the ceiling, leads nowhere. A column ends above the dining table without touching it. The owners, so the story goes, struggle at first to live in a house that was not made for them. It is architecture as experiment, not as service: the building demonstrates an idea, and the inhabitant is, despite themselves, its witness.
Deconstructivism, by elimination
In 1988 the Museum of Modern Art in New York stages the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, with seven designers: Gehry, Libeskind, Koolhaas, Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Tschumi and Eisenman. The name is a commercial label more than a theory, and Eisenman himself has often refused to accept it. With Jacques Derrida, the philosopher who gives deconstruction its name, he collaborates on a garden for the Parc de la Villette (the Choral Work, 1985–86, never built) and from that conversation borrows a vocabulary of traces, absences, gaps. But Eisenman does not illustrate Derrida: he uses philosophy as Le Corbusier used cars, as a way of looking at a problem of form.
The first public building to carry this idea at real scale is the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio (1989), at Ohio State University. The campus street grid is rotated by a little over twelve degrees from the city's, and Eisenman makes that gap the theme of the project: a three-dimensional grid of white steel tubes, a sort of permanent scaffold, runs through the building and links the two grids. On the west side he rebuilds, as fragments, the towers of a red-brick nineteenth-century armory that stood there and burned in 1958: the building remembers what is no longer there without restoring it. The Wexner has practical problems, like all his works (the galleries are difficult for large-format shows), but it is the building where theory becomes a place one can walk into.
2,711 stelae
The Berlin memorial comes out of a long and troubled competition. The debate begins in the late 1980s, driven by a citizens' group, and the competition is launched in 1994; the first jury awards the top prize to a project later abandoned, and in 1997 a second round invites a restricted group of architects. Eisenman initially submits the project together with the sculptor Richard Serra, who withdraws in 1998 after Chancellor Helmut Kohl's criticism of its scale; Eisenman reduces it, lowers the stelae and adds an underground documentation centre. The Bundestag approves the project in 1999. Construction begins in 2003 and the memorial is inaugurated on May 10, 2005.
The result can only be understood by walking into it. The ground is not flat: it slopes down toward the centre, so the stelae, of varying height, rise around whoever enters. At the edges they reach your knees; toward the centre they tower two or three metres over you, and the corridors between them are barely a metre wide, so that two people cannot walk side by side. The gaze loses its references, the sounds of the city fade, crossings and escape routes change at every step. Eisenman has stated that the work does not wish to represent anything specific: it is an ordered system that has lost touch with human reason. There are no names, no symbolism; only concrete, grid, scale. Below, at the south-east corner, the Ort der Information (information centre) tells instead, through names, photographs and letters, the stories of the victims, and was a counterweight requested by the commissioners.
As with any memorial, this one has had its controversies: in 2003 it emerged that one of the firms supplying the anti-graffiti treatment belonged to a group whose parent company had in the past supplied the Zyklon B gas to the extermination camps; construction stopped for days, and in the end it was decided to continue. Today the memorial is open all day, all year, and visitors lie on the stelae, sit on them, children play among them, which has been debated from the start. Eisenman has replied that he did not want a place where behaviour is prescribed.
The Eisenman paradox
Eisenman's most ambitious project after Berlin is the Cidade da Cultura de Galicia, in Santiago de Compostela, won in 1999 and conceived as a complex of six buildings on Monte Gaiás. Its form comes from the overlay of three maps: the plan of the medieval historic centre, the pilgrim's scallop-shell symbol and a Cartesian grid, deformed over the relief of the terrain. The original project called for six buildings; two have been completed, the museum and the library, opened from 2011 onwards, while the rest has been suspended after costs grew enormously and the regional government changed course. It is a frequent fate in his most ambitious works: the same theorist who teaches that architecture is autonomous from its uses ends up depending on everything outside the drawing: budgets, clients, politics.