Changes are Coming: Interview with Peter Eisenman on the City of Culture of Galicia

Author: Vladimir Belogolovsky (interview) with Peter Eisenman
Year: 2011
Source type: article (published interview)
Raw file: raw/articles/belogolovsky-eisenman-2011-changes-are-coming.md

Summary

An interview in which Peter Eisenman discusses the City of Culture of Galicia (Santiago de Compostela), the monumentally budgeted cultural complex he won against competitors including Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel. The conversation centers on Eisenman's method of deriving form from superimposed "traces" of the site (in a Derridean sense), his insistence that his architecture "never represents anything," her critique of "green"/sustainability as a non-theoretical position, and his forecast that the next paradigm shift in architecture will be driven by economics — "we are in lateness. Something is coming."

Key Claims

• The trace-based method: Eisenman identified four form-defining local traces in Santiago — the historical downtown street grid, the typography of the hill, an abstract Cartesian grid, and the symbolic scallop-shell sign of Santiago — and superimposed them to create an imagined site condition. "The beginning, therefore, is not the actual site, but the traces of the site in the Derridean sense."
• Rejecting the metaphysical site: following Derrida ("there is no value of origin"), the project does not make primary the actual physical site; Eisenman compares this to Freud's Rome — "many layers of history and of place." This is his concept of landscape.
• "Unnatural nature": the Santiago buildings are made to seem as if they "come out of the ground like giant mountains," compressing "something that would take 10 million years" into 10 years. Eisenman insists "My architecture never represents anything" — it is an unnatural nature, neither nature nor against nature.
• Critique of "green": Eisenman dismisses sustainability/LEED as having "nothing to do with architecture" — "some of the worst buildings I have seen are done by sustainable architects." The environment "has always been part of architecture"; it is "not a theoretical position."
• Architecture displaces places: echoing his claim that architecture's great oxymoron is that it must create places but instead displaces them, he describes how the glass floor and cut hill of the project disrupt conventions of ground, floor, walls, and interior.
• "We are in lateness": "We are no longer in Modernism, we are no longer in Post-modernism, we are no longer in Deconstructivism, we are no longer anywhere. ... I think we are in lateness. Something is coming." The next big paradigm shift, he argues, will be driven by economics as capitalism is left behind for a new social-economic structure.

Connections

Concepts: Unnatural Nature · Star Architecture · Iconic Architecture · Architectural Object
Authors: Peter Eisenman · Vladimir Belogolovsky · Manfredo Tafuri
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function
Related source notes: Spain Halts Eisenman's City of Culture · The Architecture of the City in the Age of its Financial Reproducibility

Direct Quotes

"The beginning, therefore, is not the actual site, but the traces of the site in the Derridean sense."

"My architecture never represents anything. It is not representing an unnatural nature. It is an unnatural nature."

"Because 'green' and sustainability have nothing to do with architecture. Some of the worst buildings I have seen are done by sustainable architects."

"We are no longer in Modernism, we are no longer in Post-modernism, we are no longer in Deconstructivism, we are no longer anywhere. ... I think we are in lateness. Something is coming."

"The next big paradigm shift in architecture will be driven by economics."

Open Questions

• If the next paradigm is economic (Eisenman) or a matter of "capital switching" (Harvey), how do Eisenman's own monumental, state-funded commissions fit into the financialized city Bismarck describes?
• Does Eisenman's "unnatural nature" recuperate the landscape rhetoric of the neoliberal object, or genuinely hold a critical distance from it?