Coda to a Career: Eisenman's City of Culture

Author: Christopher Hawthorne
Year: 2014 (The Architect's Newspaper)
Source type: article (criticism)
Raw file: raw/articles/hawthorne-2014-coda-eisenman-city-of-culture.md

Summary

Hawthorne visits Peter Eisenman's City of Culture de Galicia (Santiago de Compostela), the largest and most star-crossed project of the architect's career, near the end of his life. Reading it against Robin Evans's 1985 takedown of Eisenman ("radical in his fundamentalism, not in challenging fundamentals"; his writings an "armored vehicle" and "bodyguards"), Hawthorne finds the campus — born during Spain's Bilbao-inspired boom, opened during the economic collapse — a "tender ruin," its architecture "shorn of the protective rhetorical coat that Eisenman's essays and lectures ... have provided."

Key Claims

• Evans's 1985 critique: Eisenman's opaque prose was "an armored vehicle" protecting the buildings from scrutiny; his ideas functioned "not so much as the theoretical basis of his buildings as 'bodyguards.'" "Eisenman is in fact a jealous guardian of the stable and fundamental features of architecture. He is radical in his fundamentalism, not in challenging fundamentals." Work marked by "changelessness."
• Built context: the project was "born during Spain's Bilbao-inspired architectural boom," comparable to a cross between Gehry's Bilbao and Meier's Getty; "It was born in the Spain of excess and is opening during an economic collapse, as a sort of monument to the construction bubble" (Spanish journalist). Wainwright: "a bloated vanity project."
• The grid/traces method on site: the forms are "derived by a series of clashing and deformed grids" — the historic street grid of Santiago combined with the pilgrims' scallop shell, laid on the hilltop, with two internal warring grids and "deformation lines"/"flow lines."
• The exposed, vulnerable ruin: with the missing theatre, "the disconnections that have always been a key element in Eisenman's formal language are redoubled by the sense of rupture in the construction schedule"; the campus "looks, more than anything, vulnerable." "This is not the late work of an architectural giant ... but something far purer, more naked, more affecting, and less developed. ... The place is a tender ruin."
• The star-architecture economy: built on a hilltop with no transit connection — "one clue about how different this effort is from Gehry's Guggenheim" as part of a larger civic revival; the "avant-garde hilltop version of an abandoned suburban subdivision."

Connections

Concepts: Star Architecture · Iconic Architecture · Critical Architecture
Authors: Christopher Hawthorne · Peter Eisenman
Debates: Spectacle vs. Function
Related source notes: Changes are Coming (Belogolovsky & Eisenman) · Spain Halts Eisenman's City of Culture (Archiweb)

Direct Quotes

"Eisenman is in fact a jealous guardian of the stable and fundamental features of architecture. He is radical in his fundamentalism, not in challenging fundamentals." (Robin Evans, as quoted)

"[H]is ideas acted not so much as the theoretical basis of his buildings as 'bodyguards' keeping them safe from jostling scrutiny." (on Evans's critique)

"It was born in the Spain of excess and is opening during an economic collapse, as a sort of monument to the construction bubble." (Spanish journalist, as quoted)

"[T]his is not the late work of an architectural giant ... but something far purer, more naked, more affecting, and less developed. ... The place is a tender ruin."

Open Questions

• Does the "exposed ruin" of the Cidade da Cultura undermine or confirm the star-architecture economy that produced it — and Eisenman's own "we are in lateness / economics will drive the next paradigm" claim?