The formal bases of Modern Architecture : Peter Eisenman's analytical method = Las bases formales de la Arquitectura Moderna : el método analitico de Peter Eisenman

During the 1960s and 1970s the theme of language became the subject of interest in several disciplines. Many critics and theorists of architecture argued about the possibility to conceive architecture as a language. Architecture is a language? And if so, how does its grammar and syntax work? Does it have a conventional meaning? The American architect Peter Eisenman tried to answer to those questions writing his dissertation The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture elaborated at Cambridge University between 1960 and 1963. Eisenman’s critic work constitutes the attempt to analyze architecture beyond geometrical and proportional methods. According to Eisenman the idea of architecture as language is a theoretical proposal to demonstrate the primacy of form in architecture in opposition to aesthetic, stylistic and functionalistic foundamentals since the Modern Movement. The paper aims to explain Eisenman’s theories on architecture focusing on his fascination with formal analysis. Eisenman’s theories represent an alternative point of view within post-modern architecture, which saw form as result of archetype research and synthesis. Eisenman, in contrast, considers form in terms of its qualities as inner structure device of architecture and in this way his work expands the domain of autonomy approach in architecture, providing a linguistic explanation of formal properties. According to Eisenman’s composition theory, architectural objects are not revealed as completely isolated geometric units. The architectural space is relational, always putting in communication an internal with an external, one figure with another, in a continuous layering of forms. And this, in turn, is what allows Eisenman to define form in architecture as a system of deformations and as a spatial limit at the same time. This research investigates Eisenman’s early architectural writing and also his architectural production called Cardboard Houses (1967-79), later known as House of Cards. Moreover the paper dwells on the book Ten Canonical Building (2008), the last upgrade of Eisenman’s analysis method which suggests, as Stan Allen wrote, “the construction of a new orthodoxy” in architecture.