Constructs 2013_spr

17 SPRING
2013
Inner Agents: Palladio
and Eisenman
2 4
3a, 3b, 3c
distinct typological change from a centralized
organization to a field of layered spaces with
no hierarchy. The design ultimately seems
to set spaces in tension apart from the initial
elastic, generic organization, proposing
spatial articulations through the walls and the
columns (fig. 4). The resultant spaces acquire
autonomy from the relational logic, proposing
a non-reversible composition, and revisiting
Eisenman’s reading that the buildings seem
less cohesive. Any interpretation is a design
decision influenced by an ideology. This
alternative reading also offers an unstable
idea of origin, a displacement that offers a
level of critique in which any new condition
may become a new parameter.
Palladio may have proposed both
the establishment of a relational order and
a resistance to the homogenizing quality
predetermined by that same order. The
design of Palladio’s buildings opens up what
Eisenman calls a state of “undecidability” by
critiquing the set of parameters that indexed
its process.
But with Palazzo Chiericati, this
problem may be useful to question certain
parametric issues in contemporary digital
architecture, pointing out Eisenman’s preoccupation
with resisting superficial diagrammatic
readings. His formal method in the
1970s developed an increasingly complex
series of diagrams from basic displacements
in a step-by-step logic of iterations; however,
the departure organizational structure is not
questioned through this process, and an idea
of a stable origin prevails.
The implicit project in progressive
parametric variations is to resolve a structural
typological change within relative topological
displacements that can critique and
transcend absolutes given a stable origin.
Recent generations may consider
architectural history irrelevant. This is clear
in the current state of architecture discourse,
wherein innovation is referenced by advancement
over previous digital form-generation
methods or digital representation techniques
without addressing a cultural displacement
that would activate content in the work. The
implicit condition is that computation has
induced an ahistoric architecture.
Mannerist Displacements and
Continuous, Unstable Origins
According to Eisenman, Palladio’s resistance
to deterministic order, through addressing
the autonomy of the parts in a building,
distances his work from Mannerism. The
architecture of the installation is a juxtaposition
based on a synoptic reading of two floor
plans: Palladio’s Palazzo Della Torre (Verona,
c. 1555) and Carlo Rainaldi’s Santa Maria in
Campitelli (Rome, 1656–65). The exhibition’s
plan articulates an architectural quotation,
a critical reference to Palladio by Rainaldi’s
building, bringing historic reference to the
autonomy of the parts in a building (fig. 2).
Rainaldi critiques the spatial plasticity of his
master, Francesco Borromini, proposing a
disarticulation of the building by interrupting
the undulating continuity of space, breaking
the artificial linearity of Brunelleschi’s
perspectival space focalized on the altar—a
clear reference to Palladio’s Il Redentore
(Church of the Most Holy Redeemer,
Venice), where spaces become sequentially
disarticulated.
Eisenman and Roman use Rainaldi’s
disarticulation to critique Wittkower’s reductive
reading for a closer appreciation of
architecture in tension with its own organizing
principles. This interpretation relates to
Eisenman’s reading of Terragni and Palladio’s
influence on Terragni’s work, specifically in
the Casa Giuliani Frigerio (Como), where on
one side the unifying relational openings of
the façades reveal the volume as a mass in
tension with the openings that separate each
of them on the other side, making the façades
independent planar elements. This results in a
non-cohesive building that seems to explode,
belying the stability of the structure.
Eisenman Against His Precedents:
A Second Parental Killing
This exhibition goes against a simple
misreading of Eisenman’s work, especially
his Formal Basis in Modern Architecture, a
PhD thesis based on transfigurations that
alter the stability of a formal principle.
Guido Zuliani’s essay “Evidence
of Things Unseen,” in Tracing Eisenman,
questions Rowe’s assumed legacy
in Eisenman by proving that his diagram
between Palladio’s La Malcontenta and Le
Corbusier’s Villa Stein was based on a
mathematical 1-2-1-2-1 spatial sequence,
as opposed to Wittkower’s diagram which
depicts Palladio’s spaces as an ABCBA,
in which the middle space is different from the
side spaces, implying an architecture differentiation.
With this reading, Eisenman broke
with an assumed legacy based on the work
of Rowe. If there is a different virtuality for each
villa, with this reading Eisenman obliterates
Wittkower, as claimed by Anthony Vidler in
his review of Eisenman’s exhibition.
The problems raised in this exhibition
are pertinent to contemporary discussions
that identify the limits of working relationally
and the possibility of a project that is open
to indetermination. Computer algorithms are
based on recurring, treelike bifurcating structures,
eliminating the possibility of a different
kind of thinking process other than the set of
predetermined ideas implicit in the system.
The question relative to parametric design is,
whether a different thinking process or spatial
organization is possible through a dissipation
of the given structure—as a structural
displacement that can engage a different
type of thinking process than that given by
these relational structures.
What is interesting in Eisenman’s
argument is the tension between a parameter
that measures differences and the
possibility that these differences can create
new parameters. If this reading is possible,
Palladio anticipated a project that is still
problematized today, between the structuralist
parametric possibilities of computation
and the resistance brought by poststructuralist
indetermination.
—Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa
Lorenzo-Eiroa is associate professor adjunct
at Cooper Union and design principal of New
York–based Eiroa Architects.
“Surrogate. He is a surrogate for me.” That
was Peter Eisenman’s way of cutting short
a question, in a 1980 Archetype interview,
about his work on Giuseppe Terragni “. . .
Since I cannot be my own critic, I can criticize
my own work acting as a critic agent only
using other architecture as a vehicle.”
But when he says this exhibition
“is not about Palladio, per se,” a pause is
necessary. “In and of itself” is the usual
rendering of per se, but per can mean either
by or through, and se can mean either itself,
himself, or themselves. While Eisenman
throughout his career has had, and still has,
recourse to references outside the discipline
of architecture, or outside his own architecture,
his going outside is always a technique
to return with a vengeance inside. To gain
greater agency within the canonical inside:
an inside agent. Who else has read Terragni’s
Casa Giuliani-Frigerio, in and of itself, as
exactingly Who else has tracked these
particular coordinates of this series of villas
with this kind of precision
That Eisenman limits his “intrinsic”
analysis to resist any aspects that he considers
“extrinsic”(historical context, tectonic
articulation, social, and cultural modalities)
should not limit anyone else interested in
developing much fuller explorations of these
works through testing these hypotheses
with additional forms of analysis. But any
student of Palladio, from the most beginner
to the most advanced would benefit from
patiently following in sequence Eisenman’s
concise captions regarding these twenty
buildings. Allotted space here does not allow
me to read his close-reading, its insights and
blind-spots, but particularly crucial is the way
Eisenman demonstrates—in relation to the
reductio ad absurdum of his ideal versions of
the villas in über-symmetry mode—how each
and every Palladio villa rather than a simple
aggregation of elemental parts is a complex
superposition of loggias, porticos, transition
spaces, and central spaces, which embed
into and emerge out from each other in an
astonishing array of recombinate iterations.
Certainly some future critic will track,
with the same phrases Eisenman uses for
Palladio, the development from his early
villas that enacted a crisis of synthesis
(House I, House II, House III, House VI) to
his later building complexes that extended,
dissipated, disaggregated, and re-aggregated
between landscape and building. But
for Palladio and Eisenman, inner agents
both who misread prior canons, analyses
of their relational taxonomies should not be
portrayed as teleological imperatives but as
transformational ranging across differential
states, where sometimes early themes get
recombinated into later work.
While it seems unaccountable to
recombine the mid-sixteenth century of
Palladio with the mid-seventeenth century of
Rainaldi, once again here Eisenman points
us to another period that needs reexamining.
For those interested in composite techniques
there are extraordinary modes to be investigated
in the range between disaggregation
and re-aggregation (the refusal to completely
fuse or completely unfuse) not only in all of
Rainaldi’s work, but in other architects of this
period such as Pietro da Cortana (not to be
missed are the composite tectonics of his
SS Luca e Martina and S. Maria della Pace)
and Martino Longhi the Younger. This would
also help us see certain related recombinative
modes in Palladio’s later work of Palazzo
Valmarana, the Loggia del Capitanio, the
Venetian churches.
Sarah Whiting has proposed that
it’s time to look at our disciplinary histories
again. Indeed with new critical and formal
tools it is time to reconsider all of our histories,
from anytime, anyplace, any mode,
but particularly those periods that used to
dominate historical studies. And while some
may find it ironic, it remains interesting that
the non-historian who has kept discussions
of these histories from the Renaissance
until today most alive in the field of design in
this moment—even and especially through
his own series of surrogates—is also one
of the most radical architects of the last
half-century.
—Mark Rakatansky
Rakatansky, principal of Mark Rakatansky
Studio, is an architect and adjunct professor
at Columbia’s GSAPP. He is author of, most
recently, Tectonic Acts of Desire and Doubt.