Peter Eisenman

A fresh, groundbreaking analysis of renowned Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti s five built works, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning. Much has been written about Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti s mantra of part-to-whole as one of the continuing conditions of architecture. While this underlying thesis has oft been repeated in the annals of architectural history and theory, architects have rarely questioned the idea. In Rewriting Alberti, architect Peter Eisenman suggests, however, that Alberti provoked a radical discourse beyond the part-to-whole dialogue featured in his Ten Books. Eisenman s in-depth analysis of Alberti s five built works reveals a disjunction between the architect s buildings and theoretical writings, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning based on the fragmentation of homogeneous space. Rewriting Alberti includes contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Mario Carpo, and Daniel Sherer. Carpo, an architectural historian and critic, theorizes that Alberti s work initiated an idea of the discipline as a notational system akin to contemporary computational logics. By way of comparison, Sherer, an architectural historian, reconsiders critic Manfredo Tafuri s readings of Alberti, and architect and theorist Aureli draws on Alberti to propose another idea of the architectural project. Here, in one book are four different discourses (and more than 60 drawings) which look back at the origins of architectural signs and semiology and forward to understand the way that history informs architecture today.

As climate, culture, and technology evolve and become increasingly unpredictable, architecture’s stasis becomes more incongruous. Werewolf explores an emerging but under-investigated branch of architecture that embraces the transformation of form, performance, and the responsiveness to environments and context. These ideas are studied through architectural precedents and framed by critical essays by Jesse Reiser, Greg Lynn, Jimenez Lai, Spyros Papapetros, Kari Weil, as well as the editors. The shift from passive buildings to reactive structures is now imperative, as climate change and political turmoil exacerbate the unpredictability of environments. Werewolf expands on the architect’s agency to critically address political, social, and environmental unrest. Revealing the cunning and agile ways in which architecture can negotiate rather than resist change, this book departs from the fixed Vitruvian man and uses the figure of the werewolf to propose a model where changes of state, mutation, and decomposition are conceptually fundamental.

A provocative case for historical ambiguity in architecture by one of the field's leading theoristsConceptions of modernity in architecture are often expressed in the idea of the zeitgeist, or "spirit of the age," an attitude toward architectural form that is embedded in a belief in progressive time. Lateness explores how architecture can work against these linear currents in startling and compelling ways. In this incisive book, internationally renowned architect Peter Eisenman, with Elisa Iturbe, proposes a different perspective on form and time in architecture, one that circumvents the temporal constraints on style that require it to be "of the times"—lateness. He focuses on three twentieth-century architects who exhibited the qualities of lateness in their designs: Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk. Drawing on the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and his study of Beethoven's final works, Eisenman shows how the architecture of these canonical figures was temporally out of sync with conventions and expectations, and how lateness can serve as a form of release from the restraints of the moment. Bringing together architecture, music, and philosophy, and drawing on illuminating examples from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, Lateness demonstrates how today's architecture can use the concept of lateness to break free of stylistic limitations, expand architecture's critical capacity, and provide a new mode of analysis.

Peter Eisenman-world-famous for his Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005)-confronts historicism with theory and the analysis of form, whose distinguishing features he regards as the foundation of architectural composition. The architect illustrates his observations with numerous, extremely precise hand drawings. Eisenman wrote The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture, his dissertation, in 1963 at the University of Cambridge. The dissertation was first published as a facsimile edition by Lars Muller Publishers in 2006. The original content of the publication is now available again-the book is reprinted in a smaller format. "I knew what I wanted to write," Eisenman says of the dissertation. "An analytic work that related what I had learned to see, from Palladio to Terragni, from Raphael to Guido Reni, into some theoretical construct that would bear on modern architecture, but from the point of view of a certain autonomy of form." Hence the title of his research.

Crown Hall Dean's Dialogues: 2012-2017 collects incisive, intimate thoughts from leading contemporary architects in dialogue with students from the Illinois Institute of Technology, College of Architecture. This title collects the voices of 18 esteemed architects, designers, educators and theorists in dialogue with students from the Illinois Institute of Technology, College of Architecture. Voices ranging from Phyllis Lambert to David Adjaye to Rafael Vinoly expound and express their thoughts freely, digging deeply into essential themes that drive their work, study and process. This title provides intimate insight directly from leading architectural and design practitioners, who in the process of being interviewed, further the academic discourse conducted at IIT College of Architecture. Features interviews with leading architects and luminaries including Kazuyo Sejima, William Baker, Wiel Arets, Junya Ishigami, Stefano Boeri, Peter Eisenman, Rafael Vinoly, Ben van Berkel, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Phyllis Lambert, Riken Yamamoto, Herman Hertzberger, Armand Mevis, David Adjaye, Erwin Olaf, Dominique Perrault, Stan Allen, and Bernard Khoury. Published by Actar Publishers & IITAC

Beginning in 2003, Mark Wigley and Peter Eisenman sat down each summer with an audience of students to debate issues pertinent to contemporary architecture practice and education. This publication compiles all ten years of the debates and presents them a single edited volume. The discussions were wide-ranging, tackling issues from pedagogy to image production and from architectural style to architecture's place within culture. The cast of characters they invoked was equally expansive--Manfredo Tafuri and Colin Rowe, of course, and a host of historical and contemporary architects (alongside cultural figures like Thomas Pynchon and Steven Colbert). Although often trenchant in their points of disagreement, these debates are marked by a sense of levity and mutual respect as Eisenman and Wigley explore deeply held theoretical concerns and a series of questions about the future of the architectural discipline.

Architecture and Psychoanalysis is an analysis of the relation between psychoanalytic theory and compositional strategies in architecture. In psychoanalysis it focuses on the writing of Jacques Lacan as well as theories of the structure of the psyche, linguistics, and perception. In architecture it focuses on the writings and projects of Peter Eisenman. There are extended discussions on the thought of figures such as Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Jacques Derrida, and of the architecture of figures such as Leon Battista Alberti, Francesco Borromini, Giuseppe Terragni, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.