Eisenman's enigmas.

GIUSEPPE TERRAGNI: TRANSFORMATIONS, DECOMPOSITIONS, CRITIQUES

By Peter Eisenman. New York: Monacelli Press. 2003. [pounds sterling]40

The Casa del Fascio is certainly a tour de force, one of the great works of Modernism, fascinating because of its interplay of solid and void, of cage and frame, its three-dimensional interactions and spatial sequence. Peter Eisenman's PhD on this building at Cambridge in 1963 laid the foundation for his own architectural development and for the contribution he brought to the New York Five, but it was never published, and the Cambridge copy has almost faded away. Now rich and famous, he has been able to re-present it most lavishly, with clear line drawings to support every point, and the addition of an analysis of another Terragni building, the Casa Giuliani Frigerio. The reading of the formal and compositional issues behind these buildings, with endless discussions of bay rhythm, interactions of facades, articulation of planes, precise determination of window lines and variations on displacements and setbacks at first seems exhaustive, but it is myopic. The meanings given to the building by use are simply not discussed, despite their prominence in Terragni's own essay (included in the book), and all the difficult questions about what it means to make a house for Fascists are also ducked. The local context is as far as possible avoided, nearly all the photographs being scissor-trimmed to eliminate the background, leaving the building in stark purity. Questions of construction are never raised. Finally, although fascinating preliminary versions in Classical dress are illustrated and noted briefly, little attempt is made to follow their evolution towards the brilliant Modernist version, potentially the most interesting story of all. Instead, Eisenman is obsessed with a type of formal analysis which he implies is the essence of this architecture. At a certain mysterious point (p67, again p117) the building suddenly becomes a 'critical text', 'critical' because of its definitive use of the formal 'language' that Eisenman reveals, 'text' because of its 'notation' and the 'marks' on the facade (not graffiti, but windows and balconies). The text metaphor is Eisenman's main excuse for the claim that he has passed beyond function, form and aesthetics to the true language of architecture, shown in the genius of Terragni. I don't buy it.

The problems are first that his reading is not definitive, climinating the matters noted above, and sometimes becoming far-fetched even in its own terms--a concertina window in the back stair when open, for example, defines the edge of the perfect square on plan (but who could know?). Second, the text metaphor is stretched painfully far. The miracle of text (writing on paper--let's see where the metaphor starts) is that it can be written in any typeface or colour, at any size or on any surface, and the message comes across (problems of meaning notwithstanding). This is because of a whole series of conventions that we laboriously learn in childhood then employ so automatically that they appear transparent. Architecture has no such established system, and nor does it have a 'notation' in the sense of musical or dance notation (though it has conventions of drawing, but this is not Eisenman's usage). If its formal character looks language-like for Eisenman, it still does not work for the rest of us because the conventions are unclear, and there can be no such thing as a private language. This is not to say that architecture is meaningless, but that its meanings are complex and contingent, tied up with use and precedent and traditions of construction: they cannot be confined to a separate abstract formal realm. The point at which the Casa is supposed to make a quantum leap into being a 'text' seems quite arbitrary, for if it is to be read as a 'text', it is surely one from the start, even if it goes on being 'edited'.

In engaging with the other Terragni building, the Casa Giuliani Frigerio, Eisenman admits that the formal apparatus devised for the Casa del Fascio does not work. He assumes from the start that there is no relationship between inside and out, so he does not bother with the space planning of the flats. This lack of concordance makes the building a work of 'decomposition', and he goes to great lengths to show the ambiguities of reading in the various facades. In a candid moment, he also admits that his 'reading' failed when reapplied to works by Aalto, Corbusier and Wright. Thus the project of his thesis's title 'The formal Basis of Modern Architecture' fell short, but perhaps it has been fulfilled instead by the author supplying the necessary canonical works himself. Manfredo Tafuri, in an essay included in the book, makes the connection: 'In writing of Terragni, Eisenman redesigns him; the free present is a further theoretical manifesto sustaining his architecture without a homeland, liberated beyond space and time. Eisenman too is a master of the art of simulation. From the cold objectivity of his analyses he releases a paradoxical nostalgia, paradoxical because his object of affection is an art that banishes nostalgia from itself ... Like the stories of Poe, Eisenman's architectural works are serial by nature; they anagrammatize each other in describing their own construction to the exclusion of all else'.

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