The Eisenman Principle

David Dudley in Cornell Alumni Magazine:

EisenmanIf you’re looking for architectural anxiety, Eisenman is your man. Since his arrival on the stage in the 1960s as one of a league of loosely affiliated American followers of Le Corbusier known as the “New York Five” (the others were Meier, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, and John Hedjuk), Eisenman has been all but synonymous with a heady theory-driven audacity that tends to leave both admirers and critics baffled. He designed a deviously unlivable house based on the linguistic principles of Noam Chomsky, collaborated with Jacques Derrida in an effort to find an architectural equivalent to the French philosopher’s theory of deconstruction, and generally pushed the practical envelope of what the discipline was capable of. “Peter had a lot to do with turning architecture into an intellectual pursuit,” says his friend Phyllis Bronfman Lambert ’48, founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. “His influence was enormous. If he hadn’t come along, I don’t know where we’d be.”

More here.  And here is something I had posted some time ago by Richard Rorty on Eisenman.