Schwarz
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eisenman on terragni
AR interview
"First, let me go back to something Rosalind Krauss [art critic and theorist] said. She said that the animating device in the 1970s was the photograph—the photograph was a record of an event. In this sense it was an index, which was an attempt to modify the iconic value of the object. What is the problem with an icon? The object-as-icon is based on the metaphysics of presence [a belief in a unifying force behind truth and knowledge], as opposed to pure presence.
So, my own work in architecture attempts to produce a series of photographic plates or indices in the sense that Krauss was talking about: I have taken existing maps and superposed them to reduce their iconic, historical, and pictorial value. But the Santiago project is slightly different: It is no longer merely an index of these superpositions. For example, in Santiago, my idea was to superpose a Cartesian grid onto the existing, organic, medieval “grid,” and warp or deform them with a topological grid that projects upward. This produces lines of force that were never a part of projective geometry. They mutate in the third dimension. This has a powerful impact on the ground surface. It is a way of dealing with the ground not as a single datum, not as a foundation, not as something stable. It disrupts its iconic value, turning it into an index."