A Little Fascist Architecture Goes a Long Way
October 12, 2003
By HUGO LINDGREN
If, as some say, writing a book is like having a baby, then
the architect Peter Eisenman might just feel as if he has
been pregnant for 40 years. Now 71, he first contemplated
writing about the Italian architect Giuseppe Terragni when
he was just a graduate student. Decades passed when the
project was all but ignored - but through all those years,
a book was quietly gestating. This month, it entered the
world, bearing the name "Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations
Decompositions Critiques."
Many architects of Mr. Eisenman's stature amuse themselves
with profitable side projects like designing discount
kitchenware or overseeing coffee-table showcases for their
own work. But there is nothing amusing about this project,
nor is it likely to be profitable. At 304 heavily diagramed
pages, it is an obsessive work about an obscure Rationalist
architect, written in unforgivingly dense prose. Even its
author describes it as "exhausting reading, like root
canal."
With a linebacker's chin and cropped white hair, Mr.
Eisenman today finds himself as busy as he's ever been. His
studio in Manhattan's West 20's is brimming with cardboard
models of a football stadium he's building in Phoenix and a
vast "city of culture" complex that's planned for Spain.
Having waited until he was 50 to land his first major
commission - and accrued considerable debt along the way -
he's delighted to have so many buildings under way. But he
says that this book, in all its imposing inaccessibility,
is perhaps his most important professional accomplishment.
"I truly believe that the great heroes that create the
history of architecture are people who take risks," Mr.
Eisenman said, "and write to tell about it."
Mr. Eisenman saw the work of Giuseppe Terragni for the
first time while pursuing a doctorate at Cambridge,
England, in the early 1960's. He was, by his own
description, "a simple kid from New Jersey, a savage."
"I had been trained in America, where the architecture was
primitive," he said. "I knew nothing."
What he lacked in expertise he made up for in confidence
and charm, however, and in his first year at Cambridge, he
was given a master's course to teach. After he somehow
pulled it off, a professor gave him an encyclopedia of
modern architecture as a gift. It included two buildings,
the Casa del Fascio (1936) and the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio
(1943), that Terragni built in Como, in northern Italy. The
latter, in particular, struck him like divine inspiration.
"It was just this beautiful, pristine white cube that had a
certain aura," Mr. Eisenman recalled. "It wasn't Cubist, it
wasn't modern. It was between classical and something
else." He included an analysis of it in his Ph.D.
dissertation.
The fact that the Casa del Fascio was, as the name
suggests, built for Mussolini's Fascist government did not
deter Mr. Eisenman. "You can never say that anything is
apolitical, but this work deserved to be situated outside
the historical context," he said. "I should add that I see
Mussolini as separate from Hitler, although certainly
things did sour in Italy."
Terragni's life had cinematic sweep. He was born in 1904
into a prominent family in Como; his brother was the
Fascist mayor, and his chief architectural patron was one
of Mussolini's mistresses. But as Terragni was just getting
started in his career, World War II intervened; he was sent
off to the Russian front, where the Italians collapsed near
Stalingrad. In the chaotic retreat that ensued, Terragni
produced drawings of the suffering he witnessed, and then
went mad. He spent his last days roaming the streets of
Como, before dying at 39.
Mr. Eisenman uncovered all of this in the course of his
early research, which included rummaging around in the
attic of Terragni's old studio. None of it, however, found
its way into the book. Instead of simply popularizing the
work of an overlooked innovator, Mr. Eisenman decided that
he would use Terragni's work as a way of organizing his own
thinking about architecture.
Real life conspired against that heady goal, however. Mr.
Eisenman returned to the United States in 1963 and took a
series of teaching jobs. He got married, had children, got
divorced. He started a research institute in New York, ran
it for years, then shut it. He organized museum shows and
wrote many articles, a number of them in the deeply
theoretical "root canal" mode. He became a master, he said,
of "starting everything and finishing nothing." He worked
on the Terragni book fitfully, employing small armies to
help him with the drawings, including a young architect
named Daniel Libeskind. In the late 1970's, he commissioned
the Italian theorist Manfredo Tafuri to write an
introduction. Publication seemed close.
But Mr. Eisenman was easily distracted - so much so that
his early clients grew frustrated by his scattershot
attention, and opportunities to build often slipped out of
his grasp. After establishing himself as one of the world's
pre-eminent "paper architects" - a designer whose work
exists only in words and images - he finally got a string
of sizable commissions, including the heralded Wexner
Center in Columbus, Ohio, which was completed in 1989.
Based on the controversial theory that art should be
"challenged" by its environment rather than displayed
neutrally, the museum secured for Mr. Eisenman a place
among the most highly regarded American architects.
Through this project he also met his second wife, the
journalist Cynthia Davidson. She - and the serious time he
spent on his psychoanalyst's couch - helped Mr. Eisenman
work his way back to Terragni. Mr. Eisenman was becoming
preoccupied with his standing in architectural history.
What imprint would he leave on the culture when he was
gone? He came to the conclusion that mere architecture was
not enough. "You know, our Arizona stadium will be torn
down in 30 years because it will be useless," he said. "All
the great stadiums get torn down."
Books, he decided, could deliver a more powerful and
lasting impact. Even if their print run is tiny, even if
their terminology is comprehensible only to a rarefied
minority, they communicate ideas more clearly and widely
than any single building can. So he returned to his
manuscript and took it to Monacelli Press. Mr. Eisenman,
who describes himself as "a bad writer, completely tone
deaf," persuaded the book's editor, Andrea Monfried, to go
to his office to help him. As she sat there, he read aloud
the manuscript in its entirety. Twice. "That's how I
corrected myself," Mr. Eisenman said. "Certain things I
wrote were impossible to say, and that's how I discovered
they were gibberish."
According to Ms. Monfried, the process was unorthodox but
effective. "Peter needs an audience," she said. "That's the
way he thrives."
The book is divided into three sections. One is about the
Fascio; another is about the Giuliani-Frigerio. The third
collects three essays: an account of the building of the
Casa del Fascio, by Terragni himself; the essay by Tafuri
(who praised Mr. Eisenman for having the "courage to be an
aristocrat" but who was so angry about the book's delays
that at the time of his death, in 1994, the two were not
speaking); and a final entry from Mr. Eisenman.
The casual reader will find it all a pretty hard slog. Mr.
Eisenman's analysis is relentless and methodical, working
deliberately through the details of each building and
slinging terms like "datum planes," "isostatic lines" and
"oblique readings." The book compresses, he said, three
different phases of his own intellectual development, from
formalism to structuralism and on to poststructuralism.
"It's like a Godard movie," he said, "a series of
jump-cuts."
Whatever it is, having brought it forth, Mr. Eisenman has
no desire to serve as its watchful guardian. He will not be
going on any author tours and will not be promoting it on
the lecture circuit. One exception was an appearance last
month at the Urban Center in Midtown Manhattan, during
which he gave a brief, impassioned presentation, asserting
the cultural significance of books over architecture. It
was an unusual message for a room packed with architecture
students, but it seemed to connect. Of the 120 or so people
there, 57 lined up afterward to purchase their piece of
history, which has a cover price of $60. Responding to the
suggestion that a book tour could more than pay for itself,
Mr. Eisenman shook his head solemnly. "I don't care if
anybody buys it," he said. "I care that I was able to
finish it, and now I have."
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