Book Review

Ijlal Muzaffar
Eisenman Inside Out:
Selected Writings, 1963–1988
By Peter Eisenman
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004

Given more than twenty five years of writing and built work,
arguing to undermine the sovereignty of the author function
and intention in architecture, Peter Eisenman’s latest collection
of his past essays, Eisenman: Inside-Out, is a curious attempt
at preservation of precisely these two characteristics: his
authorship and his intentions. But perhaps more peculiar is
Eisenman’s declaration that this theoretical work, produced
mostly during the first twenty years of his career as an aca-
demic, is a “probing into the heart of architecture by an archi-
tect, not a historian or an academic theoretician, in an attempt
to explain its interior discourse, its inside, as something other
than a study of essences or dialectic strategies.”1 The book is
a reclamation of this inside-out space of the architect, against
two accusations of the historian and the academic theoreti-
Cover of Eisenman Inside Out: Selected cian: “Many critics complain that my work reflects two cultural
Writings, by Peter Eisenman.
problems,” Eisenman declares in the opening sentence, “one,
an unregenerate internalized formalism; and two, the prolifer-
ation of models from outside of architecture.”2 For Eisenman,
then, the collection of essays is a correction of a certain
myopia of architectural discourse about its own interiority, its
normative conditions, assumptions it holds as natural, expos-
ing “its manifold conditions…in a way that has rarely been for-
mulated by either architect or critic…[saving it from being]
smothered in the claustrophobic rhetoric of a so-called natural
or classical language of architecture.”3 This statement begs the
question, why is Eisenman’s approach so uniquely critical?
The answer appears to be hidden in one of three footnotes to
the introduction. Defending his turf against the contemporary
competition from Rem Koolhass and Frank Gehry, Eisenman
declares that Koolhaas’ writing, which deals with the relation-
ship of culture to architecture, depicts “a belief that architec-
ture can manifest the myriad social, economic, and political
problematic at any given time.”4 Gehry, on the other hand,
Eisenman argues, does not have an explicit body of written
theory. Instead, Gehry’s work argues, through the force of per-
sonal expression, “that architecture can manifest the aesthetic
sensibility of a culture at any particular point in its history.”5 In
contrast Eisenman’s work is the “revealing of deep belief and
ideology to show the structure of architecture as cultural com-
Future Anterior
Volume 1, Number 2 mentary or aesthetic sensibility at work [emphasis added].”6
Fall 2004 This claim to exposing a meta-discourse, which deals not with
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the politics of architecture but the very possibility of architec-
ture’s politics, is tied to a project of identifying a history of
“unconscious repressions” in architecture. This is the story of
architecture’s interiority, or perhaps to put it more accurately,
“Architecture’s Interiority”, which holds the key to all possibili-
ties of meaning and its expressions in form, be it classical
notions of transcendental principles, Renaissance rules of rep-
resentation and historical precedence, or modernist revisions
of these relationships. Unraveling from Vitruvius to Alberti to
modernism to the digital age, this trans-historical interiority
forces us to define architecture in such terms as historical
precedence, the normative condition of the present, the corre-
spondence between form and function, human experience,
and expression of culture and politics. For architecture to gain
a critical autonomy, it must expose the normative condition of
this interiority. Only then can it open up possibilities for
untheorized futures, and necessary revisions of the past that
reflect new relationships of form and meaning.
Eisenman’s claim brings us to another question: how is
this meta-interiority identified? This time the answer comes
from a short piece Eisenman wrote as an afterword to the
client’s commentary on his famous House IV.7 Here Eisenman
defines the project’s criticality as resistance to the discourse
of preservation. Monuments, Eisenman argues, represent a
certain “nostalgia for the status quo.” Restoration of the
building to its “original state” is worse. “While the monument
attempts a preservation of the present into the future, restora-
tion attempts to return the present to the past.”8 Both the
construction and the preservation of monuments are based on
a “static” conception of architecture. In contrast, the House IV
is an example of a “dynamic” notion of architecture. It denies
any reference to a historical origin. Even the preservation
efforts have only changed the “nature” of the house to new
states. This notion of criticality, as an escape from the desire
for an origin, assumes the presence of an escapable origin, as
well as knowing what constitutes references to that origin.
Criticality defined in this way attributes, to use Eisenman’s
own term, an “essence” to the very notion of the origin that it
seeks to displace. This presumed certainty of identifying the
“enemy,” is reflected in the current book as well.
“Certainly,” Eisenman claims “there are enough references
to what architecture is, or concerns itself to be, and to what it
could or should be, to lead one to the possibility that architec-
ture too has such an interior discursive formulation [emphasis
added].”9 Eisenman’s framing becomes problematic in the
shadow of the presumed certainty of uncovering a meta-interi-
ority, forgetting the lesson learnt from dealing with particular
historical problems in the book, that is, that the inquiry itself
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cannot not shape the object it seeks to uncover. A subversive
work is critical not because it escapes the past, but because it
shows that we cannot not want to return to the past. The
question of criticality lies not in escaping preservation, but in
the manner of preservation itself. All preservations, to put a
twist on a much used pun, are not preserved equally.
It should be the primary lesson of deconstruction that the
difference between the inside and the outside of any dis-
course is never annulled, and must not be annulled. In our
desire to undermine the primacy of the signified, we should
not end up privileging the signifier. In seeking out the interior-
ity of architecture, we should not end up privileging inquiry as
a means to an origin, thereby only reproducing the interiority
in another direction. Deconstruction must take into account
the lack of sovereignty of the critic herself. The desire for an
exposed interiority must never be fulfilled. The difference
between the inside and the outside in which the project takes
hold must also decompose.
Eisenman’s consequent use of semiotic and structural the-
ory and Derridian deconstruction in his writing over the years
have certainly introduced new stakes into the debate around
the evolving relationship of form and meaning in a particular
tradition of western classical architecture, and to that end his
contributions are invaluable. Yet to claim that this debate
determines all possible histories of architecture would be a
disservice to his own arguments. Eisenman’s claim to a meta-
interiority leaves no room for those “academics and critics” for
whom Rem Koolhaas’ framing of the relationship between
architecture and culture does not meet the bill of current glob-
al politics, except as particular instances of that interiority.
This rules out the gains made through cultural, feminist, and
Marxist theory in architectural history as mere instantiations of
some meta-interiority of architecture.
The collection of essays can be divided, according to
Eisenman himself, into two parts, representing two phases in
his intellectual career. Even though the two approaches blend
into each other through a uniform transition, the two attitudes
toward history can be differentiated at the poles. The essays
from the early 1960s, perhaps almost to the mid 1970s, char-
acterize Eisenman’s attempts, as he himself acknowledges, to
fashion an “ur-formalism,” a certain autonomous discourse
that, using “linguistic analogies,” returns meaning, figuration,
and representation to architecture without reference to norma-
tive standards of rules and styles. This, Eisenman had
thought, would displace architecture’s interiority from a classi-
cal language paradigm to a linguistic one. This framework was
later abandoned because of the realization that the
linguistic/semiotic paradigm was also predicated on “stable
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conceptions of structural relationships,” similar to the classical
ones that it sought to displace. In these essays, linguistics
was seen as an outside that could open up the unconscious
repressions of the classical and modern paradigm. In this
regard Eisenman accepts Derrida’s later caution—issued in the
controversial exchange between the architect and the philoso-
pher in the mid 1980s—that the correspondence between
architectural and linguistic metaphors cannot be guaranteed.
In “Toward an Understanding of Form in Architecture” (1963),
Eisenman challenges what he considers the two sides of the
then-contemporary debate on the question of historical prece-
dence in architecture: the “English Revisionist Functionalism”
stressing the insignificance of form (spanning the arguments
of Reyner Banham, Cedric Price, and Archigram), and John
Summerson’s classicist proposition that all form is based on
primary solids. Compounding a structuralist tilt with an incli-
nation toward Gestalt psychology, Eisenman contends that a
we can identify a third way, a certain critical language of form
that can provide a shared criteria for design and criticism by
uncovering the author’s original intentions. Eisenman identi-
fies a meta-language of intention, function, structure, tech-
nique, and form to show how these categories can combine
building and surrounding environment towards a clarity of
expression.
This desire towards a meta-language of form continues in
“Notes on Conceptual Architecture” (1971). Here Eisenman
attempts to delineate a conceptual language of architecture in
response to developments in conceptual art, one that can
invoke a kind of nihilism about the efficacy of a designed
object and bring out the object as a “thing in itself.” The proj-
ect of an abstract language of architecture becomes more pro-
nounced in the essay, “Cardboard Architecture” (1972), on the
architects’ famous House I and House II projects, arguing for
the possibility of form as a pure marking or a notational sys-
tem. This possibility is further explored in the work of Alison
and Peter Smithsons and James Sterling in “From Golden Lane
to Robin Hood Gardens” (1973).
Toward the end of the 1970s the project of pure abstrac-
tion began to give way to a more nuanced approach of
employing existing elements of a discourse and complicating
them to expose their construction. The essay, “Post-
Functionalism” (1976), focuses on the “neo-functionalist”
claim of a natural correlation between form and function.
Drawing on Foucault’s notion of the episteme, Eisenman
would describe the functionalist argument as a humanist nos-
talgia out of sync with its historical moment. Renaissance
humanism had sought to correlate formal arrangement with a
moral imperative, by placing man as the originating agent of
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history. Modernism displaced the notion of the authoritarian
subject as well as the conception of a linear and continuous
history. Functionalism’s insistence on the correlations between
form and function therefore results in a mere positivism with-
out its attending moral imperative. Modernism and functional-
ism are incongruent. Functionalist correlation between form
and function must be perceived as a dialectal relationship
between evolution of form itself, a development within mod-
ernism that represent its non-corroborating and non-sequen-
tial tendencies. Though this development can have humanist
tendencies—be it seeing architectural form as recognizable
transformation from platonic solids or as a collage or frag-
ments of signs pointing to a transcendental signified—both
the tendencies define the inherent nature of the object and its
capacity to be represented. This, Eisenman, argues, is an
exclusively modernist conception.
This deconstructivist approach leads to the idea of an
architectural “text,” itself a Derridian theme. Eisenman would
perhaps most succinctly describe this idea in an essay on
Mies’ work, “miMISes READING” (1986). A “text,” Eisenman
argues, can be distinguished from an object. Even though an
object (architectural or written) may be a text, a text differenti-
ates itself from an object by being an “approximation or simu-
lation” of another object, “reveal[ing] or stimulat[ing]” its
structure.10 Mies’ work constitutes an architectural text. Mies
contaminates the modern with classical references but dispels
any anthropomorphic references, displacing the whole human-
ist symbolic discourse based on a certain relationship
between man and object. This re-inscription of the classical in
a non-classical manner creates a certain simulation of signs,
frustrating the expectancy of the classical system as it is
“betrayed by an order which itself is broken apart.”11
The later essays, Eisenman claims, explore strategies that
avoid a reductive analogy to language or the normative rule
based paradigm of the classical lexicon of architecture. The
assumption that architecture’s interiority is either historically
or semiotically determined is abandoned in these essays.
Derrida argued in “Of Grammatology” (1974), that there can be
no preferred relationship between the signifier and signified in
language, challenging Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of tran-
scendental signifier in the spoken language. One of the strate-
gies explored in the later essays stems from Eisenman’s claim
that the Derridian insight has important implications for archi-
tecture. Architecture embodies a particular relationship
between the sign and its reality. Unlike language, the sign and
the signified are always in the same present in architecture.
Eisenman’s favorite, and often repeated, example of this archi-
tectural simultaneity is the column. A column is both its reality
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(being a column and performing a function of holding some-
thing up) and a sign of that reality (a sign of something hold-
ing something else up), in the same present. Even if the col-
umn is just a sign, not performing a load-bearing function, it
still appears doubly present in our normative assumptions. For
Eisenman, this quality is unique to architecture. Because of
the simultaneity of sign and reality, architectural sign “is
always already embodied with meaning as an object different-
ly from other manmade objects.”12 For Eisenman, the realiza-
tion of this simultaneity differentiated Alberti’s interpretation
of Vitruvius’ classical lexicon, from Vitruvius’ own conceptual-
ization. For Alberti, architecture not only had to fulfill the
requirement of standing up (what Vitruvius called the quality
of firmness), but also had to look like it is standing up.
Architecture needed not only to be a reality but also to be the
sign of that reality. This quality of architecture becomes
Eisenman’s primary preoccupation in the later essays. The pri-
mary question for architecture, according to Eisenman, was
how to displace its historical anteriority and its traditional
modes of representation lodged in the necessity of meaning,
function and aesthetics, to claim a certain critical autonomy,
or singularity.
As the essays show, Eisenman is well aware of the aster-
isks to any deconstructive strategy we mentioned earlier when
he is complicating the status of meaning, sign, and subjectivi-
ty in architecture at particular geo-political moments in histo-
ry. As an index of these moments, the book is an excellent
resource on the history of architectural theory. Those cautions
only become hazy when these inquiries are presented as a his-
torical project about the historicity of architecture itself,
uncovering a meta-interiority that determines the possibilities
of all other inquiries in architectural history.
It has been said that deconstruction is not the exposure
of error, certainly not other people’s error. It is a persistent cri-
tique of necessary truths—of what one cannot not want. To
neglect one’s irrevocable complicity with the object of one’s
critique is to wield the violence of deconstruction itself. As an
anecdotal aside to his lecture at MIT in 2002, where this read-
er happened to be, Eisenman quipped that one just needs to
read the first hundred pages of Derrida’s “Of Grammatology”
to know all he had to say about deconstruction. This Derridian
caution about the violence of deconstruction itself happens to
be most pronouncedly expressed in the second section of “Of
Grammatology”, which begins on page 101.

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Author biography
Ijlal Muzaffar is a PhD Candidate in History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and
Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.

Endnotes
1
Peter Eisenman, Eisenman Inside Out: Selected Writings, 1963–1988 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2004), ii.
2
Ibid., ii
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid., xv
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
Peter Eisenman, “Afterword,” in Peter Eisenman’s House VI: The Client’s Response,
Suzanne Frank (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1994), 109–110.
8
Ibid., 109
9
Eisenman, iii)
10
Ibid., 190
11
Ibid., 200
12
Ibid., xiv

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