Architectural Design - Essay Example

House II by Peter Eisenman Peter Eisenman's scheme for architectural design on theory is drawn from outside existing architectural dogma, most notably from philosophy and linguistics. Eisenman has been grouped with the proponents of a postmodernist sensibility and symptomatic of this literary movement, his designs and buildings have been considered as texts, and labelled as deconstructivist, although he himself shuns the label. The strategies of deconstruction destructuralism, or post structuralism, promote the decay or fragmentation of existing symbolism and structure in architecture but again by itself it does not promise no ultimate replacement, neither does Eisenman offer us a new absolute. His designs, are Based on a predilection towards a polemical flow of opposition, interaction, and redefinition. The grid was the organizing principle of Eisenman's earlier work, a series of rectilinear box-like houses in which he investigated and articulated a variety of theoretical ideas, including the notion of deep structure, a proposition that there is a universal, underlying ordering device that is the natural and logical generator of a design. His theories on architecture pursue the emancipation and autonomy of the discipline and his work represents a continued attempt to liberate form from all meaning, a struggle that is at times difficult to understand. Eisenman focuses on liberating architectural form. The House II is a single family house with a flat roof and a having a form of a cube. House II of 10 numbered houses, designed for the family of Princeton professor Richard Falk, was constructed between 1960-1970 in Hardwick, Connecticut as the second house in a series of structures conceived on the basis of a square plan. For this house, Eisenman began to investigate a set of abstract formal propositions as a possible condition of an underlying structure and their initial transformations into a specific environment. Using all rectangular elements, a series of lines, planes, and volumes converge to create a complex spatial arrangement, resulting into a design proposal that exemplifies high amount of rectangularity. The term 'cardboard architecture' in relation to House II Around 1968, Peter Eisenman limited himself to a set of abstract formal propositions as a possible condition of an underlying structure and their initial transformation into a specific environment for the design of House II. The formal propositions are the line, the plane, and the volume. Whilst Eisenman uses a compositional diagonal, all the construction elements are rectangular. The house displays evocative, ambiguous and strongly formal language. Furthermore, the primarily orthogonal and rectangular language of the houses, suggest a welcome degree of complexity achieved through simple means. The house shows a simple geometry that extrudes the square to form a cube or rectangular box. The geometry of the house is made up of its stark horizontals and verticals and large expanses of glass. Every addition to the house after this will be inside this cube or box so that the form will always be the exterior skin of the house, decomposed or not. With the addition of an equal number of planes vertically and horizontally the house splits into sections. With the further addition of interior walls, varying in size, but with a distinct pattern and with the crossing of those planes with perpendicular planes to form a grid. Add a square grid of structural columns. Decompose the existing grid work and columns to form rooms with the addition of the interior walls, floors, and roofs. Punch out forms from exterior walls to make windows and punch out similar forms from interior and exterior walls to make doorways. This describes the simple design process followed by the designer which imparts the building a simple geometry which is made up of planes and lines converging at different points to form different geometries which essentially resemble the functions of a cardboard; not structurally but visibly. The works of these series of houses are hence sometimes termed as the cardboard architecture. The ambiguity of the structure and its effect on the proposal Eisenman has developed increasingly complex formulations of structures in the house with and ambiguity created for the function of the structure which behaves in an uncommon manner. The structure is identifiable in the house but still remains unidentified regarding the role that the structural elements play. His work includes Inducing destabilization and rupture in the very structures so long associated with providing the structural stability to buildings and essentially for the load transfer. The columns and wall do not always perform the functions which they are thought to carry in the established works of architecture. The structure is coolly rational, but it is a rationality that is wholly self-referential, intentionally challenging human sensibilities of elegance, beauty, and comfort. Instead of basing the design on function, with form to follow, the House I and II explore specific structural principles, with functions to fit in as best they can, if they can. This introduction of functional distress in a most treasured sanctuary, the home, is typical of Eisenman's striving to produce dislocation and provoke uncertainty. We can see that the hidden structure of the House II displays the following traits. There is a clear and simple rule applied in composing the plan of this house - all elements are in a parallel or perpendicular relationship to any other element. Square grid composition is constant - subdivision of the grid is mutable. All elements are in some predetermined angular relationship (usually parallel or perpendicular) with other elements. The grid composition possesses a reflective symmetry along a diagonal axis from corner to corner of the grid. According to Eisenman, certain architectural elements had loaded meanings: they possessed inherent meaning that was easily recognizable. Two of these elements were the column and the wall. There is an attempt to remove the pragmatic concerns from the wall and the column and express their nature through the preconceptions of Cartesian space. Beginning with an arrangement of sixteen columns on a square grid, Eisenman shifts this initial matrix diagonally. This "shadow" (which replaces the columns with walls) creates interstitial or implied space. Through a series of calculated and disciplined moves, these spaces suggest inherent possibilities that the Cartesian system possesses yet are only revealed when the actual environment is altered. This is the difference between what Eisenman terms deep structure and a prior condition. Deep structure possesses the potential to reveal these spatial experiences but requires a physical alteration to make them manifest. This manifestation is a prior condition in which the act of shifting creates these readable spaces but the initial platonic form is no longer a singular unit, but a fragment of its original whole. The barren nature of the immediate site context and its effect on House II The house in located with an adjacent barn and 110 acres of rolling meadows and woodlands, with no reference to it by any manner. It is conceived as autonomous and self-referential, independent of the context of the surrounding, human context or function, as functions of mathematical universality and for the same purpose it stands in the barren surroundings without any references made to the surroundings, to the extent it does not even show any design response to the climatic conditions of the region. The flat roof of the house is a non practical design decision keeping in mind the heavy snow fall in the region. The architectural ideas of the architect attempt to create contextually disconnected architecture. Summing up The proposal for House II is a purely theoretical, autonomous and self-referential architectural investigation that seeks no other meaning than those found in its own matrix. The complexity is the result of a set of formal rules that are given highest priority for the design process. Despite its reductionist choice of geometrically simple construction elements, House II is a spatially complex building which set a strong example toward freeing architecture from the then established doctrine of 'Form follows function'. Eisenman's early concerns centred on late modernist understandings of form, structure, autonomy, self sufficiency, and strict self referentiality. He prescribed for himself an autonomous architecture which was to be accomplished through the greatest possible reduction of the system of ambiguities that he had arranged through a distilled network of formal relations. His main concern in this regard was with not allowing his 'architectural signs' to stand alone, ensuring a controlled one way decodification of these signs and preventing secondary languages from penetrating the text and charging it with 'irrelevant meanings'. As Eisenman described the process and the importance of this general project: 'to distinguish architecture from building requires an intentional act- a sign which suggests that a wall is doing something more than literally sheltering, supporting, enclosing; it must embody a significance which projects and sustains the idea of 'wallness' beyond mere use, function, or extrinsic allusion. Thus its paradoxical nature; the sign must overcome use and extrinsic significance to be admitted as architecture; but on the other hand, without use, function, and the existence of extrinsic meaning there would be no conditions which would require such an intentional act of overcoming. Read More