Architect, Turkey
Sedad Hakkí Eldem was the leading proponent of a regionalist and tradition-conscious
modernism in 20th-century Turkish architecture. Born in Istanbul as the descendent of an
elite Ottoman family, Eldem spent his childhood in Geneva, Zurich, and Munich, where
his father served as an Ottoman diplomat. He studied architecture in the Imperial School
of Fine Arts in Istanbul (1924–28; the school was established in 1882 by his great-uncle
Osman Hamdi Bey), which was based on the École des Beaux-Arts. After graduation, he
spent two formative years in Europe (1928–30), visiting the offices of Le Corbusier and
August Perret in Paris and working with Hans Poelzig in Berlin. His beautifully rendered
sketches, titled “Anatolian Houses,” dating from this period also reflect his fascination
with Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie houses, which were inspirational for his own vision of
the modern Turkish house. In 1931, he returned to Istanbul to start his own practice and
joined the faculty at the Academy, where he taught continuously for 48 years.
Eldem’s architectural training at the Academy coincided with the end of the Ottoman
revivalist (or national style) in Turkey. By 1930, that style was replaced by the
International Style-influenced German and Austrian modernism of Ankara, the symbol of
the new Kemalist Republic. Critical of the academicism of the former and the formal
sterility of the latter, Eldem posited the traditional Turkish residential vernacular as the
only viable source of a modern and national architecture. He devoted a lifetime to the
theorization, codification, and promotion of the “Turkish house” as a distinct cultural and
plastic type spread throughout the vast territories of the Ottoman Empire, especially in
Istanbul, the Balkans, and northern Anatolia. In 1934, he established the National
Architecture Seminar at the Academy to study and document hundreds of such traditional
houses, which, he argued, already embodied modernist qualities in the rationality of their
floor plans and the constructional logic of the timber frame clearly manifest in their
facades. Although much of this material perished in the Academy fire of 1948, it
constitutes the core of his Türk Evi Plan Tipler i (1954; Plan Types of Turkish Houses) and his monumental Türk E v i
(1984; Turkish House), conceived in five volumes. In addition to these seminal works,
Eldem published numerous monographs on individual pavilions, kiosks, and houses of
Istanbul as well as a two-volume documentary of the city’s engravings and old
photographs.
Eldem’s early built works were largely private houses in Istanbul based on traditional
Turkish plans and displaying the characteristic tile roofs, wide overhanging eaves, and
modular repetition of projecting windows above the ground floor. These features became
his distinct personal style, which he elaborated in numerous private villas for wealthy
clients, mostly along the banks of the Bosphorous, well into the 1980s. In most examples,
the modular grid that acted as the generator of the plan, and the facade versus the in-fill
panels within the grid were distinctly articulated in different materials and colors. His
masterpiece, the paradigmatic Taslík Coffee House in Istanbul (1950; demolished in 1988
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 750
and rebuilt on an adjacent site), is a reinforced concrete replica of a 17th-century shore
mansion on the Bosphorous.
The larger and more monumental public buildings of Eldem’s early career were also
informed by his quest for a rationalist conception of modern Turkish architecture.
Working in partnership with Emin Onat and in close association with Paul Bonatz, Eldem
became the leading proponent of what was termed “National Architecture Movement” in
the 1940s, epitomized by the Faculties of Sciences and Letters of the University of
Istanbul (1942–44). This building is organized around a series of open courtyards and
displays the classicizing tendencies of the period in its use of monumental tall colonnades
and stone facing. The main facade is an elongated version of Eldem’s Turkish house idea,
blown up in scale and lifted above a monumental colonnade on the ground level with
clear allusions to Paul Bonatz’s Stuttgart Railway Station (1912–28). In the courtyards,
Eldem adopted the Ottoman walling technique of alternating brick and stone layers, also
used by Bruno Taut in the Faculty of Humanities Building in Ankara (1937–38).
The most acclaimed scheme of Eldem’s long career, however, was the Social Security
Administration Complex in Zeyrek, Istanbul (1962–64), which won an Aga Khan Award
in 1986. The program is skillfully scaled down and fragmented into smaller blocks, and
the scheme conforms to the topography of the triangular site sloping toward the old
neighborhoods of Zeyrek, with its narrow streets and wooden houses. In its sensitivity to
the scale and architectural character of one of the few remaining traditional
neighborhoods in Istanbul, the design marks the shift in Eldem’s attitude from the more
monumental nationalist classicism of the 1940s to a more contextualized modernism of
the 1960s.
Peter Eisenman
Architect and theorist, United States
As an architect, writer, educator, and theorist, Peter Eisenman has consistently striven
to reveal the critical function of architecture. His commitment to maintaining architecture
as a critical practice has led him to adopt the role of architectural impresario, inciting,
supporting, and publishing the research and production of subsequent generations of
architects. Eisenman’s writings, most notably “Notes on Conceptual Architecture:
Towards a Definition” (1971), “The Futility of Objects” (1984), and “The End of the
Classical, the End of the Beginning, the End of the End” (1984), have become seminal
texts within architectural theory.
Eisenman was the founder and director of the architectural think tank the Institute for
Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS; 1967–82). At the IAUS, Eisenman was also one
of the founders and editors of Oppositions , a seminal and influential journal of architectural
criticism. It was during this period as well that a 1969 CASE meeting and exhibition at
the Museum of Modern Art, New York, cited Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles
Gwathmey, John Hedjuk, and Richard Meier as “The New York Five.” The Five, also
known as “the Whites” (because of their penchant for using pure white forms) shared an
interest in formal abstraction.
Studying under Colin Rowe at Cambridge University, Eisenman wrote a
doctoral dissertation (“The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture,” 1963)
that reflects Rowe’s influence; it also reveals how early it was that
Eisenman expanded formal analysis beyond the purely compositional to
explore the structural possibility of architecture. He contributed to the
broadening of the discipline of architecture by turning to linguistics,
philosophy, and art theory; namely, Structuralism, Poststructuralism,
Deconstruc-tivism, and other approaches including the writings of French
philosophers Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.Between 1967 and 1980, Eisenman designed a series of houses that focused on revealing
the process of performing architectural abstraction. These houses, numbered rather than
named and documented with scientifically precise serial axonometrics, represented
research into the generation, transformation, and decomposition of architectural form.
The first four houses—House I (1967–68) in Princeton, New Jersey; House II (1969–70)
in Hardwick, Vermont; House III (1969–71) in Lakeville, Connecticut; and House IV
(1971, unbuilt)—examined within architecture what Noam Chomsky called “deep
structure”: a self-referential language devoid of semantic content. Beginning with House
VI (1975) in Cornwall, Connecticut, Eisenman moved away from the compositional,
transformative formalism of the early houses in favor of what he called a
“decompositional” approach, a strategy that focused more on relations and process than
on the formal qualities of the final object.
On founding his practice in 1980, Eisenman turned from the domestic to the urban
scale. The interest in the structure of the grid that had marked his houses was translated
into a horizontal-generating device in the Cannaregio Town Square housing competition
entry (1978) in Venice and the acclaimed Berlin Housing project (1982–86) in Berlin.
Eisenman’s first significant public building in the United States was the Wexner Center
for the Visual Arts (1983–89) at Ohio State University, which was the first project to
actively engage the ground plane. The Wexner can be understood as a constructed fiction:
a fragmented and reordered reconstruction of an armory tells one version of the story,
whereas another version is revealed by the gridded spine, which registers the discrepancy
between the campus and urban grids. The University Art Museum (1986, unbuilt) for
Long Beach, California, and the Choral Works/Parc de la Villette project (1986) in Paris,
designed with French philosopher Jacques Derrida, all illustrate an archaeological
Entries A–F 747
approach by which historic or existing forms were taken from a site and then scaled
according to a fictive scenario.
If the transition from the houses to the artificial excavation projects can be understood
as a move from object to site, Eisenman’s subsequent career shift represented a turn from
Cartesian geometries to supple geometries. This transition, facilitated by computer-aided
design, was initiated with a series of projects that engaged the Deleuzian concept of
folding. In these works, most notably the Rebstock Park Master Plan (1991) in Frankfurt,
Germany, attention is still paid to the site, but the design solution is one of folding the
ground plane rather than extruding it. Here, the architecture and the site fold into each
other, creating a continuous sequence across the site, which throws into question
distinctions between horizontal and vertical. This manipulation of the existing site grew
even more complex with subsequent projects, such as the Arnoff Center for Design and
Art (1988–96) at the University of Cincinnati, which employed a dynamic, nonlinear
mathematical operation to produce a sinuous, torqued curve that, when juxtaposed with
the repeated Cartesian geometry of the existing building, creates what theorist Sanford
Kwinter has referred to as a “Piranesi-effect of unforeseeable complexity” (p. 13).
Recent projects, most notably the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences (1997–
present) in New York City and the Galicia City of Culture (2000–present) in Santiago de
Compostela, Spain, continue this Piranesian propensity. Derived from complex computer
technologies, the generated geometries are fluid and smooth, creating extremely graceful,
innovative forms. Although the computer has been instrumental in aiding Eisenman’s
generation of complex forms, it is even more significant for its role in shifting his
intellectual focus. If the early houses sought the critical within the performance of the
process, this highly complex current work cites the critical within possibilities of
performance; that is, within any aspect of the work, any possibility inherent to the work.
As he describes the Galicia City of Culture design, “[It] produces a new kind of center,
one in which the coding of Santiago’s medieval past appears not as a form of
representational nostalgia but as an active present found in a tactile, pulsating new
form—a fluid shell.”
Eisenman’s work continues to challenge the limits of architectural form and the
boundaries of architecture, landscape, and urbanism; meanwhile, Eisenman the
impresario continues to further the intellectual project of architecture through his
writings, lectures, and provocations.
As an architect, writer, educator, and theorist, Peter Eisenman has consistently striven
to reveal the critical function of architecture. His commitment to maintaining architecture
as a critical practice has led him to adopt the role of architectural impresario, inciting,
supporting, and publishing the research and production of subsequent generations of
architects. Eisenman’s writings, most notably “Notes on Conceptual Architecture:
Towards a Definition” (1971), “The Futility of Objects” (1984), and “The End of the
Classical, the End of the Beginning, the End of the End” (1984), have become seminal
texts within architectural theory.
Eisenman was the founder and director of the architectural think tank the Institute for
Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS; 1967–82). At the IAUS, Eisenman was also one
of the founders and editors of Oppositions , a seminal and influential journal of architectural
criticism. It was during this period as well that a 1969 CASE meeting and exhibition at
the Museum of Modern Art, New York, cited Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles
Gwathmey, John Hedjuk, and Richard Meier as “The New York Five.” The Five, also
known as “the Whites” (because of their penchant for using pure white forms) shared an
interest in formal abstraction.
Studying under Colin Rowe at Cambridge University, Eisenman wrote a
doctoral dissertation (“The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture,” 1963)
that reflects Rowe’s influence; it also reveals how early it was that
Eisenman expanded formal analysis beyond the purely compositional to
explore the structural possibility of architecture. He contributed to the
broadening of the discipline of architecture by turning to linguistics,
philosophy, and art theory; namely, Structuralism, Poststructuralism,
Deconstruc-tivism, and other approaches including the writings of French
philosophers Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.Between 1967 and 1980, Eisenman designed a series of houses that focused on revealing
the process of performing architectural abstraction. These houses, numbered rather than
named and documented with scientifically precise serial axonometrics, represented
research into the generation, transformation, and decomposition of architectural form.
The first four houses—House I (1967–68) in Princeton, New Jersey; House II (1969–70)
in Hardwick, Vermont; House III (1969–71) in Lakeville, Connecticut; and House IV
(1971, unbuilt)—examined within architecture what Noam Chomsky called “deep
structure”: a self-referential language devoid of semantic content. Beginning with House
VI (1975) in Cornwall, Connecticut, Eisenman moved away from the compositional,
transformative formalism of the early houses in favor of what he called a
“decompositional” approach, a strategy that focused more on relations and process than
on the formal qualities of the final object.
On founding his practice in 1980, Eisenman turned from the domestic to the urban
scale. The interest in the structure of the grid that had marked his houses was translated
into a horizontal-generating device in the Cannaregio Town Square housing competition
entry (1978) in Venice and the acclaimed Berlin Housing project (1982–86) in Berlin.
Eisenman’s first significant public building in the United States was the Wexner Center
for the Visual Arts (1983–89) at Ohio State University, which was the first project to
actively engage the ground plane. The Wexner can be understood as a constructed fiction:
a fragmented and reordered reconstruction of an armory tells one version of the story,
whereas another version is revealed by the gridded spine, which registers the discrepancy
between the campus and urban grids. The University Art Museum (1986, unbuilt) for
Long Beach, California, and the Choral Works/Parc de la Villette project (1986) in Paris,
designed with French philosopher Jacques Derrida, all illustrate an archaeological
Entries A–F 747
approach by which historic or existing forms were taken from a site and then scaled
according to a fictive scenario.
If the transition from the houses to the artificial excavation projects can be understood
as a move from object to site, Eisenman’s subsequent career shift represented a turn from
Cartesian geometries to supple geometries. This transition, facilitated by computer-aided
design, was initiated with a series of projects that engaged the Deleuzian concept of
folding. In these works, most notably the Rebstock Park Master Plan (1991) in Frankfurt,
Germany, attention is still paid to the site, but the design solution is one of folding the
ground plane rather than extruding it. Here, the architecture and the site fold into each
other, creating a continuous sequence across the site, which throws into question
distinctions between horizontal and vertical. This manipulation of the existing site grew
even more complex with subsequent projects, such as the Arnoff Center for Design and
Art (1988–96) at the University of Cincinnati, which employed a dynamic, nonlinear
mathematical operation to produce a sinuous, torqued curve that, when juxtaposed with
the repeated Cartesian geometry of the existing building, creates what theorist Sanford
Kwinter has referred to as a “Piranesi-effect of unforeseeable complexity” (p. 13).
Recent projects, most notably the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences (1997–
present) in New York City and the Galicia City of Culture (2000–present) in Santiago de
Compostela, Spain, continue this Piranesian propensity. Derived from complex computer
technologies, the generated geometries are fluid and smooth, creating extremely graceful,
innovative forms. Although the computer has been instrumental in aiding Eisenman’s
generation of complex forms, it is even more significant for its role in shifting his
intellectual focus. If the early houses sought the critical within the performance of the
process, this highly complex current work cites the critical within possibilities of
performance; that is, within any aspect of the work, any possibility inherent to the work.
As he describes the Galicia City of Culture design, “[It] produces a new kind of center,
one in which the coding of Santiago’s medieval past appears not as a form of
representational nostalgia but as an active present found in a tactile, pulsating new
form—a fluid shell.”
Eisenman’s work continues to challenge the limits of architectural form and the
boundaries of architecture, landscape, and urbanism; meanwhile, Eisenman the
impresario continues to further the intellectual project of architecture through his
writings, lectures, and provocations.
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