Architecture Books – Week 7/2025
Celebrating Peter Eisenman
This newsletter for the week of February 10 looks at Notes on Peter Eisenman, a new book from the Yale School of Architecture celebrating the career of the famed architect and educator. The books from the archives are a similar such Festschrift and five-year-old book co-written by Eisenman. In between are the usual new releases and headlines. Happy reading!
Book of the Week:
Notes on Peter Eisenman: The Gradual Vanishing of Architecture, edited by M. Surry Schlabs (Buy from Yale University Press [distributor for Yale School of Architecture] / from Amazon / from Bookshop)
Over two days in November 2022, a few months after architect Peter Eisenman turned 90, the Yale School of Architecture held Notes on Peter Eisenman: Towards a Celebration, a symposium featuring Jeffrey Kipnis, Greg Lynn, Rafael Moneo, Joan Ockman, Robert A.M. Stern, and numerous others. Convened by M. Surry Schlabs, the event celebrated Eisenman’s “long and illustrious career as an architect, thinker, author, and educator, a figure whose innovative work as a designer and tireless dedication as a teacher over the past half-century have helped form—and ever re-form—the field of architecture as we know it today.” Eisenman began teaching at Yale in the 1970s and was a visiting professor there at the time of the symposium, so it made sense for Yale to host such a celebration. Ditto this book, or Festschrift, published this week by Yale SOA, a little over two years after the symposium.
The title of the book and the design of its cover announce “Eisenman” by subtly referencing two early creations. The title, Notes on Peter Eisenman, echoes Notes on Conceptual Architecture: Towards a Definition, which Eisenman “wrote” in 1970 and was published in the Walker Art Center's Conceptual Architecture double issue 78/79; I use quotes around wrote because the piece consisted solely of numbers floating on white pages and corresponding footnotes written out in full — certainly a conceptual creation. Three years later, Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) published the first issue of Oppositions, the journal focused on the history and theory of primarily modern architecture that would see 26 issues printed between 1973 and 1984. Consistent across the journal’s issue were its square format and bold, text-forward design by Massimo Vignelli. With its matching page size and cover in PMS Warm Red, Notes on Peter Eisenman will fit on people’s bookshelves alongside their issues of Oppositions.
A reference unknown to me before cracking open the book was “The Gradual Vanishing of Architecture,” the contribution to the symposium by Kurt W. Forster that lends the book its subtitle. While the essay comes last in the book, a footnote in Schlabs’s introduction directs readers to start there, because “few people understood Peter better than Kurt.” That may well be the case, but for me the best beginning in the book was Joan Ockman’s six-part “The Beginning of the Beginning,” a series of conversations she had with Eisenman in August 2001 for a book project that never happened. Interspersed among the seventeen other “notes,” the interviews feature numerous anecdotes on Eisenman’s upbringing and education (cut off by the events of 9/11, the pair didn’t even get to his professional life), including his time during the Korean War and his travels with Colin Rowe. It’s a great read, and I hope its publication here provokes the pair to resume the conversation.
As recounted in “The Beginning of the Beginning,” Eisenman and Rowe would have a falling out, but it was hardly the only time Eisenman had differences with a friend, be it professionally and/or personally. George Baird’s contribution, “Peter Eisenman: ideological enfant terrible or architectural scene-maker sans pareil?,” describes how their lengthy on-again/off-again relationship was fostered by mutual appreciation and assistance but complicated by the “ideology wars” in the 1980s and 90s and educational bureaucracies. Baird’s honest account, which ends with him pushing to get Eisenman what he saw as a deserved Topaz Medallion a few years after he received one himself (he was successful), is the kind of text that makes this book a Fetschrift: a celebration of an important academic’s contributions and achievements. Although both Forster and Baird died between the symposium and publication (as did Anthony Vidler, who was scheduled to give the keynote in November 2022 but had to back out due to an illness), the overall sentiment of Notes on Peter Eisenman is upbeat and illuminating, exhibiting what Schlabs describes as a “playful, evocative, and mysterious image of the mark [Eisenman] has left on the profession, and all of us.”
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
Thomas Heatherwick: Making, by Thomas Heatherwick (Buy from Thames & Hudson / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Featuring sixteen new projects and fresh photography, this updated and revised volume remains the definitive publication on the internationally acclaimed designer Thomas Heatherwick.” Note: the first edition was published in 2012.
The Palm Springs School: Desert Modernism 1934-1975, by Alan Hess (Buy from Rizzoli / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The book is the first to fully explore the wide ranging forms [architecture in Palm Springs] has taken, from houses to gas stations, hotels to airports, banks to restaurants and spas.”
Modernism in Africa: The Architecture of Angola, Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, edited by Docomomo International (Buy from Birkhäuser / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Many African countries are home to extraordinary architecture that is virtually unknown.” This book features “documentation of over 60 buildings from eight countries with new drawings and photographs.”
Begin Again. Fail Better: Preliminary Drawings in Architecture and Art, edited by Helen Thomas, Dorothee Messmer, Katja Herlach and Manuel Montenegro (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “An exploration of the architecture design process through the persistent spirit of beginning. This book brings together some 180 preliminary architecture drawings.”
LAN—29 Projects: Architecture and Urban Designs, by Benoît Jallon and Umberto Napolitano (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “The first book on the innovative Paris-based design firm LAN (Local Architecture Network),” founded by Benoît Jallon and Umberto Napolitano in Paris in 2002 “to research architecture at the interface of several disciplines.”
Sponge Park: Gowanus Canal, by Susannah C. Drake (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Introduces DLANDstudio’s pioneering and award-winning Sponge Park concept for the regeneration of the notorious Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.”
OASE 118: Book Reviews: From Words to Buildings, edited by Christophe Van Gerrewey and Hans Teerds (Buy from NAi Booksellers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “In this issue of OASE magazine,” of which I’m a contributor (full disclosure), “the history of the architectural book review is outlined through 25 case studies from the eighteenth century until today.”
Architecture and the Public Good, by Tom Spector (Buy from Anthem Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — A paperback of the 2021 book that “proposes solutions that would enable the profession to more forcefully state its case to the world” is being released this week.
It's About Time: The Architecture of Climate Change, by Derk Loorbach, Véronique Patteeuw, Lea-Catherine Szacka, Saskia van Stein and Peter Veenstra (Buy from nai010 Publishers / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “From the first Earth Day to the Paris Climate Agreement, a chronology of 45 key events in the fight for sustainable design.”
Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.
Book News:
I visited the AA Folios: 1986–1991 exhibition at Cooper Union recently, writing about it for World-Architects. The exhibition followed last year’s AA Folios: 1983–1985, which I also wrote about. Combined, the exhibitions displayed the fourteen rare and covered Folios released by the Architectural Association under Alvin Boyarsky’s tenure.
Over at Untapped, Anthony Paletta reviews Archigram Ten, recently published by Circa Press as the first issue of the famed magazine since Archigram 9.5 fifty years ago. He likes it overall but laments how the computer imagery created by new contributors can't match up with Archigram's output from the late 1960s. (Stay tuned for more Archigram news next week.)
Read “Architects, Builders, and the Failed Promise of Deep Collaboration,” a conversation between Gregg Garmisa, Phil Bernstein, John Cerone, and Alexis McGuffin excerpted from Harvard Design Magazine 52: Instruments of Service. (A review of the issue in this newsletter is forthcoming.)
From the Archives:
Given that Festschrifts are common in academia, one finds such publications in the realm of architecture devoted to Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Rudolf Wittkower, Karsten Harries, and other historians, mainly. Even Notes on Peter Eisenman, it should be noted, focuses on Eisenman’s contributions via teaching and writing rather than as a practicing architect. An exception can be found in ANY 90: Philip Johnson Festschrift, a 1996 issue of ANY magazine edited by Cynthia Davidson. It’s an exception because Johnson was an architect, a curator, a writer — nearly everything but an educator. Still, Johnson was probably the most influential architect of the second half of the 20th century, as much for his networking and nurturing of young talent as for his modern and postmodern buildings of questionable quality, so a celebration of his 90th birthday in print was something of a given, as was it being done by ANY, the journal that descended from Oppositions and was a mouthpiece for the architects who crowded around Johnson. The list of contributors illustrates his importance: Frank O. Gehry, Richard Meier, Arata Isosaki, Vincent Scully, Michael Graves, Rem Koolhaas, Charles Jencks, Phyllis Lambert, Paul Rudolph, Richard Serra, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, Paul Goldberger, and Peter Eisenman, to name only about half of them. The sentiments range from a sketch or annotated photograph to a few lines of text or a long essay, accompanied by congratulatory ads from, fittingly, Joseph E. Seagram & Sons and the Four Seasons Restaurant. All of it is presented on ANY’s large tabloid sheets. Today, nearly 30 years later, the issue can only be recommended to diehard fans of Johnson; but I can’t help wonder, are there any left?
One of the eighteen contributions to Notes on Peter Eisenman is “On the Legacy of Eisenman’s Formal Analysis Method” by Elisa Iturbe, an architectural design and educator who was Eisenman’s co-author on the 2020 book Lateness, the third book in the POINT: Essays on Architecture series edited by Sarah Whiting. I reviewed the book in September 2020, writing in part:
“[The] target of Lateness is architecture's infatuation with the new, something that is rooted in 20th-century Modernism but is also promoted through Parametricism's gung-ho embrace of digital technologies this century. A definition of ‘lateness’ is hard to pin down, but it basically consists of architectural designs that are not interested in novelty or trying to fit in with the zeitgeist of contemporary architecture. The argument is laid out in six chapters, three of them focused on individual architects: Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk […] through words and images, the latter in the black-and-red drawing technique Eisenman has used for decades and that has appeared in such books as Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000. […] Architects interested in critical alternatives to architecture's infatuation with novelty will appreciate Lateness, even as it provokes more questions than providing answers.”
Thank you for subscribing to A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books. If you have any comments or questions, or if you have your own book that you want to see in this newsletter, please respond to this email, or comment below if you’re reading this online. All content is freely available, but paid subscriptions that enable this newsletter to continue are welcome — thank you!
— John Hill