Advisor: Otavio Leonidio
Dissertation: Peter Eisenman and other architecture: of the Arabesque and Grotesque
Defense date: 28/02/2019
Abstract
Peter Eisenman has untimely warned that the modernist doctrine of the
relation between form and function has only lasted a speech unchanged 500 years
ago. To repair this misconception it is necessary to break with function as the
founding principle and to regard representation as a false authority that suggests a
kind of true and exact relationship between the architectural object and what it
means. In doing so, Eisenman investigates the idea of presence and the
representation of presence, as repressors of other interpretations and new
meanings, and decrees the indispensability of the complete recognition of
metaphysics: the idea of presence and the presence of absence. To achieve this
displacement Eisenman elaborates an “other” architecture produced as a “text”
rather than an architecture as an image, which intends to break with metaphysical
dialectics and its opposition peers through an exploration of the “between.” The
“text” never allows a single meaning. To arouse such ambivalence Eisenman will
use two terms: The Arabesque and the Grotesque, evoking with these two words a
whole system of concepts and methodologies that synchronously conducted his
work and his thinking. This dissertation intends to demonstrate the extraordinary
potential that allowed the arabesque and the grotesque to become “text”, breaking
of oppositions and hierarchy of values, emptying of signs, blurring of boundaries
and conventional classificatory systems and, above all, exploring the poetic.
Validating, therefore, that they are the very displacement of architectural
metaphysics.