SILVIO CASSARA
Impregnated with "culture" in the broadest sense, oozing from the work of Peter Eisenman is the imposing mass of projects conducted for decades on the meaning and sense of desing work.
Architecture understood as History as Philosophy, as Art, as Mathematics as Literature; understood - as it should be - as the rigour of a discipline that intends to reappropriate its own operational spheres, delimiting with extreme exactness the bounds and possibilities of a profession that is continually measuring itself against destabilizing visual systems and technological apparatuses. In History and outside of History precisely in order ot continue it, in Tradition and outside of Tradition so as not to become barren, the architecture of Peter Eisenman does not intend to offer comfort with the simple sugestion of a hard-to-define aesthetics or the illusion of an evanescent technique. Yet, paradoxically, with both. THe unpredictability of his design work anchors it to the identification and clarification of his own objectives, specifying the value of the sign uderstood as fundamental conceptual expression and not as simple foraml mystification.
The validity of this formidable theoretical apparatus aiming to bring a renewed and personal linguistic system into the territories of architecture is confirmed by the comparison wiht an ever broader territorial systems, as is testifiesd to by the projects on a territorial scale of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial and the Cultural Centre of Galicia, the most recent, and well represented in the present volume, evidence of the vitality of a design system that is continuallyy self-renewing.
