American architect Peter Eisenman discusses the leaps of faith that built his career
The American architect and writer spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2011
Peter Eisenman is an American architect known for his high modernist and original designs, including The City of Culture in Spain and, most famously, the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.
Born New Jersey in 1932, he discovered architecture in his first year of university at Cornell and never looked back.
Eisenman's work has always been almost equal parts theory and practice. He designed private homes at the same time as he founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, the most influential think tank in American architecture of the late 1960s through the early '80s.
It wasn't until he turned 50 that Eisenman began building major projects, starting with the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio and branching out to an office building in Tokyo, a convention center, a center for design and art at the University of Cincinnati, a National Football League stadium and more.
He's also published many books about architecture, including the 2020 title Lateness written with Elisa Iturbe.
Eleanor Wachtel spoke to Eisenman in 2011 in New York about his attraction to architecture and his biggest projects.
Introduction to architecture
"What was fortunate about Cornell was that it was a large university with many very disciplines that were taught. My dorm counselor in my first year was an architectural student in his fifth year. I had never heard the word architecture before my freshman year at Cornell. I didn't know you could study such a thing. I would go down to his room at night and help him make models and draw, because I always loved to make models and draw when I was a child.
"I thought, 'My God, you can do this and go to school, that is draw, build models, et cetera.' So I went home at spring vacation and the last day before I was to go back to Cornell, I said to my parents, 'I have something to tell you.'
"We assembled in our living room. It was a ceremonial room, the largest room in the house, which was never used, stuffed furniture and this sort of thing. I had never called a meeting.This is what was so stunning. The hour before I left for Ithaca, I said, 'I have something to tell you. I am going to be an architect.'
I had never heard the word architecture before my freshman year at Cornell.- Peter Eisenman
"The stunned look on their faces was incredible. My father's first sentence was, 'Is this another one of your jokes?,' and I said, 'No, this is not another one of my jokes.'
'He said, 'Alright, you get one year to prove yourself and if you don't make it in architecture, you're out. You're not going to Rutgers, you're not going to university, you're going out to work because I don't believe in this. You have to prove to me that this is something that you want.'
"So I did."
Returning to earth
"I lived in a fantasy world. Manfredo Tafuri, the architectural critic from Italy, wrote an essay on my work called Meditations of Icarus. He said, 'Peter Eisenman tried to look into heaven and the sun melted his wings and he fell to Earth,' and I did, like Icarus, fall to earth.
"I started doing projects that were dealing with the Earth, which was symbolic of my unconscious digging into the ground of who I was. I became more realistic and more practical and more in touch with my own psychological being. It also broke up by marriage and I quit the institute shortly thereafter.
At 50 years old, I had learned enough and it was time to stop practicing and do real scale buildings.- Peter Eisenman
"I started out on my own practice. I started building larger buildings and larger projects. I became confident enough. See, I was always frightened that I didn't know enough or wasn't good enough to build major buildings. By the time I was 50, in 1982, I decided I did know enough and I could do it.
"At 50 years old, I had learned enough and it was time to stop practicing and do real scale buildings."
The Berlin memorial
"It was the most difficult [of all the things I'd done] in the sense that first of all, being raised as an American Jew and German Jew who had nothing to do with the Holocaust — my family came over in 1848, so I was very assimilated — I knew nothing about the Holocaust and I thought this would be something I just didn't want to do because I've always thought that Holocaust memorabilia, films and things like that cheapen really happened. So I didn't think I was capable of doing it.
"But I took 10 years to complete the project and I learned a lot about the whole nature of collective guilt and the problems of memorial and memory and this kind of thing. I was convinced after a while that I could do it and that our memorial was the right one and that what I wanted it to be was every day, that there were no symbols, no signs, just the experience of the field.
It's an open idea, the idea being to situate the Holocaust in the everyday, not make it sacred, not reify it, but bring it into everyday reality.- Peter Eisenman
"Even this morning, a person called me and said their daughter walked through the field in Berlin the other day and cried. Of course you can cry, but the little kids go and play tag. People will sit and sunbathe on the pillars. They jump from pillar to pillar. They have lunch there. So it's an open idea, the idea being to situate the Holocaust in the every day, not make it sacred, not reify it, but bring it into every day reality."
Peter Eisenman's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
