Collage,
Christopher Coletti
Robert Rauschenberg,
“Erased DeKooning”,
Image of Fall of the Berlin
Wall.
The Palimpsest City:
Eisenman,
Derrida,
and Berlin
Christopher Coletti
“A Deconstructive Architect is therefore not one who dismantles buildings, but one who
locates the inherent dilemmas within buildings. The deconstructive architect puts the
pure forms of the architectural tradition on the couch and identifies the symptoms of a
repressed impurity. The impurity is drawn to the surface by a combination of gentle
coaxing and violent torture: the form is interrogated.”
-Phillip Johnson, preface for the 1988 Museum of Modern Art exhibition
“Deconstructivist Architecture”.
“If each language proposes a spatialization, an arrangement in space which doesn’t
dominate it but which approaches it by approximation, then it is to be compared with a
kind of pioneering, with the clearing of a path. A path which does not have to be
discovered but to be created. And this creation of a path is not at all alien to
architecture. Each architectural place, each habitation has one precondition: that the
building should be located on a path, at a crossroads at which arrival and departure are
both possible. There is no building without streets leading towards it or away from it;
nor is there one without paths inside, without corridors, staircases, passages, doors. And
if language cannot control these paths towards and within a building, then that only
signifies that language is enmeshed in these structures…”
-Jacques Derrida, interview, “Architecture Where the Desire May Live”
“Here is what I was thinking about: I needed something in the site, in the context of the
Derridean notion of absence and presence. To me the discourse of absence is very
important in the ground projects and in the idea of the trace. Freud talks about how
Rome was built on a series of traces of levels; that going into the unconscious is digging
into the traces of history that have been sedimented; your own history, cultural history
that you have to get at. And so Corbu offered one layer of that cultural history. In other
words, you’ll see in Berlin I did the same thing with the grid of 1760, the grid of 1830,
and superposition of traces, which is how Rome evolved, how Berlin evolved, how cities
evolve; I have always been interested in the evolutionary process of the physical traces
left by the previous building.”
- Peter Eisenman in an interview with Iman Ansari, “Eisenman’s Evolution:
Architecture, Syntax, and New Subjectivity”
Berlin is a palimpsest city, one which has been written, unwritten, and rewritten more
than perhaps any other. It is for precisely this reason that it has fascinated architects, artists,
designers, musicians, philosophers and countless great thinkers in any one of it’s many
lifetimes. This remained still entirely true in the post-modern age, as the Berlin of the Eighties
was a city torn in two by one of the most heavily militarized borders on earth, ground-zero in the
tension between the worlds two great superpowers, a physical manifestation of an everheightening summit of paranoia and existential angst. The state of the city, of art, and of the
world at this very moment makes the 1987 IBA a particularly fascinating one. This IBA coincides
with one of the larger seismic shifts in architecture, the advent of Deconstructivism, a theoretical
framework and approach that taps into this zeitgeist especially well. Among the early
practitioners and evangelists of this approach was one who’s fascination with Berlin is well
established, New York’s enfant terrible Peter Eisenman. Eisenman’s contribution to this IBA
was a pivotal application of his and Jacques Derrida’s intellectual framework for architecture
applied to a site deeply imbued with contemporary and past intersections of meaning, symbol,
space and language; a public housing project sited right on the Wall, across from Checkpoint
Charlie, arguably the most explicit spatial manifestation of the tension of the Cold War. This
site, the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, overlaid with layer after layer of political, artistic, and
social meaning, provided the perfect testbed for an actualization of Eisenman and Derrida’s
ideas for a semiotic architecture.1 Over the course of this paper, I will convey the origins and
development of Eisenman’s design, the final built form, and the lived built history, and analyze
the role and varying levels of success of an application of this Derridean semiotic theoretical
framework at every stage of the buildings life.
The 1987 IBA brief for the site Eisenman was given called for a building at
Friedrichstraße 43 which would contain social housing and, through architecture, inspire a
“spirit of reconnection”2 at the edge of the Wall. To understand Eisenman’s original approach to
this brief, we must look at his original conceptual drawings and media, as they articulate a
wholly different building then that which was actually eventually built. The original drawings
convey a building with a large garden which was given entirely to public function. This “Garden
of the Wall” and the accompanying apartment building were determined through a shifted
vector system of two grids; a grid informed by the urban structure of Berlin, the excise wall, and
the Berlin Wall, and a grid informed by the global Meridian system, the intersection of the two
articulating the particular place that Berlin and that site had in global geopolitics at the time.
Peter Eisenman, Carlos Brillembourg, “Peter Eisenman by Carlos Brillembourg: The Bomb Magazine Interview”, BOMB Magazine
117 (2011): Accessed March 29, 2016. http://bombmagazine.org/article/5991/peter-eisenman
1
F-IBA: The Research Initiative IBA 87, “Residential and commercial building Friedrichstr., Rudi Dutschke-Str.”, F-IBA: Accessed
March 29, 2016. http://f-iba.de/wohn-und-geschaeftshaus-mit-mauer-museum-haus-am-checkpoint-charlie/
2
The Garden, which did the conceptual heavy-lifting for the project, was designed to be an
exercise in Eisenman’s ideas of the “Artificially Excavated City”, a walk-in planar monument
which contained public viewing towers allowing users to look over the Berlin Wall.3 The
development of the ideas of the Artificially Excavated City are seen most clearly in his other
unbuilt project in Cannaregio4, yet the most clear articulation of the original ideas of a semiotic
architecture in a precedent can be seen in his and Derrida’s collaborative project in Bernard
Tschumi’s Parc de La Villette, the CHORA L WORKS.5 For Eisenman and Derrida, the
relationship between language, symbol, meaning, and architecture is dense, challenging, and on
occasion, outright contradictory. However, the CHORA L WORKS provides a good starting
point, both for its deeply theoretical underpinnings, most of which remain constant at least in
the early part of Eisenman’s career, but also because it microcosmically points to some of the
consistent failures and successes of Eisenman’s approach to Deconstructivism and semiotic
architecture. In the work of Derrida, a Chora (itself originally proposed by Plato in the
Timaeus)6 is a receptacle that can shape contents and imprint on surfaces without itself having a
physical form; it cannot be represented. It is the ‘spacing, which is the condition for everything
to take place, for everything to be inscribed’. Thus, one can imagine the theoretical difficulties
in making something that by it’s very definition can not be represented, represented, especially
in a medium as tactile as architecture. And yet Eisenman and Derrida tried, both at the CHORA
L Works and, in other forms, in the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie. In fact, we can see the Garden
of the Haus as a synthesis of his two major theoretical approaches, the Artificially Excavated
City and the Chora. It embodies the ideas of the AEC as it points to and is informed by vectors of
history and memory, absence and presence, and the ideas of the Chora in it’s (theoretical)
questioning of authorship and process and public usage. However, in both of these approaches,
especially when they’re combined, we can understand the difficulty in moving from theory to
praxis, and we realize a certain quandary in the work of Eisenman: can architectural praxis in
the form of drawing be enough, or must architecture be valued only as a built space? For
Eisenman, whose approach so often pushes against the edges of what architecture even is,
oftentimes his ideas are far better encapsulated in drawing and writing then they are built, and it
is thus useful to analyze the two individually as well as compositely. In the same way that the
3
Peter Eisenman, edited by Jean-Francois Bedard, “Cities of Artificial Excavation” (Milan, Rizzoli, 1994), 73-78.
Iman Ansari. "Eisenman's Evolution: Architecture, Syntax, and New Subjectivity" 23 Sep 2013. ArchDaily. Accessed 30 Mar 2016.
http://www.archdaily.com/429925/eisenman-s-evolution-architecture-syntax-and-new-subjectivity/
4
5
Peter Eisenman, Jacques Derrida, “CHORA L WORKS” (New York, The Monacelli Press, 1997).
Leon Cruickshank, “THE CASE FOR A RE-EVALUATION OF DECONSTRUCTION AND DESIGN; AGAINST DERRIDA,EISENMAN AND THEIR
CHORAL WORKS” The Radical Designist Issue 3 (April 2010): Accessed March 28, 2016: http://www.iade.pt/designist/pdfs/
6
003_07.pdf
projects in Cannareggio and in La Villette could not be built, so too does Haus am Checkpoint
Charlie experience a certain small death in its transition from drawing and concept to actual
programmatically-charged space. While this project differs in that it is actually built, it’s perhaps
important to realize that what was constructed is in many ways a very different project, carrying
an idea that unfortunately was in some ways dead on arrival. The drawings reflect an intellectual
strength and clarity, a clarity that becomes muddled through construction.
The built version of the structure evolved from the drawings in a few notable
ways. The Garden, the theoretical underpinning of the whole project, ended up not
being capable of being constructed. This was due to a combination of legal and financial
issues as well as architectural ones.7 Thus, all that was built on the site was the
apartment building itself, which also lost some of its principal aspects. The Grids, which
were supposed to be inherent in the Garden and viewed from an aerial perspective, were
lost, and then to reintroduce them, were projected in the form of color on the facade.
Regardless of the role of authenticity in the value systems of Deconstruction, this can’t
help but come across as a moment of unfortunate compromise in the ethos of the space.
Along the same questions of authenticity, Eisenman’s position as a theorist first and
foremost comes to the front in the resolution of certain details. Ignoring the rather
conventional distribution and layout of the floorpans of the units, even details in the
facade and the execution of the various grids lack an ability to take some of the original
ideas to the finish-line, so to speak. Eisenman has spoke often about his approach to
construction, and is entirely clear about his stance on the matter.
“If there is a debate in architecture today, the lasting debate is between architecture as a
conceptual, cultural, and intellectual enterprise, and architecture as a phenomenological
enterprise – that is, the experience of the subject in architecture, the experience of
materiality, of light, of color, of space and etc. I have always been on the side opposed to
phenomenology. I’m not interested in Peter Zumthor’s work or people who spend their
time worrying about the details or the the grain of wood on one side or the color of the
material on the surface, etc. I couldn’t care less.”8
7
Ibid 2
8
Ibid 4
While this approach is controversial, in the bulk of his built projects, it doesn’t
necessarily hinder an understanding of his theory; however, I would argue that at least
in the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, the lack of attention paid to the resolution of certain
details, especially in the articulation of the grid, ultimately ends up meaning that the
theoretical underpinnings of the project are hard to decipher from a study of the
building itself, and so one must study the original drawings, despite their no longer
correlating with the built reality. The last thing that grounded this building deeply in it’s
original intention was the Berlin Wall, but after it’s fall in 1990, the building was largely
unhinged from it’s proposed design, and what political charge it may have once had was
all but lost. The fall of the Berlin Wall and it’s affect on this building does bring up some
interesting questions though. If we revisit the idea of the Chora, and we can see this
building as a receptacle for the impressions of that which is around it, the absence of the
Wall can be as profound as a presence. Thus, in it’s reflection of an absence, does the
building retain a certain strength of it’s original ideas? I would argue yes, that it does,
but one has to be careful; all of the buildings in the area can, if read deeply (which is at
the root of deconstruction), act as Chora for the wall. The only real difference between
how Eisenman’s building accomplishes this and all others do is simply a matter of
intention. That’s something of a dangerous slope however, as the whole idea, at least
originally, of a Derridian semiotic approach to deconstruction, is a questioning of
authorship and of process, and thus the intention becomes unraveled. This doesn’t
necessarily take away from the efforts of Eisenman, because we wouldn’t be asking these
questions if he hadn’t given us a reading and an intention, but it does illuminate the
philosophical difficulty of the whole enterprise.
If we were to apply an additional lens of understanding to this project, we can use
Alan Colquhoun’s “On Modern and Postmodern Space” as a way of understanding the
place this project has within the larger context of the IBA process and it’s place in West
Berlin. It becomes especially interesting taking into account Colquhoun’s interpretation
of the avant-garde of the Weimar period, especially with social housing, which is exactly
what Haus am Checkpoint Charlie is. A comparison between then social housing of the
avant-garde of the Weimar period and the avant-garde of post-modernity is essential
because we can understand how the intentions and goals of the semiotic understanding
of the potentials of architecture are wholly different from that of early modernism,
especially at the basis of a relationship between the building to the city and to the past.
Colquhoun describes this early Weimar modernism as intrinsically utopian, having very
direct implications for livability, politics, etc. It’s a manifesto-driven architecture. While
it might be incorrect to say that Eisenman’s approach isn’t manifesto-driven, it’s
certainly post-utopian. It’s an architecture placed in a very real space that’s arguably as
dystopian as it gets, and thus is trying to accomplish very different things than the
housing of an earlier generation. It’s embedded semiotically in the urban space it’s
placed in, tied at every limb to the weight of history. If the public-housing of the Weimar
era was tied to the future, Eisenman’s approach is quite literally the opposite. While this
isn’t true of all post-modern architecture, it tends to be true of deconstructivism, which,
perhaps more so than the work of people like Venturi or Rossi, is really imbued with a
sense of struggle between total nihilism and existential weight. “Torture”, as Phillip
Johnson describes it as, is that which separates the aesthetic forms of Eisenman from
the utopianism of these early models. Colquhoun summarizes this phenomenon as such:
“It conceives of the city historically as well as spatially continuous-capable of
being read as a palimpsest. In the early 20th century avant-garde, the city was seen
diachronically, as linear development over time, each period cancelling the ones before
in the name of the unity of the Zeitgeist. The revisionist view looks at the city as a result
of temporal accumulations in space-the latest intervention taking it’s place in the total
sequence.” 9
Alan Colquhoun, “On Modern and Postmodern Space” in Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Criticism Ideology. (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1985), 24.
9
Canareggio
CHORA L WORKS
Drawings for IBA Berlin
Project as Built
Bibliography
Mark Wigley, Philip Johnson, “Deconstructivist Architecture” (New York, The Museum of
Modern Art, 1988).
Peter Eisenman, Carlos Brillembourg, “Peter Eisenman by Carlos Brillembourg: The Bomb
Magazine Interview”, BOMB Magazine 117 (2011): Accessed March 29, 2016. http://
bombmagazine.org/article/5991/peter-eisenman
F-IBA: The Research Initiative IBA 87, “Residential and commercial building Friedrichstr., Rudi
Dutschke-Str.”, F-IBA: Accessed March 29, 2016. http://f-iba.de/wohn-und-geschaeftshausmit-mauer-museum-haus-am-checkpoint-charlie/
Peter Eisenman, edited by Jean-Francois Bedard, “Cities of Artificial Excavation” (Milan,
Rizzoli, 1994), 73-78.
Iman Ansari. "Eisenman's Evolution: Architecture, Syntax, and New Subjectivity" 23 Sep 2013.
ArchDaily. Accessed 30 Mar 2016. http://www.archdaily.com/429925/eisenman-s-evolutionarchitecture-syntax-and-new-subjectivity/
Peter Eisenman, Jacques Derrida, “CHORA L WORKS” (New York, The Monacelli Press, 1997).
Leon Cruickshank, “THE CASE FOR A RE-EVALUATION OF DECONSTRUCTION AND
DESIGN; AGAINST DERRIDA,EISENMAN AND THEIR CHORAL WORKS” The Radical
Designist Issue 3 (April 2010): Accessed March 28, 2016: http://www.iade.pt/designist/pdfs/
003_07.pdf
Alan Colquhoun, “On Modern and Postmodern Space” in Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture
Criticism Ideology. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), 24.
All images courtesy of Peter Eisenman Architects