Kari Jormakka: Which advice would you give to the people who go see your exhibition? Should we take it as a work retrospective in the classical sense, unified by the figure of the author, despite the remarkable variety of ideas presented; or should we see it as a textual mapping of the changing intellectual climate from the sixties to the present day?

Peter Eisenman: It is both, I think. My argument is that the intellectual climate experienced a radical change on 9/11. I'm doing a book called the Architecture of the Disaster, where disaster refers not only to the terrorist attacks but also to the metaphysics of presence. Before the attacks, from 1968 to 2001, we were in what Guy Debord called „the society of the spectacle“. On that day, we witnessed the grandest spectacle ever: the live demolition of two pieces of symbolic architecture. My work rethought itself after 9/11, and I believe that we are now in the „age of terrorism“, not in the „age of the spectacle„. There will never be another spetacle like the one we witnessed on 9/11. Architecture can never compete with media in this sense, so architecture has to change.
My work is anti-spectacular, and this exhibition is anti-spectacular, anti-diffusive, anti-sculptural. When I saw Zaha Hadid's select exhibition last year, I thought it was absolutely incredible, but then I realized that it was not what architecture is about. In my exhibition, you feel the ceiling, the floor, the walls; you feel nothing else. Because there's nothing to see, and that was the whole idea. You have nothing to see, yet you're seeing everything because the architecture becomes both foreground and background. It is in a sense empty, in that it is not representational. It shows the materials, how it was built, what the room is like; you see all these things. The projects become incidental. It is not an exhibition of pictures on a wall. It's an exhibition, in a sense, about itself. In one way the exhibition is representative of my work – with grids and columns – but in another way it's very different from my previous work. I never would have conceptualized such an exhibition five years ago. I think it's a very tough critique of where architecture is today. The exhibition is about architecture distinguishing itself as an autonomous discipline from sculpture. Sculptors cannot do architecture, and architects cannot do sculpture. The exhibition provokes some interesting questions. To take this romantic space and turn it into this cool bare place where there are no signs, no direction, no narrative; all of those things are part of my work. Yet it's not like the Berlin Mahnmal. The monument in Berlin is about Angst; the material and the scale are really very different. The MAK exhibition is almost a degree zero, if there could be such a thing. The way the light spaces work, there is no orientation: the architecture doesn't orient, it disorients. It doesn't do anything, and yet it does everything. For me, that is a very interesting possibility.

KJ: In the press release your show is characterized as a „negative exhibition“.

PE: Peter Noever calls it that. I think it's a very positive exhibition, in the sense that it's sitespecific. It's Vienna, the site of theunconscious, the shadow, Wittgenstein, Freud. If there is any combination of Freud and Wittgenstein, it is here: the exhibition has the coolness and the abstraction of Wittgenstein and the unconscious of Freud. So I would not call it negative: it is a commentary on the moment in architecture that we live in.

KJ: Apropos Wittgenstein, you included in the exhibition your formal analyses of Palladio, and we have all seen your diagrams of Giuseppe Terragni's buildings. Have you ever made a formal analysis of the Palais Wittgenstein?

PE: No, I haven't because I don't think it could be analyzed in the same way as one might analyze Adolf Loos or Giuseppe Terragni. Not being an architect, Ludwig Wittgenstein didn't really know what he was doing architecturally. You can analyze Loos, but not Wittgenstein. I'm not interested in the house; I am interested in him as a thinker. But let me ask you a question. There is a sensibility, I think, operating in the exhibition. I don't think it's a negative sensibility in the sense of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. I think it's more post-structuralist in the sense of a Derridean take on things. I wonder what you think; what was your reaction to it?

KJ: Well, I am not sure what Peter Noever might mean by a negative exhibition; perhaps he would be able to relate it in some way to Adorno's negative dialectics or the idea of art as a kind of negation of the culture industry. But as far as exhibitions go, I would not call yours a negative one, albeit it could be described in terms of deconstructive inversions, or even better, Hegelian dialectics. At first glance, the museum space appears empty since the exhibits are „hidden“ in the columns, so it is a negation or antithesis of the notion of exhibition; but as soon as one enters the space, catches glimpses of the exhibits, one's curiosity is aroused; hence, the first negation (concealment) is overturned by the second negation (concentration of attention), thereby affecting a Hegelian synthesis of a super-exhibition, rather than a negative one. But the price of this dialectic is complicity with the exclusionary strategies of traditional museal exhibitions: since there is not that much space for each project, the works are presented as objects for visual contemplation divorced of any context, the way sculpture is exhibited. And yet these fragments of form are standing in, I suppose, for works of architecture. Without the catalogue or other information, how can people who are not familiar with your design processes and your theoretical concerns respond to the exhibits, or even tell the difference between you and Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid? In visual terms, your 1993 design for the Max Reinhardt Tower in Berlin looks a lot like a 1911 sketch by Czech cubist Pavel Janák, but is this a relevant comparison? To me, your most important and influential contribution to architecture has been the problematization of the design process, and this is in my view underrepresented in the exhibition. On the plus side, this exhibition model provides the opportunity to include an amazing range of work. And yet, you cannot include everything, especially as at the moment you are probably busier as an architect than ever before. The moment of success has often proved a mixed blessing for architects: one may not be able to dedicate as much attention to a project as one might wish; one has to deal with complex programmatic and budgetary issues. How do you feel about your works-in-progress?

PE: First of all, you cannot compare projects of a small, didactic scale, such as my early house projects, or more theoretical ones, such as the Cannareggio project, or even the Wexner Center, let's say, with the stadium that I am designing in Glendale, Arizona. A stadium has so many requirements that I don't think it will be theoretically an important project, but it's important for an architect to get these projects, to design a major public building, especially as such projects are not usually given to architects with theoretical leanings. We're working on another stadium in La Coruña, and on the German Olympic Stadium at Leipzig. We are also doing an opera house in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, as well as two libraries there. It's a big, big project. It remains to be seen whether it will avoid the problems of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, with one architect doing a large complex. But it's the first time I've worked with stone, and it also has a very interesting use of glass at a scale on the façade that is very different from before. So it will be very interesting to see. For example, Kari, I would argue that the Holocaust Memorial project in Berlin was a risk. What will it be like when it opens and people are in it? I know how I feel about it, but what will the German people feel? Or what will people feel about the exhibition here in Vienna? Noever took a risk with this project. The question is what the reaction will be. The risks are now greater for me because the projects are literally larger. An opera house, a stadium, or other such large-scale projects also have somewhat larger implications than my early work. Of course, the theoretical work is moving as well: it is far more political than it used to be; it's more involved in public reactions to things; it's far more concerned with how people react in space. I'm much more interested in how people react in space than whether they like this project or that project. It's not about saying, „Oh, look at this project and that!“ It's about the reactions that the projects evoke in the people who enter the space.

KJ: You have got many of your commissions through competitions. Do you find that competitions promote significant innovation in architecture – or does the process lead to compromises in that in order to get the attention of the jury, a competition entry tends to become a one-liner with no subtlety or substance?

PE: No, no we don't compromise. In fact the way we enter competitions, like the one for the World Trade Center, we didn't go in to win. We went in to make a great project. Now, if you go in to win, then it's useless. But of course, if you win with a great entry, then you get to build a great project. Except for the houses, all of the buildings that we've built have been won in competitions.

KJ: With its strong form, the entry in the competition for the WTC site looks very different from your other recent work shown in the exhibition, such as the Santiago de Compostela buildings.

PE: Well, don't forget, there were four of us, four very strong egos. The installation seems to pick up on the problems of the WTC. I don't know how much of the design is Peter Eisenman, how much is Steven Holl, how much is Charles Gwathmey, how much is Richard Meier; I can't tell. It's a collaborative project. Look, I have worked with Michael Heizer, Jacques Derrida, Richard Serra; I've worked many times on collaborative projects. It doesn't always have to be Peter Eisenman alone.

KJ: Would you say that the World Trade Center competition process sparked a new interest in architecture? For a long time, you have been skeptical about the chances of architecture in competition with other media. Could highly publicized architectural competitions make the public aware of the cultural value of architecture?

PE: First of all, I think that we should talk about two different worlds here: Europe and America. Here, you don't have to worry about media because media is all over architecture. Whether or not there is a competition, architecture is part of the culture. In the United States, the only time we've had any great media attention was over the World Trade Center Competition, and the competition itself has proven to be a disaster, both the way the winning scheme won, and now the decision not to do the winning scheme. I don't think it created any more of a public awareness of architecture. Let's take the new Museum of Modern Art in New York: that's not architecture. They spent 500 million dollars on no architecture. In the United States, there's no consciousness about the role of architecture as an ideological matrix, while in Europe the opposite is the case. On 9/11, the terrorists attacked an architectural symbol. If they wanted to disrupt the city, they could have attacked the infrastructure in New York. Instead, they wanted something that would be symbolic. It seems to me that architecture creates political, social and economic symbols that may, as in the case of the World Trade Center, be recognized as such all over the world, across cultures.

KJ: Walter Benjamin, whom you mentioned earlier, claims that while a tourist views a famous building with attentive concentration, most people experience architecture much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. In some ways, Walter Benjamin anticipated not only Guy Debord but also your ideas about architecture not being able to compete with the media. In contrast to you, he felt that the age of the spectacle did not commence in 1968 but in the nineteenth century, with phantasmagorical images that still in his time held sway over a spectator's subconscious and inhibited anything new from occurring, including a critical awareness of the present. In this methodical exercise in oblivion, the urban experience played a crucial role, and indeed the paradigm of oblivion and distraction is for him architecture.

PE: I don't agree with Benjamin that architecture is seen in a state of distraction. A city is not the same as architecture. We walk around the city, but cultural artifacts, like the World Trade Center, are never seen in a state of distraction. Flying over New York, you always saw the World Trade Center. If we looked out our window, in New York, we saw them. They were part of our view. And then we saw them come down. That wasn't merely distraction.

KJ: But the WTC towers were not important symbols because of their architectural quality, I suppose; at least they were never really celebrated by critics and historians as great architecture. But to return to your point about architecture enjoying a higher status in Europe, and people being more aware of architecture on this side of the Atlantic: If that is so, can you name a few important new architectural projects from Austria that have caught your attention?

PE: You know, I wouldn't know. If you asked me about Spain, I wouldn't know. I mean, I don't really know. Look, I know there are very good young architects, a lot of them are Dutch. There's Foreign Office Architects; they are very good.

KJ: Did you know that Farshid Moussavi is teaching in Vienna?

PE: Oh, she is? She and Zaera-Polo are very talented young architects. I know some bright young architects in Italy. In Austria I don't know any. I don't mean to say that there aren't any, I just don't know any.

KJ: For better or worse, you have often been described as a formalist throughout your long career. Most recently, Bob Somol, Sarah Whiting and Stan Allen have named you a representative of „critical practice“, in which a highly articulate form becomes a form of resistance in the spirit of Manfredo Tafuri, as opposed to the easygoing „projective practice“ of Rem Koolhaas, which they believe is better in tune with the times. Form, it is argued, will give way to shape or performance. Formalism and form have been challenged in art history as well: Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois have proposed rewriting the history of modernism from the point of view of the Bataillean l’informe. What is in your view the status of form today?

PE: Do you know Pier Vittorio Aureli?

KJ: Yes, last year I reviewed his dissertation proposal at the Berlage Institute on the topic of absolute architecture. In a very charged text, he made reference to both Roland Barthes's „writing degree zero“ and to the 1960 work Production of commodities by means of commodities by Piero Sraffa, the Cambridge economist whom Wittgenstein praises in the foreword to the Philosophical investigations. Aureli's attempt to articulate for such an absolute architecture a syntax of matter that would reveal the process of production of the object through the form of the object itself brings to mind your work from the sixties.

PE: Aureli wrote a critique of Somol which was published in the Log magazine which my wife Cynthia Davidson does. He also wrote another excellent critique of Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas in Arquitectura Viva magazine. It's better to ask Aureli what he thinks of the shape/form opposition. I disagree with Somol on the postcritical turn and on shape. And although Rem is the architect I most admire, we are very different: his Content and my Terragni book couldn't be more opposed. For example, I am not interested in the marketplace; I am not interested in branding – I mean, why should I be interested in the Prada Store? Why?

KJ: Because, if Rem is right, shopping is the only remaining form of public life.

PE: He says that, but for me reading, for example, is a form of public life. I brought a new book on Marcel Proust with me in which 28 writers discuss their favorite lines in A la recherche du temps perdu. Beautiful book, and you know, Proust described how in the space of an hour a book sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, only a few of which we would have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them. Compared to reading, shopping – well, the fact is, I can't stand to shop. I mean, I have worn these clothes for years.

KJ: I remember seeing those very same clothes years ago when you were teaching at Ohio State University.

PE: You've seen these very same clothes, right? I have one pair of shoes and when they are worn out, I buy another pair of the same. My wife doesn't go shopping with me because it's no fun. I go into a store; I say give me that, that, that ... it's the same thing I've always had.

KJ: You said there were many good architects in the Netherlands. Some of the Superdutch talk about a corporate avantgarde, about combining business with architecture. Michael Speaks made a big deal about the Dutch approach as the next big thing after the formal investigations by you and Greg Lynn.

PE: I think that the Dutch can talk about what they want to talk about. It makes very good commercial sense. You have to read Karl Chu's critique of Rem, Greg, and me in Perspecta 35. All I can say is that I agree with Chu's critique of Rem and me, and I also agree with Aureli's critique of Rem and me. I am very open and I learn from criticism. When Tafuri used to critique me it was terrific! I think we don't have enough great criticism.

KJ: One last question. What do you think will be the next big thing? The next avantgarde? What's the next step?

PE: You know, I am not a futurologist. When I wake up in the morning, I say I have my whole life in front of me. That does not mean that I know what my whole life is going to be. I know things change radically all the time, and if you said Rem Koolhaas will be the future, I would respond by saying that this too will pass. As I get older and perhaps a little wiser, I remember thinking that Michael Graves would never be out of fashion; I remember thinking that Frank Gehry would never be out of fashion. We are now thinking that Rem will never be out of fashion. If you get caught up in those things, you could go crazy. As far as I am concerned, the nice thing is that I have never been in fashion. I am still moving and my career has not been based on fashion. I don't know what the next thing will be, but I know I won't be it.

Transcript by Emma S. Gargus

Peter Eisenman gave this interview on the occasion of the exhibition „Barefoot on White-Hot Walls“ at the MAK, Vienna, 2004/2005.