The Limits of Autonomy

This year, for the first time, there is not a student in the building who has passed through Formal Analysis, a mainstay of the first-year curriculum for some twenty years until Peter Eisenman’s semi-retirement in spring of 2023. The course taught students how to closely read buildings, with the premise of form as a consequence of logical operations.

For Eisenman and his Deconstructivist movement, this premise proceeds from linguistic theory, based on a close reading of post-structuralist philosophers like Jacques Derrida. His insistence on the primacy of the formal diagram over function, feeling, structure, materials, sustainability, equity, and just about everything else has earned him a maverick reputation. In a 2004 interview with Archinect, he said:

“I have the most rapport with right-leaning political views, because first of all, liberal views have never built anything of any value…when it comes to architecture, ultimately its politics is autonomy. [emphasis added] That’s why I can look…at Albert Speer, even though he was what he was…I believe that the architecture that the fascist regime was doing was a very important moment in time.”

According to Charles Jencks, Eisenman’s logical approach to form and emphasis on architecture’s political autonomy shares common ground with certain classicist architects. Eisenman’s own analytical gaze has pointed most frequently to buildings of the classical world and those of its disciples, most notably Palladio. In response to Cooper Union students’ calls for more diverse design precedents, he reportedly said, “You have Italy, France, and Germany. What more diversity could you want?”

Eisenman is now over 90 years old, with a career that looms enormous over the past half century. During that time his ideas have been absorbed, debated, canonized, reviled, and misinterpreted by thousands of students, critics, and practitioners, including this author and, as it happens, a certain James C. McCrery II.

The architect hired to design Trump’s ludicrous addition of a 90,000 sf ballroom to the White House, McCrery studied under Eisenman at the Ohio State University in the 1980s before going on to work in his office. Purportedly, the young architect fell out of love with deconstructivism and found his true calling—classicist architecture—at the office of Allan Greenberg (another former Yale faculty and, as one of the “Grays” along with former dean Robert A.M. Stern, a foil to Eisenman and the rest of the “Whites” in Stern’s famous “Five on Five” discourse of the early 1970s).

McCrery’s published renderings do away with all polluting externalities—people, cars, structure, materials, sustainability, equity—to show only the all-white form of an all-white White House, calling to mind Eisenman’s own formal diagrams, substituting analytical red for autocratic gold as the sole allowance to color. (Incidentally, they also bear the telltale lighting and cirrus-streaked sky of a screenshot exported directly from Enscape.) Eisenman’s comment on the design, published in Christopher Hawthorne’s newsletter Punch List, was simply that “putting a portico at the end of a long facade and not in the center is what one might say is untutored.” In a 1982 debate with Christopher Alexander, Eisenman controversially praised disharmony and incongruity in architecture. Evidently, McCrery’s is not the kind of disharmony and incongruity he had in mind.

Two weeks ago, Trump reinstated his 2020 executive order declaring “classical architecture” the preferred style for all federal buildings. Specifically denounced as “unpopular,” “undistinguished,” and “unappealing” are brutalism (ouch) and deconstructivism (bizarrely high-brow). How disappointing that our own fascist regime will not likely be doing any important architecture.

Describing Formal Analysis for the first volume of this magazine in 2014, Eisenman stated, “This is not a class of facts, it is of values. Whose values? Mine.” A provocative mantra for running a course, it is now the ideology running the country with the largest military in the history of the world. Before we try to “build anything of value” in this political reality, we better know whose values we’re talking about.