Investigation
Investigate: Twelve Steps of Aronoff
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In Peter Eisenman’s 1999 book Diagram Diaries, he is searching through all the projects and buildings he has produced, for what he calls the “possibility that architecture can manifest itself, manifest its own interiority in a realized building.”(1) In other words, we could say that Eisenman is searching for a hinge between the design process and the final product of architecture, or that he is searching for a tool or concept that will ensure the presence in the final building of the aspects that he embedded in his design space. To do so, Eisenman divides the architectural design process and the design space into three places: the anteriority of architecture, the interiority of architecture and the exteriority of architecture. He writes:
In the interiority of architecture there is also an a priori history, the accumulated knowledge of all previous architectures. This history can be called architecture’s anteriority. It is the accumulation of the tropes and rhetoric used at different periods of time to give meaning to architecture’s discourse ... The singular causes architecture to be always in the present but different from its manifestation in the past. This past is the anteriority as it is manifest in the interiority of architecture.(2)
The anteriority of architecture, the grounding understanding of space, for instance, has to be manifest in the interiority of architecture, its scholastic procedures or methods. This interiority often reflects exteriority, which could be the site or a text that influences architecture from the outside. If the anteriority is not present, the architecture becomes ‘unique’ without references to anything but itself, while if the anteriority is present the architecture becomes ‘singular’ – a repetition of a past, yet different from the past.
As Peter Eisenman goes through a range of his own projects, he positions the projects and their operands according to the three categories. Of anteriority, he mentions the perspective of Brunelleschi, the symmetry of Palladio and the ‘parti’ of the Beaux-Art, of interiority, he mentions grids, cubes, EL-forms and bars, while he of exteriority mentions site, texts, mathematics and science.(3) These elements are diverse in function – some are active ‘tools’ others passive references – and diverse in value – some are accepted into his architecture, others are rejected. In this way, Eisenman suggests that we draw borders on the map of our design space, and that we place its different elements according to function. This may place Lynn’s formal exercise in the interiority part of a design space, while MVRDV’s datascape may be placed in the exteriority part of a design space. We can say that they both share an anteriority of architecture, as a shared frame of reference, a shared culture of space and a shared reliance on science, from where they draw different conclusions. We could say that by Eisenman’s division the different operands in the design space have been informed of their place, which of course can be changed with great potential.
As an example of how Eisenman constructs and manipulates his ‘informed’ design space, we could take a closer look at the Aronoff Center for Design and Art, in Cincinnati, Ohio from 1988-96.
For the Aronoff project, Eisenman’s design process goes through twelve more or less well-defined steps, which are:
1. 3-dimensional blocks on line
2. Curves are introduced; the blocks are related to the curve
3. Overlapping between the blocks
4. Tilt/Twist x-y overlapping
5. Torsion, phase shift between two grids, extrusion and torsion, blocks become solids
6. Dual movement, torsion of grids
7. Solids are copied in the x-y plane, two series; torqued solids (ts) and torqued traces (tt)
8. Solids are elevated relative to context, two series shift in x-y plan
9. The overlapping of ts and tt creates space (rooms, atrium); the chevron geometry diffuses ts and tt
10. The structural grid becomes the phases of the torqued solids
11. The spatial planning is done from the inside relative to program; change in reference system, from the reference grid to a system of longitude, latitude and altitude
12. Adjusting transformations of form
These are of course not twelve easy steps, and we should expect a great deal of reverse engineering, since the process was done step by step, not knowing all twelve steps before hand. However, we can see that these steps construct a design space from three parts. It is constructed from a system of reference – a grid, which provides a structure to both Eisenman’s imaginary design space and the final space of the building. This grid changes in the middle of the process to become even more dematerialized and liquid as a geographic frame of reference – it can no longer follow the formal transformations as the project changes from an object to a landscape. The second part of the design space, is a range of formal operations as Eisenman has described them in Diagram Diaries: extrusion, twisting, extension, interweaving and so forth. The third part is the input from outside mainly in the form of the chevron geometry from the school that Eisenman’s project should replace.
If we observe the twelve steps of Aronoff as a path through Eisenman’s particular design space, it is could be described as a path through the three places that Eisenman mentions: The anteriority of the Cartesian grid and the geographic measures, the interiority of the formal procedures, and the exteriority of the chevron from the former school. Everything in the process is related to the anterior structure of space, just as it would be in a historical sense, by either accepting the structure or rejecting it.
The philosopher John Rajchman has identified this anterior use of a spatial structure in Eisenman’s project for Rebstockpark Master Plan in Frankfurt from 1990-94:
The grid has always been a central element in Eisenman’s architecture and architectural discourse, and in the Rebstock project, it does not disappear; it is not, and cannot be, abolished. The strategy is rather to introduce something into – or more precisely, to find something ‘implicated in’ – the gridded space, which it cannot contain, which leaks or spills out from it, linking it to the outside. In this way the grid becomes only a dimension of the folding of the space in which it figures … The Rebstock fold is thus not only a figural fold as in origami – not a matter simply of folded figures within a free container or frame. Rather the container itself has been folded together, or complicated, with the figures. Rebstock is folding in three dimensions.(4)
In the terms of a design space divided into three parts, we could say that the ‘leakage strategy’, which Rajchman proposes, is a constructive use of the shortcomings of Eisenman’s very own system. It leaks, where the categories are diffused or uncovered, where the spatial structure has to change because it has been folded too much, or in the case of Aronoff, where the chevron geometry disturbs the formal procedures.
So, Eisenman’s three places of a formal process does carry a valid description of a design space, which may contain all three places in one spatial construction and describe the different productive splits or leaks that Rajchman notes.
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(1) Eisenman, Peter (1999), Diagram Diaries, London: Thames & Hudson, p. 37.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Eisenman’s naming of science as an exteriority of architecture is comparable to the discussion of the relations between architecture and science in the chapter A New View on Space. Opposite Eisenman, the view on science in that chapter is that science very much is the interiority to architecture.
(4) Rajchman, John (1998), Constructions, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, p. 22.
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