From "form" to "memory." From houses of no site to the city as a determinant in Peter Eisenman's projects

Abstract

Over the years, Peter Eisenman's approach to his criticisms of current architecture has changed. In the scope of this article, however, the search for it has never ceased to be the architecture’s autonomy, starting, initially, from the support in conceptual art and linguistics, and, later, migrating to post-structuralist interpretations. The criticism that was previously configured in an architecture devoid of external references, then comes to have in the urban context the great agent of the design of his projects. Thus, this article aims to present Eisenman's critical architecture and discuss how it ceases to be so exclusive of its contextual elements and starts to relate to the memory of the places in which it is inserted. Therefore, we sought to read authors who influenced Eisenman's work, as well as texts by the architect himself and his critics, with the intention of better understanding the environment and the reflections that provided such architectural productions, in addition to the transition from the first one to the second one. In this study, the main differences between both actions were identified, but it was also concluded the existence of a conversion regarding the distancing of the observer/user from the two different series of projects.