Peter Eisenman. Installation view at Palazzo Bembo, 2016.

By Other Means
“The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes.”
— George Bataille – “Architecture”

“War is the continuation of politics by other means.”
— Carl von Clausewitz – On War

The curatorial assertion
The small exhibition “By Other Means" embraces the provocation of Alejandro Aravena, director of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, that "there are several battles that need to be won and several frontiers that need to be expanded in order to improve the quality of the built environment and consequently people's quality of life." But complex battles must always be fought on many frontiers.
Undertaking a direct responsibility for the broad quality of everyday life is architecture’s newest frontier, though certainly today its most pressing. However, for better and worse, the preponderance of architecture’s capacity to produce its prodigious range of physical feats, organizational sophistications, and psychological, social, intellectual, and artistic effects derives almost entirely from its five-thousand-year history of complicity with, and service to, entrenched power and wealth. The value of these extraordinary skills remains inestimable and will largely determine our abilities to succeed on the new fronts toward which Aravena redirects our attention.
At the same time we cannot retreat from old fronts, we must continue to contest them. Civic, cultural, political, and other edifices of power, authority, and concentrated wealth will be built. These will continue to exercise powerful functional and symbolic significance and affective and existential force on people and peoples. Thus, the architectural traits of these constructions are as instrumental to our everyday lives as those of ordinary architecture. If architecture’s concern for the overall quality of life is to be pursued at every level, from material to social to intellectual to existential to spiritual, these traits must be debated as fiercely as any other.
More than anything else, one frontier of architectural work cannot be pitted against another as if they were “enemies.” Such bad faith posturing is the essence of ressentiment, the psycho-sociology of petty-hostility-become-counterfeit-morals first analyzed by Kierkegaard. The crippling effects of ressentiment on all disciplinary practices and their higher ambitions have been developed continuously since Kierkegaard’s work by philosophers, economists, psychologists, and others, from Nietzsche through Weber to Scheler to Deleuze.
Thus do Mathew Ford and Jeffrey Kipnis, curators of this exhibition, assert that any architecture that contests the traditional allegiance between the discipline and entrenched power and wealth, whether by refocusing the discipline’s attention toward a direct engagement with society’s immediate material needs or by challenging the familiar design conventions of bourgeois, class, or institutional entitlement pursues a bona fide project of activism.
Peter Eisenman’s Struggle Against the Humanist tradition: A case study
Peter Eisenman’s architecture has become synonymous with a single-minded insistence on a conceptual critique of bourgeois architectural conventions. His joins the conceptual to the critical by evidencing and exploiting the potentials of architecture’s intrinsic rhetorical structures – formalist, linguistic, and textual - that have heretofore remained quashed
by the de jure status of the discipline’s traditional, humanist values.
If today his design research is widely regarded today as a disengaged
academic conceit, his project has always and continues to entail, a political
conjecture: architecture can only assist the empowered to exercise insidious
control over the suborned if the latter are not paying close attention to the
architecture itself. Only then can a palace or a courthouse or a museum or a
cathedral or a library or a villa induce submissiveness. The very qualities we
most admire in great works of architecture – intimacy, repose, spirituality,
transcendence, stateliness, majesty, awe – while not in and of themselves
to be despised, are nevertheless also the very architectural instruments
that authority uses to belittle, to subject. Whenever a work of architecture
demands close attention, close reading, its palette of effects cannot but
change in character from the emotive to the intellectual, and it can no longer
serve so easily the ends of power.
If well reasoned, it is, however, just a conjecture, one that joins a large
body of similarly motivated work in twentieth-century art, literature, and
music still waiting for a final assessment of its actual instrumentalities.
But at a personal level, where the architect has pursued this aim for more
than half a century, a close examination of the record suggests he has not
found it easy to adhere to its principles with rigor and dispassion. Rather,
Peter Eisenman’s architecture suggests a prolonged internal struggle with
his own impulse toward architecture’s humanist tradition.