Peter Eisenman: Barefoot on white-hot walls
15 December – 22 May
www.mak.at
This disconcerting exhibition, conceived by
Peter Eisenman as a spatial and psychological manifestation of his prominent
40-year career as thinker, critic and architect, dramatically transforms the
classically inspired interior of Vienna’s decorative arts museum into one
vast, dimly-lit grid of squat, column-like chambers penetrating a
claustrophobically lowered temporary ceiling.
These glowing, white-hot towers, some permanently inaccessible and punctured
only by small windows that provide tantalising views of simple architectural
models, struggle, like some wild Piranesian fantasy, to contain walk-through
sculptural maquettes and reconstructions of Eisenman’s relatively modest
portfolio of realised buildings. Many of them are unfamiliar structures that
have been overshadowed by his theoretical publications and an intense
personal dialogue with the late deconstructive philosopher Jacques Derrida.
This intimidating re-examination of the modernist legacy of the grid and the
column, like Eisenman’s early De Stijl-inspired House VI (1972–5), applies a
deceptively restricted set of rules to a limited set of elements, developing
layered complexities perfectly in tune with the unresolved urban condition
of the modern city. The flowing diagrammatic reconstruction of a section of
the Max Reinhardt Haus (1992), an enormous office block resembling a
prismatically transformed Moebius strip looping vertically through the
fragmented cityscape of Berlin, and the delicate model for the Musée du Quai
Branley (1999), a warped framework dramatically merging the roof forms of
Parisian apartments with the iron legs of the nearby Eiffel Tower, offer
intriguing intersections between tradition and possible architectural
futures. Both templates emerge from the basic genetic code, or memory, of
existing structures not as fragments or figuration but as a presence of
absence.
This is a powerfully appropriate concept to unleash in the city of Freud. It
reveals a sympathetic architecture of innovative physical passages
spiralling away from established systems of expansion. Eisenman’s most
famous work to date, the enormous Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
(1997–2005), is perhaps its most poignant demonstration. This structure,
2700 concrete pillars varying in height according to voids and intersections
in the city of Berlin, takes the logic of the grid to a point of such
banality that it suggests all attempts at rational order are ultimately
destined to grow out of proportion to their intended purpose and lose touch
with human reason.
Dan Wilkinson