A provocative case for historical ambiguity in architecture by one of the field's leading theorists Conceptions of modernity in architecture are often expressed in the idea of the zeitgeist, or "spirit of the age," an attitude toward architectural form that is embedded in a belief in progressive time. Lateness explores how architecture can work against these linear currents in startling and compelling ways. In this incisive book, internationally renowned architect Peter Eisenman, with Elisa Iturbe, proposes a different perspective on form and time in architecture, one that circumvents the temporal constraints on style that require it to be "of the times"-lateness. He focuses on three twentieth-century architects who exhibited the qualities of lateness in their designs: Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk. Drawing on the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and his study of Beethoven's final works, Eisenman shows how the architecture of these canonical figures was temporally out of sync with conventions and expectations, and how lateness can serve as a form of release from the restraints of the moment. Bringing together architecture, music, and philosophy, and drawing on illuminating examples from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, Lateness demonstrates how today's architecture can use the concept of lateness to break free of stylistic limitations, expand architecture's critical capacity, and provide a new mode of analysis.

Architecture and Psychoanalysis is an analysis of the relation between psychoanalytic theory and compositional strategies in architecture. In psychoanalysis it focuses on the writing of Jacques Lacan as well as theories of the structure of the psyche, linguistics, and perception. In architecture it focuses on the writings and projects of Peter Eisenman. There are extended discussions on the thought of figures such as Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Jacques Derrida, and of the architecture of figures such as Leon Battista Alberti, Francesco Borromini, Giuseppe Terragni, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Peter Eisenman-world-famous for his Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005)-confronts historicism with theory and the analysis of form, whose distinguishing features he regards as the foundation of architectural composition. The architect illustrates his observations with numerous, extremely precise hand drawings. Eisenman wrote The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture, his dissertation, in 1963 at the University of Cambridge. The dissertation was first published as a facsimile edition by Lars Muller Publishers in 2006. The original content of the publication is now available again-the book is reprinted in a smaller format. "I knew what I wanted to write," Eisenman says of the dissertation. "An analytic work that related what I had learned to see, from Palladio to Terragni, from Raphael to Guido Reni, into some theoretical construct that would bear on modern architecture, but from the point of view of a certain autonomy of form." Hence the title of his research.

Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, based in New York, is one of America's most distinguished and honored architectural offices. The firm, to much acclaim, recently finished a complete restoration of and major new addition to Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark Solomon S. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and has an active practice in large-scale institutional projects including Werner Otto Hall, the Busch Reisinger Museum and Fine Arts Library addition to the Fogg Museum at Harvard University; the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York; and three buildings at Cornell University, all featured in this monograph. Among the firm's extensive production of corporate work are the International Design Center/New York showroom buildings and the Solomon Equities office building in New York; the Golf Clubhouse and the Contemporary Resort Convention Center at Walt Disney World in Orlando; the IBM Corporation office building in North Carolina; and the David Geffen Company office building in Beverly Hills. The firm has designed corporate interiors for Knoll International, Herman Miller, D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, and the Ronald Lauder Foundation. This volume also features private houses and apartments in California, New York, Texas, Vermont, Switzerland, and Taiwan, as well as Gwathmey Siegel's decorative arts objects, including furniture, tableware, and floor coverings, for such companies as Swid Powell and Knoll International.

In 1963 at the University of Cambridge, Peter Eisenman a" world famous for his Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005) and respected and feared by his colleagues for his intellectual acuity and quick-wittedness a" wrote a dissertation on the formal basis of modern architecture. In it, the architect confronts historicism with theory and the analysis of form, whose distinguishing features he regards as the foundation of architectural composition. Eisenman illustrates his observations with numerous, extremely precise hand drawings. This striking document, with its idiosyncratic photographs, fully deserves to be published here, for the first time, in a faithful reproduction of the original. In an afterword, Peter Eisenman discusses this remarkable starting point of his practical and theoretical work.

A long-awaited reassessment of Andrea Palladio's canonical villas that challenges widely accepted interpretations of the Renaissance architect's work Many historians of architecture have viewed the villas of Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) as physical manifestations of the classical architectural principles described in his treatise The Four Books of Architecture (I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura). Written toward the end of his life, The Four Books illustrate Palladio's built work, redrawn the way he wanted it to be. In this groundbreaking new study, American architect and educator Peter Eisenman analyzes twenty of Palladio's villas, offering a radical interpretation of the Renaissance master's work. Working from an architect's perspective, Eisenman, with Matt Roman, shows the evolution of Palladio's villas from those that exhibit classical symmetrical volumetric bodies to others that exhibit no bodies at all, just fragments in a landscape. This conclusion stands in stark contrast to studies that emphasize principles of ideal symmetry and proportion in Palladio's work. Featuring more than 300 new analytic drawings and models, this handsome book is an important addition to the corpus of Palladian studies and a testament to Palladio's lasting place in contemporary architectural thought.

Architecture, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, has suspended historical references in favor of universalized abstraction. In the decades after the Second World War, when architectural historians began to assess the legacy of the avant-gardes in order to construct a coherent narrative of modernism's development, they were inevitably influenced by contemporary concerns. In Histories of the Immediate Present, Anthony Vidler examines the work of four historians of architectural modernism and the ways in which their histories were constructed as more or less overt programs for the theory and practice of design in a contemporary context. Vidler looks at the historical approaches of Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and Manfredo Tafuri, and the specific versions of modernism advanced by their historical narratives. Vidler shows that the modernism conceived by Kaufmann was, like the late Enlightenment projects he revered, one of pure, geometrical forms and elemental composition; that of Rowe saw mannerist ambiguity and complexity in contemporary design; Banham's modernism took its cue from the aspirations of the futurists; and the "Renaissance modernism" of Tafuri found its source in the division between the technical experimentation of Brunelleschi and the cultural nostalgia of Alberti. Vidler's investigation demonstrates the inevitable collusion between history and design that pervades all modern architectural discourse--and has given rise to some of the most interesting architectual experiments of the postwar period. Anthony Vidler is Dean and Professor of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, New York. He is the author of Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (2000), The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (1992), both published by The MIT Press, and other books.

Architectural travel, from the Eternal City to the generic city. The Grand Tour was once the culmination of an architect's education. As a journey to the cultural sites of Europe, the Tour's agenda was clearly defined: to study ancient monuments in order to reproduce them at home. Architects returned from their Grand Tours with rolls of measured drawings and less tangible spoils: patronage, commissions, and cultural cachet. Although no longer carried out under the same name, the practices inscribed by the Grand Tour have continued relevance for contemporary architects. This edition of Perspecta-the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America-uses the Grand Tour, broadly conceived, as a model for understanding the history, current incarnation, and future of architectural travel. Perspecta 41 asks: where do we go, how do we record what we see, what do we bring back, and how does it change us? Contributions include explorations of architects' travels in times of war; Peter Eisenman's account of his career-defining 1962 trip with Colin Rowe around Europe in a Volkswagen; Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's discussion of their traveling and its effect on their collecting, teaching, and design work; drawings documenting the monolithic churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia; an account of how James Gamble Rogers designed Yale's Sterling Library and residential colleges using his collection of postcards; and a proposed itinerary for a contemporary Grand Tour-in America. Contributors Esra Akcan, Aaron Betsky, Ljiljana Blagojevic,, Edward Burtynsky, Matthew Coolidge and CLUI, Gillian Darley, Brook Denison, Helen Dorey, Keller Easterling, Peter Eisenman, Dan Graham and Mark Wasiuta, Jeffery Inaba and C-Lab, Sam Jacob, Michael Meredith, Colin Montgomery, Dietrich Neumann, Enrique Ramirez, Mary-Ann Ray and Robert Mangurian, Kazys Varnelis, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Enrique Walker

It has been said that Peter Eisenman considers architecture a form of shock therapy; whatever his intent, Peter Eisenman has indeed created one of the most controversial bodies of work of any contemporary American architect. Eisenman's architecture, along with the complex, genre-straddling theories upon which it is built, is active and polemical, and his buildings--whether executed or not--are ingenious essays on the way humans and inert materials occupy and control space. Eisenman combines a theoretical background and a remarkable academic pedigree with a bold, uncompromising design sensibility that places him along the country's most revered architects. Diagram Diaries is an unprecedented illustrated chronicle that showcases Eisenman's work to date from his earliest house designs to the heralded Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, through current commissions such as the Memorial for the Victims of the Holocaust in Vienna. This volume is more than a straightforward survey of the architect's work, however; it is by its very nature an engaging exploration of the process of design. Essays and detailed descriptions are built along a central axis tracing Eisenman's career. Project profiles are organized according to their generating motif: the inside of architecture, or projects generated by the internal forces of shapes and forms; and the outside of architecture, projects governed by external forces such as site and scientific process. Through Eisenman's own essays and through extensive illustration, readers come to understand Eisenman's diagram-based approach to design whereby sites and structures can be manipulated in diagram form. Diagram Diaries offers readers a succinct, totallyup-to-date exposition of Peter Eisenman's design philosophy and a meticulously illustrated presentation of this architect's groundbreaking contributions to twentieth-century American design.

All the works selected for "Big Sign Little Building" explore new interpretations of landscape that synthesize art and architecture. Artists include Charlotte Posenenske, Ed Ruscha, Claes Oldenburg, Allan D'Arcangelo, Robert Smithson and Jeff Wall.

Aldo Rossi, a practicing architect and leader of the Italian architectural movement La Tendenza, is also one of the most influential theorists writing today. The Architecture of the City is his major work of architectural and urban theory. In part a protest against functionalism and the Modern Movement, in part an attempt to restore the craft of architecture to its position as the only valid object of architectural study, and in part an analysis of the rules and forms of the city's construction, the book has become immensely popular among architects and design students.An Oppositions Book.