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Petereisenman 140117073107 Phpapp02 2

Peter Eisenman is an American architect born in 1932. He studied architecture at Cornell University and Columbia University. Eisenman is known for developing principles of design theory and working with the group "The New York Five". In the 1980s he established his own practice in New York. Eisenman is renowned for his Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, which uses a field of concrete stelae without clear organization to represent the lack of meaning in the Holocaust. The stelae vary in height and have spaces between to allow people to pass through. For the Wexner Center of Arts, Eisenman used overlapping rotated grids to give the architecture its own voice and identify connections at different scales.

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Abhishek Gandhi
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69 views9 pages

Petereisenman 140117073107 Phpapp02 2

Peter Eisenman is an American architect born in 1932. He studied architecture at Cornell University and Columbia University. Eisenman is known for developing principles of design theory and working with the group "The New York Five". In the 1980s he established his own practice in New York. Eisenman is renowned for his Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, which uses a field of concrete stelae without clear organization to represent the lack of meaning in the Holocaust. The stelae vary in height and have spaces between to allow people to pass through. For the Wexner Center of Arts, Eisenman used overlapping rotated grids to give the architecture its own voice and identify connections at different scales.

Uploaded by

Abhishek Gandhi
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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PETER EISENMAN

INTRODUCTION
• Peter Eisenman was born in 1932 in Newark, New Jersey. He studied
architecture from 1951 to 1955 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York,
and later at Columbia University in New York City, and concluded his
academic training in 1963 with a doctoral thesis on design theory.

• He worked together with Charles Gwathmay, John Hejduk, Michael Graves


and Richard Meier in the architects’ group »The New York Five. At this
time, Eisenman developed his principles for design theory in a number of
key publications.

• At the beginning of the 1980s, Eisenman established his own architectural


practice in New York, and since that time has created a number of
important and diverse structures.

• A recurrent topic is his thesis about an architecture of memory, from


which he derives the postulate of a place-oriented or »textual«
architecture, which affords the observer a unique experience, difficult to
express adequately, of space and time.
MEMORIAL FOR MURDERED JEWS, BERLIN.
• The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as
the Holocaust Memorial, is a memorial in Berlin to the Jewish victims
of the Holocaust.

• The Berlin Holocaust memorial was the outcome of a process which


extended over a period of 17 years, moving from a grass-roots initiative to
a government resolution and eventually a multi-stage competition.

• Peter Eisenman won the competition and construction of project started


in April 2003. It was inaugurated on May 10’ 2005, sixty years after the
end of World War II.
CONCEPT : HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL
• Generally, while experiencing a building a person walks through the
building perceiving columns on the left and moving around and again
there are columns on the right, so there can be a sort of conclusion about
the building being symmetric, axial etc. So understanding of a buildings
comes from being presence in the experience.

• But in the holocaust memorial, experiencing the building does not give
you understanding of the monument. In this project, when we move, we
do not learn anything, there is no specific path to follow, any point within
the memorial is no different than any other point.

• The underlying idea behind the memorial was to reduce the meaning of
experience because this relates to what happened in camps. The
memorial intends to show the absence of meaning in the executions
carried out in camps.

• The memorial is an analogy to experience of the camps but also an


analogy to the idea of breaking down the relationship between experience
and understanding.
• Often referred to as a “field of stelae,”
the memorial consists of 2711
concrete stelae (95 cm x 2.37 m), with
heights varying from less than a
meter to 4 meters.

• The stelae are separated by a space


equal to the width of an individual
stele, or enough room for a single
individual to pass through.

• The memorial is traditional in the


sense of using material such as
concrete, which is a common means
for the construction of memorials, but
it is innovative in its form and design.

• There is a quality of indeterminacy to


the entire field, despite what appears
to be a regularly spaced grid.
Regularity is only perceived when
standing on top of one of the lower
pillars at the perimeter or in an aerial
photograph.
WEXNER CENTER OF ARTS
Design process
• The literal use of the
rotated grid is used by
Eisenman as an extensive
method of giving the
architecture its own voice.

• The identification of the


dialectic grids stems from
conditions that exist at the
boundary of the site,
Eisenman then grafts one
grid on top of the other
and seeks potential
connections or ‘event sites’
at the urban, local, and
interior scales.
Thank You

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