The Palimpsest City:Eisenman, Derrida, and BerlinChristopher Coletti

Collage, Christopher Coletti Robert Rauschenberg, “Erased DeKooning”, Image of Fall of the Berlin Wall.

“A Deconstructive Architect is therefore not one who dismantles buildings, but one who locates the inherent dilemmas within buildings. The deconstructive architect puts the pure forms of the architectural tradition on the couch and identifies the symptoms of a repressed impurity. The impurity is drawn to the surface by a combination of gentle coaxing and violent torture: the form is interrogated.” -Phillip Johnson, preface for the 1988 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Deconstructivist Architecture”.

“If each language proposes a spatialization, an arrangement in space which doesn’t dominate it but which approaches it by approximation, then it is to be compared with a kind of pioneering, with the clearing of a path. A path which does not have to be discovered but to be created. And this creation of a path is not at all alien to architecture. Each architectural place, each habitation has one precondition: that the building should be located on a path, at a crossroads at which arrival and departure are both possible. There is no building without streets leading towards it or away from it; nor is there one without paths inside, without corridors, staircases, passages, doors. And if language cannot control these paths towards and within a building, then that only signifies that language is enmeshed in these structures…” -Jacques Derrida, interview, “Architecture Where the Desire May Live”

“Here is what I was thinking about: I needed something in the site, in the context of the Derridean notion of absence and presence. To me the discourse of absence is very important in the ground projects and in the idea of the trace. Freud talks about how Rome was built on a series of traces of levels; that going into the unconscious is digging into the traces of history that have been sedimented; your own history, cultural history that you have to get at. And so Corbu offered one layer of that cultural history. In other words, you’ll see in Berlin I did the same thing with the grid of 1760, the grid of 1830, and superposition of traces, which is how Rome evolved, how Berlin evolved, how cities evolve; I have always been interested in the evolutionary process of the physical traces left by the previous building.” - Peter Eisenman in an interview with Iman Ansari, “Eisenman’s Evolution:

Architecture, Syntax, and New Subjectivity”

Berlin is a palimpsest city, one which has been written, unwritten, and rewritten more than perhaps any other. It is for precisely this reason that it has fascinated architects, artists, designers, musicians, philosophers and countless great thinkers in any one of it’s many lifetimes. This remained still entirely true in the post-modern age, as the Berlin of the Eighties was a city torn in two by one of the most heavily militarized borders on earth, ground-zero in the tension between the worlds two great superpowers, a physical manifestation of an ever-heightening summit of paranoia and existential angst. The state of the city, of art, and of the world at this very moment makes the 1987 IBA a particularly fascinating one. This IBA coincides with one of the larger seismic shifts in architecture, the advent of Deconstructivism, a theoretical framework and approach that taps into this zeitgeist especially well. Among the early practitioners and evangelists of this approach was one who’s fascination with Berlin is well established, New York’s enfant terrible Peter Eisenman. Eisenman’s contribution to this IBA was a pivotal application of his and Jacques Derrida’s intellectual framework for architecture applied to a site deeply imbued with contemporary and past intersections of meaning, symbol, space and language; a public housing project sited right on the Wall, across from Checkpoint Charlie, arguably the most explicit spatial manifestation of the tension of the Cold War. This site, the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, overlaid with layer after layer of political, artistic, and social meaning, provided the perfect testbed for an actualization of Eisenman and Derrida’s ideas for a semiotic architecture. Over the course of this paper, I will convey the origins and 1

development of Eisenman’s design, the final built form, and the lived built history, and analyze the role and varying levels of success of an application of this Derridean semiotic theoretical framework at every stage of the buildings life. The 1987 IBA brief for the site Eisenman was given called for a building at Friedrichstraße 43 which would contain social housing and, through architecture, inspire a “spirit of reconnection” at the edge of the Wall. To understand Eisenman’s original approach to 2

this brief, we must look at his original conceptual drawings and media, as they articulate a wholly different building then that which was actually eventually built. The original drawings convey a building with a large garden which was given entirely to public function. This “Garden of the Wall” and the accompanying apartment building were determined through a shifted vector system of two grids; a grid informed by the urban structure of Berlin, the excise wall, and the Berlin Wall, and a grid informed by the global Meridian system, the intersection of the two articulating the particular place that Berlin and that site had in global geopolitics at the time.

Peter Eisenman, Carlos Brillembourg, “Peter Eisenman by Carlos Brillembourg: The Bomb Magazine Interview”, BOMB Magazine 1

117 (2011): Accessed March 29, 2016. http://bombmagazine.org/article/5991/peter-eisenman

F-IBA: The Research Initiative IBA 87, “Residential and commercial building Friedrichstr., Rudi Dutschke-Str.”, F-IBA: Accessed 2

March 29, 2016. http://f-iba.de/wohn-und-geschaeftshaus-mit-mauer-museum-haus-am-checkpoint-charlie/

The Garden, which did the conceptual heavy-lifting for the project, was designed to be an exercise in Eisenman’s ideas of the “Artificially Excavated City”, a walk-in planar monument which contained public viewing towers allowing users to look over the Berlin Wall. The 3

development of the ideas of the Artificially Excavated City are seen most clearly in his other unbuilt project in Cannaregio , yet the most clear articulation of the original ideas of a semiotic 4

architecture in a precedent can be seen in his and Derrida’s collaborative project in Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de La Villette, the CHORA L WORKS. For Eisenman and Derrida, the 5

relationship between language, symbol, meaning, and architecture is dense, challenging, and on occasion, outright contradictory. However, the CHORA L WORKS provides a good starting point, both for its deeply theoretical underpinnings, most of which remain constant at least in the early part of Eisenman’s career, but also because it microcosmically points to some of the consistent failures and successes of Eisenman’s approach to Deconstructivism and semiotic architecture. In the work of Derrida, a Chora (itself originally proposed by Plato in the Timaeus) is a receptacle that can shape contents and imprint on surfaces without itself having a 6

physical form; it cannot be represented. It is the ‘spacing, which is the condition for everything to take place, for everything to be inscribed’. Thus, one can imagine the theoretical difficulties in making something that by it’s very definition can not be represented, represented, especially in a medium as tactile as architecture. And yet Eisenman and Derrida tried, both at the CHORA L Works and, in other forms, in the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie. In fact, we can see the Garden of the Haus as a synthesis of his two major theoretical approaches, the Artificially Excavated City and the Chora. It embodies the ideas of the AEC as it points to and is informed by vectors of history and memory, absence and presence, and the ideas of the Chora in it’s (theoretical) questioning of authorship and process and public usage. However, in both of these approaches, especially when they’re combined, we can understand the difficulty in moving from theory to praxis, and we realize a certain quandary in the work of Eisenman: can architectural praxis in the form of drawing be enough, or must architecture be valued only as a built space? For Eisenman, whose approach so often pushes against the edges of what architecture even is, oftentimes his ideas are far better encapsulated in drawing and writing then they are built, and it is thus useful to analyze the two individually as well as compositely. In the same way that the

Peter Eisenman, edited by Jean-Francois Bedard, “Cities of Artificial Excavation” (Milan, Rizzoli, 1994), 73-78.3

Iman Ansari. "Eisenman's Evolution: Architecture, Syntax, and New Subjectivity" 23 Sep 2013. ArchDaily. Accessed 30 Mar 2016. 4

http://www.archdaily.com/429925/eisenman-s-evolution-architecture-syntax-and-new-subjectivity/

Peter Eisenman, Jacques Derrida, “CHORA L WORKS” (New York, The Monacelli Press, 1997).5

Leon Cruickshank, “THE CASE FOR A RE-EVALUATION OF DECONSTRUCTION AND DESIGN; AGAINST DERRIDA,EISENMAN AND THEIR 6

CHORAL WORKS” The Radical Designist Issue 3 (April 2010): Accessed March 28, 2016: http://www.iade.pt/designist/pdfs/003_07.pdf

projects in Cannareggio and in La Villette could not be built, so too does Haus am Checkpoint Charlie experience a certain small death in its transition from drawing and concept to actual programmatically-charged space. While this project differs in that it is actually built, it’s perhaps important to realize that what was constructed is in many ways a very different project, carrying an idea that unfortunately was in some ways dead on arrival. The drawings reflect an intellectual strength and clarity, a clarity that becomes muddled through construction.

The built version of the structure evolved from the drawings in a few notable

ways. The Garden, the theoretical underpinning of the whole project, ended up not

being capable of being constructed. This was due to a combination of legal and financial

issues as well as architectural ones. Thus, all that was built on the site was the 7

apartment building itself, which also lost some of its principal aspects. The Grids, which

were supposed to be inherent in the Garden and viewed from an aerial perspective, were

lost, and then to reintroduce them, were projected in the form of color on the facade.

Regardless of the role of authenticity in the value systems of Deconstruction, this can’t

help but come across as a moment of unfortunate compromise in the ethos of the space.

Along the same questions of authenticity, Eisenman’s position as a theorist first and

foremost comes to the front in the resolution of certain details. Ignoring the rather

conventional distribution and layout of the floorpans of the units, even details in the

facade and the execution of the various grids lack an ability to take some of the original

ideas to the finish-line, so to speak. Eisenman has spoke often about his approach to

construction, and is entirely clear about his stance on the matter.

“If there is a debate in architecture today, the lasting debate is between architecture as a conceptual, cultural, and intellectual enterprise, and architecture as a phenomenological enterprise – that is, the experience of the subject in architecture, the experience of materiality, of light, of color, of space and etc. I have always been on the side opposed to phenomenology. I’m not interested in Peter Zumthor’s work or people who spend their time worrying about the details or the the grain of wood on one side or the color of the material on the surface, etc. I couldn’t care less.” 8

Ibid 27

Ibid 48

While this approach is controversial, in the bulk of his built projects, it doesn’t

necessarily hinder an understanding of his theory; however, I would argue that at least

in the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, the lack of attention paid to the resolution of certain

details, especially in the articulation of the grid, ultimately ends up meaning that the

theoretical underpinnings of the project are hard to decipher from a study of the

building itself, and so one must study the original drawings, despite their no longer

correlating with the built reality. The last thing that grounded this building deeply in it’s

original intention was the Berlin Wall, but after it’s fall in 1990, the building was largely

unhinged from it’s proposed design, and what political charge it may have once had was

all but lost. The fall of the Berlin Wall and it’s affect on this building does bring up some

interesting questions though. If we revisit the idea of the Chora, and we can see this

building as a receptacle for the impressions of that which is around it, the absence of the

Wall can be as profound as a presence. Thus, in it’s reflection of an absence, does the

building retain a certain strength of it’s original ideas? I would argue yes, that it does,

but one has to be careful; all of the buildings in the area can, if read deeply (which is at

the root of deconstruction), act as Chora for the wall. The only real difference between

how Eisenman’s building accomplishes this and all others do is simply a matter of

intention. That’s something of a dangerous slope however, as the whole idea, at least

originally, of a Derridian semiotic approach to deconstruction, is a questioning of

authorship and of process, and thus the intention becomes unraveled. This doesn’t

necessarily take away from the efforts of Eisenman, because we wouldn’t be asking these

questions if he hadn’t given us a reading and an intention, but it does illuminate the

philosophical difficulty of the whole enterprise.

If we were to apply an additional lens of understanding to this project, we can use

Alan Colquhoun’s “On Modern and Postmodern Space” as a way of understanding the

place this project has within the larger context of the IBA process and it’s place in West

Berlin. It becomes especially interesting taking into account Colquhoun’s interpretation

of the avant-garde of the Weimar period, especially with social housing, which is exactly

what Haus am Checkpoint Charlie is. A comparison between then social housing of the

avant-garde of the Weimar period and the avant-garde of post-modernity is essential

because we can understand how the intentions and goals of the semiotic understanding

of the potentials of architecture are wholly different from that of early modernism,

especially at the basis of a relationship between the building to the city and to the past.

Colquhoun describes this early Weimar modernism as intrinsically utopian, having very

direct implications for livability, politics, etc. It’s a manifesto-driven architecture. While

it might be incorrect to say that Eisenman’s approach isn’t manifesto-driven, it’s

certainly post-utopian. It’s an architecture placed in a very real space that’s arguably as

dystopian as it gets, and thus is trying to accomplish very different things than the

housing of an earlier generation. It’s embedded semiotically in the urban space it’s

placed in, tied at every limb to the weight of history. If the public-housing of the Weimar

era was tied to the future, Eisenman’s approach is quite literally the opposite. While this

isn’t true of all post-modern architecture, it tends to be true of deconstructivism, which,

perhaps more so than the work of people like Venturi or Rossi, is really imbued with a

sense of struggle between total nihilism and existential weight. “Torture”, as Phillip

Johnson describes it as, is that which separates the aesthetic forms of Eisenman from

the utopianism of these early models. Colquhoun summarizes this phenomenon as such:

“It conceives of the city historically as well as spatially continuous-capable of

being read as a palimpsest. In the early 20th century avant-garde, the city was seen

diachronically, as linear development over time, each period cancelling the ones before

in the name of the unity of the Zeitgeist. The revisionist view looks at the city as a result

of temporal accumulations in space-the latest intervention taking it’s place in the total

sequence.” 9

Alan Colquhoun, “On Modern and Postmodern Space” in Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Criticism Ideology. (New York: Princeton 9

Architectural Press, 1985), 24.

Canareggio

CHORA L WORKS

Drawings for IBA Berlin

Project as Built

Bibliography

Mark Wigley, Philip Johnson, “Deconstructivist Architecture” (New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1988).

Peter Eisenman, Carlos Brillembourg, “Peter Eisenman by Carlos Brillembourg: The Bomb Magazine Interview”, BOMB Magazine 117 (2011): Accessed March 29, 2016. http://bombmagazine.org/article/5991/peter-eisenman

F-IBA: The Research Initiative IBA 87, “Residential and commercial building Friedrichstr., Rudi Dutschke-Str.”, F-IBA: Accessed March 29, 2016. http://f-iba.de/wohn-und-geschaeftshaus-mit-mauer-museum-haus-am-checkpoint-charlie/

Peter Eisenman, edited by Jean-Francois Bedard, “Cities of Artificial Excavation” (Milan, Rizzoli, 1994), 73-78.

Iman Ansari. "Eisenman's Evolution: Architecture, Syntax, and New Subjectivity" 23 Sep 2013. ArchDaily. Accessed 30 Mar 2016. http://www.archdaily.com/429925/eisenman-s-evolution-architecture-syntax-and-new-subjectivity/

Peter Eisenman, Jacques Derrida, “CHORA L WORKS” (New York, The Monacelli Press, 1997).

Leon Cruickshank, “THE CASE FOR A RE-EVALUATION OF DECONSTRUCTION AND DESIGN; AGAINST DERRIDA,EISENMAN AND THEIR CHORAL WORKS” The Radical Designist Issue 3 (April 2010): Accessed March 28, 2016: http://www.iade.pt/designist/pdfs/003_07.pdf

Alan Colquhoun, “On Modern and Postmodern Space” in Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Criticism Ideology. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), 24.

All images courtesy of Peter Eisenman Architects