Architectural Possibilities in the Work of Eisenman
Michael Jasper
Credit Line: Eisenman/Robertson Architects. Site plan for University Art Museum, Long Beach, California, 1986-1988, graphite on translucent paper, 105 × 101 cm, DR1987:0859:302. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
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Names: Jasper, Michael (Professor of architecture), author. Title: Architectural possibilities in the work of Eisenman / Michael Jasper.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Research in architecture series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022029272 (print) | LCCN 2022029273 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367181833 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032379555 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429059964 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Eisenman, Peter, 1932---Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC NA737.E33 J37 2023 (print) | LCC NA737.E33 (ebook) | DDC 720.92--dc23/eng/20220720
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029272
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029273
ISBN: 978-0-367-18183-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-37955-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-05996-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429059964
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Figures
Part I Eisenman/Robertson Architects. Perspective for University Art Museum, Long Beach, California, 1986–1988, ink on paper, 83 × 61 cm, DR1987:0859:374. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture 21
Part II Peter D. Eisenman, Architect. Site plan for International Seminary of Design in the Area of Cannaregio-West, Venice, Italy 1978-1980. DR1991:0017:050. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture 73
4.1 Approaches to urban planning developed during the Cannaregio Town Square project, 1978–1980. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Peter D. Eisenman, Architect. Notes and sketches about urban planning for International Seminary of Design in the Area of Cannaregio-West, Venice, Italy 1978–1980, black and pink ink on vellum paper, 42 × 29.6, DR1991: 0017:063) 78
4.2 Destabilisations in Romeo and Juliet. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman/Robertson Architects. Axonometric for Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors 1985, reprographic copies with coloured adhesive, acrylic sheets, paper sheet 92 × 61 × 2 cm, DR1994:0148:249) 81
4.3 Diagrams of scaling and superpositioning in Romeo and Juliet. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman/Robertson Architects. Site plans for Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors 1985, reprographic copies with ink, acrylic sheets, paper sheet, panel: 61 × 61 × 2) 82
4.4 Topographic survey for University Art Museum. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman/Robertson Architects., Long Beach, California 1986-1988, 28 × 22 cm, DR1987:0859:277) 85
4.5 Sketch plan for Monte Paschi Bank Competition. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman Architects Renato Rizzi. Plan for Monte dei Paschi Bank International Competition for the Design of Piazza Matteotti, Sienna, Italy circa 1988, ink on yellow paper, 61 × 76 cm, DR1999:0040:006:028)
5.1 Manuscript sheet with notes on Tokyo Opera House Competition. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman/Robertson Architects. Sketch and notes for Tokyo Opera House Competition, Tokyo, Japan 1985, reprographic copy, 28 × 43.2 cm, DR1999:0200:003)
5.2 Sketch for Tokyo Opera House Competition. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman/Robertson Architects. Perspective for Tokyo Opera House Competition, Tokyo, Japan 1985, reprographic copy with pencil, 61 × 92 cm, DR1999: 0202.014)
5.3 Site plan sketch of registrations for Banyoles Olympic Hotel. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman Architects. Sketch for Banyoles Olympic Hotel, Banyoles, Spain 1989-1990, coloured ink on paper, 38.6 × 91.8 cm, DR1999:0045:002:029)
5.4 Sketch section, Banyoles Olympic Hotel, indicating process registrations. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman Architects. Sketch for Banyoles Olympic Hotel, Banyoles, Spain 1989, pencil and coloured ink on paper, 44.7 × 91.8 cm, DR1999:0045:003.041)
88
100
101
104
108
6.1 Process sketch, Atocha 123 Hotel. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman Architects. Sketch perspective for Atocha 123 Hotel, Madrid, Spain 1989-1993, pencil on translucent paper, 46 × 75.5 cm, DR1999:0053:002:001) 122
6.2 Process sketch, corner detail, Atocha 123 Hotel. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman Architects. Corner detail for Atocha 123 Hotel, Madrid, Spain 1989-1993, pencil on translucent paper, 61 × 66 cm, DR1999:0053:002:002)
122
6.3 Process sketches, Yokohama International Port Competition. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman Architects. Sketches for Yokohama International Port Terminal Design Competition, Yokohama, Japan 1994, pencil and coloured ink on paper, 22 × 28 cm, DR1999:0073:001:001) 124
6.4 Process axonometric sketch, Yokohama International Port Competition. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman Architects. Axonometric for Yokohama International Port Terminal Design Competition, Yokohama, Japan 1994, reprographic copy with ink, 22 × 28 cm, DR1999:0073:001:010)
6.5 Process diagram, The New National Museum of Korea. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman Architects. Isometric for The New National Museum of Korea, Seoul, South Korea 1995, reprographic copy, 22.8 × 32.6 cm, DR1999:0074.001.001)
6.6 Progress presentation panel, The New National Museum of Korea. Peter Eisenman fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture (Eisenman Architects. Plan and perspective for The New National Museum of Korea, Seoul, South Korea 1995, collage on translucent paper, 81.8 × 116.3 cm, DR1999:0074:005:007)
125
126
127
2.1 Comparative mapping of elements across four historical writings 52
4.1 Set out of architectural aspects examined in three projects by Peter Eisenman: Cannaregio Town Square (Venice, 1978), Romeo and Juliet (Verona, 1985), University Art Museum (Long Beach, 1986) 91
6.1 Aspects of event in period writing of Peter Eisenman 128
6.2 Comparison of event in Atocha 123 Hotel and Yokomana Port Competition projects by Peter Eisenman 129
7.1 Matrix of terms in four of Peter Eisenman’s advanced architecture studios 145
Endless Possibilities
ISomething happened in the mid 1980s, during some occasion or other: not all at once but over a period of years as Eisenman’s extraordinary House series came to a natural resolution. This is the series running from House I (1967) through House El Even Odd (1980) to Fin d’Ou T Hou S (1983) and Guardiola House (1988). Or perhaps external conditions combined in ever diverse configurations to lead or pull Eisenman towards a set of architectural considerations different from those considered in the Houses.
Of the many curiosities that provoked the chapters in this book, there is this sense that Eisenman sought in these years to consistently approach the very conditions of architecture’s possibility. Three opening clues in support of this observation can be claimed. Though I found the phrase late in writing this book, Sanford Kwinter articulates this idea of work on the conceptual grounds of the discipline. In attempting to reflect on what it is that is going on in the completed Aronoff Center for Design and Art in Cincinnati, Kwinter suggests that it is another instance of Eisenman working to create ‘the very possibility of architecture.’1 Kwinter goes on to elaborate on this suggestion without substantial expansion. Kwinter does this in part by referencing an unpublished lecture by Eisenman from that same year. In this lecture, Eisenman talks about building ‘… the possibility of building.’ 2
Towards the end of the period under review, and to turn to a second clue, Eisenman provides a succinct description of this underlying ambition. It occurs in an interview with Frédéric Levrat that appears in a special dossier published by L’architecture d’aujourd’hui in 1992. The dossier is illustrated by, though the text is largely without explicit reference to, period projects including the Olympic Hotel Banyoles, the Tokyo Opera House Competition entry, Alteka Office Building Tokyo, and a dedicated section on the then in-progress design for the Aronoff Center.
In the interview with Levrat, Eisenman responds to a question about how he positions his project. Eisenman states: ‘There are always architects who are on the edge. I am trying to insert the possibility of what the edge means: disruption, dislocation, transposition, refiguration and re-establish
DOI: 10.4324/9780429059964-1
it in the center.’3 We come back in the following sections in more detail to some of the variations and different manifestations this singular architecture might take, but for the moment it is worth highlighting certain of the terms involved as evoked or used in the interview. These include groundless figures and what he later characterises as figure-figure urbanism as distinct from a figure/ground urbanism. The idea of an architecture capable of holding certain terms in suspension is also evoked. This idea of a figure-figure urbanism, for instance, occupies Eisenman over many years and returns as an affirmation of the persistence of the notion in a 2012 presentation by the architect at a conference delivered under the banner of resistance.4
A third clue to support the use of the lens of possibilities in approaching Eisenman’s thinking comes in another interview. An inkling of what is at stake in the mid 1980s can be found in an interview between Jeffrey Kipnis and Eisenman. It is published in 1990 in an issue of A+U (Architecture and Urbanism) devoted to recent work of the office. Alongside essays by Tadao Ando, Kurt Forster, Ignasi de Solà-Morales, and Kipnis, the journal issue includes material on Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus Convention Center, Banyoles Olympic Hotel competition entry, and College of Design Architecture Art and Planning, University of Cincinnati. In the interview, Kipnis posits that the Wexner Center project, over the course of the project’s transformation from competition to construction, reveals a shift in Eisenman’s preoccupations from process to design. The former, Kipnis argues, is aligned with the House series, the latter triggered by projects from Cannaregio Town Square (Venice, 1978) and IBA Social Housing (Berlin, 1981–1985) onward. In response to this suggestion, Eisenman sets out another way to frame this period. It is worth citing at length this part of the interview and then work to unpack the various threads. In response to Kipnis, Eisenman states:
… my work [since Berlin] has moved from process to aesthetic. At a certain point there was a crossover from a concern with the process to a concern with the object. The initial reason for the interest in process was the dislocation of the creative subject. Process was a way of saying that the tradition of the creative subject must be displaced. And so I worked with supposedly autonomous processes. Now I am more interested in the dislocation of the architectural object. Though it is true that my projects seem more “designed” now, it must also be said that the process in its manifestation as text continues to play an essential role in the work. 5
Eisenman thus argues against design as the emergent aim. In its stead he reinforces a number of tactics to maintain or open heretofore repressed possibilities. These possibilities include a tactic of displacing the subject and dislocating the object in favour of the process per se. The indenture of the aesthetic is argued against. According to Eisenman, the beautiful does
not cause one to think. The absence of a force causing one to pause is for Eisenman a critical failure or at minimum a disadvantage.
Within the frame of the possible and possibilities, one can also include reference to what Eisenman formulated at various times as an architecture that renders or pushes into the realm of the non-dialectical a range of conditions that otherwise might be considered on the side of the classical, the modern, or the postmodern. Discussed below in relation to Eisenman’s essay ‘The End of the Classical,’ these include uncovering other kinds of situations that escape or abandon limits. These limits, in turn, are claimed by Eisenman to constrain architecture’s activities and ideas. These comprise limits imposed by the very process of classical/modern composition assumed to be bound to hierarchies and polarities including figure/ground and form/function. These in turn open up a series of questions that are approached in Eisenman’s writing, the projects of the office, and the student work emerging out of his university teaching. The exegetical task for the reader then becomes one of establishing the conditions of possibility of, for example, and taking Eisenman at his word, a ‘non-dialectical relationship between figure and ground, the possibility of producing groundless figures, of spacing as opposed to forming.’6
As he notes reflecting on certain of the consequences of such a stance, they include moving from description to creation. In this realm, it is a move from a solely analytic to constituting what Eisenman elsewhere calls a template of possibilities. In discussing the mechanisms explored in Rebstockpark, for instance, Eisenman characterises the reframing as a ‘displacement possibility.’ 7
To take another tack, Eisenman elsewhere describes his approach, or perhaps more accurately the consequences of his approach to architecture culture, as an unveiling. This occurs in a 1997 interview. In discussion with Alejandro Zaera-Polo and reflecting on recent work, Eisenman suggests that his projects ‘attempt to uncover what was previously repressed in the conventions of architecture…’; and a few pages later he reiterates this point, stating: ‘I do not think my projects are negative … Rather, they attempt to uncover what is repressed by the conventions or norms at any one time.’8 This project of revealing otherwise hidden or covered facets in turn can be claimed to lead to an opening up the architect’s practice to different conditions.
Elsewhere, in ruminating on the twists and turns of the previous decade, Eisenman provides another description of what is at stake. In a discussion of the idea of anteriority, he writes: ‘Criticality evolves out of the possibility of both repetitions, to know what has gone before, and difference, to be able to change that history.’ 9 The ambition thus can also be said to track along by working on the origin and very conditions that establish architecture: conditions that may lead to change architecture’s anteriority: to open, that is, heretofore unimagined architectural qualities.
A longer citation provides additional material to begin to suggest the relevance of possibilities as an interpretive frame for these concepts touched
4 Endless Possibilities
on already including anteriority, repetition, and their differences. Eisenman continues in this same text, picking up the charge of ‘changing that history’ which requires precisely a more complex understanding of, and capacity to suspend, form generation decisions. If the idea of suspending form decisions is too extreme a characterisation, we can at least situate the stance on such decisions in the context of larger disciplinary concerns at the time. Eisenman continues to react to the moment: ‘Modelling blobs on the computer or random shapes by hand is flawed in that it does not take into account this anteriority.’ This is the necessary obligation for Eisenman of recognising and thus potentially impacting architecture’s past. He continues: ‘What these methods [computer generation, random hand generation] produce is a form of individual expression which on occasion has power to move, to motivate, and even to be critical, but which is a unique rather than a singular expression. Individual expression may always be different but it involves no repetition.’10
This necessary repetition, in hindsight, may also be about justifying the endless returns made in these years. To start to give some sense to this, let us turn to Kenneth Frampton, a key period protagonist.
II Decomposition and Timelessness
In an essay published in 1982, Frampton transcribes a sentiment not only in the air but also revealed in the work of architecture schools and on the boards in offices at the time. This is a period that describes itself as in crisis or at best outside the comforts of disciplinary and professional stabilities.
Ruminating on what he characterises as a lost or vitiated vitality, Frampton arrives at a turn of phrase that resonates at this distance of some 40 years, a brooding reflection that captures a mood of disenchantment with modern architecture’s ability to deliver on the goods. To deliver, that is, on its social, technological, and eschatological premises. These, in turn, gathered ideas and devices that convention, according to one trajectory, locates in the wake of movements such as avant-gardism, neoplasticism, and rationalism.
In developing his argument, Frampton turns to the work of Eisenman as providing a singular response to this state of affairs, discerning the latter’s period projects and writing a stance that is able to resist or at minimum repel the pull of a decomposing modernity. A modernity, for a despondent Frampton, that is literally becoming limp and in the process of turning liquid. This resistance force occurs at the level of the building as well as at the level of city ideas therein revealed. Frampton writes of paired lines accompanying Eisenman’s work. Not at all theoretical, for Frampton what stands out is Eisenman’s ability to simultaneously repel ‘to an equal degree, the deliquescence of a vulgar modernity and [at the same time] the recurrent, naïve nostalgia’11 for a supposed ideal future.
To state differently Frampton’s suggestion, Eisenman’s project is deemed distinctive in its capacity to deny the seduction of stable architectures in favour of building propositions that demand multiple readings. At the
same time, for Frampton, Eisenman’s work favours an equally ambiguous urban realm, without claiming that Eisenman has an idea of the city per se, though I’ll briefly reference later in this chapter one foray in that direction t hrough studio teaching in those years. Eisenman allows, that is, for the possibility of urban scale speculations never achieving, let alone even wanting to imagine, the possibility of an urban totality.
Specifically referencing Eisenman’s contemporary projects and writing at this key point of his argument, Frampton cites at length in support of his assessments an essay of Eisenman’s from 1980 dealing with the latter’s House XIa. Frampton here refers to Eisenman’s ‘Sandboxes: House XIa’ essay. Out of this essay, Frampton focuses on a statement of Eisenman’s suggesting that it is no longer possible at this present time to return to a belief in any ‘original totality’ or ‘unity.’12 The present age rather is one of partial fragments, that is, fragments that have no trace of a beginning point or hope of an original whole. Eisenman’s idea of partial objects continues to accompany him for the next 20 years, finding one manifestation around the question of the partial figure, a question returned to in Chapter 5.
Frampton finds therein ‘a kind of perpetual “emancipation of dissonance” executed within the fissures of history.’13 What might be seen as another turn to aesthetic suspension, this emancipation, this freedom found in instabilities and positive ambiguities, will a few years later see Frampton sidling up to and siding with, Eisenman’s call for what the latter characterises as a not-classical architecture. As discussed in the closing section of this chapter, this later moment will find Eisenman and Frampton paired up at a 1984 conference specifically around these issues.
The temperament discerned by Frampton, along with the clues proffered above to the frame of possibilities, can serve as an introduction and working place holder to the following reflections on concerns underlying Eisenman’s thinking over the period in the review of the mid 1970s to mid 1990s. With Frampton, whom one senses is particularly close to those fading lines of early twentieth century avant-gardism, there is a palpable feeling of being betrayed, already unmoored and awash, abandoned to the dangers opened up in the gapping ground rent by a history no longer linear and with no hope of retreat or recovery. Perhaps to counter this state, Frampton appeals to Eisenman as a contemporary witness, one uniquely placed to take up a different stance, and perhaps – returning to an underlying conjecture in this chapter – provide elements of a response to certain perceived crises in architecture and at the same time while equally and more essentially revealing still-to-be-realised possibilities.
Taking Frampton at his word, that Eisenman provides one way forward, let us examine a pair of contemporary essays by Eisenman and see what if any evidence there is of such a resistance temperament. Both published in 1984, the essays are ‘The Futility of Objects: Decomposition and the Processes of Difference’14 and ‘The End of the Classical: the End of the Beginning, the End of the End,’15
While different points of view could be adopted, for our purposes two hypotheses can organise the analysis. The first hypothesis: that there are elements in each of the essays that support Frampton’s claim to see at play in Eisenman an architectural stance that effectively and perpetually resists the crutch of beginnings and ends, of a logic of a before and an after as symptoms of what Frampton calls vulgar modernity. As we’ll see, Eisenman acknowledges the difficulty of maintaining such a stance, referring to the tidal pull of ruptures in his own thinking and work, and for the discipline more generally. The second hypothesis: that this stance is predicated on a certain relationship to the past.
In order to approach these hypotheses, the following questions provide a further lens for our analysis: By what means and in what forms is Eisenman’s thinking about architecture’s past – whether 18th-c Venetian palazzi, Charles Berry’s 19th-c proposal for the Houses of Parliament, or the impact of mid twentieth century existential crises precipitated by World War II – rendered in these essays? How might such processes for interrogating works from architecture’s past, and adoption of a position of what will be characterised as one of perpetual displacement, contribute to how one might think about the act of architecture today?
It can be argued that Eisenman uses the phrase ‘the act of architecture’ to signal a whole program of activity including a critical rereading of the past, and an engagement with the ruptures that come with the different ‘sensibility’ announced in ‘The Futility of Objects.’16 This includes the realization around 1945 of the ‘potential extinction of the entire civilisation’ by means of nuclear conflict which for Eisenman shatters irrevocably ‘the classical and triadic condition of past, present, and future time.’17
For Eisenman in these years, if one can claim a state of crisis, it is one marked by ruptures: ruptures that Eisenman links to history and changing sensibilities.18 History, he asserts, is no longer continuous. In other words, writes Eisenman, ‘the objects and processes of the classical/modern continuity [running from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries] are no longer sustained by the present sensibility.’19 The fiction of stable histories is disrupted, and architecture is thus asked to seek out techniques appropriate to that condition: formal-spatial devices, and stances that embrace the conditions of possibility opened in those self-same ruptures. Such acts connote a condition of impossible return, as much for what they demarcate as to what they ‘invent.’ Turning to the art of invention is to reread Eisenman’s use of the term: to invent a space for architecture when confronted with the end of history. This includes hypothesising architecture as a system of differences. This is what Eisenman and others qualify as architecture as text, as distinct from architecture as image. 20
Different from a position that springs from a logic of moving beyond, and thus of beginnings and ends, Eisenman offers a counter practice outside of or different from such a beginnings-and-ends-dependent position. This is to adopt a state of perpetual freedom characterised by what
Frampton describes, as noted earlier, an ‘emancipation [generated out] of dissonance.’ 21 This is a kind of freedom from those biases that Eisenman claims create limits in a classical/modernist – and by extension postmodernist – sensibility, limits that rely on a fiction of a time beyond and of a system of differences dependent on a logic of linear time that progresses or regresses relative to ends or beginnings. By way of difference, Eisenman advocates in ‘The End of the Classical’ essay for a logic situated in what he called a ‘time beyond history.’ 22
In order to more pointedly explore these claims, let us now look at the two essays.
II.i Decomposition or Techniques of Form Finding
‘The Futility of Objects,’ published in Harvard Architecture Review, is cast in the shadows of a period marked by multiple crises, or to use Eisenman’s term as noted above, of rupture. 23 What is at work behind or underneath the formulation of decomposition and the launch of a polemic towards a not-classical/not-modern architecture? What characterises such an architecture and what might that say about Eisenman’s attitude towards history?
Raphael Moneo, in addition to taking up the challenge of elaborating on Frampton’s claims reviewed at the beginning of this chapter, provides another motivation for reading ‘The Futility of Objects.’ Moneo saw at the time in Eisenman’s text an ‘ambitious, brilliant, attractive program.’ 24 The comments are made in Moneo’s chapter on Eisenman in the former’s Theoretical Anxiety and specifically concern the notion of decomposition. Eisenman’s text provides an account of architectural conditions giving birth to their possibilities, staging the potential for architectural qualities and effects little considered or realised or articulated heretofore. As an explicit aspect of the architectural efforts under consideration, this finds a form of expression in Eisenman’s analysis of the differences between the floor plans of Palladio and Scamozzi. The combined consequence can be characterised as an apparatus that permits the architect to coordinate ensembles of formal effects into increasingly ambitious and complex texts, manifest in the writings as well as in the drawings and models.
Henry Cobb, Chair of Architecture at the GSD in those same years (1983–1986), in thinking about that period some two and a half decades later described his intent to create disruptions. Perhaps that is another part of the origin story alongside Eisenman’s own claims to disrupt, displace, and uncouple the discipline from the fictions constraining its potential freedoms. Under the banner of decomposition, Eisenman sets out as a mode of reading the past that opens the conditions of possibility for new relationships of objects and processes more congruent with ‘the present … sensibility.’25 Eisenman describes, to this end, the key aim of the essay as ‘an attempt to sketch certain aspects of the negative of classical composition by deconstructing a series of buildings which are used as heuristic approximations
Possibilities
of [the current] sensibility.’26 Taking that statement at face value pushes one to ask what the present sensibility looks like. This in turn leads Eisenman to propose architectural categories that he associates with the not-classical and describe and provide examples of architectures that manifest this or that category. The categories are the pre-compositional, the composite, and the extra-compositional. Within the thematic focus of this chapter, I emphasise this latter category, that of the extra-compositional, which occupies, along with a set of diagrammatic analyses, key parts of Eisenman’s essay.
The extra-compositional is distinguished for Eisenman by a number of qualities. These include the following six qualities or aspects that together can be claimed to contribute to bracketing techniques of what Moneo saw as decomposition’s ambitious program. They also might realise Cobb’s retrospectively stated ambition to support and even provoke disruptions.
The qualities of the extra-compositional include the following: (a) There is no recourse to an originating type. See Eisenman’s reading of the plans of Palazzo Surian and Fabrica Fino. 27 (b) There is no stable hierarchy of formal-spatial relationships. See again his analysis of Palazzo Surian. (c) There is no logic of fragments that might imply an ideal but absent whole or an originary ‘completeness,’ rather there is a condition of partial fragments. 28 (d) This not-classical order encourages the simply sequential (one after the other) or successional conditions that suspend or resist progressive time (see Eisenman’s analysis of the plan of Scamozzi’s Fabrica Fino compared to Palladio’s plan for Palazzo della Torre). 29 (e) Certain architectural works are multivalent, creating fluctuations in reading of implied and actual volume such that no single reading dominates. See, for example, Eisenman’s reading of the north façade of Giuseppe Terragni’s Giuliani Figerio Apartment Block and variances between planar and volumetric qualities. 30 (f) There are other qualities described by Eisenman, ones whose interpretation cannot be reconciled by recourse to stable polarities such as symmetry/asymmetry or plane/volume. These qualities are distinguished by an oscillation native to the work, ones that Eisenman will later in his career refer to as states of blurring. 31
The ambition throughout the essay, to take up a more recent synthetic phrase by Eisenman, could be claimed to ‘reawaken history.’32 It is to reawaken architecture’s past with the intent specifically not to arrive at any stable, decidable interpretation but instead to accompany what Eisenman calls the act of the architect as one of perpetual resistance to temptations of hierarchy, centrality, and closure, all with an aim to introduce instability, multivalence, and openness.
II.ii Timeless, Objectless, Arbitrary: Conditions of a Not-Classical Architecture
In the same year as ‘The Futility of Objects’ appears, Eisenman publishes ‘The End of the Classical’ in Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal. The title of the essay says it all. Or does it? The subtitle does tell a bit more:
‘the End of the Beginning, the End of the End.’ The resistance to what Eisenman at the time calls centrisms preoccupies him in these years and this essay works through a group of centrisms or fictions.
In a similar manner but different from ‘The Futility of Objects’ essay, ‘The End of the Classical’ also starts with remarks about the problem of continuity, another sign of the predicament at hand. Writing some years later, Jeffrey Kipnis senses Eisenman’s interest in engaging the problem of continuity. In an interview with Eisenman published in 1990, the two discuss a range of continuities that Eisenman works to destabilise or dislocate with the consequent outcome of opening up or revealing different architectural conditions. In discussing the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts and Fine Arts Library, for example, Kipnis suggests Eisenman’s project has an effect of distracting or turning away from what he calls a ‘nostalgia of place’ such that the project opens up ‘the open-ended possibilities of place.’33 Place, in other words, is not stable and knowable. This question of nostalgia for place or context will come back, alongside a critical attitude towards nostalgias of meaning and use.
Returning to ‘The End of the Classical,’ in the essay Eisenman suggests that there are three continuities that together demarcate the state of what he calls ‘the classical’ and that a specific stance on each in relation to thinking architecture differently needs to be adopted. By the classical, he refers to an abstract system of relations in place since the sixteenth century and demarcated by certain continuities or fictions. According to Eisenman, the three fictions are representation, reason, and history. He further characterises the classical as that which is distinguished by several conditions, including a logic of origins, of ends, and ‘the process of composition’ itself. 34
Eisenman then goes on to refer to the qualities that might distinguish what he calls a ‘not-classical’ architecture. The dialectic being staged calls for a temperament different from a succession of styles such as ‘classicism, neoclassicism, romanticism, modernism, postmodernism.’35 An underlying proposition is that beyond stylistic differences, one is better off thinking about architectural culture as ‘a system of relations’ that are beyond style.
For the purposes of our focus on possibilities, key aspects of a notclassical architecture can be identified. Such factors include the following: (a) Modification replaces composition and transformation. 36 (b) Invention of a ‘non-dialectical, non-directional, non-goal oriented process’ such that architectural form is imagined such that it is not ‘a strictly practical device’ but by some means is itself a place of invention. (c) The architect-historian is positioned to read the architectural object as text. 37 To frame the work differently, in this essay Eisenman proposes to conceptualise as well as set out markers for work on ‘the act of architecture’ per se. Within the act of architecture, he continues: ‘Architecture becomes text rather than object when it is conceived and presented as a system of differences rather than as an image or a dialectical presence.’38 (d) Finally, Eisenman claims the purpose of the ‘Futility of Objects’ essay includes transposing a number of ideas –graft, motivation, decomposition – ‘from a purely analytic framework to
a program for work.’39 This is a further demonstration of an appeal to a whole program of work, the underlying plane of work on architecture’s conditions of possibility.
Eisenman concludes ‘The End of the Classical’ by suggesting that the architect’s aim is to invent the conditions for a perpetual present, one without obligation or burden towards either an ‘idealised past’ or maintaining endless naïve hope in a never-to-arrive future. In this, Eisenman falls into Frampton’s positive trap of resisting repeating what the latter identified as that naïve nostalgia as discussed earlier. In nostalgia’s place, Eisenman’s project aims to open what he characterises as ‘an other “timeless” space of invention.’40 The space of invention to be opened is one that contains a relation to certain past architectures. Needing to find forms and spaces, however, calls up the problem of design technique. In an essay discussed below, Eisenman suggests a not-classical architecture as one that no longer manifests history, reason, or the present/the contemporary and rather may appropriately be described as an ‘architecture as is.’ I return to this below.
From a certain point of view, then, Eisenman’s position is radically opposed to ‘the ideology of the zeitgeist.’41 In that light, his position adds a terrible burden on the architect that is also a terrible freedom: the luxury of believing one is released from the past as well as released from the compact of a future time. For Eisenman, the classical, modern, and postmodern alike are ‘trapped in the illusion of the eternity of their own time.’42
Eisenman’s attitude, whether leading or following Frampton, is exactly one of resistance to the ‘illusion’ of being trapped in one’s own time. In this regard, ‘The Futility of Objects’ essay can also be claimed to perform ultimately a kind of work on ‘the ideology of the zeitgeist.’ From this point of view, and to return to Frampton’s contemporaneous sense, Eisenman provides a way to keep things open endlessly, witnessing events as they unfolded.
II.iii
‘I have had trouble coming to terms with writing about Eisenman’s work.’ Thus begins an essay by Robin Evans which appeared in print shortly after a 1985 exhibition on Eisenman’s Fin d’Ou T Hou S at the Architectural Association.43 A rare secondary source on the two essays touched on above, it is appropriate to refer to Evans as a way into some final observations before returning to the hypotheses that opened this chapter.
Evans is not complimentary, to say the least, at least as regards the object of the exhibition. Evans describes the Fin d’Ou T Hou S project as ‘disappointing.’44 His disappointment resides initially around the apparent exhaustion of the techniques, or perhaps positive fulfilment of the ideas trialled in the Houses. Evans briefly discusses ‘The Futility of Objects’ and ‘The End of the Classical’ essays in getting there, without however expanding on their impact or reach.45 In his comments on the two essays, he supports a primary interpretation that sees in the two Eisenman essays
Possibilities 11 evidence of a singular stance. Both essays, writes Evans, ‘involve the construction and maintenance of positions, the determining of a stance.’46
In this way, the essay provides further justification to a reading of Eisenman in these years as all about positioning, opening, and catalysing. In this sense, given the extent and depth of that moment of ruptures, a larger study should necessarily reveal additional lines of influence and attraction to the theme of possibilities. Three lines stand out and concern relationships to Eisenman’s teaching, to period work of his office, and to Aldo Rossi.
As regards the relationship to teaching, while Eisenman is writing and publishing the ‘Decomposition’ article, he is in the middle of a three-year visiting professorship from 1983 to 1985 at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.47 Some student work arising out of period studios is the object of a public exhibition and included in a monograph. Is there evidence of a preoccupation with possibilities in the teaching materials and student work? These questions are returned to in the closing chapter of this book.
As regards the relationship to the office, while the two essays that have been the target of reflections in his chapter are under development and eventual publication, a number of projects are in parallel underway in the office. These include IBA Social Housing (Berlin, 1981–1985), Wexner Center for the Visual Arts and Fine Arts Library (Columbus, 1983–1989), Fin d’Ou T Hou S (1983), and Romeo and Juliet (Verona, 1984–1985). Is there evidence of Eisenman’s conceptual preoccupations on display in period projects, completed variously by Eisenman/Robertson or Eisenman Architects?
To start to respond to the question, two projects could be examined to see if there is any relation – complimentary, antagonistic, neutral - to the preoccupations discussed above. Tokyo Opera House and Fin D’Ou T Hou S in their claimed resistance to stabilities might lead this inquiry: the former via its deployment of scaling and tracing as form-space generation techniques and the latter via a further variation of the cube investigations. A number of factors that would inform a review include the following: (a) a consideration of Eisenman’s use of partial figures; (b) the emphatic or unapologetic embrace of discontinuities. Is that what he was thinking in ‘The End of the Classical’ essay by the term ‘arbitrary’?48 On this factor, Eisenman puts on notice interpretive responses that might look to turn to the comfort of the evocation of an architecture with qualities of timelessness (without ends or beginnings), one that is non-representational (objects are futile) and artificial. (c) Evans provides a clue to all this. In his investigation of Fin d’Ou T Hou S, Evans believes he finds evidence that Eisenman has insinuated ideas of movement ‘into the speechless immobility of the object … [and that such ideas of movement] give it an unworldly animation that takes the place of the meaning he [Eisenman] made such efforts to evict all those years ago.’49 The suggestion that animation supplants meaning is only one of several ideas worth tracking here.
Finally, as regards the relationship to Aldo Rossi, evidence both circumstantial and direct suggests it is appropriate to explore Eisenman’s relation
to Rossi to further understand what is at stake in framing the analysis in terms of the trope of possibilities. In these same years, for example, Eisenman publishes his Editor’s Introduction to the English language version of Rossi’s, The Architecture of the City. Under the title ‘The Houses of Memory: The Text of Analogue,’ Eisenman’s essay is at least on the surface worth a close reading in its own right. 50 Topics fall more on the side of the autobiographical, of temperament and sensibility, and of the architecthistorian’s stance than on the side of the project. One should interrogate the nature of the influence and/or impact of Rossi on Eisenman at this moment of swerves in his office and his teaching.
II.iv
To wrap this section up, let’s consider another episode in that eventful year. It is still 1984 and Ricardo Bofill, Eisenman, Frampton, and Edward Jones are brought together at a conference in Canada. The conference is Banff Session ‘84, a meeting that itself sought to confront different positions to see what might be created out of their coming together. In addition to separate presentations, an abbreviated transcript of discussions between the four along with audience comments is published as ‘The Transcripts.’ Echoing sentiments Frampton already made in 1982 referenced at the opening of this chapter, in ‘The Transcripts’ Frampton refers to the time as ‘a dark period’ with specific reference to the shadows cast in the prospect of nuclear conflict. Describing his own mood as ‘pessimistic,’ Frampton states that what he thinks is needed in such a context ‘is to create sensibility and strong nerves [in order] to continue with the possibility of cultivating the species [referring here to the profession of architecture] under very adverse conditions.’51 If we take this seriously, Frampton ties his hope on someone with a specific sensibility and nerve.
Frampton goes on to articulate a difference which might be useful for providing another point of clarification to close off these meditations. While discussing the ‘Ohio State building’ – Eisenman’s office has recently been announced as the 1983 competition winners for what will become the Wexner Center – Frampton states: ‘I often feel that one of the differences that divides Peter and myself is the degree to which I am concerned or I have become more concerned with the capacity of certain architects to build in a significant way, whereas Peter is more concerned with the conceptual ground of the act [of the architect] in the first place.’52
Accepting Frampton’s claim that Eisenman’s contribution is at the level of conceptual grounds, the architect’s stance rendered in ‘The Futility of Objects’ and ‘The End of the Classical’ essays might be heralded as containing a program of endless possibilities. To call out Eisenman’s position as demonstrating ‘strong nerves’ and sufficiently focused on the side of conceptual grounds is perhaps a not unreasonable place to position oneself in times of rupture.
That this program is marked by a desirable or at minimum intentional indeterminacy is provisionally found in at least two planes of activity that correspond to the key terms that can be taken as abbreviations of the formal and theoretical preoccupations in the two essays: decomposition, timelessness. On the one hand, it is about a plane of form generation or space discovery; on the other hand, it concerns a plane that functions to position one’s thinking outside of, and different to, ideas of beginnings and ends, outside and different from time as continuous. The one can be claimed to be revealed through what Eisenman called on as an open process of decomposition. The other plane might then be located through a temperament that gladly embraces constant imbalance, disruption, and dislocation given the rupture of history. This other plane of activity might be rendered by a state of perpetual resistance that is intended to maintain a ‘timeless’ space of invention or discovery, one that requires a radical engagement with the present. This is to contribute to opening up the conditions of possibility for architecture’s capacity to resist that state of dissipation that so shook Frampton in 1982: a capacity which favours the multivalent, the blurred, the positively ambivalent. Together, these work to repel the many nostalgias Frampton sets up, including nostalgia for meaning, for a place, and his plea to Eisenman to stand as a counter witness.
In ‘The Transcripts,’ the following is attributed to Eisenman as a summary of a not-classical architecture and can serve appropriately as the last word in this section. Eisenman states: ‘It is no longer a certification of experience, a simulation of history, reason or reality in the present. Instead, it [a not-classical architecture] may more appropriately be described as an architecture as is - … a representation of itself… [an] architecture as a process of inventing an artificial past and futureless present.’53
At that moment in the mid 1980s, and perhaps still today, Eisenman’s activity can be claimed to provide one version of a practice of resistance, a practice capable of repelling architecture’s vulgar capacity to imagine something like a non-linear time, or a critique of its inability to imagine something different from a linear time. Instead, we are left with an insistent plea for the present, and an architecture as is with all its possibilities, a rare and perhaps one of the few viable acts of architecture that remain. This idea of a practice of resistance is further considered in Chapter 1.
III T he Paradox of Continuity54
III.i
Before moving to some closing observations and then to a description of what follows in the remainder of the book, we turn to Enric Miralles. In a kind of prose poem reflection published in 1997, Miralles Eisenman’s key contribution to the discipline of architecture is the latter’s ‘search for the place where his works are possible.’55 By this qualification, one senses that for Miralles,
Endless Possibilities
Eisenman is enamoured not with appearance and image but rather with ‘the project that makes them appear.’56 Thus, one task is to respect the singularity or logic of each text and each project in order to begin to understand the aspects of the logics that contribute to their appearance.
There is no paradox in Eisenman’s head-on take up of the topic of continuity in the mid 1980s. It is a premonition of things to come: of shifts in focus and interest.
In part, the foregoing attempts to contribute to revealing certain ideas and architectural devices that may be claimed to resist ‘a metaphysic of embodiment at any cost,’ to reference a phrase of Jeffrey Kipnis. 57 Such an ambition is made in order to be in a position to found a counter position. This counter position is intended to at least in spirit find or found a plane where an other architecture is possible. This is perhaps an aspect of the love that Miralles describes.
Kipnis’ plea to resist a metaphysic of embodiment, to return to our earlier appraisal, appears in an essay that considers the consequence of certain actions of Eisenman as distinct from other speculative architectural practices. In this optic, the task is to isolate any number of architectural effects, sensitive to their freedom from an outside narrative of ends and beginnings. The set of actions released in the writings, lectures, drawings, models, built objects, and settings together create a momentum that contributes to (re) constituting lines of force. These lines of force are so conceived and constituted that architectural matters can be allowed to move in unknown directions in a motion situated in the wake of other recognisable responses. This is a motion that at the same time opens up heretofore unknown states. This interpretation accepts the unconsolidated swirl of ‘agitative hypotheses’ that the following chapters touch on. It is to Kwinter that one owes this qualification of the Eisenmanian project, a project that sees Kwinter in a retrospective glance back at the first 30 years of Eisenman’s production as if from no distance at all. 58
III.ii
This chapter examines the specific sensibility at work and the utility ascribed to, and deployed towards, specific instances of what Eisenman calls in ‘The Futility of Objects’ an extra compositional approach, one different from approaches aligned with classicism and modernism. The terms decomposition and timeless architecture provide a shorthand for mapping the thinking at work and may prove of resonance in considering the materials in the subsequent chapters.
A constant effort is made when considering the writing and design projects of the period to identify and follow shifts in attention, all the while acknowledging they won’t be tied to a single trajectory but many. Such shifts, or swerves in focus, in turn can be claimed to result in redirections in architectural energies, assuming such redirections spring from or be led
Possibilities 15 by pivots in attention. Alternatively, a change in space generation strategies or design techniques could be equally claimed to be influential in shaping the object of focus. These in turn can be said to delimit the potential impact on practice, on theory, and on education. The various chapters that follow then can be said to touch on one or more of these trajectories.
This book attempts to illuminate and illustrate conceptual and formal activities on display in, and at work through, Eisenman’s writing and projects between 1975 and 1995. Some reference is made that said to materials both primary and secondary outside these neat chronological limits. In Chapter 3, for example, some of the material prepared for the Anytime conference (held 1997, published 1998) is used. The closing chapter, a sort of afterword which considers aspects of Eisenman’s studio teaching, examines materials from the early 2010s.
In terms of structure, following this opening chapter that addresses the broad theme of possibilities, the book is organised into two main parts. The first examines a limited range of thematic frames – resistance, history, time – in a focused look at the writings of Eisenman from the period and secondary commentary. This first part of the book begins with a chapter that identifies early concerns, from Eisenman’s dissertation to the House series of projects read through the notion of resistance. Then there is an examination of the architectural thinking of Eisenman with an analysis in the following chapters of two key concerns that occupied him in the middle period (1980s, 1990s): the idea and practice of history as analysis; and the question of architecture’s relation to time rendered through a series of notions including presence, absence, figure and ground, the interstitial, and partial figure. An overarching trope of temporality specific to the modernist project is argued to describe the period.
The second part of the book contains three chapters organised chronologically according to major thematic concerns and formal investigations found in Eisenman’s work from the 1980s and 1990s. The chapters individually and together propose to amplify the arguments set out in Part I and examine projects that cross parallel preoccupations clustered around the terms ground, figure, and event. A final chapter considers aspects of Eisenman’s studio teaching and a sensibility that favours positive displacement.
Individual chapters in the online version of the book open with an abstract to aid readers in identifying specific themes and references. A bibliography is provided at the end of each chapter in a similar spirit of supporting focused reading around areas of specific interest.
Notes
1 Sandford Kwinter, “Can One Go Beyond Piranesi? (Liner Notes for a Building Revisited),” in Twelve Authors in Search of a Building. The Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the University of Cincinnati, ed. Cynthia D Davidson (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1996), 155.
2 Peter Eisenman, a lecture at Rice University in February 1996 cited by Kwinter, “Can One Go Beyond Piranesi?,” 156.
3 Peter Eisenman, “Entretien: Du processus à la presence [Interview: from process to presence],” with Frédéric Levrat, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui 279 (February 1992): 105.
4 For a reference to figure figure urbanism, see Eisenman’s contribution to the 2012 symposium held at the Princeton School of Architecture on 9 November 2012. A video recording of the day’s events can be found at: accessed 06-08-2021, https://vimeo.com/channels/petereisenmansymposium/videos. A reference to the ambition to contribute to a figure figure urbanism can be found in Part 1 of 4 vimeo recordings, about an hour into the session recording.
5 Peter Eisenman and Jeffrey Kipnis, “Interview: Peter Eisenman with Jeff Kipnis”, A+U (Architecture and Urbanism) 232 (January 1990): 173.
6 Peter Eisenman, “A Conversation with Peter Eisenman,” with Alejandro Zaera-Polo, El Croquis Peter Eisenman 1990-1997 83 (1997): 20.
7 Peter Eisenman, “Unfolding Events. Frankfurt Rebstockpark and the Possibility of a New Urbanism,” in Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990-2004 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 15.
8 E isenman, “A Conversation with Peter Eisenman,” 9, 15.
9 Peter Eisenman, “Diagrams of Anteriority,” in Diagram Diaries (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 37.
10 E isenman, “Diagrams of Anteriority,” 37.
11 Kenneth Frampton, “Formation and Transformation,” in De Stijl: 1917-1931, Visions of Utopia, ed. Mildred Friedman (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982), 120. Cambridge Dictionary provides the following definition for deliquescence: noun. 1. the process of becoming liquid as a result of absorbing moisture from the air; 2. The process of melting or turning liquid. Accessed 02-07-2021, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ deliquescence
12 Peter Eisenman, “Sandboxes: House XIa,” A+U (Architecture and Urbanism): Special Issue Peter Eisenman 112 (January 1980): 223.
13 Frampton, “Formation and Transformation,” 123.
14 Peter Eisenman, “The Futility of Objects: Decomposition and the Processes of Difference,” Harvard Architecture Review, no. 3 (Winter 1984). The essay is reprised in Peter Eisenman, Inside Out Selected Writings 1964-1988 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 169–187. The original version published in Harvard Architecture Review is referenced in these notes.
15 Peter Eisenman, “The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End,” Perspecta. The Yale Architectural Journal, no. 21 (1984). The essay is reprinted in a slightly different format and without the original illustrations in Peter Eisenman, Inside Out Selected Writings 1964-1988 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 152–168. The original version published in Perspecta is referenced in these notes.
16 E isenman, “The Futility of Objects,” 65.
17 E isenman, “The Futility of Objects,” 65, 66.
18 E isenman, “The Futility of Objects,” see page 81, note 8 for a discussion of a rupture in sensibility that occurred relative to the presumed continuity embracing classicism and modernism from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
19 E isenman, “The Futility of Objects,” 67.
20 A d ifferent study should track the notion of text in Eisenman’s writing in these years.
21 Frampton, “Formation and Transformation,” 123.
22 Peter Eisenman, “End of the Classical,” 169.
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Tanagræans, the Chæroneans, the Orchomenians, the Lebadeans, and the Thebans: for they thought fit to be reconciled with the Platæans, and to join their gathering, and to send their sacrifice to the festival, when Cassander the son of Antipater restored Thebes. And all the small towns which are of lesser note contribute to the festival. They deck the statue and take it to the Asopus on a waggon, and place a bride on it, and draw lots for the order of the procession, and drive their waggons from the river to the top of Cithæron, where an altar is prepared for them constructed in the following manner. They get square pieces of wood about the same size, and pile them up one upon one another as if they were making a stone building, and raise it to a good height by adding firewood. The chief magistrates of each town sacrifice a cow to Hera and a bull to Zeus, and they burn on the altar all together the victims (full of wine and incense) and the wooden images, and private people offer their sacrifices as well as the rich, only they sacrifice smaller animals as sheep, and all the sacrifices are burnt together. And the fire consumes the altar as well as the sacrifices, the flame is prodigious and visible for an immense distance. And about 15 stades lower than the top of the mountain where they build this altar is a cave of the Nymphs of Mount Cithæron, called Sphragidion, where tradition says those Nymphs prophesied in ancient times.
CHAPTER IV.
The Platæans have also a temple to Arean Athene, which was built from the spoil given to them by the Athenians after the battle of Marathon. The statue of the goddess is wooden but gilt over: the head and fingers and toes are of Pentelican marble. In size it is nearly as large as the brazen one in the Acropolis, (which the Athenians dedicated as the firstfruits of the battle at Marathon,) and is also the work of Phidias. And there are paintings in the temple by Polygnotus, Odysseus having just slain the suitors, and by Onatas the first expedition of Adrastus and the Argives against Thebes. These paintings are on the walls in the vestibule of the temple, and at the base of the statue of the goddess is an effigy of Arimnestus, who commanded the Platæans in the fight against Mardonius and still earlier at Marathon.
There is also at Platæa a temple of Eleusinian Demeter, and the tomb of Leitus, the only leader of the Bœotians that returned home after the Trojan war. And the fountain Gargaphia was fouled by Mardonius and the Persian cavalry, because the Greek army opposed to them drank of it, but the Platæans afterwards made the water pure again.
As you go from Platæa to Thebes you come to the river Oeroe, Oeroe was they say the daughter of Asopus. And before crossing the Asopus, if you turn aside and follow the stream of the Oeroe for about 40 stades, you come to the ruins of Scolus, among which are a temple of Demeter and Proserpine not complete, and half the statues of the goddesses. The Asopus is still the boundary between the districts of Platæa and Thebes.
CHAPTER V.
The district of Thebes was they say first inhabited by the Ectenes, whose king was the Autochthon Ogygus, hence many of the poets have called Thebes Ogygiæ. And the Ectenes they say died off with some pestilence, and Thebes was repeopled by the Hyantes and Aones, Bœotian races I imagine and not foreigners. And when Cadmus and his Phœnician army invaded the land the Hyantes were defeated in battle and fled the following night, but the Aones were submissive and were allowed by Cadmus to remain in the land and mix with the Phœnicians. They continued to live in their villages, but Cadmus built the town called to this day Cadmea. And afterwards when the town grew, Cadmea was the citadel for lower Thebes. Cadmus made a splendid marriage if, according to the Greek tradition, he married the daughter of Aphrodite and Ares, and his daughters were famous, Semele as the mother of a son by Zeus, and Ino as one of the sea goddesses. Amongst the greatest contemporaries of Cadmus were the Sparti, Chthonius and Hyperenor and Pelorus and Udæus: and Echion was chosen by Cadmus as his son-in-law for his conspicuous valour. About these men I could obtain no further knowledge, so I follow the general tradition about the origin of the name Sparti.[48] And when Cadmus migrated to the Illyrians and to those of them who were called Enchelians, he was succeeded by his son Polydorus. And Pentheus the son of Echion had great power both from the lustre of his race and the friendship of the king, though he was haughty and impious and justly punished by Dionysus. The son of Polydorus was Labdacus. He on his death left a son quite a boy, whom as well as the kingdom he entrusted to Nycteus. The sequel I have already set forth in my account about Sicyonia, as the circumstances attending the death of Nycteus, and how the guardianship of the boy and care of the realm devolved upon Lycus the brother of Nycteus: and the boy dying also not long after Lycus became guardian for Laius the son of Labdacus.
It was during Lycus’ second guardianship that Amphion and Zethus invaded the country with a band of men. And those who were anxious for the continuance of Cadmus’ race withdrew Laius, and Lycus was defeated in battle by the sons of Antiope. And during their reign they joined the lower town to Cadmea, and called it Thebes from their relationship to Thebe. And I am borne out by the lines of Homer in the Odyssey:[49]
“Who first gave its towers and seven gates to Thebes, for though they were strong, they could not dwell in a spacious unfortified Thebes.”
As to the legend about Amphion’s singing and the walls being built as he played on his harp, Homer has made no mention of it in his poems. But Amphion was famous for music, and from his relationship to Tantalus learnt the harmony of the Lydians, and added three strings to the lyre, which had previously had only four. And the author of the poem about Europa says that Amphion was the first who played on the lyre, and that Hermes taught him how: and that by his strains he drew stones and animals. And Myro, the Byzantian poetess who wrote epic and elegiac verses, says that Amphion first erected an altar to Hermes and received from him the lyre on it. It is said also that in Hades Amphion paid the penalty for his railing against Leto and her sons. This punishment of his is mentioned in the poem called the Minyad, and there are references in it both to Amphion and the Thracian Thamyris. And when the family of Amphion was destroyed by pestilence, and the son of Zethus was slain by his mother for some fault or other, and Zethus also died of grief, then the Thebans restored Laius to the kingdom.
When Laius was king and wedded to Jocasta, the oracle at Delphi told him that he would die at the hands of his son, if Jocasta bare him one. And that was why he exposed Œdipus, who was fated after all when he grew up to kill his father. He also married his mother. But I do not think he had any children by her. My authority for this view is Homer, who in his Odyssey has the following lines.[50]
“I also saw the mother of Œdipus, beautiful Epicaste, who did a horrible deed, unwittingly marrying her own son, for he married her
after slaying his father, but soon the gods made it publicly known.”
But how could they soon make it publicly known,[51] if Œdipus had 4 children by Jocasta? So they were the children of Euryganea the daughter of Hyperphas, as is shown by the poet who wrote the poems called the Œdipodia. Onatas also painted for the people of Platæa Euryganea dejected at the quarrels of her sons. And it was in the lifetime and during the reign of Œdipus that Polynices departed from Thebes, fearing that the curses of his father would be fulfilled: and he went to Argos and married the daughter of Adrastus, and returned to Thebes after the death of Œdipus, being sent for by Eteocles. And on his return he quarrelled with Eteocles, and went into exile a second time. And having begged of Adrastus a force to restore him, he lost his army and challenged Eteocles to single combat. And he and his brother killed each other, and as the kingdom devolved upon Laodamas the son of Eteocles, Creon the son of Menœceus ruled as guardian for the boy And when Laodamas grew up and took the reins of power, then a second time the Argives led an army against Thebes. And the Thebans encamping against them at Glisas, Laodamas slew in the action Ægialeus the son of Adrastus, but the Argives gaining the victory Laodamas with those Thebans that were willing to follow him withdrew the night following to the Illyrians. And the Argives captured Thebes, and delivered it over to Thersander the son of Polynices. And when some of those who were going with Agamemnon to the siege of Troy sailed out of their course, and met with a reverse at Mysia, then it was that Thersander, who was the bravest of the Greeks in the battle, was slain by Telephus, and his tomb is in stone as you drive over the plain of Caicus in the town of Elæa, in the part of the market-place which is in the open air, and the people of the country say that funeral rites are paid to him. And after the death of Thersander, when a second fleet was got together against Paris and Ilium, they chose Peneleos as their leader because Tisamenus the son of Thersander was not yet old enough. But when Peneleos was killed by Eurypylus the son of Telephus, they chose Tisamenus as their king, the son of Thersander by Demonassa the daughter of Amphiaraus. And Tisamenus suffered not from the wrath of the
Furies of Laius and Œdipus, but Autesion his son did, so that he migrated to the Dorians at the bidding of the oracle. And on his departure they chose as king Damasichthon, the son of Opheltes the son of Peneleos. His son was Ptolemæus, and his Xanthus, who was slain by Andropompus in single combat by treachery and not fairly. And thenceforward the Thebans resolved to entrust their government to several magistrates, and not to let everything depend on one man.
[48] Namely, that they were armed men who sprang up from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus
[49] Odyssey, xi. 263-265.
[50] Odyssey, xi 271-274
[51] Perhaps Pausanias is hyper-critical here. Is he not answered by the following line in the ὑπόθεσις to Œdipus Tyrannus, λοιμὸς
CHAPTER VI.
Of their successes and reverses in war I found the following to be the most notable. They were beaten by the Athenians in battle, when the Athenians fought on the side of the Platæans in the war about borders. They were beaten a second time by the Athenians in the neighbourhood of Platæa, when they seem to have preferred the interests of king Xerxes to those of Greece. The popular party was not to blame for that, for at that time Thebes was ruled by an oligarchy, and not by their national form of government. And no doubt if the barbarian had come to Greece in the days when Pisistratus and his sons ruled at Athens the Athenians also would have been open to the charge of Medizing. Afterwards however the Thebans were victorious over the Athenians at Delium in the district of Tanagra, when Hippocrates, the son of Ariphron, the Athenian General perished with most of his army. And the Thebans were friendly with the Lacedæmonians directly after the departure of the Medes till the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians: but after the conclusion of that war, and the destruction of the Athenian navy, the Thebans soon joined the Corinthians against the Lacedæmonians. And after being beaten in battle at Corinth and Coronea, they were victorious at the famous battle of Leuctra, the most famous of all the battles between Greeks that we know of, and they put down the decemvirates that the Lacedæmonians had established in their towns, and ejected the Lacedæmonian Harmosts. And afterwards they fought continuously for 10 years in the Phocian War, called by the Greeks the Sacred War. I have already in my account of Attica spoken about the reverse that befell all the Greeks at Chæronea, but it fell most heavily on the Thebans, for a Macedonian garrison was put into Thebes; but after the death of Philip and accession of Alexander the Thebans took it into their head to eject this garrison: and when they did so the god warned them of their coming ruin, and in the temple of Demeter Thesmophorus the omens were just the reverse of what they were before Leuctra: for then the spiders spun white webs near the doors
of the temple, but now at the approach of Alexander and the Macedonians they spun black webs. There is also a tradition that it rained ashes at Athens the year before Sulla began the war which was to cause the Athenians so many woes.
CHAPTER VII.
And now the Thebans were expelled from Thebes by Alexander, and escaped to Athens, and were restored by Cassander the son of Antipater. And the Athenians were very friendly in this restoration to Thebes, and the Messenians and Arcadians of Megalopolis also gave their help. And I think Cassander restored Thebes chiefly out of hatred to Alexander: for he endeavoured to destroy all the house of Alexander, for he ordered the Macedonians (who were exceedingly angry with her) to stone to death Olympias Alexander’s mother, and he poisoned the sons of Alexander, Hercules his son by Barsine, and Alexander his son by Roxana. Nor did he himself terminate his life happily, for he was swollen with the dropsy, and eaten up by worms. And of his sons, Philip the eldest not long after his accession was taken off by consumption, and Antipater the next killed his mother Thessalonice, the daughter of Philip (the son of Amyntas) and Nicasipolis. His motive for putting her to death was that she was too partial to Alexander her youngest son. And Alexander invited in Demetrius the son of Antigonus, and succeeded by his help in deposing his brother Antipater, and punishing him for his matricide, but seemed in Demetrius to find rather a murderer than ally. Thus was Cassander punished by the gods. In his lifetime the Thebans rebuilt all their old walls, but were destined it seemed to taste great misfortunes still. For they joined Mithridates in his war against Rome, I think only out of friendship to the Athenian people. But when Sulla invaded Bœotia panic seized the Thebans, and they repented, and tried to get again the friendship of the Romans. But Sulla was wroth with them, and found out other means of injuring them, and took half their territory on the following pretext. When he began the war with Mithridates he was short of money, he collected therefore the votive offerings from Olympia, and Epidaurus, and from Delphi all that the Phocians had left. These he distributed among his troops, and gave the gods in return half Thebais instead of money. The land thus taken away the Thebans afterwards got back by the favour of the Romans, but in other
respects became thenceforwards weaker and weaker, and in my time the lower part of the city was quite deserted except the temples, and the citadel which they still inhabit is called Thebes and not Cadmea.
CHAPTER VIII.
And when you have crossed the Asopus, and gone about 10 stades from Thebes, you come to the ruins of Potniæ, among which is a grove to Demeter and Proserpine. And the statues by the river they call the Potnian goddesses. And at a stated season they perform other customary rites, and admit sucking pigs into what are called the Halls: and take them at the same season the year following to Dodona, believe it who likes. Here too is a temple of Dionysus Ægobolus (Goat-killer). For in sacrificing to the god on one occasion the people of Potniæ were so outrageous through drunkenness that they even killed the priest of Dionysus: and straightway a pestilence came on them, and the oracle at Delphi told them the only cure was to sacrifice to Dionysus a grown boy, and not many years afterwards they say the god accepted a goat as victim instead. They also shew a well at Potniæ, in which they say if the horses of the district drink they go mad.
As you go from Potniæ to Thebes there is on the right of the road a small enclosure and pillars in it: this it is thought is the place where the earth opened and swallowed up Amphiaraus, and they add that neither do birds sit on these pillars, nor do animals tame or wild feed on the grass.
At Thebes within the circuit of the old walls were seven gates which remain to this day, and all have their own names. The gate Electris is called from Electra the sister of Cadmus, and Prœtisis from Prœtus, a native of Thebes whose date and genealogy it would be difficult to ascertain. And the gate Neiste got its name from the following circumstance; one of the chords in the lyre is called nete, and Amphion discovered this chord at this very gate. Another account is that Zethus the brother of Amphion had a son called Neis, and that this gate got its name from him. And there is the gate Crenæa, so called from a fountain. And there is the gate called Highest, so called from the temple of Highest Zeus. And the sixth gate is called Ogygia. And the seventh gate is called Homolois, this is the most recently named gate I think, (as Ogygia is the oldest-named,) and got its
name from the following circumstance. When the Thebans were beaten in battle by the Argives at Glisas, most of them fled with Laodamas the son of Eteocles, but part of them shrank from a journey to the Illyrii, and turned aside into Thessaly and occupied Homole, the most fertile and well-watered of all the Thessalian mountains. And when Thersander the son of Polynices restored them to Thebes, they called the gate by which they entered Homolois in memory of Homole. As you go from Platæa to Thebes you enter by the gate Electris, and it was here they say that Capaneus the son of Hipponous, making a most violent attack on the walls, was struck with lightning.[52]
CHAPTER IX.
Ithink this war which the Argives fought is the most memorable of all the wars which were fought between Greeks in the days of the heroes. For the war between the Eleusinians and the Athenians, as likewise that between the Thebans and the Minyæ, was terminated by one engagement, and they were soon friends again. But the Argive host came from the middle of the Peloponnese to the middle of Bœotia, and Adrastus got together allies from Arcadia and Messenia. And likewise some mercenaries came to help the Thebans from Phocis, as also the Phlegyæ from the district of the Minyæ. And in the battle that took place at Ismenius the Thebans were beaten at the first onset, and when they were routed fled to the city, and as the Peloponnesians did not know how to fight against fortifications, but attacked them with more zeal than judgment, the Thebans slew many of them from the walls, and afterwards made a sally and attacked them as they were drawn up in order of battle and killed the rest, so that the whole army was cut to pieces except Adrastus. But the battle was not without heavy loss to the Thebans, and ever since they call a victory with heavy loss to the victors a Cadmean victory.[53] And not many years afterwards those whom the Greeks call Epigoni marched against Thebes with Thersander. Their army was clearly swelled not only from Argolis, but also from Messenia and Arcadia, and from Corinth and Megara. And the Thebans were aided by their neighbours, and a sharp fight took place at Glisas, well contested on both sides. But the Thebans were beaten, and some of them fled with Laodamas, and the rest were reduced after a blockade. The epic poem called the Thebais has reference to this war. Callinus who mentions that poem says that it was written by Homer, and his view is held by several respectable authorities. But I think it is of a later date than the Iliad and Odyssey. But let this account suffice for the war between the Argives and the Thebans about the sons of Œdipus.
[52] See Æschylus, Septem contra Thebas, 423 sq.
[53] See Erasmi Adagia
CHAPTER X.
Not far from the gates is a large sepulchre to all those who fell in battle against Alexander and the Macedonians. And at no great distance they show the place where they say, believe it who will, that Cadmus sowed the teeth of the dragon that he slew by the well, and that the ground produced a crop of armed men from these teeth.
And there is a hill sacred to Apollo on the right of the gates, the hill and the god and the river that flows by are all called Ismenius. At the approach to the temple are statues of Athene and Hermes in stone, called gods of the Vestibule, Hermes by Phidias and Athene by Scopas, and next comes the temple itself. And the statue of Apollo in it is in size and appearance very like the one at Branchidæ. Whoever has seen one of these statues and learnt the statuary’s name will not need much sagacity, if he sees the other, to know that it is by Canachus. But they differ in one respect, the one at Branchidæ being in bronze, the Ismenian in cedarwood. There is here also the stone on which they say Manto the daughter of Tiresias sate. It is near the entrance, and its name even to this day is Manto’s seat.
And on the right of the temple are two stone statues, one they say of Henioche the other of Pyrrha, both daughters of Creon, who ruled as guardian of Laodamas the son of Eteocles. And still at Thebes I know they choose annually a lad of good family, good looking and strong, as priest to Ismenian Apollo: his title is laurel-bearer, because these lads wear crowns of laurel-leaves. I do not know whether all who wear these laurel crowns must dedicate to the god a brazen tripod, and I don’t think that can be the usage, for I did not see many tripods so offered. But the wealthiest lads certainly do offer these tripods. Especially notable for age and the celebrity of the person who gave it is that given by Amphitryon, Hercules wearing the laurel crown.
Somewhat higher than the temple of Apollo Ismenius you will see the spring which is they say sacred to Ares, who placed a dragon there to guard it. Near it is the tomb of Caanthus, who was they say the brother of Melia and the son of Oceanus, and was sent by his father
to seek for his sister who had been carried off. But when he found Apollo with Melia he could not take her away, so he dared to set the grove of Ismenian Apollo on fire, and the god transfixed him with an arrow, so the Thebans say, and here is his tomb. And they say Melia bare Apollo two sons Tenerus and Ismenius, to Tenerus Apollo gave the power of divination, and Ismenius gave his name to the river. Not that it was without a name before, if indeed it was called Ladon before the birth of Apollo’s son Ismenius.
CHAPTER XI.
On the left of the gate called Electris are the ruins of the house where they say Amphitryon dwelt, when he fled from Tiryns owing to the death of Electryon. And among the ruins is to be seen the bridal-bed of Alcmena, which was made they say for Amphitryon by Trophonius and Agamedes, as the inscription states,
“When Amphitryon was going to marry Alcmena, he contrived this bridal-bed for himself, and Anchasian Trophonius and Agamedes made it.”
This is the inscription which the Thebans say is written here: and they also show the monument of the sons of Hercules by Megara, giving a very similar account about their death to that which Stesichorus of Himera and Panyasis have written in their poems. But the Thebans add that Hercules in his madness wished also to kill Amphitryon, but sleep came upon him in consequence of a blow from a stone, and they say Athene threw the stone, which they call Composer. There too are some statues of women on a figure, rather indistinct from age, the Thebans call them Sorceresses, and say that they were sent by Hera to prevent Alcmena from childbirth. Accordingly they tried to do so, but Historis the daughter of Tiresias played a trick on them, she cried out in their hearing, and they thought Alcmena had just given birth to a child, so they went away deceived, and then they say Alcmena bare a boy.
Here too is a temple of Hercules called Champion, his statue is of white stone by Xenocritus and Eubius, both Thebans: the old wooden statue the Thebans think is by Dædalus and I think so too. He made it, so the story goes, in return for an act of kindness. For when he fled from Crete the boats he made were not large enough both for himself and Icarus his son, and he also employed sails, an invention not known in his day, that he might get the advantage of the boats of Minos (which were only rowed) by availing himself of a favourable wind, and he got off safe, but Icarus steering his boat rather awkwardly it upset they say, and he was drowned, and his
dead body carried by the waves to an island beyond Samos which then had no name. And Hercules found and recognised the corpse, and buried it, where now is a mound of no great size, by the promontory that juts out into the Ægean Sea. And the island and the sea near it got their names from Icarus. And on the gables Praxiteles has carved most of the 12 Labours of Hercules, all in short but the killing of the Stymphelian birds, and the cleansing of the country of Elis, and instead of these is a representation of the wrestling with Antæus. And when Thrasybulus the son of Lycus and the Athenians with him put down the Thirty Tyrants, (they had started from Thebes on their return from exile), they offered to this temple of Hercules colossal statues of Athene and Hercules in Pentelican marble, by Alcamenes.
Near the temple of Hercules are a gymnasium and racecourse both called after the god. And beyond the stone Composer is an altar of Apollo Spodius, made of the ashes of the victims. There is divination there by omens, which kind of divination I know the people of Smyrna use more than all the other Greeks, for they have outside their walls beyond the city a Temple of Omens.
CHAPTER XII.
The Thebans used of old to sacrifice bulls to Apollo Spodius: but on one occasion during the festival when the time for the sacrifice drew nigh, and those who had been sent for the bull did not come with it, they sacrificed to the god one of the oxen in a waggon that chanced to be near, and since that time they have sacrificed oxen employed in labour. They also tell this tradition, that Cadmus when travelling from Delphi to Phocis was guided on his journey by a cow which he had purchased from the herds of Pelagon, which had on each side a white mark like the orb of the moon at the full. Cadmus and all the army with him were according to the oracle to make their home where the cow should lie down tired. This spot they show. There in the open air is an altar and statue of Athene, erected they say by Cadmus. To those who think that Cadmus came to Thebes from Egypt and not from Phœnicia this name of Athene affords refutation: for she is called Onga which is a Phœnician word, and not by the Egyptian name Sais. And the Thebans say that the house of Cadmus was originally in that part of the citadel where the market-place now is: and they shew the ruins of the bridal chambers of Harmonia and Semele, this last they do not allow men to enter even to this day. And those Greeks who believe that the Muses sang at the marriage of Harmonia say that this spot in the market-place is where they sang. There is also a tradition that together with the lightning that struck the bridal-chamber of Semele fell a piece of wood from heaven: and Polydorus they say adorned this piece of wood with brass, and called it Dionysus Cadmus. And very near is the statue of Dionysus, made by Onasimedes of brass throughout, the altar was made by the sons of Praxiteles.
There is also the statue of Pronomus, a man most attractive as a flute-player. For a long time flute-players had only three kinds of flutes, for some played in the Dorian measure, and other flutes were adapted to the Phrygian and Lydian measures. And Pronomus was the first who saw that flutes were fit for every kind of measure, and was the first to play different measures on the same flute It is said
also that by the appearance of his features and the motion of all his body he gave wonderful pleasure in the theatre, and a processional song of his is extant for the dwellers at Chalcis near the Euripus who came to Delos. To him and to Epaminondas the son of Polymnis the Thebans erected statues here.
CHAPTER XIII.
Epaminondas was of illustrious descent, but his father was very poor even for an average Theban, and he learnt very carefully the national education, and when he was quite a stripling went to school to Lysis the Tarentine, who had been a pupil of Pythagoras of Samos. And, when the Lacedæmonians were at war with the Mantineans, Epaminondas is said to have been sent amongst others from Thebes to aid the Lacedæmonians. And when Pelopidas was wounded in the battle, he ran great risks to bring him out of it safe. And afterwards when Epaminondas went on an embassy to Sparta, when the Lacedæmonians agreed to ratify with the Greeks the peace known as the peace of Antalcidas, and Agesilaus asked him if the Thebans would allow the various towns in Bœotia to subscribe to the peace separately, “Not,” he answered, “O Spartans, until we see your neighbouring towns setting us the example.” And when war at last broke out between the Lacedæmonians and the Thebans, and the Lacedæmonians attacked the Thebans with their own forces and those of their allies, Epaminondas with part of his army stationed himself near the marsh Cephisis, as the Peloponnesians were going to make their attack in that quarter, but Cleombrotus the king of the Lacedæmonians turned aside to Ambrosus in Phocis, and after slaying Chæreas, who had been ordered to guard the by-roads, and the men who were with him, passed by and got to Leuctra in Bœotia. There Cleombrotus and the Lacedæmonians generally had portents from the gods. The Spartan kings when they went out to war used to be accompanied by flocks of sheep, to sacrifice to the gods and to give them good omens before battles. These flocks were led by a particular kind of goat that the shepherds called catoiades. And on this occasion some wolves attacked the flocks but did no harm to the sheep, only slew the goats. Vengeance is said to have come upon the Lacedæmonians in consequence of the daughters of Scedasus. Scedasus lived at Leuctra and had two daughters Molpia and Hippo. They were very beautiful and two Lacedæmonians, Phrurarchidas and Parthenius, iniquitously violated them, and they forthwith hung
