The Ineffable and the Knowable: A Design Theory on the Double Unknown Side of the Architectural Project

Abstract

Here, I simply take "classical" relative to "classicism," although Eisenman split both terms, as well as from "classic." Peter Eisenman, "The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End," Perspecta 21 (1984): 156, footnote #2. 8 Peter Eisenman draws this transition as follows: "[The architect Jean-Nicolas-Louis] Durand embodies this moment of the supreme authority of reason. In his treatises, formal orders become type forms, and natural and divine origins are replaced by rational solutions to the problems of accommodation and construction." Eisenman, "The End of the Classical," 160. For Helio Piñón, the classical type in architecture is a "normative authority [...] a conventional entity, with social and historical validity," that propels a determination for mimesis. Piñón, Teoría Del Proyecto, 2006, 22, [author's translation]. 9 As Eisenman writes on the classical: "The perspective of the end thus directed the strategy for beginning.Therefore, as Alberti first defined it in Della Pittura, composition was not an open-ended or neutral process of transformation, but rather a strategy for arriving at a predetermined goal." Eisenman, "The End of the Classical," 159. 10 About the former, Eisenman claims that the nature of modernist thought entails "a displacement of the man away from the center of his world. […] Objects are seen as ideas independent of man." Eisenman, Eisenman Inside Out, 84. 11 Its extreme moment can be found in mid-twentieth century in North America with the High Modernist art critics Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried leading the scene. In architecture, it is Eisenman who pushed modernism from a formalist perspective.