http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1376652,00.html
Feuds? I've had a few
He's a Jew who is a close friend of Albert Speer's son; he's had blazing
rows with Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind; he's used to having bitter
arguments with his clients. And his new Holocaust memorial in Berlin has
added to his controversial reputation, as he tells Deyan Sudjic
Sunday December 19, 2004
The Observer
Berlin, it used to be said, is the city that, in the rush to rebuild
itself after the wall came down, hired the world's best architects, but
then did its best to make sure that they built their worst buildings
there. Peter Eisenman, who was in the city last week to lower the last
of the 2,751 charcoal grey concrete monoliths that constitute Germany's
largest memorial to the Holocaust into position, certainly had his
problems. But despite everything, his design, spreading over nearly five
acres of central Berlin, promises to be one of Europe's most
extraordinary pieces of architecture. A spectacle that defies the
spectacular.
The Field, as Eisenman calls the project, is just south of the
Brandenburg Gate. His columns are arranged in rank upon rank of
cemetery-straight rows. But they vary in stature, undulating up and
down, from the height of a flower just a few inches tall, to that of a
full-grown 15ft tree.
With a shock of white hair that makes him look like Steve Martin, and a
New Jersey rasp that suggests Donald Rumsfeld, Eisenman energetically
resists any literal interpretations of the huge structure. 'Any
representation of the Holocaust is bound to be less than the enormity of
what happened, and so become kitsch, sentimental and hollow,' he told
one interviewer. 'The space isn't a graveyard. I didn't want any names;
it should be absent of meaning.'
If Eisenman is evoking anything with the project, it is the experience
that he had walking into an Iowa cornfield many years ago. 'I walked 100
yards in and couldn't see my way out. That moment was very scary. There
are moments in time when you feel lost in space. I was trying to create
the possibility of that experience, that frisson, something that you
don't forget.'
Building the monument has been a predictably traumatic process, one
which began back in 1998 when Richard Serra, who had worked on the
original competition entry for the memorial with Eisenman, pulled out
citing personal and professional reasons. The design was scaled down to
meet the objections of those Berlin politicians who thought that this
'wreath-dumping ground' as Michael Naumann, the culture minister at the
time put it, was simply too imposing for such a prominent site. It
survived bitter complaints from another competitor, Daniel Libeskind,
once a protege of Eisenman's, now a bitter enemy, that the design owed
more than was good for it to an idea of Libeskind's.
It endured the controversies over a fundraising campaign that seemed to
suggest that all Germans were Holocaust-deniers. And it went through a
six-month hiatus when the firm supplying the coating to protect the
concrete from graffiti was discovered to have once had a subsidiary that
manufactured Zyklon B for concentration camps. It even managed to
survive a backfiring attempt at jocularity by Eisenman, who pointed out
that the same supplier also manufactured his gold fillings. 'My dentist
told me where they came from and asked me if I wanted him to take them
out,' he told the committee in charge of building the monument. The
former president of the Berlin Jewish community stormed out, calling for
Eisenman, who is Jewish, to resign.
On a site close to what was once the garden of Hitler's chancellery,
it's not easy to make jokes about architecture. This was where Albert
Speer had his office and where he used to bring the Führer late at night
to gloat over the 100ft-long model of the new Berlin that they wanted to
build together. Extraordinarily, Eisenman calls himself a close friend
of Albert Speer the younger. Like his father, Speer is an architect; he
worked with Eisenman on an unsuccessful bid to design an Olympic stadium
for Leipzig. Is there anything a little strange about the idea of the
designer of the Holocaust memorial working with the son of Hitler's
architect?
'With Albert, there is a bit of an edge, but we are great friends. It's
the fascination of the other; Albert always wanted to be a Jewish
intellectual, and I always wanted to be a f...' He trails away without
finishing the word fascist. 'We can't all be what we want to be.'
There is no doubt that Eisenman does have a bit of a thing about
fascism. After 30 years of work, he has finally published his book on
Giuseppe Terragni, the Italian blackshirt architect who fought for
Mussolini on the Eastern Front, and whose greatest work was the fascist
party headquarters in Como, which has hypnotised him ever since he first
saw it. Eisenman's client for his biggest project, in Santiago de
Compostela, is Manuel Fraga, an octogenarian political godfather who was
once a minister for Franco. Not that Eisenman is an authoritarian
himself. Quite the contrary; he has always presented his work as
radical, even oppositional.
His other preoccupation, besides his all-consuming passion for American
football, is with numbers. His submission for the Ground Zero
competition took the form of a cluster of towers, each 1,111 feet high.
He got married on 11 November. And there was one report that the
Holocaust memorial was going to end up with 2,711 slabs.
After a lifetime presenting architecture as an intellectual challenge,
rather than a physical, material one, Eisenman, at 72, has finally,
perhaps even reluctantly, turned into a public figure. At the Venice
architecture biennale this summer, he collected the golden lion for
lifetime achievement. In person, he switches between machine gun-speed
bonhomie, gossip and an impenetrable architectural discourse that makes
Rumsfeld, even in his 'there are no known unknowns' mode, sound like a
model of lucidity. Eisenman's disembodied voice cuts through the
exhibition spaces in Vienna. 'Presence is a secondary condition,' he
suggests, 'a trace of another condition, a writing which is not written
to reinforce meaning.'
This dichotomy between the affable, anything but opaque, private
Eisenman and the public figure is a feature that no doubt kept his pair
of psychoanalysts busy all through the 1980s, one of them on the phone
from California, the other face to face in New York. The first time I
met him, he told me about the time he had to leave Cambridge in a hurry
after collecting his PhD, something to do with an angry don and a
shotgun, apparently.
It was not exactly what I was expecting from a man with a formidable
reputation as an architectural intellectual. But Eisenman is a man who
has made a career out of defying expectations. More than anybody, he is
responsible for the architectural obsession with mathematical phenomena
and with the attempt to make linguistic theory applicable to the design
of buildings.
All of these obsessions, and many more, are hinted at in the
extraordinary installation in Vienna, which is more like a work of
architecture in its own right than a conventional exhibition. Eisenman
has taken over a huge 19th-century exhibition hall, 30 feet high, and
made it disappear, installing a low, white, flat, false ceiling
interrupted by a grid of 30 white, room-size boxes, some open, some
closed. Trying to navigate your way around this eerie new space is as
disorienting as negotiating the Holocaust memorial, an experience that
it is clearly intended to mirror.
Each box is devoted to one aspect of Eisenman's work, with a cluster of
four of the Berlin slabs at the centre. In one box is the entire book on
Terragni, pasted on to the walls soaring unreadably overhead; in another
is a Piranesi engraving, one of his other heroes; in another, a series
of explorations of the proportions and the occult geometry of Palladio's
villas. There are fragments of the Compostela project, a plan for a
railway station in Naples and an ethnographic museum in Paris that looks
like a melting Eiffel Tower on its side.
According to Eisenman, the exhibition, with its carefully concealed
exhibits that only reveal themselves gradually, is intended to strike a
blow for content. 'It's against the spectacular,' he says. For him: 'The
age of the spectacular ended with 9/11. We are in a time of terror,
protection and enclosure.'
In the end, though, he concedes: 'The exhibition is like a big diagram
of what's inside Peter Eisenman's head.' There is an Eisenman designed
T-shirt on sale in the museum shop; 'I am not difficult, architecture
is', it announces in discreetly modest type. Frank Gehry, who last year
found himself in receipt of a letter signed by Eisenman that began:
'Dear Frank, We think you are a prick', is unlikely to agree. The letter
was the product of Gehry complaining about the insulting fees being
offered to participants in the Ground Zero competition.
Nor would Eisenman's first clients, the now divorced academic couple for
whom he built a house at Princeton. Florence and Richard Falk met
Eisenman at a cocktail party and they talked about a Chomskyesque house.
'I don't know what it meant, but it sounded good,' Richard Falk told the
New York Times. What it turned out to be was a house with leaky
skylights and a complete lack of acoustic privacy that went way over
budget. 'Peter misled me somewhat deliberately about the economics,'
Falk said. Eisenman replied angrily: 'I don't design houses with the
nuclear family idea, because I don't believe in it as a concept. I was
interested in doing architecture, not in solving the Falks privacy
problems.'
But Eisenman is quick to reject the idea that his abstractions, and his
search for hidden allusion and meaning in architecture, make him a
hermetic artist, remote from the demands of practice and people. 'I
cannot do sculpture, I am an architect, so the show talks about things
that an architect uses - floors and walls and ceilings.' It's not a view
that is universally shared.
The Wexner Centre for the Arts in Ohio, Eisenman's first substantial
cultural building completed in 1989, is closed for a $10 million
rebuilding whose chief purpose is to make a practical place in which to
show art, free from the risk of water dripping down the walls and
blinding sunshine fading the paintings. According to the director, some
of her trustees got so impatient with Eisenman that she had to plead
with them not to demolish the building and start again.
Eisenman's role as an intellectual force in contemporary architecture is
secure. The verdict on his buildings will very much depend on the way
the Compostela project, a huge cultural complex, including an opera
house, and library, turns out. He is quick to deny the persistent
stories that he has lost control of the building process.
'It's going great; the first building opens in May. It's beautiful. We
have a new contract to supervise the project, with two people in Spain
working on the colours and the furniture. Anything else is scuttlebutt.
You must have been talking to Danny Libeskind too much.'