Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques

Rating:
Summary: give me shelter
Review: A complete waste of money. I bought this book because I loved the buildings in it and all i got was some photo-shopped nonsense by a fool. You can't even really get a good look at the buildings, since that doesn't forward Eisenman's theories. I'll never again buy anything with Eisenman's name on it. The book took forty years because he has nothing interesting to say and his ego only just got big enough to publish those nothings. Seriously, the book offers no new understanding of these buildings, it just makes you wish architects studied construction and not theory. You can't live in a theory.

Rating:
Summary: Opera Buffa
Review: Eisenman dissects the Casa Del Fascio as a pathologist would examine a corpse. In simplistic diagrams the building's parts are duly chronicled in uninspired prose. One is left with the impression that he has examined a piece of graph paper with coordinates and alignments. That the building represented human endeavor, or embodied cultural aspirations seems lost on Eisenman in this humdrum attempt at scholarship.

Knowing the nihilistic, anti-human qualities of Eisenman's superficial approach to design, and the ever-mutable "logic" in his work, this is no surprise. He lacks any intuitive understanding of space or scale and a lifetime of pretentious writing has not equipped him for the serious task at hand. Ever since Eisenman indulged himself placing columns in the middle of a client's dining table, he has gotten away with his preposterous intellectual gimmickry, passing it off as "challenging", the stock-in-trade excuse for ridiculous and contrived design. [Interestingly, when it came to his own apartment, Eisenman handed off the work to another firm who produced a fairly cozy design. This hypocrisy shows a lack of sincerity in his unrefined speculations, and no thinking person should ever take Eisenman seriously again.]

This lowbrow rhetoric has served as a handy tool for the mediocre academic whose primary audience is susceptible students. But Eisenman's shaky credibility is rapidly and thankfully waning, the result of absurd quasi-intellectual hypotheses which produced crude buildings, no single one of which has achieved enduring respect. Revisionist histories already marginalize him as a sideshow huckster, an irritating distraction from more meaningful debates developing elsewhere. Worried about this legacy, and trying to curtail a widening flow of criticism about his crumbling oeuvre, the Terragni book supposedly was his pitch to more lasting fame. But this bumbling attempt at scholarship fails as a serious academic study more rapidly than his buildings failed as credible works of architecture.

Eisenman never understood the crucial difference between diagrams and buildings. This lethargic and unperceptive book offers tedious quantities of them in lieu of keenly observed criticism. For an exercise that occupied some 40 years of his life, there's very little to show for it. Ill equipped for incisive inquiry, he offers one-dimensional reporting. For Eisenman, the dubious theorist who's act endorsed nihilism and alienation as though they were virtues, history will probably deny this sad and foolish man a favorable mention. Reading this rather desperate attempt to reinvent himself as a historian, one is tempted to feel sorry for him looking back on a wasted career. But considering the lack of sincerity in Eisenman's work and his disregard for our shared environment, sympathy is hardly a suitable reason to bother with this inept dissertation today.


Rating:
Summary: Wasted Effort - Don't Waste Your's
Review: For a book that was 40 years in the making, it tells us little about Terragni, but a great deal about Eisenman. So much so, one wonders whether this was in fact the purpose of the book. As usual, Eisenman busies himself 'decoding' things that were never coded in the first place. Eisenman never saw a wall he wasn't willing to develop a theory about. - Often, - where none was intended by Terragni - Eisenman steps in to fill the void with his own irrational and highly subjective musings. True to form Eisenman adds a whole slew of invented words into his text. Diagrams of Eisenman's own design are selectively overlaid on photos and plans to support Eisenman's theory of the month. The usual architectural gibberish abounds. And the author grabs at any fashionable social, critical, cultural or mathematical theory available to agrandize himself (or his intellectual view of himself) and seem more intelligent than he is. In the end, he offers little or nothing (nothing useful that is) to an understanding of Terragni's work. Most interestingly, Eisenman never once documents that he finds the building beautiful. Perhaps he was so busy ratifying obscure positions, he failed to identify the underlying aesthetic ideal that Terragni surely had in mind. Thus, it is a thoroughly joyless book. One wonders how someone could spend 40 years researching a subject and fail to convey any sense of enthusiasm or delight in the Casa Del Fascio. (I read this book as part of my Master's Program researching Italian Rationalism. There are a great number of writers who have much to say about the style. Eisenman is not one of them.)

Rating:
Summary: Shallow Investigation
Review: For such a big book it is a paper-thin study. I was disappointed that Eisenman reduced the buildings in the most simplistic way to lines and platonic shapes. And the text is dull and lifeless. I would not recommend this to anyone.

Rating:
Summary: Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critique
Review: Forty years after writing his master's thesis on this Italian rationalist's two 1930s masterworks in Como-the Casa del Fascio and the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio-Eisenman has turned it into a book. Beautifully produced in the best Monacelli manner, crammed with diagrams and crisp black and white photographs, it's a beautiful object to contemplate and browse, but a very demanding read. Legendary as the first building is, fascinating though it may be to contrast it with the second, Eisenman tells us far more than any reasonable person would want to know about these two structures, and nothing at all about the architect and the factors that shaped his work. (Michael Webb is the book reviewer for LA Architect magazine.)

Rating:
Summary: Magnum Obfuscation
Review: If you absolutely have nothing better to do one day, try wading through Eisenman's prolix and heavily befogged dissection of his own crudely assembled `theoretical' positions. It is one of the failings of current architectural writing that it's authors seem compelled to make seemingly simple things unnecessarily complex. And to an intelligent reader, (i.e. one not taken in by the industry's self-laudatory stances), it is evident that few of these authors have anything worthwhile to offer real architectural or urban discourse. In the world of contemporary architectural speculation, Peter Eisenman is the weakest of the amateur-hour theorists playing word games in the quasi-philosophical sandbox. Of his many failings, the most pernicious is that he lacks the basic ability to distinguish between assumption and fact. And lacking any really systematic approach to reasoning, (quasi-Derrida one day, pseudo-Foucault the next - all, incidentally, deeply misunderstood), he takes the usual academic low road of clouding his conjectural positions in vague and deliberately impenetrable prose. Remarkably unreasonable and capricious suppositions are here presented as though a valid design methodology. Never one to be phased by a lack of substantive evidence, Eisenman merely invents a loosely-fitting diagram to substantiate his thesis. (His improbable dotted lines and diagonals may seem to suggest great import, but the careful reader will have fun spotting the many inconsistencies and contradictions in the logic that is randomly applied.) - Not to put to fine a point on it, this book is nonsense overly dressed up in obtuse semantic verbiage. There is nothing of value in this bloated and extremely tedious volume.

Rating:
Summary: Excessive & Pointless
Review: Lots of diagrams (too many) documenting various iterations of the Case del Fascio. But it gets repetitive and boring. Eisenman makes too much out of the process and almost noting out of the result. The 'critiques' are mostly predictable stuff and not at all penetrating. It's just another excuse for Eisenman to spout the usual archi-speak jargon that is wearing very thin.

Rating:
Summary: Shallow Investigation
Review: This book reduces Terragni's buildings to a series of graphic exercises in alignment and proportion. Each elevation is studied separately but there is almost no sense of the building as a whole. Totally disappointing exercise.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing Exercise in Graphics
Review: This book reduces Terragni's buildings to a series of graphic exercises in alignment and proportion. Each elevation is studied separately but there is almost no sense of the building as a whole. Totally disappointing exercise.