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page167from Building Ideas
at New Harmony and the High Museum in
Atlanta. While these later works dealt with movement and the idea of the “architectural
promenade” they held back from a truly rigorous engagement with the disciplines
of syntactic structures. Eisenman, on the other hand, makes explicit use of
these ideas, such as in the complex formal systems and transformations in “House
VI”. The basic principle in Eisenman’s work is similar to that seen with
Hertzberger, where the meaning of the form is initially somewhat arbitrary, but
while in Hertzberger’s case significance arises out of use-patterns, in
Eisenman’s work it is even more elusive. Where “meaning follows function” in
Hertzberger’s buildings, “function follows form” with Eisenman. As he writes of
it himself in describing “House I” in the essay included in the book Fiver
Architects: House I posits one alternative to existing conceptions of spatial organization. Here there was an attempt, first, to find ways in which form and space could be structured so that they produce a set of formal relationships which is the result of the inherent logic of the forms themselves, and, second, to control precisely the logical relationships of those forms.24
He
goes on to discuss the distinction in architecture between the real structure
of the building and the implied structure of form – the latter providing a
potentially “deep-structural” system which he claims might provide new
potential to receive meanings.
Throughout
these early projects he considers architecture an autonomous discipline and
explores the code by which forms are combined. This syntax then generates a
series of transformations which forms a system of compositional principles. As
one critic wrote in describing this process:
Eisenman’s
early work thus incorporates two standard structuralist principles: the
bracketing off of the context both physical and historical,
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