Ice Ice Eisenman

There's just no escaping Peter Eisenman if you want to talk about iconicity in architecture. There's pretty much no escaping Peter Eisenman no matter what you want to talk about in architecture, of course, but especially so with things iconic. Just lost myself (again) in Diagram Diaries and M Emory Games. Some quotes:

From "Diagram Diaries" (New York, Universe Publications, 1999)

"While diagrams of painting, sculpture, and architecture were often seen as similar in their content, my use of the diagram proposed that there was some critical difference between them. This difference was found in the unique relationship in architecture between its instrumentality and its iconicity, between architecture's function and its meaning, and ultimately between its sign and its signified." (pp. 49-50)

"Previously, specific forms in architecture were always linked to a function (a column must always have a shape and a material dimension) and, therefore, to a meaning. My innitial idea in the use of the diagram was that the substrate of form, here referred to as an aspect of architecture's interiority, could be detached from such programmatic concerns. This is what Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss have called the need to preserve the singularity of objects by cutting them off from their previous modes of legitimation. For architecture, this would mean a process that would displace form from its assumed necessary relationships to function, meaning, and aesthetics without at the same time necessarily denying the precense of these conditions." (pp. 50-51)

"...[Eisenman's idea of the formal] articulated both a quality of what at the time was called generic form, such as linearity - as opposed to a specific line - and the idea of a process of form suggested by a relationship of form in space, such as rotation and shear, which again had nothing to do with the actual physical character of the form but with something implied in the relationship between forms." (p. 52)

"...In any built work, while there were columns and beams - precences in the space - they were not holding anything up. These 'structural' elements asked whether it was necessary to have a functioning structure in order to be necessarily iconic (i.e., to symoblize function). Was the actual material column to be considered merely a functional element or was it also a sign? Was the unstructural or 'cardboard' column, since it was not a functioning structure, also a sign?" (pp. 57-58)

"A self-referential sign was defined in the House II diagrams as the difference between an iconic sign and an indexical sign. Traditionally, the diagram had been used as an iconic sign - one which referred outward to some metaphoric existence. Now, the diagram was seen instead as a series of indexical signs: a system of differences that had little metaphoric or iconic content, but rather could be seen as a notational system understood as different from other formal systems. These indexical signs were thought to exist in some sort of suspension from their iconic condition yet as a potential condition of interiority. It was not that these indexical signs did not also have an iconic value, but this value could coexist with their indexical quality." (p. 64)

"...Walter Benjamin's thesis that architecture is viewed by an essentially distracted observer." (p. 65)

"The need to detach the icon from the instrument in order to read architecture not merely as a language but as a singular manifestation of an interiority of difference became an important part..." (pp. 67-68)

From "M Emory Games" (in "M Emory Games: Emory Center for the Arts" (New York, Rizzoli International Publications, 1995), p.58-59

"Our work imposes a conceptual memory on the volumetric massing of an object, and in doing so attempts to subvert icons of presence, the building mass itself, with a striated network of what could be described as lines of memory. Little of the iconicity of these lines of memory comes from the traditional forms of iconicity in architecture, such as function, structure, aesthetics, or a relationship to the history of architecture itself. Rather, the iconicity of these lines comes from a writing that is indexical as opposed to iconic. An index is something that refers to its own condition. In this sense its iconic role is more one of resemblance than it is one of representation. The facade of a building, while traditionally thought to be a representation, also has the possibility to be indexical. The plan, on the other hand, while clearly indexical also has iconic characteristics. Writing attempts to suggest that both the plan and the facade can be used as indices. In order to have a writing in this context one must first make a distinction between a resemblance and a representation. A representation always refers to something external, while a resemblance also refers to internal characteristics. Representations rely on a traditional notion of memory that is linguistic and historical. A resemblance can also be understood as a simulacrum that is not based on a visual relationship. In a sense the simulacrum is a representation without resemblance or the sign of a sign. Such a condition of sign becomes an index. Thus the lines of memory act as a simulacrum rather than a representation."