Eisenman Architects

Todd Gannon

The basic form of the American sports stadium has not changed much in the last century. But in an unexpected and controversial act of daring, the Arizona Cardinals football team selected awarding-winning architect and intellectual provocateur Peter Eisenman to design their stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Opened in the summer of 2006, Eisenman's latest work rejects all traditional and staid notions of the sports stadium. Inspired by and sectioned like a barrel cactus, its shell is composed of huge, steel paraboloid sections. The domed stadium boasts a steel-and-fabric retractable roof that allows lightto penetrate when closed while maintaining an airy feel inside. The most ground-breaking feature of the design is its grass roll-out field, which remains outside the stadium until game time, when it is rolled in on steel wheel sets powered by small electric motors. Eisenman Architects, the eighth volume in the Source Books in Architecture series, provides a comprehensive look at a contemporary masterpiece and a landmark of excellence in civic and sports architecture.

Home Field Advantage - 8 University of Phoenix Stadiam Source Books in Architecture

Peter Eisenman

Kurt Walter Forster

Luis Fernández-Galiano

Peter Eisenman's competition-winning project for the City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, is a formidable battery of museums, libraries, and auditoriums, a cultural acropolis atop a spectacular hillside site in northeastern Spain. By excavating the hilltop and arranging six buildings as a kind of artificial topography, Eisenman creates a new warped landscape that seems to merge building and ground, that occupies the hilltop without seeming to have been built upon it. In CODEX, the New York-based Eisenman, known for a career of formal investigations, reveals in essays and illustrations his theory of coding as a device for producing form. Through more than three hundred line drawings and perspectives, the development of the code--and the buildings and landscape it informs--becomes apparent, culminating in a giant earthwork as excavation of the site begins.

The City of Culture of Galicia

Code X

Stephen Dobney

It is difficult to say which is the more impressive career accomplishment: to have generated an endlessly renewed trail of agitative hypotheses over a 30-year period, or to have eschewed nearly all the comforts of consolidation - and the inevitable complacencies - afforded by conventional, repeatable "successes" such as the production of "great" buildings or the development of a signature style. In both these respects, Peter Eisenman differs not only from other architechts of his own generation, but from nearly all other architects working today. When Eisenman's work began in the early sixties, it was, and remains to this day, a primarily tactical enterprise: its force from the outset was drafted from that of the enemy - classicism - but was also turned aggressively against it... Eisenman's task has been to develop a practice that, to borrow an expression from Foucault and Nietzsche, would come from outside... There is not now, nor has there ever been, a fixable Eisenmanian alternative architecture; tactical space after all is made up of a series of seized "occasions," so that the momentary triumphs that punctuate its unfolding campaign are never - indeed cannot be - stored. Eisenman's practice is assembled and articulated in movement and in the spirit of movement; it operates through invasion, disruption, and the release of temporarily trapped forces into free motion and recombination.

Eisenman Architects

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