5. EXCAVATION SITES 31

PART 2

6. A STUDY OF PETER EISENMAN’S ARTIFICIAL EXCAVATION

As evident in the project of ‘Artificial Excavation of Edinburgh’, the works of Peter Eisenman has heavily influenced the design and the methodology for excavating the city. Although through the thesis, the project has deviated significantly from Peter Eisenman and his concept of ‘excavation’ through an archaeological turn, many of his projects such as the Cannaregio (1978), Berlin (1980), Long Beach (1986) and Chora L (1985- 86) were notable in providing the necessary foundation for my concept of ‘Artificial Excavation’.

As Eisenman, my project also sees history as a tool for enquiry and grounding the project in reality. In a conversation with Alan Balfour and Jean-François Bédard, Eisenman was asked about this need for history in his project of Berlin where he clarifies this concept of history.

He explains,

‘It is a way to legitimate the project...[However even] to this day, I am still inventing stories about these projects because I am so fearful of any personal expressionism, let us say of the hand of the author.’30

Thus even in my project, history and cartographical mapping therefore becomes a tool for manufacturing new urban design paradigm where history interprets the figurations such as the ruins of the Flodden Wall or the King’s Wall which are discovered on the excavation sites. As Eisenman, my work looks to move away from any of my personal authoritarianism and neutralises my hand in the design.31 Hence, I just become an author who records history through time and interprets them through texts and diagrams as Piranesi does in his experimental project of Campo Marzio in Rome.

The following sections evaluates briefly each ofthe projects by Peter Eisenman and why his projects were incompatible with my concept of excavation.

30 Jean-Francois Bedard and Alan Balfour et. al., in ‘Conversation with Peter Eisenman’, in Cities of Artificial Excavation. p. 122.

31 Ibid. p. 124.

6. A STUDY OF PETER EISENMAN’S ARTIFICIAL EXCAVATION

6.1. CANNAREGIO, VENICE: 1978

Before the project at Cannaregio, Eisenman’s study focused solely on an architectural body in itself without a site or a context. The early houses of Eisenman’s explorations focused on the string of a larger thought process through a series of transformational diagrams where each of the previous diagram functioned as the foundation for the new one. Thus it was evident that it was only in Cannaregio project where these houses were finally grounded onto a real site and a real context.32

The project of Cannaregio follows a literal study of the site through three texts representing the past, present and the future.

Peter Eisenman describes these three texts as:

‘Three prevailing “isms” of architecture [that] involve nostalgia, a malaise involving memory – modernism, a nostalgia for the future; postmodernism, a nostalgia for the past; and contextualism, a nostalgia for the present.’ 33

The concept of excavation and hidden memories in this project is utilised through a simple idea of a cut in the ground. The diagonal cut thus exposes these memories of the past onto the present city. The representation of the diagrams also speak a hidden memory of the past where the gold represents the represents the gold of Venice as well as the mysticism of the alchemist Giordano Bruno who was martyred and the Venetian red represents his death and martyrdom: a hidden memory of the city of Venice is embraced in the idea of excavating the past.36

The project at Cannaregio is the first project where the concept of ground and excavation was used. The ground became a vessel for the architecture along with the memories of the past and the future. The thesis follows a similar notion of textualisation of the concept of past, present, and future where the ground is seen containing memories of the past which are excavated in the present city of Edinburgh and the architecture is visualised as the object of the future city.

The memory of the future involves modernism, the superimposition of the artificial grid of Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital which was never constructed recognises this era of modernism which challenges the irregular context of Venice as an ‘Emptiness of the Future’ where Eisenman establishes the grid as the potential sites for his houses in the near future34 (see Fig. 20- 21). The houses on the other hand represent the present through contextualism where the objects though lifeless blocks serve as a contextual object located in existing site of Cannaregio. However, the scales of the objects differ from one another: where one was too small to be considered to be an inhabitable place (maybe a model of the house?), one was maybe of the size of a house with the smaller object (the model, perhaps?) incorporated in this body which might change the language of the object itself from a house to maybe a museum and one too large to be considered a house incorporated both the model and the house itself (see Fig. 22). The interchangeable scale throughout the project makes it difficult to predict the real scale of the object creating an artificial sense of the blocks itself with its architectural language and functionality of the objects changing at every point.35 It eliminates the relationship of the context and human proportion to the architecture as it can be seen in his drawings of the houses which appear to be abstract and disproportional to a human scale and literally uninhabitable which challenges the concept of reality in his project.

32 Jean-Francois Bedard and Alan Balfour et. al., in ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity in Peter Eisenman’, in Cities of Artificial Excavation. p. 32.

33 Jean-Francois Bedard and Alan Balfour et. al., in ‘Cannaregio’, in Cities of Artificial Excavation. p. 47.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid. p. 47- 48. 36 Ibid. p. 48- 50.

21 |Office of Peter Eisenman, Architect, Presentation drawing: site plan, 1978. Pen and black ink with transparent coloured adhesive film on acetate over beige Pantone paper, 99.7 x 99.7 cm.

6. A STUDY OF PETER EISENMAN’S ARTIFICIAL EXCAVATION

6.2. IBA SOCIAL HOUSING, BERLIN: 1980

Eisenman for his Berlin project studied the transformation of Friedrichstadt from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as patterns of urban topographies to the total destruction of the district during the war where the three buildings on the site were the only surviving artifact of the past. The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 severed the city from its past breaking it into two different realities and freezing the history of the city as a void of absence filled with memory into the new presence of the Wall.37

Thus, Berlin was the first project where the site was archaeologically excavated. But what differentiates the excavation to be determined as ‘artificial’ is the application of the Mercator grid which does not belong to the memory of the site and act as a tool for the excavation. As the grid mines deeper into the memory of the site, historical traces of the eighteenth-century walls and the foundation stones dating back to the nineteenth century are discovered. These walls and the foundation stones although are not real archaeological artifacts, they are reconstructed artificially to symbolise the history of the site.38 Eisenman amalgamates the memory of the recent history of the Berlin Wall with the project by destabilising the ground and artificially raising the ground to new level by matching the height of the Mercator grid to 3.3 metres that is equivalent to the height of the Berlin Wall and tilting the new datum of Mercator walls to 3.3 degrees in relation to its height. The Mercator Walls thereby became the new artificial ground rendering the history of the city and its memories in an inaccessible void visible below as the ruins of the old city of Berlin in association with the contemporary city which is acknowledged by the modern-day world through the decks of the Mercator grid39 (see FIg. 23- 24).

In Berlin, Eisenman explores the concept of history and memory archaeologically which was absent in his earlier project of Cannaregio where the excavation was only introduced to ground the architecture on the site. The ground in Berlin however, is visualised to hold the archaeological artifacts belonging to a different milieu which are resurfaced by the superimposition of the Mercator grid. The project is narrated by history and not Eisenman where he just plays the role of an archaeologist who records the discoveries found in the ground. Although the artifacts in the ground are artificially constructed by Eisenman, they give a sense of reality ssociated with the site and its context (Berlin Wall).

The thesis explores this concept in excavating archaeologically for artifacts of the past but uses the real historical traces to discover them. The excavation of time in Edinburgh is based on real artifacts which may include foundation walls, soil, and rocks rather than artificially reconstructed objects as seen in the Berlin project.

23 |Office of Peter Eisenman, Architect, Conceptual diagrams, 1980. Transparent coloured adhesive film on photostat, 46.2 x 36.0 cm and 46.6 x 37.3 cm.

37 Jean-Francois Bedard and Alan Balfour et. al., in ‘Berlin’, in Cities of Artificial Excavation. p. 74.

38 Ibid. p. 75- 76.

39 Ibid. p. 78- 80.

6. A STUDY OF PETER EISENMAN’S ARTIFICIAL EXCAVATION

6.3. UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM, LONG BEACH: 1986

The University Art Museum at Long Beach challenges the old design processes and the functionality of an architecture. Eisenman in the project queries the role of architecture itself as a ‘shelter’ and tries to revisualize the programme, and the function of the architecture as an invention in ‘fiction’ which investigates the building’s own history through design. The vision for the project was to imagine what the site might look like a hundred years after the university campus was formed and two hundred years following the settlement of the state of California itself. The theory was to envision the excavation of the building through time as a ruin of the historical memories buried in the ground as palimpsest of surfaces. As one might rediscover the Art Museum in 2049, he might learn about the memories of the old civilisation and the city through the artifacts discovered in the ground40 (see Fig. 25- 27).

The excavation generates a narrative of architecture’s own history where the architecture represents an archive of a lost civilisation rediscovered in the future through traces and memories of surfaces as how ‘sometimes stone bears the mark of a riverbed, sometimes the outlines of county lines, sometimes the mark of writing.’41

As Berlin, history narrates this project at Long Beach. While in the Berlin project Eisenman used archaeology to excavate the city’s past, here the site’s future narrates the story of the present and the past where the programme of the architecture is to investigate its own history.

The idea of visualising the site as a ruin buried under a new ground in 2049 holding these memories creates a sense of an archaeological narrative. A similar concept is employed in the project of ‘Artificial Excavation of Edinburgh’ where the city and even this archive is visualised to be rediscovered in the year 2050 through an archaeological excavation of the city’s past ground and the new vegetal world.

40 Jean-Francois Bedard and Alan Balfour et. al., in ‘Long Beach’, in Cities of Artificial Excavation. p. 131- 132.

41 Ibid. p. 132. 25 |Office of Peter Eisenman/ Robertson Architects, Photometric survey of the California State University at Long Beach Campus, September 11, 1985.

26 |Office of Peter Eisenman/ Robertson Architects, Presentation model: upper level plan relief, phase 4, between June 2 and August 5, 1986. Transparent coloured adhesive film and gold paint on the white museum board, 80.0 x 75.5 cm

6. A STUDY OF PETER EISENMAN’S ARTIFICIAL EXCAVATION

6.4. CHORA L WORKS, PARC DE LA VILLETTE, PARIS: 1985- 1986

Parc de la Villette planned by Bernard Tschumi challenged the traditional design concepts as Eisenman does in his project by visualising the park as a site of continuous rediscovery where the natural and the artificial exists in association with one another rather than designing the park through a traditional landscapeoriented concept. The project encourages explorations and interactions with the architectural follies –red steel framed structures acting as a point of reference for explorations in the park with an informal programme permitting the user to interpret the functionality of the object as per their requirements42 (see Fig. 28).

The garden designed by Peter Eisenman in collaboration with Jacques Derrida in the Parc de la Villette attempts to disrupt the time and place with a similar comparison of Cannaregio in Venice. The elements of memory on the site which consists of city walls, a slaughterhouse, and the follies designed by Tschumi which can also be found in Eisenman’s Cannaregio project. In order to dislocate time and place and excavate these memories on the site, the garden is superimposed with Eisenman’s project in Cannaregio and scaled to the site boundary, thereby disturbing the site with another site43 (see Fig. 29).

The ground is stratified with these layers of past, present, and future from both the sites as a park of stone and water with no vegetation following the conceptual idea of a 21st century park which confronts the traditional design concept of a heavily landscaped garden.

The concept of Tschumi’s 21st century park through the design of the architectural follies bears a similar resemblance to Eisenman’s el structures. However, the follies have a scale and proportion associated with it. It can be interpreted as an habitable space. Tschumi uses these objects as a point of reference in the large park with an open-end functionality which changes as per the user, for instance, the folly can be a cafe or an information centre or even just a viewing deck with no furniture. The concept of disjunction in architectural design allows the space to be flexible in its programme. The networks of architectural agencies in the city of Edinburgh are designed through a simar concept where the agencies lack a properly framed function attached to it. The reason to disjunct architecture in the thesis was to assume that the architecture belonged to the future and is yet to be constructed by the future city and hence thhe concept of architecture cannot be defined in this current present.

The concept of follies allowed my thesis to have a visualisation set in the future year of 2050 where the architecture becomes the catalyst for the excavation of the city.

42 Eduardo Souza, AD Classics: Parc de la Villette/ Bernard Tschumi Architects. ArchDaily, January 09, 2011. Accessed on July 31, 2021. https://www.archdaily.com/92321/ad-classics-parc-de-la-villette-bernardtschumi

43 Jean-Francois Bedard and Alan Balfour et. al., in ‘La Villette’, in Cities of Artificial Excavation. p. 187- 188. 28 |Bernard Tschumi, Grid of follies superimposed on the Parc de la Villette site and the Canal de la Villette, Paris, 1983.