Giuseppi Terragni:

Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques

By Peter Eisenman.

The Monacelli Press, 2003,
304 Pages,
ISBN 1885254962

   Peter Eisenman’s long awaited book dedicated to the work of the Italian Rationalist Architect Giuseppi Terragni is now available. If you have been eagerly waiting for another glossy magazine quality monograph that have flooded the architectural book market for last two decades, then look elsewhere. This highly autobiographical study of Terragni’s masterworks: the Casa del Fascio and the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio, in the Architect’s hometown of Como, Italy, requires the reader to pay close attention, in order to gain new insights.

“ The reading of a building need not result in a sequential, progressive, and ultimately singular narrative; instead, its meanings can be temporally complex, partial, and contingent.”
--Peter Eisenman

In his introduction, Eisenman begins with the premise that his book is as much about himself and his way of viewing architecture as it is about Terragni, Eisenman proceeds to tackle the subject with a series of two-color drawings and diagrams supporting a complex and accessible text. Complemented by archival drawings from Terragni’s studio, and slightly altered period photographs. At times difficult, the reader will be forced to stop and examine the drawings, which have been carefully and beautifully delineated by Peter Eisenman.

The book’s subtitle, Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques, serves as the structuring device for the text. The Casa del Fascio is “transformed,” the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio is “decomposed,’ and the “critiques” are essays by Terragni himself (on the Casa del Fascio, first published in 1936), and by the renowned Italian architectural historian and theorist Manfredo Tafuri (“Terragni, Subject and Mask,” first published in Oppositions in the 1980s). It is significant that Eisenman uses the term “decomposition”, a word Terragni used (in his Relazione sul Danteum, 1938), and Eisenman is in fact, decomposing the facades of the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio.

“In writing of Terragni, Eisenman redesigns him; the free present is a further theoretical manifesto sustaining his architecture without a homeland, liberated beyond space and time. Eisenman too is a master of the art of simulation.”
--Manfredo Tafuri

Peter Eisenman’s method of analysis is removed from the traditional approaches, which are based on social, historical, aesthetic, and functional point of view. Instead, Eisenman describes the articulations and openings on the facades as constituting a set of marks. These notations provide the basis for his analysis, for example, in the Casa del Fascio, each of the four sequential design schemes records the previous state, encoding the process of transformation in the final building.

Any architect or student, whom appreciates the methodology of the architectural design, will return to Professor Eisenman’s thoughtful and exhaustive opus again and again.

 

Jan. 2004