Lateness

By Peter Eisenman, Elisa Iturbe and Sarah Whiting

A provocative case for historical ambiguity in architecture by one of the field's leading theorists

Conceptions of modernity in architecture are often expressed in the idea of the zeitgeist, or "spirit of the age," an attitude toward architectural form that is embedded in a belief in progressive time. Lateness explores how architecture can work against these linear currents in startling and compelling ways. In this incisive book, internationally renowned architect Peter Eisenman, with Elisa Iturbe, proposes a different perspective on form and time in architecture, one that circumvents the temporal constraints on style that require it to be "of the times"—lateness. He focuses on three twentieth-century architects who exhibited the qualities of lateness in their designs: Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk. Drawing on the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and his study of Beethoven's final works, Eisenman shows how the architecture of these canonical figures was temporally out of sync with conventions and expectations, and how lateness can serve as a form of release from the restraints of the moment.

Bringing together architecture, music, and philosophy, and drawing on illuminating examples from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, Lateness demonstrates how today's architecture can use the concept of lateness to break free of stylistic limitations, expand architecture's critical capacity, and provide a new mode of analysis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jul 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691203911

Book preview

Series Editor’s Preface

POINT offers a new cadence to architecture’s contemporary conversation. Deliberately situated between the pithy polemic and the heavily footnoted tome, POINT plumbs the world of the extended essay. Each essay in this series hones a single point while situating it within a broader discursive landscape, thereby simultaneously focusing and fueling architectural criticism. These short books, written by leading theorists, historians, and practitioners, engage the major issues concerning architecture and design today. The agility of POINT’s format permits the series to take the pulse of the field, address and further develop current issues, and turn these issues outward to an informed, interested public.

With Lateness, architect Peter Eisenman, writing with Elisa Iturbe, offers up the ideal model of POINT, even if to speak of idealization is to counter Eisenman’s own argument. This essay is at once deeply personal and yet highly relevant to practitioners and students alike. Contemporary architecture, Eisenman argues, is so focused on making an immediate splash that it has no impact—architecture has become a world of complexity for the sake of complexity, representation for the sake of representation, exuberance for the sake of exuberance. Laying out a remarkably clear argument that relies on a close analysis of three projects by Adolf Loos, John Hedjuk, and Aldo Rossi, Eisenman offers us the model of lateness—work that is contingent, nondialectical, nonzeitgeist, and non-avant-garde. This short volume does not offer up a how-to of lateness; instead, it provokes an entirely new way of thinking of architecture’s time, as well as its impact.

—Sarah Whiting

Lateness

Introduction

In November of 1989, my major building, the Wexner Center, opened. Participating in that occasion, among others, was Laurie Anderson, who that same year had issued an LP called Strange Angels. On it was a song, The Dream Before, which resonated with me. It was a ballad about Hansel and Gretel alive and well, living in Berlin, the site of another of my projects. In the lyrics, Gretel asks Hansel, What is history? Hansel’s reply alludes to Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s drawing Angelus Novus, describing history as an angel being pushed backward into the future by a storm from paradise. In Benjamin’s account, the winds are so strong that the angel can no longer close his wings, and even if he would like to, he cannot pause to awaken the dead and to make whole what has been smashed. The storm—which is identified as progress—forces the angel past the ruins of war against his will, and although there is no depiction of rubble in the foreground of the drawing, Benjamin writes, "where a chain of events appears before us, he [the angel] sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet."¹ Benjamin was trying to come to terms with the twentieth century as a time when astonishing technological advancements were paired with unprecedented atrocities of war. His analysis of the Klee drawing reveals his disillusion in the ideals of the twentieth century and his skepticism of the notion of progress. For Benjamin, progress represented the concept of implacable linear time derived from Hegel’s concept of the forward march of history, and could only be ideological, as evidenced by the way the storm interferes with the angel’s process of perception: as he is carried swiftly away, he cannot hold his gaze upon the events of the present in order to perceive them critically, for the storm pushes him ever forward.

In architecture, belief in progressive time manifested itself in the twentieth century’s concept of the zeitgeist, an Hegelian incarnation that saw the spirit of the age as a propulsive force different from any previous defining era such as the baroque or the neoclassical. In contrast, the zeitgeist was seen as the evolution of a collective consciousness about the present and, tinged with a utopian energy, saw the present as both a means to break away from the inherited values of the nineteenth century and as a vehicle to look forward into the future. This produced an almost universal idea in the early twentieth century, called the modern, and its fervor for novelty in form and construction was embedded in a belief in progressive time. Evidence of this new temporality can be found in Mies van der Rohe’s notion of the will of the epoch, and his interest in using new materials and building technologies to express the essence of the present. Similarly, Le Corbusier’s five points proposed a new architectural language that maximized the potential of new materials and reconceived the nature of urban relationships to reflect a society structured by industry and technology.

With the zeitgeist as a framework, the question of how to be present became the means by which the moderns projected into the future, and so, despite modernity’s transformational aspirations and its critical capacity to challenge the status quo, there emerged a characteristic faith in the possibility of a