Eisenman Architects: City of Culture of Galicia

http://archinect.com/features/article.php?id=91086_0_23_0_M

While still active modes of research and production, the four trajectories of articulation, notation, decoration and figuration have, in the intervening thirty years, confronted impasses internal to their development that have provoked subsequent practices to redirect priorities and hybridize modes of production as the opportunit ies of technology and demands of cultural aud iences have allowed. For example, Peter Eisenman's conceptual markings and notations of design process have been invariably registered through manipulations of the structural grid. While this worked well at the scale of the early houses, the sheer size of the later work has opened a disjunction between the structure and its ability to legibly serve as an index of the design process, reaching an extreme in his Cultural Center for Santiago de Compostela. With apparently massive volumes given over to the poche of doubled floors and ceilings, and facade fragments in danger of popping off swollen elevations, the irreparable gap between the constructional and notational logics produces a situation where the grid as disciplining geometry can only be rendered as ornamental applique.The grid, in other words, becomes a thematic trope, a drywall voice over that is necessary to maintain continuity and serve as a reminder of where one is in the critical design narrative. (Somol: "Green Dots 101", p. 31)