Architect Peter Eisenman 'stars' at Reunion, in person and in media

Peter Eisenman

By Linda Myers

Internationally renowned architect Peter Eisenman will be on campus to celebrate his 50th Cornell reunion this weekend. The winner of numerous architectural awards, Eisenman '54 earned his B.Arch. degree at Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP). The Louis Kahn Professor of Architecture at Yale University last fall, he currently is designing a 68,000-seat multipurpose stadium for the professional football Arizona Cardinals in Phoenix, among other projects.

"Being Eisenman," a special video portrait of Eisenman made over the past year by Phil Handler '62, B.Arch. '64, M.Arch. '65, also will screen during the Reunion 2004 weekend. And "Box of Changes," an exhibition of Eisenman's "I Ching"-influenced design proposal for a competition for a museum in China, will be on view throughout the weekend in Sibley Hall's Hartell Gallery, where the video will run continuously on small-screen television.

On Saturday, June 12, in 157 E. Sibley Hall there will be a breakfast reception hosted by AAP Dean Porus Olpadwala, starting at 8 a.m., with Eisenman as the special guest. Following a 9 a.m. wide screen viewing of the video about him, Eisenman will talk informally about being back on campus and answer questions about his life and work.

All events are free and open to the public. Hartell Gallery hours are today, June 10, 2-5 p.m.; Friday, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.; and Saturday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.

"Cornell is an important part of Peter's life and an important generator of where he is today," said Handler. "The video shows that." Eisenman originally enrolled in Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences, until an influential counselor in his dormitory got him excited about architecture, related Handler. A champion swimmer, he joined the university's swim team, but the coach told him he was spending too much time in the architecture studio and not enough in the pool and that he would need to choose. He picked architecture and never looked back, said Handler.

Eisenman now is the principal architect at Eisenman Architects, New York. His was among the four final architectural teams asked to submit design proposals for rebuilding the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. His Wexner Center for the Visual Arts and Fine Arts Library at Ohio State University, completed in 1989, received a 1993 National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects. Other lauded projects include the Columbus (Ohio) Convention Center and the Aronoff Center at the University of Cincinnati. He has competed and won prizes at the International Architectural Biennale in Venice. Current Eisenman projects include a Holocaust memorial in Berlin and a museum, library and opera house for the pilgrimage city of Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

A scholar as well as a practitioner, Eisenman founded Oppositions, an influential journal of architectural ideas, and is the co-author, with philosopher and post-modern theorist Jacques Derrida, of Chora L Works (Monacelli Press, 1997), among other writings. "As both an architect and educator, Eisenman has consistently argued that architecture is part of a larger cultural discourse," said Milton Curry, Cornell associate professor of architecture. The video includes tributes to Eisenman by such fellow architects and educators as Robert A.M. Stern, the dean of Yale School of Architecture, and Pritzker laureate Richard Meier '56, the designer of Cornell's planned Life Science Technology Building.

"At an age when many architects are content just to rest on their laurels, Peter is still active," observed Handler, "and his most successful buildings, as he says in the video, are yet to come."