"Istanbul Quadrille"

Peter Eisenman is an internationally recognized architect, educator, theorist and author with a career defined by award-winning large-scale housing and urban design projects, innovative facilities for educational institutions, and a series of inventive private houses. He worked as an independent architect, educator and theorist before establishing a full-time architectural practice in 1980, Eisenman Architects. In 1967, he founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, an international think tank for architecture in New York, and served as its director until 1982.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. Among other awards, in 2001 he received the Medal of Honor from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and the Smithsonian Institution’s 2001 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture. He was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Eisenman is currently the Charles Gwathmey Professor in Practice at the Yale School of Architecture. His most recent books include Written Into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990-2004 (Yale University Press, 2007) and Ten Canonical Buildings, 1950-2000 (Rizzoli, 2008), which examines in depth buildings by 10 different architects.

He holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University, a Master of Science in Architecture degree from Columbia University, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Cambridge University (U.K), as well as several honorary degrees.

Eisenman will present a lecture titled “Istanbul Quadrille" at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 21 in Giffels Auditorium, in Old Main, at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He will discuss a project by Eisenman Architects with Aytac Architects (Istanbul). A description follows.

With one of the longest, richest, and most culturally varied histories of continuous habitation of any of the world’s great cities, Istanbul is a monument to the idea of the city as a palimpsest, as a physical record and trace of its evolving history. Perhaps more than any other city it represents collisions of time, space, and organization. For this reason, the three ideas that have dominated major urban interventions in the twentieth century – the grid, the collage, and the contextual diagram – seem particularly ill suited to Istanbul, and especially for so large a site as the Yenikapi project. While the tabula rasa power of the grid can afford invaluable rationalization and organizational equivalencies, these are precisely what is not needed in a city whose spatial, organizational, and architectural variabilities are its most precious urban assets. For similar reasons, the collage – whose power is to intensify variability where it is lacking – is a pointless and ineffectual urban strategy in so complex a place. The contextual diagram technique affords the architectural urbanist the ability to read latent urban typologies in a given circumstance and make these vividly manifest, but Istanbul is already rich with superbly manifest urban typologies, making such a strategy unnecessary. In short, these three strategies would fail in the case of the Yenikapi site because they either erase the invaluable qualities of the city’s layers or merely re-inscribe features that are already abundantly present.

Therefore, the goal of our project – an entry to the Yenikapi Transfer Point and Archaeo-park Area International Preliminary Architecture Project Competition – is to introduce a new organizational force into the city that both weaves together the incongruent features of the existing site into a series of different urban matrixes and generates an energy that flows out from the site and thus re-enlivens the major elements of the existing palimpsest of the city as a whole – its histories, archaeologies, organizational and stylistic diversities. Our project can be understood at three different scales: the most comprehensive is the scale of our urban vision; the second is the scale of the urban design; and the third is the scale of the architectural design, which incorporates the archive buildings, the rail stations, and the Archaeopark.

The public is invited to attend this lecture, which is presented by the Fay Jones School of Architecture. This is the school’s Architecture Theory Lecture.