In the early days of his career Peter Eisenman searched for a purely syntactic architecture in which he tried to do away with all semantics. His design for a set of houses from that period shows the will to structure form and space in such a way that "a set of formal relationships" (Eisenman 1975: 16) is produced. Somewhat later he introduced the term "post-functionalism" in architectural discourse, a term that would inspire the entire deconstructionist movement and Bernard Tschumi in particular.
From the 1980s onwards, the post-structuralist notions of trace and palimpsest come to play a bigger role in Eisenman's projects. The site at which a building is to be constructed is never a tabula rasa, but has a history that haunts the spot, like a spectre. This is what, in accordance with Derrida's concept of the spectral (Derrida 1994), could be called the "spectrality" of the site. It manifests itself in the traces, the relics of a certain past that stays alive on any site. According to Eisenman, the architect should acknowledge these traces and integrate them into the architectural whole. Utopian modernism, that wanted to leave the past behind and to construct buildings like signs on a blank page, indulged in a nave humanist idealism Eisenman wants to do away with once and for all.
The architect as archaeologist
But how can one pay attention to the actual traces present in a place? A clarifying example can be found in Eisenman's entry for a competition on a housing project near Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, a competition that was won by Rem Koolhaas whose project has afterwards been executed. Eisenman's unrealised project included more than the original assignment, a housing block next to the Berlin Wall. Eisenman wanted to raise an entire city block against the Wall that would incorporate the existing buildings in the new project. Around that block, an underground park was designed that was to be called the "City of Excavations". By constructing a park below ground level the architect hoped to discover archaeological relics of the old city. Still, no relics that explicitly referred to the city's history were found, but that did not seem to bother Eisenman. The essential point was not that "real" archaeological objects could be shown, but rather that the project emphasised and drew the people's attention to the site as a pool boiling with history. That is why the City of Excavations was planned to contain a part of a wall that would serve as a merely hypothetical reconstruction of a nineteenth-century rampart.It is quite easy to understand the uncanny character of the City of Excavations. In psychoanalysis, the underground often functions as a metaphor or a substitute for the subconscious. In the same way the psychoanalytical method is often compared to the archaeological as a kind of "digging for meaning". Eisenman descends to the repressed in order to reveal or to produce what had to remain hidden in humanist and functionalist architecture: the site's past history.
At the same time the descent into earth, a motif that returns in Eisenman's project for Cannareggio in Venice, is endowed with a very uncanny kind of quality. It resembles the way to the crypt, which was a topos of nineteenth-century uncanny experiences. The descent to the City of Excavations reminds of the descent into a tomb, a pre-eminently uncanny place. We don't have to read Freud to know that "many people experience the feeling [of the uncanny] in the highest degree in relation to death" (Freud 1955: 241).
The architect as geologist
Architecture, however, need not go underground in order to evoke feelings of defamiliarisation, destabilisation and disorientation. The mere sight of many deconstructionist buildings suffices to bewilder the spectator. The brutal, threatening, splintered forms of deconstruction stand out against the geometrical forms of modernism and classicism and the pompous elegance of baroque and rococo. In his efforts to tear architecture loose from the benumbing trance of tradition, Eisenman wants to create buildings and places "with the possibility of looking back at the subject" (Eisenman 1992: 21). The architect may realise this possibility by means of a technical instrument Eisenman calls "folding". In his design for the Emory Center of the Arts (see fig. 4), that is still under construction now, Eisenman used
Fig. 4: Eisenman - Emony Center
folded forms for the first time. Peculiar about these forms, says Eisenman, is that, apart from an effective dimension, they also possess an affective spatial dimension. The formal folds of the Emory Center remind of what Marcel Duchamp called a "geological landscape" (Duchamp in Vidler 1992: 140) and are easily associated with strata in the earth's crust. The most influential female deconstructionist architect Zaha Hadid also creates geological landscapes in her projects. Especially in her project for The Peak in Hong Kong (see fig. 5),
Fig. 5: Hadid - The Peak
Techniques of tectonics and folding are deconstructions of what Broadbent (1991: 85) calls "plate construction". There is, however, another form of deconstruction that often gives rise to uncanny effects - or rather, affects - namely deconstruction of what Broadbent (ibid.) calls "frame construction". These deconstructions burst the traditional geometric forms of the skeleton and replace them by chaotic, polygonal forms. Good illustrations of what could be called "frame deconstruction" can be found in the designs of the Austrian Coop Himmelblau.
