Peter Eisenman ‘54, world-renowned architect and Cornell graduate, gave his third lecture at Cornell in two years on Wednesday night. He is known for his heavily theoretical approach to design and his work is often thought of as representative of the deconstructivist and late modernist movement. Eisenman was also a member of the New York Five, an unofficial group of five architects whose projects were often considered an exploration of pure modernism.

After an unusually short introduction, the attention was turned over to Eisenman. Sans microphone and not getting up from his desk, the architect told the auditorium that he had modified the lecture he was planning on giving, titled “Lateness and the Politics of Media,” because a student had mentioned that the titled seemed to be for a sociology lecture rather than an architecture one. Instead he would show a series of images of both older projects and his own work to demonstrate his design approach.

Eisenman started his lecture by comparing sculpture and architecture trends of the 1960s, when a major shift occurred. Sculpture, which was traditionally a “pedestal” form of art, started to become site-specific. The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of earthwork artists such as Robert Smithson, who is best known for his Spiral Jetty — a massive earth-spiral in Utah, extending from the land into a lake. As sculpture became site-specific, architecture became less so. High modernism emerged, and historical precedents and physical aspects of the site became less important as buildings aspired to stand alone as objects.

Eisenman then began to relate his own work to these movements. In his design approach, he asks the question of how to make architecture concerned with both the site and with time. To achieve this, Eisenman layers grids that existed on the building’s site during different times and then manipulates and superimposes them to create a plan. He does not initially concern himself with how the building operates and what the building looks like. This is similar to Freud’s theory of how the human mind works — it is a layering of different times and different experiences, many of them in the unconscious. In his work, Eisenman attempts to excavate these invisible and no longer existing grids as an uncovering of the unconscious of the site.

This approach is clearly very theoretical, and has earned Eisenman’s projects the nickname of “paper architecture,” because their physical manifestation is much less important than the design process behind them. In fact, while showing images from the opening of his newest cultural complex in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, the architect commented that the building “takes people very well. In fact, it looks better with people in it.” He also said that he liked the “interplay of people against the complex forms of the building,” suggesting that people were an afterthought in his almost monolithic and sculptural creation.

Toward the end of the lecture, Eisenman seemed to bring in aspects of his planned lecture about lateness. He argued that we are currently in a late phase of modernism, and perhaps in a late phase of his own work, but that we are on the verge of another very big paradigm shift, perhaps similar to the 1960s. Citing grassroots movements, the political chaos all over the world and what he called the “demise of democracy,” the architect predicted that it would soon be possible to be avant garde again. Encouraging students to wait out their time, he told the young audience that they had come too early. The message was overall promising: rejoice, aspiring architects — your time will come.