Architectural Design Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Architectural Design - Essay Example His designs, are Based on a predilection towards a polemical flow of opposition, interaction, and redefinition. The grid was the organizing principle of Eisenman's earlier work, a series of rectilinear box-like houses in which he investigated and articulated a variety of theoretical ideas, including the notion of deep structure, a proposition that there is a universal, underlying ordering device that is the natural and logical generator of a design. His theories on architecture pursue the emancipation and autonomy of the discipline and his work represents a continued attempt to liberate form from all meaning, a struggle that is at times difficult to understand. Eisenman focuses on liberating architectural form. The House II is a single family house with a flat roof and a having a form of a cube. House II of 10 numbered houses, designed for the family of Princeton professor Richard Falk, was constructed between 1960-1970 in Hardwick, Connecticut as the second house in a series of structures conceived on the basis of a square plan. For this house, Eisenman began to investigate a set of abstract formal propositions as a possible condition of an underlying structure and their initial transformations into a specific environment. Using all rectangular elements, a series of lines, planes, and volumes converge to create a complex spatial arrangement, resulting into a design proposal that exemplifies high amount of rectangularity. The term 'cardboard architecture' in relation to House II Around 1968, Peter Eisenman limited himself to a set of abstract formal propositions as a possible condition of an underlying structure and their initial transformation into a specific environment for the design of House II. The formal propositions are the line, the plane, and the volume. Whilst Eisenman uses a compositional diagonal, all the construction elements are rectangular. The house displays evocative, ambiguous and strongly formal language. Furthermore, the primarily orthogonal and rectangular language of the houses, suggest a welcome degree of complexity achieved through simple means. The house shows a simple geometry that extrudes the square to form a cube or rectangular box. The geometry of the house is made up of its stark horizontals and verticals and large expanses of glass. Every addition to the house after this will be inside this cube or box so that the form will always be the exterior skin of the house, decomposed or not. With the addition of an equal number of planes vertically and horizontally the house splits into sections. With the further addition of interior walls, varying in size, but with a distinct pattern and with the crossing of those planes with perpendicular planes to form a grid. Add a square grid of structural columns. Decompose the existing grid work and columns to form rooms with the addition of the interior walls, floors, and roofs. Punch out forms from exterior walls to make windows and punch out similar forms from interior and exterior walls to make doorways.This describes the simple design process followed by the designer which impart s the building a simple geometry which is made up of planes and lines converging at different points to form different geometries which essentially resemble the functions of a cardboard; not structurally but visibly. The works of these series of houses are hence