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PE: It is a bit like a footprint in the sand. Pull the foot away and you know the foot has been there. But depending on the weight, and the impact of the foot hitting the sand, et cetera, there is always an index of force. If I take a clay ball and I throw it at you, and I hit you with it, it is going to deform you in a certain way. Computers have been able to simulate how these types of forces deform things. That is what we are trying to do at Santiago. What you see is the index of a throw.

Richard Meier & Partners Architects, Eisenman Architects, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, Steven Holl Architects: Rendering, World Trade Center site design proposal, New York City, December 2002 (above). Eisenman Architects: Model of Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, Germany, 1998, in progress (above and below). Photos courtesy Eisenman Architects

AR: What about architecture vis à vis the landscape? Isn’t the ground a neutral palette?

PE: The ground is never neutral. There is always a figure/ground dialectic. In Santiago, the ground is now figured, and figures erupt out of the ground. It was impossible to do individual buildings in Santiago, because they were part of a single idea of landscape. If there were only one or two of the mound buildings, they would have become expressionist objects. When they are part of the landscape, they become something else.

AR: The excavation of Santiago looks like an ancient city. It is enormous.

PE: That is true. The scale is that of giant earthworks. These mounds are 60, 70 feet high. We cut 600,000 cubic meters of rock material. We will be able to restore some of it to the site when the construction is finished.

AR: Could you have done your latest work without the computer—merely
as plastic investigation? Is this science and other sorts of human intelligence coming together?

PE: First of all, there is no question that the Santiago project is a response to Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao. It was clear from the competition that’s what the client wanted. The people short-listed in the competition–Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel, Daniel Libeskind—are an indication that they wanted something out of the ordinary. So Santiago was an answer to Bilbao, but that response could not have been made if we did not have the computer programs to generate the kinds of superpositions that created a new form of built landscape. Frank uses the computer to create icons; we use it to make an index.

The computer is necessary, but the central issue for me is philosophical: Jacques Derrida says that “architecture will always mean,” and Rosalind Krauss says that “architecture will always have four walls.” These two statements define the metaphysics of presence in architecture. It is interesting that Derrida questions the hegemony of metaphysics in philosophy, but he seems perfectly content to let it remain in architecture. In fact, post-structuralism questions the entire edifice of metaphysics—except in architecture. The underpinning of Western thought for 200 years, since Immanuel Kant, has been based on an idealist metaphysics. On the one side there is Gehry (the artist), and the computer. On the other, there are ideas. I attempt to put those things together, along with taking a risk, to challenge the metaphysics of presence.

AR: OK. But back to the computer. What role does the computer play in your creativity?

PE: I do not use the computer. I do not even do e-mails. We have a group of bright kids who know how to use these programs. I set the theoretical premises. But we work back and forth between the computer and physical models.

AR: And do you really care if the spectator or visitor knows about the ideas—the theoretical premises—behind the work?

PE: We try to find a way to capture in form something that is not expressionism, but which has a density and layering of ideas––which causes information to blur and become something else––affect perhaps. Throughout history, events have been determined by the difference between objective and subjective reality. Subjective reality has to do with spectacle and the media. It implies a passive condition in the observer. Effects of the object become affects in the subject.

The media distances you from experience. What architecture does that media does not do involves the body, the mind, and the eye simultaneously.