Peter Eisenman

Architect / United States / Eisenman Architects

www.eisenmanarchitects.com

Peter Eisenman is an internationally recognized architect and educator whose award-winning large-scale housing and urban design projects, innovative facilities for educational institutions, and series of inventive private houses attest to a career of excellence in design.

Prior to establishing a full-time architectural practice in 1980, Eisenman worked as an independent architect, educator, and theorist. In 1967, Eisenman founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), an international think tank for architecture in New York, and served as its director until 1982. He received a Stone Lion (first prize) for his Romeo and Juliet project at the Third International Architectural Biennale in Venice in 1985, and was one of the two architects selected to represent the United States at the Fifth International Venice exhibition in 1991. The firm’s City of Culture of Galicia project was shown in the Eighth and Ninth International Biennales in 2002 and 2004, and the railroad stations for Pompei at the Tenth Biennale in 2006.

Eisenman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Arnold W. Brunner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 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 by the International Architectural Biennale in Venice in 2004. Popular Science magazine named Mr. Eisenman one of the top five innovators of 2006 for the Arizona Cardinals’ new stadium.

Eisenman’s academic career includes teaching at Cambridge, Princeton, and Ohio State universities and at the University of Illinois. At Harvard University, he was the Arthur Rotch Professor of Architecture from 1982 to 1985, and the Eliot Noyes Visiting Design Critic in 1993. He was the first Irwin S. Chanin Distinguished Professor of Architecture at The Cooper Union, in New York City, and is currently the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor of Architecture at Yale University.

Eisenman has published widely and written several books, including Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950–2000 (Rizzoli, April 2008); Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004. (Yale University Press, 2007); The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture (Dissertation 1963, facsimile. Lars Müller, 2006); Eisenman: Inside Out, Selected Writings 1963–1988 (Yale University Press, 2004); and Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques (The Monacelli Press, 2003).

Eisenman 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 (UK). He holds three honorary Doctorates of Fine Arts, from the University of Illinois, Chicago; the Pratt Institute in New York; and Syracuse University. In 2003 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Architecture by the Università La Sapienza in Rome.

Contributed Articles

Daily Features

Peter Eisenman Answers The Proust Questionnaire—Book Edition

By Peter Eisenman November 7, 2013

Gravity’s Rainbow, not reading, and others subjects get covered in Peter Eisenman's answers to Designers & Books’ questionnaire.

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