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A Prehistory of the Cloud

Reviews instability of the moments of interface between and within supposedly discrete parts. Rather than focusing on the division between parts as way to clarify their delimiting boundaries, Eisenman (with the assistance of Matt Roman) produces diagrams that characterize such moments of interface as promiscuous—as important moments in Palladio’s buildings that have at least two, sometimes three, different formal and/or spatial allegiances. Highlighting architectural elements and spaces as rhetorical devices, Eisenman is able to undermine the rules about proportion and meaning that we thought we knew to be omnipresent in Palladio’s villas. What had previously been deemed as Palladio’s intermittent flirtations with mannerist tendencies, or his occasional acts of transgression from an established formal rule set, Eisenman argues is indicative of the true project of Palladio—a project that is committed to spatial heterogeneity and “the virtual” in lieu of homogeneity and “the ideal.” An important broader lesson is that the lens through which one evaluates a work of cultural production can act as an instrument to produce new forms of knowledge. If Adorno articulated the importance of analysis to let the truth of a work unfold, Eisenman has articulated the importance of analysis to let the truths of a work unfold. The theorizing, historicizing, and tireless analyzing in this book is done in service to a meaningful meta-argument, which is folded into the middle of the preface of the book and risks not receiving the attention it deserves. Eisenman invokes Le Corbusier to help his description of the “other” as a distinguishing aspect found in architecture and not found in building. He relays to us that architecture is architecture when, in reference to the size of a window in a room, “it is not what it is expected to be.” Fundamentally, this observation alone explains the impetus to perform the multitude of close readings on Palladio’s villas. Eisenman—curious and speculative—is truly an architect’s architect, and he encourages us that we should be too. Out of architecture, when read closely with commitment and care, can come new languages of architecture. As Eisenman states most clearly himself, “the analyses is as much about Palladio as it is about the importance today of close reading itself.” Likewise, Eisenman’s new book, Palladio Virtuel, is important today and warrants a close reading itself.