15th Century Architecture: Representation, Reason, and History

READING RESPONSE 3 – PETER EISENMAN
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Reading Response 3 – Peter Eisenman
This paper will respond to the article "The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End" by Peter Eisenman. The article was published in 1984 in volume 21 of the journal Perspecta. Eisenman postulates that architecture from the 15th century to the present has been founded on three fictions: representation, reason, and history. I was intrigued to learn of the existence of a continuous mode of thought since the 15th century: I was not aware that the classical has persisted for five hundred years in one form or another. My reaction to the reading was skepticism at the possibility of obliterating the past.
According to the author, each of the fictions served a principal function: "representation was to embody the idea of meaning; reason was to codify the idea of truth; history was to recover the idea of the timeless from the idea of change." The persistence of these three fictions explains the continuity of architectural thought for five centuries. Eisenman argues that modernism's attempts at moving away from ornament toward functionalism in an "attempt to represent reality itself" is just another stylistic continuation of the architecture that preceded it.[Peter Eisenman, “The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End,” Perspecta 21 (1984): 154, https://doi.org/10.2307/1567087.] [Eisenman....