House X

Much of the material presented here was first published in the Japanese magazine, Architecture and Urbanism, No. 1, January 1980. In Eisenman's architecture the process of design is a process of research into formal structures and shapes which do not exist prior to the design. At the beginning  there is an idea that is both formal and conceptual, and the design becomes an obsessive search for the corresponding shape. The "idea" is the organizing force; it is the energy which determines the design of a structure of empty positions which will be occupied by shapes.