Supervisor: Vincent Brunetta
Submitted on September 2002
Peter Eisenman's Houses of Cards are a quest for an autonomous architecture, whose formal language and compositional rules are free of all external referents, focusing solely on the internal coherence of the spatial composition. The New York architect draws on structuralist theories and linguistics, which were very much in vogue in architectural circles in the 1960s and 1970s. The Houses of Cards are a series of six houses (Houses I, II, III, IV, VI & X) that represent successive stages in the development of resolutely complex geometries, illustrated by Peter Eisenman's equally complex writings. The aim of this Master's thesis is to decipher the formal and theoretical complexity of these projects, and to present the Houses of Cards project in its entirety in a didactic 3D short film.
The work includes 3D models from Master students Laurent Arnoldi, Steve Trefois, Michel Lefèvre, Stéphane Blaes, and Sharham Agaajani.