Becoming-ground of a figure: Peter Eisenman's The Galician City of Culture

Abstract

This study is about understanding of the Deleuze's concept of becoming in the context of figure-ground relations, through Peter Eisenman's architectural project 'The Galician City of Culture' built in Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Locating the study within the frames of ontology and phenomenology of space, theory of text and cultural analysis, the main hypothesis of this paper is that Eisenman's project 'The Galician City of Culture' performs transgression of the language of modernist architecture, blurring the boundaries between figure and ground. In other words, Eisenman's figurative form of 'The Galician City of Culture' is caught up in the act of becoming-ground (of a tectonic expression, but also of a broader social and cultural context). Developing this hypothesis through historical, comparative, theoretical and analytical method, the main aim of this study is understanding the architectural practice not as a mere art object, situation or an event, but as a work that is formed in the dense network of surrounding texts of society, landscape and culture, which is not exempted from these networks but occurring in the midst of them, determined by them and also determinative for them. In what way does Eisenman's architecture perform the transgression of the language of modernist architecture? How can that, which is an architectural form, at the same time be understood as transgression and vice versa, how can that, which is deviation, derogation, unfolding, at the same time be the form? How can we understand the concept of a figure becoming-ground in the context of the Eisenman's concrete example of architecture? These are the key questions of this study. In theoretical context, the study is based on the investigations of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Colin Rowe, Le Corbusier, Jean Lyotard, Rosalind Krauss, Georges Bataille and Homi Bhabha.