Peter Eisenman challenges to Rem Koolhaas

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Peter Eisenman

Peter Eisenman. A distinguished member of the group of The New York Five, he opened his own studio in New York in 1980, after teaching at some of the most prestigious universities of the World, such as Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Yale and Ohio.

Peter Eisenman holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree form Cornell University, a Master of Science in Architecture degree from Columbia University, an M. A. and Ph. D. degrees form Cambridge University (UK). He holds honorary Doctorates of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois, Chicago, the Pratt Institute in New York and Syracuse University. In 2003, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Architecture by the Universitá La Sapienza in Rome.

In 1967, Eisenman founded in New York the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), a body of international experts dedicated to architecture, which he was director of until 1982. He was awarded the first prize at the third edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1985 for his project "Romeo & Juliet". He was also one of the two architects chosen to represent the United States at the Fifth International Architecture Exhibition in Venice in 1991, and he returned there again in 2002 and 2004 to display the project for the City of Culture of Galicia.

He has authored emblematic architectural works such as the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, the Aronoff Center at the University of Cincinnati or the Holocaust Memorial located near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. His projects are characterized by a style defined as "modern deconstructivism", very close to the line of work of Arata Isozaki, Frank Gehry or Rem Koolhaas.

Peter Eisenman has also been awarded many other prizes and distinctions, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Brunner Award and the National Honor Award of the American Institute of Architects, the latter on two occasions, one for the Wexner Center in Ohio and the other for the headquarters of the Koizumi Sangyo Corporation in Tokyo.

In 2010, he received the international Wolf Prize in Architecture

Website of Eisenman Architects

Act.>. 12-2012

REM KOOLHAAS

Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944. He began his career as a journalist, working for the Haagse Post, and as a set-designer in the Netherlands and Hollywood. He beganHe frequented the Architectural Association School in London and studied with Oswald Mathias Ungers at Cornell University. In 1978, he wrote Delirious New York: a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, which has become a classic of contemporary architectural theory. In 1975 – together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp – he founded OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture).

The most important works by Koolhaas and OMA, from its foundation until the mid-1990s, include the Netherlands Dance Theatre at The Hague, the Nexus Housing at Fukuoka in Japan, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the Grand Palais of Euralille and Lille, the Villa dall’Ava, the Très Grande Bibliothèque, the Jussieu library in Paris, the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Seattle Public Library.

Together with Koolhaas’s reflections on contemporary society, these buildings appear in his second book, S,M,L,XL (1995), a volume of 1376 pages written as though it were a “novel about architecture”. Published in collaboration with the Canadian graphic designer, Bruce Mau, the book contains essays, manifestos, cartoons and travel diaries.

In 2005, with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman, he was the founder to the prestigious Volume magazine, the result of a collaboration with Archis (Amsterdam), AMO and C-lab (Columbia University NY).

His built work includes the Qatar National Library and the Qatar Foundation Headquarters (2018), Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris (2018), Fondazione Prada in Milan (2015/2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing (2012), Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), Seattle Central Library (2004), and the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2003). Current projects include the Taipei Performing Arts Centre, a new building for Axel Springer in Berlin, and the Factory in Manchester.

Koolhaas directed the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and is a professor at Harvard University, where he directs The Project on the City, a research programme on changes in urban conditions around the world. This programme has conducted research on the delta of the Pearl River in China (entitled Great Leap Forward) and on consumer society (The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping). Taschen Verlag has published the results. Now is preparing a major exhibition for the Guggenheim museum to open in 2019 entitled Countryside: Future of the World.

Among the awards he has won in recent years, we mention here the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize (2000), the Praemium Imperiale (2003), the Royal Gold Medal (2004) and the Mies Van Der Rohe prize (2005). In 2008, Time mentioned him among the 100 most influential people of the planet.

JUNG METALOCUS 01

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