An ivory-tower architect explores the pleasures of populism in a design for a new football stadium.

By Hal Cohen
The Metropolis Observed
October 2001

Peter Eisenman is dead. Long live Peter Eisenman. Gone is the iconoclast whose designs were so complexly embedded with Chomskyan and Derridean theory that they required a graduate seminar to unpack, and whose celebrated critiques of institutions and power made him a favorite of cultural avant-gardists worldwide. In his place stands a plays-well-with-others type whose mantra is "come to terms with." As in "you've got to come to terms with the client who wants a big garage for his two Mercedes," or "I'm coming to terms with instant replay."

This is for the best, because the architect's current project--a new football stadium for the National Football League's Arizona Cardinals--might have been difficult for the old Eisenman to stomach.

Offsite:
Read what people are saying about the Rio Salado Crossing and the new stadium--pro and con--at http://cronkite.pp.asu.edu/riosalado.
NFL stadiums do not have memorable facades. Save for Soldier Field's Roman pomp and Lambeau's grim in-dustrialism, they are elaborate closed sets for television spectacle. If a foot-ball stadium is an unlikely canvas for Eisenman's theory-driven aesthetics, Arizona--the poster child for cookie-cutter sprawl--is an even unlikelier easel. As Mike Rushman, the Cardinals consultant who brokered the match, notes, "Eisenman will give this project attention far beyond what a stadium located in Arizona would otherwise get."

The Cardinals moved to Phoenix in 1988, and have been lucklessly playing at Arizona State since. In 1997 Eisenman and the Cards proposed Rio Salado Crossing, a multiblock megastructure encompassing a new stadium, hotels, and a convention center. Instead of the overlaid grids and grab-bag facade elements that Eisenman has formerly employed to undermine the concept of "context," Rio Salado Crossing offered straightforward variations on an Indian sand painting. The result was something novel: a graceful Eisenman building. The swooping, ambitious complex rose up from the desert like a sandstorm. But money and politics intervened, relocating the project to nearby Tempe, and the sweep and scale that integrated the edifice into the landscape have been shorn. Two huge curvilinear trusses are all that remain to define the relocated stand-alone stadium.

Some of his progressive colleagues would suggest that the NFL Eisenman is a sellout. One charged that such spectacle architecture was "the most debilitating form of capital exploitation." Eisenman's Arizona allies are less uncomfortable with the idea of spectacle (and they forgo the cultural-theory speak). According to Rushman, it is a perfect arrangement: the Cards want a name-brand architect "from a whole different realm than the usual stadium architects," and Eisenman "realizes the significance of being involved in a project that will win a profile not just in academic-culture circles but in mass culture."

Eisenman once warned against "becom[ing] part of the same spectacle that we assume to criticize." Today he shrugs. "High design is looked upon as good business," he says. "It's not that people like or appreciate high design, but it's out there on the marketplace. Gehry proved that with Bilbao." As for spectacle and product, he is equally unrepentant: "All of us have to accept that spectacle has become part of what architecture is about. When you're dealing with a stadium, you're dealing with spectacle. You're dealing with selling things."

Eisenman famously rejected the very notion of "program" and argued that learning how buildings work was a waste of time. But as one insider notes, "Given the overriding, unassailable logic of a stadium from a technical perspective and a user's perspective, there's little that Peter's architecture can do to get in the way."

This potential conflict has been defused by hiring HOK--of Camden Yards, Raymond James Stadium, and Jacobs Field fame--to handle what Eisenman calls the "meat and potatoes: the field, the seating, the inside of the concourses, and all that stuff."

If spectacle and institutionalized power troubled the old Eisenman, football never did. For all his deconstructionist impulses, he says, deadly earnest, "I don't want anybody messing with watching a football game." Eisenman is a football fanatic--that rare poststructural theorist who is as happy talking about the relative merits of the three-four defense as he is about Deleuze and Guattari. His Giants season tickets date back to their Yankee Stadium days, and he reports that he was given the Phoenix job after astounding Rushman by naming the Cards' backfield from their last--and only--championship, in 1947. This is Eisenman's third football stadium design, and the first that seems likely to see a ground-breaking.

Eisenman knows that most taxpaying Cards fans are less interested in his intellectual passions for "an architecture that could write something other than its own traditional texts of function, structure, meaning, and aesthetics" and more interested in a kick-ass stadium. And that means coming to terms with an architecture of budgets, bureaucrats, and spectacle. As Eisenman once lamented to Jacques Derrida, "My architecture cannot be what it should be, but only what it can be."


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