NEW YORK.- Architect Peter Eisenman has just written the book “Giuseppe Terragni - Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques”. Peter Eisenman’s eagerly awaited magnum opus—forty years in the making—documents and investigates two of Italian rationalist architect Giuseppe Terragni’s masterworks: the Casa del Fascio and the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio, both in Como, Italy. This far-reaching study—illustrated with finely delineated two-color diagrams, archival drawings from Terragni’s studio, and period photographs—employs what Eisenman calls critical and textual readings of both buildings.

Eisenman describes the articulations and openings on the facades; these notations provide the basis for his analysis. In the Casa del Fascio, the four sequential design schemes each record the previous state, encoding the process of transformation. In the Casa Giuliani-Frigerio, it is instead the process of decomposition that generates the facades. Also included in the book are an essay by Terragni, on the commissioning, design, and construction of the Casa del Fascio, and a critique by Manfredo Tafuri, the renowned Italian architectural historian and theorist.

Peter Eisenman is principal of Eisenman Architects in New York, Louis I. Kahn Professor of Architecture at Yale University, the author of a great number of books and articles, and the subject of many others, including Blurred Zones: Eisenman Architects 1988–1998.