Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa
Associate Professor
Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa is an Associate Professor Adjunct at the School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, where he is the head professor and coordinator of Design II (fall semester), and teaches digital representation and computation courses for the undergraduate and graduate program. He is also the Director of the Digital Representation and Fabrication Certificate program at the school’s Department of Continuing Education, as well as associate professor adjunct (roving critic) at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. Lorenzo-Eiroa was previously an assistant professor at the University of Buenos Aires. He has lectured and participated as a visiting critic at The Cooper Union, Princeton University, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, Harvard University, Yale University, Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Architectural Association, University of Applied Arts Vienna and the University of Buenos Aires.
Working with continuous and discontinuous signs of information, through different media-based interfaces, Professor Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa's research focuses on constantly questioning assumed cultural structures. Through conceptual designs, his work recognizes and displaces the most stable spatial organizations through topological transformations to overcome predetermination.
Lorenzo-Eiroa collaborated directly with Peter Eisenman as a senior lead designer and project architect on a number of projects since 2002, including three built installations in Europe, the completed Arizona Cardinals Stadium (host of the 2008 NFL Superbowl) and the Second Prize for the Napoli TAV terminal design competition. He was also the lead designer for the Richard Meier-Peter Eisenman-Charles Gwathmey-Steven Holl finalist team for the World Trade Center competition organized by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.
Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa is a recognized scholar and in the fields of art, architecture, computation and theory. He has received research grants and awards from the Fulbright Program (2001), National Endowment for the Arts (2002), Butler Prize and EC-US at Princeton University (2004), among others. He has edited and written many books and is working on upcoming publications. Lorenzo-Eiroa authored Instalaciones: Sobre el trabajo de Peter Eisenman (DLO/Robles Ediciones, 2008) after his direct collaboration on more than ten projects with Peter Eisenman. He developed relational computer based graphics for the book Solsona: Justo Solsona: Entrevistas, Apuntes Para Una Autobiografia (Ediciones Infinito, 1998 - Buenos Aires) and has published a yearly course manual entitled Analog and Digital Strategies Between Interfaces since 2006. He also co-edited Life in Formation: On Responsive Information and Variations in Architecture with Aaron Sprecher and Shai Yeshayahu (ACADIA) after he co-chaired the ACADIA 2010 conference at The Cooper Union. He recently co-edited Architecture In Formation with Aaron Sprecher, to be released by Routledge in September of 2013 after a peer review process. Lorenzo-Eiroa received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture from the University of Buenos Aires. He completed a post-graduate seminar at the Superior School of Fine Arts Ernesto de la Carcova and holds an M.Arch II from Princeton University. He taught five years at the University of Buenos Aires, where he also developed research for the SICyT, and published-edited many articles.
Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa is the Design Principal of Eiroa Architects. Through this office he has been integrating theoretical speculation and disciplinary expertise in different associations, with work ranging from academic research, to scholarships and publications, to architectural design via private and state commissions in New York City and Buenos Aires. The office expertise is in architecture, design, the landscape of the city and the architecture of the landscape. EA’s projects have been published in a variety of media. Its mixed-use building proposal for the World Trade Center was part of the Thinking Big: The Masters' Plan, organized by the New York Times. Other projects have been published in Clarin Arq and La Nacion Arquitectura, and exhibited at the VIII Venice Architecture Biennale, The Instituto Cervantes in New York City, the Disseny Hub Barcelona, Pabellon D'Arsenal in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. EA's practice Manifesto was part of FreshLatino at The Storefront for Art and Architecture, and the studio's projects were presented at PechaKucha New York #11 as part of a series of events for the Festival of Ideas for the New City curated by the New Museum in New York City. EA has been involved with the design and building of projects in South America, the United States, Europe and the Internet
Projects & Links
WTC-NY Times Group
MIXED-USE CULTURAL AND RESIDENTIAL BUILDING
World Trade Center Site
New York Times Magazine “Thinking Big, The Masters’ Plan”, New York City 2002.
BAREFOOT ON WHITE HOT WALLS
BAREFOOT ON WHITE HOT WALLS
Peter Eisenman Exhibition at the MAK Museum, Vienna, Austria 2005, collaboration as project architect designer.
NAPOLI TAV
NAPOLI TAV
Competition
Collaboration as project architect for Eisenman Architects.
Instalaciones: Eisenman
Instalaciones: Eisenman
Instalaciones: sobre el trabajo de Peter Eisenman, Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa,
DLO/Robles Ediciones, Buenos Aires 2008.
Book brief:
For the first time in Spanish, this comprehensive book develops rigorously all of architect and academic Peter Eisenman’s built architecture installations. Instalaciones was authored and edited by the Argentinean architect Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, a professor at the Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York City, after collaborating in Eisenman’s studio for several years and designing three of the installations included in this publication.
This book is simultaneously a text book and an image book. Its relevance is derived from the fact that it presents important actualizations and unknown aspects of the radical theoretical thinking of Peter Eisenman, who previously collaborated with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, as he is one of the only architects to have developed a full critical deconstruction of the language of the discipline. Supervised by Eisenman, this book includes previously unpublished material: a synthetic collection of texts of Eisenman’s career, a text by professor Guido Zuliani and many texts by Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa. These texts deal both with histories and theory of architecture and its current relevance, but also critique the current state of expansion of the discipline, developing concepts such as index, diagram, writing, form, folding and spatial warping, but also affect as resistance to the visual and metaphysics of presence. These issues have been dominating the avant-gardes of the last forty years, established new canons and have positioned the work of Eisenman as a main theoretical reference.
In opposition to artistic installations, the installations are presented as pure architectural exercises; such is the case, that the book itself critically presents the installations’ spatial ideas parallel to the spatial deep structure of this medium.
Language: Spanish
Measurements: 23 x 26 centimeters (9.05” x 10.23” inches)
Pages: 192, with more than 300 images, illustrations and diagrams
Price: us$ 35.00
Distribution: Nobuko S.A. in Buenos Aires, Argentina
ACADIA 2010 Conference
ACADIA 2010 Conference Life in:formation hosted at The School of Architecture of The Cooper Union
Life in:formation was co-chaired by Associate Professor Adjunct Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, of The Cooper Union, in conjunction with Assistant Professor Aaron Sprecher of McGill University and Assistant Professor Shai Yeshayahu of Southern Illinois University.
This conference also involved a satellite exhibition at Pratt Institute of work curated by the Exhibiton Chairs of ACADIA 2010: Chandler Ahrens of Morphosis, Axel Schmitzberger Assistant Professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and Michael Wen Sen Su Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute.
The conference offered a space for the discussion of the problems involved in the way architects, engineers and artists collect, analyze, assemble, represent and implement information.
There is a growing interest in questioning the architecture implicit to the conformation of information. The architecture of information implies a critical intermediary abstract space relative to processing that has been producing a shift in the core of the discipline. These questions imply an overall ideological ambition of the conference. There is indeed a trajectory that intends to build up a critical alternative axis to the way digital information systems have been understood in architecture since 1990s, primarily based on a visual logic. Media has repressed digital architecture to a mere representational role, negating the potential relational logic of systems, a formal aesthetic fundament based on the structuring of mental relationships. It is becoming quite clear that if architects do not break or displace the given source codes of algorithms and create their own, their work is trapped by the predetermination of the set of ideas contained within those programs. What this concept questions is authorship, the necessity to displace and create structures that organize and process information; and the extent of an autonomy within the constitution of the logic of formal processes. This understanding is based on an ambition that may help a historical venture. Ultimately architecture may inform and be relevant to technology, as opposed to architecture being relative to technological actualization.
But why information at Cooper? The growing array of interfaces that striate digital architecture are layers where information is represented, crossed, manipulated and ultimately presented. If interfaces are spaces of representation, they are spaces of differentiation, and since there is no information without representation, these spaces activate a generative capacity, as architectural content is constituted in a responsive topological loop between form and content. The interface is the context within which the work is made possible, implying a topological relationship between the apparently formless flow of data that is seen extrinsic to form, structure, the interfaces involved and how information is constituted.
It seemed appropriate to question these problems to a school where the deep understanding of representation has activated different levels of self referential disciplinary thinking that propelled different structuralist and poststructuralist approaches. Such strategies enable a responsive generative capacity in interfaces where architectural problems are activated by the questioning of the frame through which they are constituted. Architecture is then possible at that moment, when the interface performs within the work, establishing an autonomy, a reality, and a metaphysics only possible within the discipline. An autonomy that has not yet entered the digital….
These premises were integrated through the curatorial work of the conference chairs, but were also challenged and expanded by the work and discussion of the many participants of such a complex international event. In order to draw certain interest towards to the immense body of work left in the publications, it is interesting to note certain themes that were able to grant certain strategies and attention against the linear use of information. The keynote lecturers included both theoreticians, historians and experimental practitioners, such as: Georges Teyssot derived from a foucaultian background the problem of curvature through a philosophical approach, critiquing linear information representation relative to the topological relationship intrinsic in Sausure’s algorithm Sign=S/s; Antoine Picon provided a critical historical reference to the digital project pointing the work of experimental practitioners; Karl Chu built up a genetic based morphogenesis based on cross relationships between the brain and organisms in an architecture autonomy implicit to computation in his Planet Automata series; Evan Douglis constructed morphing patterns that incorporate evolutionary movement; and Georges Legendre introduced a mathematical specificity from binary codes that layer information.
Overall, Life in:formation featured an impressive number of academic and experimental activities including: 10 groundbreaking 3 day long international workshops featured in 18 presentations and a round table discussion; 5 keynote lectures; 14 guest speakers sharing their work in progress; 36 peer reviewed paper presentations divided into three sessions selected by a 120 international expert peer reviewing committee; and included 16 moderated round table discussions.
For more information and the upcoming video posts please visit www.acadia.org/acadia2010
ANALOG SURFACE-MATRIX ALGORITHM
ANALOG SURFACE-MATRIX ALGORITHM
Computes digital strategies among interfaces as it indexes information in multiple topological and typological levels.
HOUSE I
HOUSE I
Cartopological space-diagram by Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Buenos Aires, 2009.
Palazzo Chiericati
ANDREA PALLADIO'S PALAZZO CHIERICATI, diagram.
Wittkower’s eleven Palladio schemes (Wittkower R. 1949) develop only a differential change of degree and not such conceptual typological change.
Topological Surface-Space
Topological surface-space parameterized against its referential dynamic Cartesian space.
Static Cartesian frame + topological möbius strip surface indexing spatial warping = integrated in a synthetic composition.
Analog and digital interfaces
Analog and digital interfaces: Infrastructure that affect environmental forces using instability to induce landscape opportunities in an ecology of natural feedback exchanging information and energy. Mississippi River Delta, ARCH 177, The Cooper Union and diagrams by Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, New York, 2006.
House II
House II
Cartopological © space
Southampton, New York, 2012-2013
Eiroa Architects
Design Principal: Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa
House II develops three topological displacements that affect the stability of each of its three referential Cartesian coordinate planes. These displacements layer information parametrically, combining different source codes through multiple interfaces. Relative displacements are targeted to activate emerging typological instances to overcome the original organizational structure. Beginning with three centralized nine square grid volumes, the center of one volume is displaced by becoming continuous with the corner of the other - a relationship repeated in the three axes. The relative relationship between the three axes is also displaced, activating multiple typologies within a unifying continuous topology. Therefore House II resolves multiple typologies that are first activated and then critiqued through topological displacements. Synthetic complex continuities between centralized courtyards become internalized through the corners; exterior bridge-spaces become internalized; and finally, a twofold L shape space integrates a horizontal XY house, a vertical YZ house and vertical XY house in a continuous topology.
All of these typologies are integrated into a continuous synthesis that displaces their initial set of categories. The displacement of center-corner and interior-exterior relationships through topology is also taken to another level, since the surfaces that actualize these continuities are also delayered. An internalized topo-logos activates a bodily affection by displacing the deterministic binary-based planar condition of the surface into a differentiated field of interstitial spatial delimitations. Architecture has been expanding towards the landscape. By enfolding this process to displace the architectural container, House II develops an internalized topo-logos that reveals non-deterministic relationships, displacing the original referential Cartesian container space through multiple operations.
