Peter Eisenman does not cheer at football games.
Peter Eisenman is a hardcore football fan. (The Wall Street Journal called him “an unrepentant sports nut.”) He has been buying season tickets to NY Giants games for a half-century.
He doesn’t cheer at them.
A month ago, he had what most sports fans could have only described as an out-of-body experience: He went and saw his favorite pro football team—50 years running—win one of the most amazing championship victories in sports history—Super Bowl XLII, his first.
He didn’t cheer.
But even more, of the 60,000 people who saw the event live, Peter Eisenman was the only person sitting in University of Phoenix Stadium, pictured above, who, while watching those men do battle, could look out at the retractable roof; its roll-in natural grass field; the completely unobstructed seating; and the massive supercolumns supporting the whole structure, say two little words, and be telling the truth.
“My baby.”
Peter Eisenman, of Eisenman Architects, designed University of Phoenix Stadium. Peter Eisenman watched his first live Super Bowl as it was won with feats of superhuman cunning and strength by a team he’s loved all of his adult life in a massive stadium people are raving about but that he remembers when it weighed less than a paper clip, when it was nothing but a pattern of neurons firing in his formidable brain.
And he still didn’t cheer.
He’s either the coolest or the most tightly-wound person ever made. Me? If I’d held all that passion, history, talent, and juice inside me, after Plaxico Burress’s game-ending catch, I’d have let out a Cuba-Gooding-Jr.-winning-best-supporting-actor-at-the-Academy-Awards style war cry squared, run out onto the field naked, and set myself on fire. But I guess that’s why I’m not Peter Eisenman.
That I’m not Peter Eisenman is also why I didn’t spend Super Bowl Sunday seated next to the smart, slender, friendly, and blonde Cynthia Davidson. The person who knows that Eisenman doesn’t scream over great plays (“We high-five! He yells when he’s angry, not when he’s happy”) knows an awful lot more about him, enough to fill a book. So she did one.
I’m talking with Cynthia about that book tomorrow, Friday, March 7, at 2 pm ET, on NONFICTION, my weekly WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, broadcasting terrestrially in the NYC tri-state, and streaming live here. The book’s called Tracing Eisenman: Peter Eisenman Complete Works (Thames & Hudson). It details Eisenman’s history and ouevre as only someone who knows him well, understands his intent, but who was an architectural critic and theorist before she met him, might do. Cynthia is cofounder of the nonprofit Anyone Corporation, and editor on a dozen books for MIT Press’s Writing Architecture series. As well, she publishes Log, an architectural journal.
