I believe the philosophy of deconstruction is a moral obligation. I believe I’m a moral architect because through my architecture I open up man’s psyche to the unconscious and repressed side.
Peter Eisenman, interview with Hanno Rauterberg, in: Talking Architecture.
Asked if his Holocaus Memorial in Berlin is out to goad the audience:
Not goad, but unsettle. Perhaps the way a picture by Caspar David Friedrich can be unsettling. It’s beautiful, but at the same time there’s something odd about its beauty. You can lose yourself in it, and get a feeling of being alone. The Memorial will have the same effect. If you wander through the steale, you lose your sense of direction and purpose and perhaps your certainties as well. The thing is, all that we have in our heads about the Holocaust is a jumble of photos and films. The Memorial attempts to break the power of these media images. It tries to overcome the hegemony of the visual side by going for primary physical experience and emotions.
Peter Eisenman, interview with Hanno Rauterberg, in: Talking Architecture.
In a book of 18 interviews with architects, three of them brought up Eisenman:
I don’t think that architecture can be critical or subversive. There are architects that see otherwise, Peter Eisenman, for example. He calls it subversive when his walls are slightly slanting. Subversion is simply a new form of style, nothing more.
Rem Koolhaas, in an interview with Hanno Rauterberg, Talking Architecture.
Architecture can’t be critical at all, it can’t oppose the reality it’s designed for. Even Peter Eisenman doesn’t believe in that sort of thing any more.
Philip Johnson, in an interview with Hanno Rauterberg, Talking Architecture.
(talking about his design for the Topography of Terror): You can’t counter terrible things with horror. We don’t need sombre event-architecture in order to remember, to understand, or be amazed. In the formidable monument that is Eisenman’s stelae memorial, I see the beginning of another catastrophe lurking within. The memorial seems to me immensely rigid. It tries to discipline people. Even in the memory, a military stance is adopted.
Peter Zumthor, in an interview with Hanno Rauterberg, Talking Architecture.