I'm so glad I found Peter Eisenman. He proves my point, all by himself. Eisenman takes contempt for the user to the next level. Big finish!

Credentials:

Peter Eisenman will always be associated with the New York Five (along with Hejduk, Graves, Gwathmey, and Meier), the subject of a 1969 MOMA exhibition, and social connections to Philip Johnson. Until 1988 he was known to study and/or teach architectural theory in the finest schools in the country, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and produced a dozen books, one co-authored with Jacques Derrida.

Eisenman's theoretical approach was strangely understandable. User-hostile, yes, and tangly, but understandable. Going forward from the proposition that Modernism had reached an artistic cul-de-sac, in "House of Cards" Eisenman proposed that human response to architectural form over the course of long centuries led to the accumulation of arbitrary cultural notions like comfort, convenience, privacy, and territoriality. A radical return-to-first-principles keeps the basic notion of 'shelter' but throws those other ideas out, so you get the possibility of all these new forms, liberating the form from stale functional ideas. And if that means the users experience friction, anxiety, and uncertainty, well, fine, that's a more honest reflection of the world we live in. "The architecture would create anxiety and distance… man and object would be independent and the relationship between them would have to be worked out anew."

The theory, then, is that Eisenman's buildings are meant to be hostile and uncomfortable from the beginning. In practice the results are much much worse.

Up until 1988 Eisenman had limited his tangible damage to office supplies and small houses in the woods. A prominent housing project in Berlin and the notorious Wexner Center at the Ohio State opened the door to a string of astonishing catastrophes. As of November 2004, football-loving Eisenman is working on the huge Arizona Cardinals stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Mainstream architectural criticism, normally forgiving and deferential to big names, is very plain about Eisenman's consistent lack of discipline. Normally you have to really read between the lines. Not here.

He has recently abandoned all theory.

Crimes:

You'd have to be a nut to ask Peter Eisenman to build you anything. You'd just have to have a deep self-destructive urge. I'm not talking about wasting a few moments looking for the front door, or psychological blah blah blah, I'm talking about wasted fortunes, bodily injury, and throwing up.

They say Eisenman sort of chuckles when he talks about how many users throw up in his buildings. It's a common reaction. I have to admit it's sort of funny. It's proof that the odd angles and colliding planes overhead really do work to disorient people and, as he's said, "shake people out of their needs".

There's the tilted funhouse Wexner, 1989, as a good example. The Wexner Center was lavishly endowed ($25M, then $43M), occupies prime real estate on the edge of Olmstead's Ohio State campus, and was a hotly anticipated Deconstructivist showpiece. As well as making you want to throw up, it has chronic leaks and moisture problems, and fundamental lighting issues like direct sunlight into fine-art exhibition spaces. In a walkthrough the spaces demand your attention, then have nothing to offer. The Ohio State board of trustees recently allocated up to $10M (then $12M, now up to $14.5M) for a shockingly extensive renovation, equivalent to an 18-year-old needing hip replacement surgery and skin grafts. It was born a wreck.

And there's the Columbus Convention Center, from 1993, which kills three blocks of pedestrian street life in downtown Columbus and is pretty from the air, they say, but expensive to maintain. And there's the Aronoff Center at the University of Cincinnati, a maintenance nightmare, apparently freshly shaken by earthquake, which also makes people queasy. I wonder if dogs shy away from it.

But the best story is about House VI, designed in 1972.

House VI is a 1500-square-foot structure that took three years to build. It's something like a tiny Winchester house, a set of tricks and jokes. An exterior column fails to reach the ground. A slot in the bedroom floor forced the young client couple to buy and sleep in twin beds. The budget began at $35K, then it was quickly $45K, then $55K. It leaked from the beginning, and was completely uninsulated. Within five years the owners found major structural damage, due to incompetent working drawings, ultimately forcing a total re-build which drained the owners' entire savings and left them with a six-figure mortgage.

The clients, the Franks, were willing to fund and live in a house-like Deconstructivist sculpture. They were less willing to fund and live in an improperly specified and badly built house-like Deconstructivist sculpture. This is a failure of craftsmanship. At some point, the Franks, frustrated beyond belief with rainwater streaming into their kitchen and Eisenman ignoring their calls and this whole chronic mess, installed a temporary slanted roof-piece simply to curb the level of damage - and this was called "an act of cultural vandalism" by one of Eisenman's admirers.

Suzanne Frank was eventually moved to set the record straight in a book-length retort, the most revealing book about American architecture that I know of. "Peter Eisenman's House VI: The Client's Response." In it Frank explains all this but still exhibits patience - to the point of masochism. After you've absorbed the amusing anecdotes, them being forced to haul their child's crib out in the yard for Philip Johnson's visit, them fighting for the right to sleep together and have a full-sized refrigerator, and Frank's regret when counting up how much this experiment ultimately cost, it's quite clear that all of Eisenman's work resonates, vibrates, sings, with a level of selfishness that is itself a kind of art.