We simply could not be more delighted that Peter Eisenman is making use of Cargo. Below an excerpt from an early and favorite book, Houses of Cards, Oxford University Press, 1987:
“Precisely because shelter always manifests presence in construction, it will tend to stabilize and in so doing ultimately lend itself to institutionalization. Any act of building will necessarily be an act of presencing. But, as stated earlier, the conceptual act of architecture is the critique, transformation, and creation of institutions. Thus architecture can be considered, paradoxically, contradictory to building, to its institutionalizing presence. As such, architecture cannot be except as it continuously distances itself from its own boundaries; it is always in the process of becoming, of changing, while it is also always establishing, institutionalizing. It has the potential to be simultaneously a creation and a critique of the institutions it builds. This is what might be termed the challenge of dislocation for the architect and for architecture.
As every dislocation of presence also requires, to some extent, its reaffirmation, any activity that would entirely abandon the terms of both the metaphysic and the physic would not be involved in the activity of dislocation but of destruction, for dislocation is enabled only by the play of absence against presence, by the work on and within the contradictory terms of the discourse. This condition is particularly significant in architecture as opposed to, for example, the discourses of philosophy, because in the latter the presence of the material, language, can be made to disappear into signs characterized by their transparency, a type of absence in language. Because of the unavoidable imperative of presence in architecture, it makes entering into a stabilizing metaphysic where, for example, scale and form succumb to an authoritative center. Hence architecture is an activity that is highly resistant to dislocation and decentering. This is the paradox of architecture.“
“Precisely because shelter always manifests presence in construction, it will tend to stabilize and in so doing ultimately lend itself to institutionalization. Any act of building will necessarily be an act of presencing. But, as stated earlier, the conceptual act of architecture is the critique, transformation, and creation of institutions. Thus architecture can be considered, paradoxically, contradictory to building, to its institutionalizing presence. As such, architecture cannot be except as it continuously distances itself from its own boundaries; it is always in the process of becoming, of changing, while it is also always establishing, institutionalizing. It has the potential to be simultaneously a creation and a critique of the institutions it builds. This is what might be termed the challenge of dislocation for the architect and for architecture.
As every dislocation of presence also requires, to some extent, its reaffirmation, any activity that would entirely abandon the terms of both the metaphysic and the physic would not be involved in the activity of dislocation but of destruction, for dislocation is enabled only by the play of absence against presence, by the work on and within the contradictory terms of the discourse. This condition is particularly significant in architecture as opposed to, for example, the discourses of philosophy, because in the latter the presence of the material, language, can be made to disappear into signs characterized by their transparency, a type of absence in language. Because of the unavoidable imperative of presence in architecture, it makes entering into a stabilizing metaphysic where, for example, scale and form succumb to an authoritative center. Hence architecture is an activity that is highly resistant to dislocation and decentering. This is the paradox of architecture.“