Code X

Peter Eisenman's competition-winning project for the City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, is a formidable battery of museums, libraries, and auditoriums, a cultural acropolis atop a spectacular hillside site in northeastern Spain. By excavating the hilltop and arranging six buildings as a kind of artificial topography, Eisenman creates a new warped landscape that seems to merge building and ground, that occupies the hilltop without seeming to have been built upon it. In CODEX, the New York-based Eisenman, known for a career of formal investigations, reveals in essays and illustrations his theory of coding as a device for producing form. Through more than three hundred line drawings and perspectives, the development of the code--and the buildings and landscape it informs--becomes apparent, culminating in a giant earthwork as excavation of the site begins.