The advantage to coming to a well-known work late and as an outsider—I’m a writer, not an architect—is that I saw it fresh, away from the noise of adulation and reaction. Making a model of Eisenman's House II gave me a chance to experience it closely, over time, as well as provided a platform to think about our time and much else.

“The public realm has shrunk to an apologetic ghost but the private realm has not been significantly enriched; there are no references—either historical or ideal; and in this atomized society, except for what is electronically supplied or is reluctantly sought in print, communication has either collapsed or reduced itself to impoverished interchange of ever more banal verbal formulae.”

From Rowe and Koetter, Collage City. 

This is our world now, where we vacillate between futuristic utopias and visions of apocalypse. Look at the language of the last election and the state of our verbal culture, at how much we have become fractured into narrow whims and absorbed in broad passions. We devote ourselves to specialized disciplines that do not speak among themselves. Or we delight in personal chaos yet deflect complexity of any kind, giving ourselves instead to the most direct, the simplest expression, which speaks loudest. No wonder many of us promote the purist color and want to build protective walls and throw people out. But the rest of us have to ask whether we have been aligned the last year by anything more than our outrage, our desire for removal of that man. Or we have surrendered to the simplest, purest desire of all, profit, and endowed it with absolute freedom, which means absolute power, and watched it flow to the top. Cathedrals have been replaced with corporate monoliths that dominate our public streets.

I see House II as a critical corrective.