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The actual Eisenman is around the corner, huddled with a dozen young staff members around a cardboard model. He is not happy. The model is a plan for the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews, scheduled to open in Warsaw in 2008. Eisenman's firm is one of eleven international teams competing for the project, to be built around the site of the city's old Jewish ghetto. The plan is supposed to use portions of the existing ghetto walls, but Eisenman doesn't like the well-ordered shape of the complex on the table. "I'm trying to cut off the symmetry," he says. "Everything is too regular--I want variety."

The staff members--a studiously hip collection of young architecture grads and interns--shuffle pieces of the model, moving elevator shafts and staircases around as Eisenman looks on. A particularly random configuration catches his eye. "There--I like the odd shapes and sizes." A digital camera is summoned to capture the latest arrangement, and Eisenman immediately opens a fast-paced banter on Italian Serie A soccer. "So--who wins this week? Fiorentina?

No, a young Italian staffer says: Chievo, the team from Verona. Eisenman shakes his head. "Chievo's going down," he says.

And then it's back to work. The staff disperses to their computers and drafting tables and the boss resumes his usual station in the middle of the office. A bearish man of seventy-two with a thick thatch of close-cropped white hair, Eisenman does not dress the part of avant-garde New York architect and intellectual: he wears a rumpled sweater-and-khaki combination and looks like a vigorous retiree en route to some weekend yard work. He oversees his firm from a chaotic compound of desks in his eleventh-floor loft on a street of mannequin dealers and sewing-machine repair shops in Manhattan's fashion district. The arrangement echoes a European atelier--a master and his apprentices sharing a workshop, with no receptionist or personal assistant. When the phone rings, Eisenman might pick it up himself. "This is where I live," he says. "What the hell. I'm beyond what people will think."

The Eisenman management style is a mix of bluster and bonhomie. He sits amidst his staff, he says, because he likes to "keep an eye on them."When asked how many people he employs, he pulls himself away from the sports scores on the MSN homepage and surveys the studio, squinching his face up in thought. Maybe fifteen, he guesses, plus seven interns. "I don't know half the people here," he says in a loud stage whisper.

"You see Peter work in his office, and you wonder how the process works," says Richard Meier '56, BArch '57, the acclaimed Modernist who is Eisenman's friend, cousin, and occasional collaborator. "But it does."

The office is a busy one these days. Eisenman has three entries in competitions this summer, and two large projects are under construction: the new NFL stadium for the Arizona Cardinals, a swoopy metal-skinned facility that evokes a silver-blue barrel cactus, is slated to open in 2006; and the 173-acre "City of Culture" at Galicia--a complex of libraries, theatres, and museums that erupts out of the ground like a man-made mountain--is approaching completion in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The Santiago complex is the biggest commission of Eisenman's career, a massive monument of cutting-edge theory and engineering that city leaders envision as an international architectural icon, a showstopper to rival Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum down the road in Bilbao.

But the project on Eisenman's mind is the one that he just finished, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. He returned from Europe a week ago and is still buzzing off the largely rapturous reception that greeted the project, an abstract field of 2,711 undulating concrete pillars that covers five-and-a-half acres in the heart of the city, right outside the Brandenburg Gate. The memorial has generated near-ceaseless controversy in Germany since it was first proposed in the late 1980s. Critics complained about the enormous size of the site and the fraught symbolism of its location on the site of Hitler's demolished chancellery, and the attachment of the outspoken Eisenman to the project in 1997 merely added fuel to the fire. Sculptor Richard Serra, who collaborated on the original design, quit early in the process when the German government demanded extensive changes. Later, construction was delayed for months when a furor erupted over a subcontractor's Nazi ties (and over a joke Eisenman cracked in an ill-considered attempt to defuse the issue). When the memorial finally opened on May 10, it was front-page news across the continent.

But not, Eisenman notes, in New York, where the New York Times ran a mostly unqualified rave by critic Nicolai Ouroussoff ("It is able to convey the scope of the Holocaust's horrors without stooping to sentimentality--showing how abstraction can be the most powerful tool for conveying the complexities of human emotion") on the first page of the Arts section, not A- 1 itself. This seems to strike the architect as a slight. "It's very strange," he says. "You'd think, this being what you might call a Jewish city, me being a New York architect . . . "He lets the thought trail off.

Eisenman, who is Jewish, has always nursed some ambivalence about the Berlin project. "When we first started, I didn't know if I wanted to do this," he says. "I have mixed feelings about memorials, about Holocaust memorials--and about the Holocaust, since my family was not personally involved. I also felt that most memorials played on sentimentality, not memory, and became a certain kind of kitsch." The solution he arrived at--a stark plain sinking beneath a gray grid of monoliths--was inspired by an Iowa cornfield in which Eisenman was once lost. Visitors describe it as disorienting, alienating, oppressive. Which is fine with Eisenman, who has said that he wanted the memorial to be a "receptacle for anxieties."

If you're looking for architectural anxiety, Eisenman is your man. Since his arrival on the stage in the 1960s as one of a league of loosely affiliated American followers of Le Corbusier known as the "New York Five" (the others were Meier, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, and John Hedjuk), Eisenman has been all but synonymous with a heady theory-driven audacity that tends to leave both admirers and critics baffled. He designed a deviously unlivable house based on the linguistic principles of Noam Chomsky, collaborated with Jacques Derrida in an effort to find an architectural equivalent to the French philosopher's theory of deconstruction, and generally pushed the practical envelope of what the discipline was capable of. "Peter had a lot to do with turning architecture into an intellectual pursuit," says his friend Phyllis Bronfman Lambert '48, founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. "His influence was enormous. If he hadn't come along, I don't know where we'd be."

For his efforts, Eisenman has been rewarded with a reputation as the premier puzzler in the field--"The most intellectually convuluted, infuriating major architect in America," as Time declared in 1989. Though his first public commission didn't arrive until his fifties--for the first half of his career, he was largely a "paper architect" who wrote scholarly essays and designed theoretical buildings--the handful of finished projects on his résumé have always attracted an outsized share of controversy. To adherents of the New Urbanism movement, who value human-scale buildings that tread gently on the environment, Eisenman's work is the apotheosis of modern architecture's perverse user-unfriendliness. (The colliding planes and tilting walls of his Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University leave some museum-goers literally nauseated.) Then there's his equally disorienting jokey/ brusque manner, fondness for dense academic archi-speak, and history of intellectual donnybrooks with clients, critics, and other builders (among them former protege Daniel Libeskind of World Trade Center master-plan fame, who accused Eisenman of cribbing ideas for the Berlin memorial from his own Jewish Museum).

Even amid the boldface personalities of post-Bilbao celebrity architecture, Eisenman is a reliably polarizing force; read anything written about him and the word that appears with numbing regularity is "provocateur,"much to the architect's (possibly feigned) chagrin. "I don't mean to be," he protests. "I mean, I'd like to be a pussycat. I'd rather have you say, ‘Hey, that's a really neat guy. People got him wrong.' But I'm not going to sacrifice what I think. The kinds of ideas I have are very strong. I'm a strong person, a strong architect. And I do strong projects. Certainly, our project in Berlin is not a pussycat project."

And yet Eisenman will admit to a strategic mellowing."You can't be an enfant terrible all your life--it doesn't wear well," he says. "I'm an elder statesman and I have to be more careful now." He agreed to downsize the Berlin monument (the original Eisenman/Serra design had 4,000 stelae), obligingly revised his Cardinals stadium several times, and played a supporting role--with Meier, Gwathmey, and Steven Holl--in the dream team of New York architects shortlisted in the 2003 WTC design competition. Their entry, a pair of 1,111-foot towers interlinked in a grid formation, failed to derail the Libeskind juggernaut, but Meier says that the collaboration itself was "amazingly smooth--we all came away feeling really good about it." Eisenman's wife, architectural journalist Cynthia Davidson, agrees. "I still think we did the best job. But we didn't have the best PR campaign."

The WTC proposal was whipped together in eight weeks, which in itself speaks to a newfound looseness in Eisenman's methodology. The fierce polemicist who attempted to turn post-structural literary theory into a house has given way to the intuitionist who's willing to eyeball it. "I'm very quick--I'm quicker than anybody in this office," he says. "I know what I want. And then people say, ‘Oh, I don't know, Peter . . . that's not according to theory.' But I'd rather have good look and bad theory. If you can bring them together, fine, but if it don't look good to me, forget it."

This doesn't sound, he admits, like the Eisenman of old. "Right--but that was thirty years ago," he says. "I'm not a paragon of consistency."

Once upon a time, Peter Eisenman was the odd kid from East Orange, New Jersey, who liked to sit alone in the high school football stadium before games. "I'd be first in line, with my quarter. I'd sit in the same place--not like the other little kids who were running around. I'd sit there quietly in the stands and meditate."

He still does this, after a fashion. Eisenman's football fetish is legendary--he's a Giants season ticket holder and likes to tell the story about how he got the Arizona stadium gig because he could name the starting backfield of the 1947 Cardinals. On autumn Saturdays, you'll probably find him at Rutgers games, where his father used to take him as a child. "We'll have fifteen people tailgating," he says. "But an hour before the game I leave and go sit by myself. I don't like to be on stage. I'd rather be in a crowd, anonymous."

At Cornell, Eisenman was a freshman backstroker on the swim team, but when his passion for architecture started interfering with practice, he took up a less demanding sport--cheerleading. His unabashed fandom is an inescapable theme. ("We get a lot of sports metaphors around here," says wife Davidson.) In conversation he switches from high theory to jock talk so seamlessly that it can be difficult to determine exactly what has riled him so. A discourse on the Holocaust memorial--"It's only provocative because of its relative condition in a society where there's very little provocation"--leads swiftly to an equally impassioned riff on the Cornell hockey team's NCAA defeat in Minnesota this spring. "I think they got screwed, the way they got seeded. If that's a provocative thing to say, OK. But I'm willing to speak my mind about what I think is an injustice. I'm willing to confront situations that I think are unfair. I'm a moral person."

After an Army stint in Korea, Eisenman picked up a master's degree at Columbia, then studied for his PhD at Cambridge in the early 1960s, where he came under the wing of Colin Rowe, the legendary theorist who taught at Cornell from 1962 to 1990. With Rowe, Eisenman toured Europe, discovered the great Renaissance builder Andrea Palladio, and returned to the United States full of ideas about new ways of combining theory, history, and practice. He took a position at Princeton--he's also taught at Harvard, Ohio State, and Cooper Union, and now divides his year between Yale and Princeton--and in 1967 founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City as a sort of bridge between academia and the built world. There he edited the journal Oppositions and presided over a hothouse of ideas with other builders and thinkers, writing articles and debating the state of the art.

What he didn't do was build anything. "I didn't know how to begin," he says. "Architecture is a dumb profession, in a way--it has no formalized apprenticeship, like law and medicine. How do you get a building? I'd gotten a PhD--a useless degree, but it teaches you to sit still for three years and be patient. I knew too much to build badly."

"Peter was content to be on the fringe of practice but in the thick of theory," says Meier. "It took him a while before he realized he wanted to be an architect."

His first buildings were appropriately contentious. He designed a series of ten numbered houses, four of which were built. The buildings were more like illustrations of theory than places to live; in an Eisenman house, columns end before reaching the ground, voids open up in floors, staircases lead nowhere, and walls and beams float or disappear. (Client Suzanne Frank wrote an entire book chronicling the travails she and her husband endured building and living in House VI.) In an effort to redefine the very purpose of architecture, Eisenman seemed willing to envision structures that waged open war on their users.

In the early 1980s Eisenman abandoned his institute and opened his own practice. The Wexner Center, completed in 1989, opened the door to other high-profile public buildings, including an award-winning housing project at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin in 1993 and the Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the University of Cincinnati in 1996. Now his firm is busier than ever: the once-unbuildable architect is much in demand for clients who want a name-brand avant-gardist attached to their office tower. "We're one of these international troubadours who go from competition to competition," he says. According to Meier, Eisenman seems to thrive on the cut-throat nature of the process. "I think Peter likes competitions because he likes the idea of competing against architects he respects," he says. "As though who the competition is against is as important as the project itself."

Throughout his recent building boom Eisenman has continued to teach--"I'm the only architect I know that has taught consistently every year for the last forty-five years," he says--and a steady output of essays and lectures has kept him in the thick of many a fight on architecture's intellectual battlefields. In 2003 he published a book he had begun forty years earlier, an exhaustive examination of Italian architect Giuseppe Terragni, who designed severe white Rationalist buildings for Mussolini's fascists. The book is vintage Eisenman--obsessive, controversial, and impenetrable. "Peter Eisenman is the closest thing we've got to a Renaissance architect--he's a theoretician, historian, raconteur, and a great gossip," says Mohsen Mostafavi, the new dean of Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. "He's both within the present and very concerned with the materiality of the past."

This submersion in the masters of architecture's past isn't just a builder's sideline--it is central to Eisenman's vision of himself as a player in the evolving drama of his art. "Every great architect in history has in one way or another been defined by their treatises, as opposed to their buildings," he says. "What would Le Corbusier have been without his treatise? What would Robert Venturi, or Rem Koolhaas? Now, what does it mean to have a place in history? Who knows?" For all his headline-watching, Eisenman says he's not interested in how the general public receives his work. He's aiming for posterity. "The two great churches in Venice are Palladio's Redentore and San Giorgio Maggiore. Do tourists ever go there? No. They go to San Marco. The average museum-goer can't tell a Picasso from a Braque. The same thing with architecture. It's not necessary for anyone who visits my projects to know the theory behind it. Architecture shouldn't demand that they know why. It's enough that I know why. And history will judge me for those whys."

I ate on a Friday afternoon, the Eisenman team turns its attention to a competition for a municipal library in Hamburg. The project is still in its early stages. They have a detailed cardboard model of the immediate neighborhood with a great empty space in the middle. Inside the void is a pile of boxes in various sizes, color-keyed to the square footage requirements of the building's various functional subsystems. As the staff gathers, Eisenman takes stock of the site.

"Holy shit, that's a big building. Can we build across the street?"

No, they can't--and the building can be no higher than the eaves of the church next door.

"What if I say I want a donut?" A staffer arranges the little boxes into the crude shape of a building with a central courtyard. "Now make a frame, like a U." As they shuffle the pieces around, Eisenman maintains a constant distracted patter, firing questions and dropping bits of urban planning lore ("You know, the perimeter block was a German idea") to his circle of followers. He ponders the historical map of the city. "So, it's a fortified town. What year?"

The meeting seems to be more pep talk than design confab. He's marshalling his troops, cheering the team before the big game. "Holy jeepers, we should try to win," he says. "This is a really interesting project. "

The architect looks at the empty space and ponders. Then, briskly, the meeting is over, and it's back to work.

"Great plan. OK. Beautiful. So we win."

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