Renowned architect now building in Italy speaks in intimate setting Critic of establishment from within, he nevertheless leads edge of modernity Harmonies of line and geometric form, diagrammed, mapped and built An extraordinarily personal presentation by well known architectural thinker Peter Eisenman took place last week (Tue March 19 2013) in the friendly confines of the wood[ paneled meeting room of the Park Avenue mansion at 68 Street owned by the Italian Institute. The ruddy, cuddly white haired intellectual-artist-engineer spoke more or less spontaneously from a sheet of red inked notes, after a introduction by an equally short, familiar Italian colleague in whom the task evidently induced a high good humor. Among the excerpts from Eisenman's writing this architect friend from Bologna, Silvio Cassara, quoted was "I was interested in an object that appeared to design itself,. As stated such a process was intended to extract the object from the history of architecture. Distancing the architect from the design process and the object (ie architecture) from the design process", "and "In order to distinguish architecture from building there must be an intentional act." Other quotes he noted were "we do culturally necessary projects that have a value to the culture", "form does not follow function", "architecture is about ideas", and "a book lasts longer than a building". Finally, "my ideas concerning this inferiority (of architectural product) have gone by many different names over the years - deep structure, immanence, formal basis among them, but for me these external models clearly enrich the architectural discourse, which would otherwise have smothered in the claustrophobic rhetoric of a so called natural or classical language of architecture." Having thus whetted our appetite for seeing how such advanced views could recommend themselves to developers public or private in Italy of all places, with its grand classical tradition of two millennia of traditional Greco-Roman architecture, Signor Cassara gave the stage - actually the seat alongside him at the table which included Professor Vitale of the Institute, and Rodolfo Panisi, the CEO of Stonepeak Ceramics, an Italian producer of sheets of polished "high tech porcelain" with which walls and floors can be given an instant marble finish and the host of the panel - to Peter Eisenman, who began by remarking that he was uncertain exactly what to say because he had no good idea about who had come to hear him. As it happened, there were quite a few young architects who had come, for example Christopher Powers, a project designer at Laguarda.Low of Little West 12th Street in Manhattan, a Columbia graduate and teacher, and some of his colleagues. One striking revelation by the speaker was made in passing. Apparently architects who become admired for their art and expertise on paper nevertheless never win a major project to give real life to their ideas.