For my final project, I created an investigation board to map the impact of three highly influential architects on postmodern space. This project has an end goal of presenting a complex interweaving of how we have gotten to where contemporary architecture is today. With reference to Joe Day’s diagram from Another Tree Grows in the Bronx, the architects presented within this investigation on postmodern space, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, and John Hedjuk, are core influential players who have moved us towards contemporary space with their overlapping spheres of thought within theory, educational bases, and geographical spheres of influence. Displayed in blue, the mapping shows that the core suspects all hold spheres of influence in schools on the East Coast specifically (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, The Cooper Union, and Columbia). However, the evidence shows that their most important built works, noted in red, are located in Europe and oddly enough, OHIO. Memorials, houses and other main centers for cultural influence included. Modernist architects, theorists, and artists such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Colin Rowe, and Sergei Einstein, present themselves in orange as co-contributors or accomplices within this investigation along with the groups such as the New York 5. Motives, displayed in green, are explicit research and implementation of encounters, semiology, chemistry between the user and the building, and movement/event studies. Other accompanying motives being that of psychology, grids, diagrams, and the shape/object. This interweaving of influences in postmodern space, brings us to contemporary architecture and more issues of inclusivity that need to be addressed for architecture moving forward. Specifically questions that arise from this investigation and information that requires further examination is the cause of the imbalance of hierarchical association in educational influence on the East coast opposed to that of the West. While East coast schools were prevalent among these suspects, what motives do suspects that interplay coast to coast have to contribute? Also, the question of many of their works moving beyond the American cultural sphere and out to locations in Europe. What about American culture has prevented impactful works of architecture to be built in the American context?
