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.

Peter Eisenman is principal of Eisenman Architects in New York and teaches at the Cooper Union and Yale University. He is the author of Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques.