Peter Eisenman, world-renowned architect and 1955 graduate of Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art and Planning, will deliver this year's Preston Thomas Memorial Lectures at Cornell. Eisenman helped redefine contemporary architecture, "challenging the idea that architecture has to have a single, clear aesthetic," said Werner Goehner, professor of architecture and chair of the Preston Thomas lecture series.

This year's talks are on Feb. 7, 8, 14 and 15 in the David L. Call Alumni Auditorium in Kennedy Hall on the Cornell campus at 6:30 p.m. The series is titled "The Critical, the Post Critical, the Ecstatic: Current Forms of Radicality."

"I anticipate that they will address the question, what does it mean to practice architecture today," said Goehner, including such issues as how new computer imaging techniques are changing older, more formalistic approaches to space. Goehner predicted that the talks would be of key interest to students and faculty in Architecture, Art and Planning and in the humanities, particularly visual studies majors, as well as any practicing architect within a 200-mile radius of Ithaca.

In 1967 Eisenman founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City, an international think tank for architectural theory and criticism that applies postmodern ideas to the field. The institute's influence has been so far-reaching, according to Goehner, that theorists and practitioners alike now view the field of study in terms of "pre- and post-1968," the institute's first full year of activity.

Eisenman went on to establish his professional practice in 1980. In 1991 his Koizumi Sangyo Corp. headquarters in Tokyo received a 1991 National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects. And in June 1999, his firm's project for a 24-block development on Manhattan's West Side waterfront won first prize in the first International Foundation for the Canadian Centre for Architecture (IFCCA) Prize Competition for the Design of Cities.

Other major built work by Eisenman includes the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus (1989), the Greater Columbus Convention Center (1993) and the Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the University of Cincinnati (1996). His social housing at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin was featured on a postage stamp commemorating the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin. Most recently Eisenman Architects won an international competition for a new 600,000-square-foot City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

The firm's current projects include a museum for the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences at the St. George Ferry Terminal in New York City and a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, featuring a sculptured landscape of concrete pillars.

Eisenman also collaborated with Jacques Derrida, the pre-eminent postmodern theorist, when the two co-wrote Chora L Works (Monacelli Press, 1997). Other publications by Eisenman include House X (Rizzoli, 1982), Fin d'Ou T HouS (The Architectural Association, 1986), Houses of Cards (Oxford University Press, 1987) and Diagram Diaries (Universe, 1999).

The schedule for Eisenman's talks is as follows:

• Feb. 7, The Critical in Architecture, Pre 1968: Interiority and the Origins of Discourse;
• Feb. 8, The Critical in Architecture, Post 1968: Automony and Negativity;
• Feb. 14, The Post Critical: Excess, Ecstatic and Affect;
• Feb. 15, The Critique of a Critique.

The talks on Feb. 8 and 15 include a response by Robert Somol, a principal with the architectural firm Somol X Pollari and adjunct faculty member with the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles. The series is funded through a gift to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning from Ruth and Leonard B. Thomas of Auburn, N.Y., in memory of their son, Preston. For more information, contact Ritsu Katsumata, (607) 255-9936.