Eisenman’s House of Guards: The Paradox of the Interstitial Trace

Abstract

American architect and educator, Peter Eisenman, treats architecture as a form of text – something that could be read through the traces produced from a design process. Eisenman’s Guardiola House, an un-built project of 1988, introduces a design innovation that has been overlooked by existing scholarship – that of the interstitial. This is a condition of the in-between that in Eisenman’s architecture forms the framework for processes that narrate transformations by way of novel notational strategies of tracing, recording, and indexing multiple absent-present references. The thesis proposes that the Guardiola House is a critical shift in Eisenman’s work, since for the first time, the trace, through the operation of imprinting, is explored in three dimensions as a condition of interstitiality, which merges the constituent geometries of the design expressing the simultaneous coexistence of two or more systems. The interstitial condition provided a new way of blurring or hybridising geometry which had not been seen in his previous work. The geometry of the Guardiola House reflects a shift in Eisenman’s approach, moving from the rule-bound transformations framed in structuralism to the complex, interpretive, and unpredictable ‘events’ of poststructuralism. This thesis asks: what is the significance, in terms of theory, culture, and program, of this notion of the interstitial for the design of the Guardiola House, as well as for the development of Eisenman’s subsequent work? This research analyses the concepts of the ‘trace’ in the Guardiola House, in both the published transformational narrative and the actual process of designing as documented in the archived drawings. Through a critical comparison of these processes, several paradoxes were found revealing how Eisenman’s intention to make architecture be read as a text or linear narrative turns out to be a fictional idealisation of reality. This thesis demonstrates that these dual processes do not result in mere inconsistencies, but are internally consistent means of productivity. It is argued that the Guardiola project – as an idea and as a process – has operated throughout Eisenman’s career, ever since his dissertation and through to his more recent work, as one consistent idea with multiple manifestations.