Between presence and absence: Phenomenal interstitiality in Eisenman’s Guardiola House

Abstract

American architect and educator Peter Eisenman treats architecture as a form of text which can be read through the absent/present traces of a design process. Though the trace has been much developed in existing scholarship, Eisenman’s Guardiola House (1988) has been overlooked in terms of its analysis and interpretation. This paper proposes that the Guardiola House is a critical shift in Eisenman’s work, since for the first time the trace, through imprinting, is developed into a condition of interstitiality, which not only expresses the merging of geometries, but provides a new way of blurring concepts and space. The Guardiola House reflects Eisenman’s shift from the rule-bound transformations framed in structuralism to the complex, interpretive, and unpredictable ‘events’ of poststructuralism. This paper asks: what significance, in terms of theory, culture, and programme, does this notion of the interstitial have for Eisenman’s work, as well as for the practice of architectural design?