Résidences secondaires : how Eisenman houses fictive structures of history

Abstract

Writing, designing and building constitute three moments in the representation and organization of reality and fiction in architecture. These three interdependent moments joined by fragile links disrupt the boundaries between architectural criticism and practice in architecture and promote interaction between the critic and the practitioner. My thesis focuses on the link between writing and designing. Peter Eisenman exemplifies the architect's transitory position between writing and designing. His interdisciplinary investigations look for architecture's other possibilities through criticism and practice, thus engaging architecture in interpretive activities.Writing will be examined not as a critical tool for design, but as an instrumental device that leads to design. On the one hand, language as a critical device explicitly grounds Eisenman's postponment of questions concerning architecture for architecture's benefit from the realm of ideas. On the other hand, its use as an instrumental device implicitly demarcates potential formal aspects of language as an agent of Eisenman's design and my own investigation in new modes of criticism of architecture. I structure this essay on a dual analysis of the case study by displacing architectural criticism from its house to another house, that of literary criticism, architecture's residence secondaire. While, architectural criticism is concerned with questions of understanding the interdependent mechanisms of form, function and ideas with respect to space, time and representation, literary criticism reveals the dislocating mechanisms of Eisenman's fictive structures of his own history in time. My interest in interactive criticisms advocates an open-ended process that writes and re-writes an event in different texts.