houses, fails in a concrete, philosophical and political sense to address housing. Equally
the interplay between architecture and the home in which philosophy, aesthetics and
discourse may be located, works with the assumption that the nature of what is housed is
such that the act of housing it will not call into question the specificity of the act itself. In
other words the unified nature of philosophy is assumed and thus is thought to have been
provided either by the unity of tradition or the singularity of its object. What needs to be
examined therefore are some of the elements at work within these assumptions; their
premises and therefore that on which they are built. Philosophy can never be free of
architecture. The impossibility of pure freedom, of pure positivity and thus of a radical
and absolute break entails that what is at stake here is, as a consequence, precisely
philosophy and architecture themselves. Of the many locations that can be given to
Eisenman’s work one is to situate it within the act of rethinking both architecture and
philosophy. A way towards an understanding of the impossibility of an absolute break
and therefore of this location of Eisenman’s work may stem from a consideration of
Descartes’ use of an architectural metaphor in the Discours de la méthode. Descartes’
attempt to refound philosophy in the wake of a complete break with the past is presented
within architectural terms. What must be traced is the founding of this attempt.^1
DESCARTES’ ARCHITECTURE
For philosophy what is at stake in the question of the relationship between architecture
and tradition is the possibility of a rethinking of architectural thought. Tradition emerges
as the site that occasions both an understanding of dominance—the categories and
concepts which are handed down and which thus determine thinking within and as
tradition—and the possibility of a thinking which, while it maintains (houses) the
dominant, is neither reducible to nor explicable in terms of it. In sum, tradition allows for
history to be thought within philosophy. In addition the tension that marks the
corresponding non-correspondence of a thinking (be it architectural or philosophical) that
is situated within tradition, and a thinking that cannot be thus situated, provides a way to
renew the concept of the avant-garde as well as providing access to an understanding of
the accompanying mode of experience (that is sensibility) proper to the avant-garde.
Descartes’ architectural ‘metaphor’ is a familiar point of entry. It goes without saying
that within Descartes’ architecture there is an explicit confrontation with tradition. The
location of this ‘metaphor’ is the Second Part of the Discours de la méthode. The context
concerns the possibility of philosophy, of a new philosophical thinking, and thus whether
tradition can be refurbished—what has been handed down by and as tradition—or, on the
contrary, whether philosophy is constrained to start again. It is not difficult to see in the
very formulation of the problem that Descartes thinks that tradition may be, in fact, left
behind. In other words that an absolute break with the past can be established.
Consequently, in discussing Descartes it will be essential to analyse the unfolding of the
metaphor as well as to examine or assess the possibility of this purported complete
departure. Descartes’ metaphor is an ‘example’ of the general problem of how change
occurs and, of course, who should bring it about. (It is thus not just a metaphor.) He notes
that
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