time the subversion of the centrality and dominance of aesthetic and evaluative
universality. While the project as an object of interpretation appears to be self-referential,
located within that self-referentiality is the tradition, though now displaced and
disseminated it can no longer be thematized. It is no longer itself. It is repeated though it
is no longer the same as itself. Homology has become heterology: not after the event but
in its being reworked. This is precisely what is at stake in dislocation. Eisenman’s own
description of the strategy of allowing the interplay of a rethinking of biology and
architecture attests to the creative potential of this location of dislocation; perhaps even a
relocation that dislocates.
As biology today dislocates the traditions of science, so the architecture of
our Bio-Centrum project dislocates the traditions of architecture. While
architecture’s role is traditionally seen to be that of accommodating and
representing function, this project does not simply accommodate the
methods by which research into biological process is carried out, rather it
articulates those processes themselves. Indeed it could be said its
architecture is produced by those very processes.^13The inapplicability of function opens up a space that can no longer be filled by
prediction. Prediction is the determination inscribed within the building that is generated
by, and hence which also sustains, the dominance of use. The space, in opening the
building, of robbing prediction of its predictive power, once again constructs the building
as an object—an object of interpretation—which can never be self-referential. There is
always the space that cannot be filled. The temporality of past, present and future
understood within sequential continuity is no longer, even in this instance, viable. This
state of affairs has already been noted when Eisenman writes of a design that extends ‘the
search into the possibilities of occupiable form’. The search opens out. The end cannot be
predicted; though it can always, in the end, be located. Opening limits self-referentiality.
The question of self-referentiality is in addition linked to the paradox mentioned
above. In Eisenman’s House VI the presence of columns in the dining room that neither
aid (in terms of function or decoration) nor hinder the intended activity, ‘have according
to the occupants of the house changed the dining experience in a real and more
importantly unpredictable sense’.^14 The experience of dislocating, expressed in a light,
almost glancing way in the above, opens up two related paths of investigation, if not of
experimentation. The first concerns the question of experience, while the second
concerns how the connection (if indeed connection is the right term) between
homogeneity and heterogeneity is to be understood, since they neither involve nor take
place within either an either/or, or a binary opposition. Understanding this ‘connection’,
beyond the purview of these oppositions, involves rethinking the relationship between
time and interpretation. (Because of the complexity of this problem all that will be
presented here is a brief sketch of some of the issues involved.)
The ascription of heterogeneity and homogeneity within the object of interpretation
take place within tradition. In other words the assumed homo-geneity of the object of
interpretation—and indeed of the philosophical enterprise itself—is both an assumption
and a consequence of tradition understood as the determination in advance. This means
that within the frame designated by tradition the homogeneous is original. Now, it is not
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