while a house today must still shelter, it does not need to symbolise or
romanticise its sheltering function, to the contrary such symbols are today
meaningless and merely nostalgic.^11It is precisely in these terms that it is possible to speak of the housing of tradition; that is
a form of housing that contains within it the tradition of housing and yet is neither
reducible to nor explicable in the terms set by that tradition. This is the paradox referred
to earlier and which is marked by the interplay between dislocation and location.
Before trying to trace the consequences of this relationship beyond the borders of
architecture it is essential to describe this paradox in greater detail. In fact it is only a
paradox in the most conventional sense. What is at play here—and this is also true of all
Eisenman’s architectural strategies—is, to use his own formulation, an attempt ‘to
question the accumulated tradition of the institution of dwelling’. It is a questioning,
however, that is neither theoretical nor abstract but which is enacted in the buildings
themselves. It does not take place outside, as though there were an outside. Not only does
this check the assumed and often unquestioned viability of the distinction between theory
and practice, it brings to the fore the twofold need for a new aesthetics and, perhaps more
importantly, a new conception of sensibility; understood, of course as part of a re-
expression of experience.
Eisenman’s plans for the Bio-Centrum at the University of Frankfurt provide a more
concrete way of extending these preliminary comments. The Centre is being constructed
for advance work in biological research. It is this ‘use’ that in the first instance
determines the elements that are involved. They enact—architecturally—the codes used
by the biologists in their own scientific work. Mark Wigley has, with great accuracy and
care, described the consequences of the interplay between the code and the basic forms of
the ‘modernist blocks’:
these intersections of modernist abstraction and an arbitrary figurative
code, which act as the basic form, are then progressively distorted to
provide the functionally specific social and technical spaces. This
distortion is effected by systematically adding further shapes in a way that
clashes—new shapes that come out of the same system of four basic
shapes that they distort.^12This description both highlights the difficulty of Eisenman’s recent work and indicates
how the site—the project—is itself enacted in terms of an initial heterogeneity which is,
by definition, incapable of synthesis. ‘Distortion’ is creative. The addition of new
elements brought about a change in the aesthetic reception or response to the earlier ones.
The complexity of the interrelationship between the elements of the project means, as
Wigley has argued, that the elements combine in a complex and unending ‘dialogue’.
There is therefore an original and multiple babble whose end is the absence of ends. The
function rather than functionality has determined the initial structure. At the same time it
not only sanctions but also determines its own distortion. This unpredictable and creative
inter-connection means that it is impossible to privilege any particular part of the
‘project’. Indeed the criteria in terms of which evaluation, response, etc., would take
place are themselves no longer straightforward. This decentring function is at the same
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