ABSTRACT
Locating architecture would seem to be unproblematic. Architecture houses. It is at home in-and provides a home for —philosophy, aesthetics and those discourses which are thought to describe it. And yet it is precisely the generality as well as the singularity of these claims that makes such a description or location problematic. In each instance something remains unquestioned. The assertion-even the argument-that architecture 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
