18 Eisenman’s House of Guards: Te Paradox of the Interstitial Trace Adrian Lo e-mail: alo003@aucklanduni.ac.nz PhD Candidate in Architecture at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Keywords: Peter Eisenman, design analysis, design theory, representation, algorithms, geometry, iteration, matrix, linear/nonlinear, transformations How does the design process matter to the resulting building? Ever since American architect and educator, Peter Eisenman, whose work and research (spanning more than 50 years) emphasized design as a series of sequential steps or ‘traces’, architectural students nowadays commonly justify their work according to the history of the making of the design. Te product matters, but more importantly is one’s process towards it. Tis distinction between process and result, or between the object and its making, is particularly ambiguous in the Guardiola House, 1988, in Cadiz, Spain, which is an overlooked unbuilt project by Eisenman. Te question is: what bearing does the Guardiola House have on the discipline of architecture? And how does it challenge traditional design in terms of methodology and conventionality? What this research does is expose the Eisenman-process as not just one design towards a single house, but in fact an interweaving and inter-narrative between two simultaneous processes. Since Peter Eisenman’s analyses of signifcant architects and their work in his PhD dissertation, he sought to reveal and discover the latent invisible systems underlying the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Giuseppe Terragni, etc. Eisenman subsequently employs this analytical technique as traces susceptible for ‘reading’ a building. Tese latent systems inform Eisenman’s notion of the trace, and its related notions of the index, marking, notation, imprint, chora, etc., as an analytical-formal device for his designs. Te analyses of the works suggests a project results from