Indeed, Eisenman's career--at least up to the point when he began to deploy digital design techniques—can be summarized as a directed struggle against these elements of architectural interiority. In his House projects and his early institutional commissions, Eisenman's aim was to confront specific elements of that interiority in order to transform them from within—to preserve their architectural specificity in the very act of critiquing and modifying their signifying potential.
The advent of digital design in architecture punctuates Eisenman's ongoing struggle with the evolving interiority of architecture in a most significant way: it allows Eisenman to refunctionalize embodiment entirely, transforming it from an indelible aspect of the architectural sign (hence a kind of negative, if enabling, constraint) into an agent in the experience of architecture (hence a creative capacity rooted in the bodily spacing of architecture). This theoretical displacement from the embodiment of the architectural object to embodiment in the experience of architecture is signaled by a shift in Eisenman's ambivalence toward interiority. In the earlier, "predigital" phase of his career, Eisenman tended to view interiority as a problem to be deconstructed; in the aftermath of the digital revolution, by contrast, his emphasis falls squarely on defending interiority as that which gives architecture its material specificity.
Nowhere does this shift appear more pronounced than in Eisenman's criticism of the currently ascendant generation of younger architects, many of whom he helped to train:
Reacting against an understanding of the diagram that characterized it as an apparently essentialist tool, a new generation, fueled by new computer techniques and a desire to escape its perceived Oedipal anxieties ... is today proposing a new theory of the diagram based partly on Gilles Deleuze's interpretation of Foucault's recasting of the diagram as “a series of machinic forces," and partly on their own cybernetic hallucinations.... [This theory] challenges both the traditional geometric bases of the diagram and the sedimented history of architecture, and in so doing ... question[s] any relation of the diagram to architecture's anteriority or interiority. (Diagram, 30)
Odd as it sounds given Eisenman's own theoretical debt to Deleuze in all of his work from the '90s, this criticism must be understood as a retrospective reaffirmation of the architect's basic commitment to interiority, even at those moments when it contradicted his primarily transitional, theoretical attachments.vi
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