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A symbolic archetype throughout history, the labyrinth has nonetheless taken on different inferences down the years. In Greek mythology, the labyrinth signified trial or initiation, a space to be traversed in order to attain knowledge or salvation. In the Middle Ages, the labyrinths on church floors depicted the spiritual path that ultimately led to its center: The Almighty. With the Renaissance, however, labyrinths became places of leisure, set within the context of gardens increasingly designed for enjoyment and pleasure. Whatever the meaning attributed, however, the labyrinth has retained one constant: its non-linear spatiality, where paths overlap, fork off in different directions, or come to a dead-end, generating a feeling of disorientation or bewilderment in those who inhabit or traverse them. A labyrinthine path is by definition one that takes longer to cross than a less complicated trajectory, its “narrative” being only gradually revealed to those navigating it as the journey proceeds, Peter Eisenman’s experimental house designs of the 1970s come to mind, where abstract rules of overlapping and volumetric translation drive the articulation of the interior spaces – a modus operandi Eisenman repeated in many of his projects with the aim of triggering disorientation and domestic unease.
This theme has been taken up in a contemporary key by architecture firm TAEP/AAP in the Bridge House in Al Khiran, a coastal city in southern Kuwait. Here, the labyrinth has been reinterpreted in two ways: as a distribution strategy to organize a series of dwelling units along an elongated, narrow plot, and as an open, fragmented spatial device that allows the surrounding landscape to percolate into the built interiors. In contrast to its time-worn counterpart, the Bridge House “labyrinth” redefines the very concept of labyrinthine spatiality. Its layout is on a clearly visible central axis with an equally obvious entrance...
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