Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman 1982 Debate and the Ontological Errors of Modernity

[rufuspollock]

These are some excerpts from the 1982 debate at Harvard between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman. For context, Eisenman was and is a leading post-modern architect and has gone on to much prominence in the architecture profession (e.g. building the holocaust memorial in Berlin). Alexander, by contrast, has continued to be largely neglected.

Ontological errors of modernity

[Christopher Alexander] I think I am going to have to give a rather more elaborate explanation. Up until about 1600, most of the world views that existed in different cultures did see man and the universe as more or less intertwined and inseparable ... either through the medium of what they called God or in some other way. But all that was understood. The particular intellectual game that led us to discover all the wonders of science forced us to abandon temporarily that idea. In other words, in order to do physics, to do biology, we were actually taught to pretend that things were like little machines because only then could you tinker with them and find out what makes them tick. That's all fine. It was a tremendous endeavor, and it paid off.

This is a crucial passage:

• Prior to 1600 we had a worldview based on interwoveness, on [[abc/interbeing]]
• Then with modernity that changed ... and permitted modern science. (why? because we need some sense of separation, of objectivity, to see the subject as separate from the world to do the experiments etc)
• However, grave problems from that, especially when taken to extremes, when it becomes the water we swim in.
• The problem is that it is factually wrong and in that wrongness creates separation and loses the ability to create well, living spaces and a well, living world.

As he continues:

But it may have been factually wrong. That is, the constitution of the universe may be such that the human self and the substance that things made out of, the spatial matter or whatever you call it, are much more inextricably related than we realized. Now, I am not talking about some kind of aboriginal primitivism. I am saying that it may actually be a matter of fact that those things are more related than we realize. And that we have been trained to play a trick on ourselves for the last 300 years in order to discover certain things. Now, if that's true -- there are plenty of people in the world who are beginning to say it is, by the way, certainly in physics and other related subjects -- then my own contribution to that line of thought has to do with these structures of sameness that I have been talking about.

In other words, the order I was sketching out last night is ultimately, fundamentally an order produced by centers or wholes which are reinforcing each other and creating each other. Now, if all of that is so, then the pitched roof would simply come about as a consequence of all that -- not as an antecedent. It would turn out that, in circumstances where one is putting a roof on a building, in the absence of other very strong forces that are forcing you to do something different, that is the most natural and simple roof to do. And, therefore, that kind of order would tend to reappear -- of course, in a completely different, modern technological style -- simply because that is the nature of order, not because of a romantic harkening back to past years. You probably understand this.

What is so special with Alexander is he makes this tangible with the concrete examples. Doubly tangible in that the subject is tangible i.e. buildings and then he gives a real example within it, like a pitched roof or a specific building.

Alexander is also so interesting (and very similar to [[abc/mcgilchrist]]) because he is able to articulate this so well and to do so using the tools of reason that modernity understands. Thus, Alexander can uses arguments from examination of form in the natural world and even some mathematics to point to these geometric features that are whole and evoke a certain deep feeling in us (just as McGilchrist uses neurology and neuroscience to point to that which transcends language and a mechanistic grasp on the world).

And it also interesting because Alexander (and McGilchrist) are in some ways harking back to (though more looping back rather than going back) to the sense of truth that was core to modernity and lost in post-modernity.

Alexander is specifically saying there is objectively a better way to build and it is better because it obeys (or is in harmony with) the underlying nature of the universe and our connection to it.

What's special is this is a kind of transcendent truth. It can be alluded to and partly spoken about and partly proved but not fully. It is also half-mystical (though not therefore necessarily mysterious or subjective). This is what makes them so confronting to late modernity / post-modernity.

Alexander is also really integrating the heart and head - in contrast to e.g. Eisenman who is head only and whose head seems completely disconnected from his heart.