Katarxis Nº 3
Contrasting Concepts of
Harmony in Architecture:
The 1982 Debate Between
Christopher Alexander
and Peter Eisenman
An
Early Discussion of the "New Sciences" of
Organised
Complexity in Architecture
INTRODUCTION
THE
DEBATE
EDITORS' COMMENTS
Editors’ Introduction
This legendary debate took place at the Graduate School
of Design, Harvard University, on November 17th
1982. Not long before it, Alexander had given a talk on
The Nature of Order, which was to become
the subject of his magnum opus of architectural
philosophy. The original version he envisaged was less
than half the size of the final four-volume work as it
now stands, but its main ideas were already formulated.
Before the debate Eisenman had listened to the tape of
Alexander's talk – one of the first public presentations
of the ideas in The Nature of Order. What
followed was thus partly shaped by those ideas. What
ensued can be said to represent an historic occasion:
Alexander is presenting his basis for the New Paradigm
in Architecture at the same time as Eisenman presents
his competing, diametrically opposed, deconstructivist
claim for such a Paradigm.
The importance of the debate has been widely recognised.
Twenty years later, the Harvard Graduate School of
Design republished it alongside three other seminal
documents from the post-1969 period: an early piece by
Alexander Tzonis on the “end of ideology in
architecture”, excerpts from a 1994 conference on
“De-naturalized Urbanity”, and a recent debate on
urbanism between Rem Koolhaas and Andres Duany. Some
people may only have heard of the 1982 encounter because
Alexander said Eisenman was “fucking up the world" in a public forum; but if
this is all one knows about it, one is not prepared for
the generally good-natured tone of most of the
exchanges.
THE DEBATE:
"Contrasting
Concepts of
Harmony in Architecture"
First
published in Lotus International 40
(1983), pages 60-68.
Reprinted in Studio Works
7 (Harvard University Graduate School of
Design),
Princeton Architectural Press (2000), pages
50-57
Peter Eisenman:
I met Christopher Alexander for the first time just
two minutes ago, but I feel I have known him for a
long time. I suddenly sense that we have been placed
in a circus-like atmosphere, where the adversarial
relationship which we might have -- which already
exists -- might be blown out of proportion. I do not
know who the Christian is and who the lion, but I
always get nervous in a situation like this. I guess
it is disingenuous on my part to think that with
Chris Alexander here something other than a
performance would be possible.
Back in 1959, I
was working in Cambridge, U.S.A., for Ben Thompson
and The Architects Collaborative [Gropius's firm].
I believe Chris Alexander was at Harvard. I then
went to Cambridge, England, again not knowing that
he had already been there. He had studied
mathematics at Cambridge and turned to architecture.
I was there for no particular reason, except that
Michael McKinnell told me that I was uninformed and
that I should go to England to become more
intelligent.
Christopher
Alexander: I'm very glad you volunteered that
information. It clears things up.
Audience:
(Laughter)
PE: In any
case, Sandy [Colin St. John] Wilson, who was
then a colleague of mine on the faculty at Cambridge
and is now professor at the School of Architecture
at Cambridge, gave me a manuscript that he said I
should read. It was Alexander's Ph.D. thesis, which
was to become the text of Chris's first book, "Notes
on the Synthesis of Form". The text so
infuriated me, that I was moved to do a Ph.D. thesis
myself. It was called "The Formal Basis of Modern
Architecture" and was an attempt to
dialectically refute the arguments made in his book.
He got his book published; my thesis was so
primitive that I never even thought of publishing
it.
In any case, I
thought that today we could deal with some of my
problems with his book. But then I listened to the
tape of his lecture last night, and again I find
myself in a very similar situation. Christopher
Alexander, who is not quite as frightening as I
thought -- he seems a very nice man -- again
presents an argument which I find the need to
contest. Since I have never met him prior to this
occasion, it cannot be personal; it must have
something to do with his ideas.
Chris, you said we
need to change our cosmology, that it is a cosmology
that grew out of physics and the sciences in the
past and is, in a sense, 300 years old. I probably
agree with every word of that. You said that only
certain kinds of order can be understood, given that
cosmology. You said the order of a Coke machine is
available to us because of our causal, mechanistic
view of the world. And then you brought up that the
order of a Mozart symphony is not available to us.
Don't you think that the activity of the French "Structuralists"
is an attempt to find out the order of things as
opposed to the order of mechanisms, the ontology of
things as opposed to the epistemology of things,
i.e., their internal structure? This kind of
philosophical inquiry has been part of current
French thought for the last 20 years. Don't you
think that it is something like what you're talking
about?
CA: I don't
know the people you are talking about.
PE: I am
talking about people like Roland Barthes, Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida.
CA: What do
they say?
PE: They
say that there are structures, in things like a
Mozart symphony or a piece of literature, and that
we can get beyond the function of a symphony or the
function of a piece of literature to provide a story
of knowledge, that we can get beyond those functions
to talk about the innate structure or order of these
things. And that this order has little to do with
the hierarchical, mechanistic, and deterministic
order of the past 300 years. Rather it is based on
an alternative to Western values as determined by
metaphysics. This order suggests not so much an
opposition as an alternative view, which suggests
that structures are not dialectical in nature but,
rather, that they are made up of differences.
I was very much in
sympathy with the things you were saying in your
lecture. In fact, I would like to think that for the
past 10 or 15 years of my life I have been engaged
in the same kind of work. My postfunctionalist essay
in Oppositions 6 proposed an other aspect of
architecture outside of function.
CA: I am
not sure I know what you are driving at. See if this
is right? One of the people on our faculty, I think,
would probably espouse your point of view in some
way. His attitude reflects a whole school of thought
that has developed -- crudely called Post-Modernism
or whatever. Anyway, there is a school of thought, a
serious group of theorists who have begun to talk
about architecture in a quite new way in the last 10
years. And this faculty member says to me, from time
to time, something like this: "Essentially, Chris,
they're saying exactly the same thing you are. Why
are you riding your horse as though you are some
lone messenger when, in fact, everybody is talking
about the same thing."
But what these
Postmodernists and Structuralists are saying is not
the same thing as what I said last night at all. Of
course, I think there are people who are very
serious and want to move the many with the
privileged view of architecture that they have in
their heads. But words are very, very cheap. And one
can participate in intellectual discussions, right,
left, and center, and you can go this way or you can
go that way. Now then, I look at the buildings which
purport to come from a point of view similar to the
one I've expressed, and the main thing I recognize
is, that whatever the words are -- the intellectual
argument behind that stuff -- the actual buildings
are totally different. Diametrically opposed.
Dealing with entirely different matters.
Actually, I don't
even know what that work is dealing with, but I do
know that it is not dealing with feelings. And in
that sense those buildings are very similar to the
alienated series of constructions that preceded them
since 1930. All I see is: number one, new and very
fanciful language; and two, vague references to the
history of architecture but transformed into cunning
feats and quaint mannerisms. So, the games of the
Structuralists, and the games of the Post Modernists
are in my mind nothing but intellectualisms which
have little to do with the core of architecture.
This depends, as it always has, on feeling.
PE: Let us
just back off for a minute. I wish we had some
pictures here. I don't want to polarize this between
the heavy, Eastern intellectual and the California
joy boy. You cannot ask people, as you did last
night, to believe you because you have done 25 years
of intellectual work -- which I have followed very
carefully and which is very intellectual -- and then
say "I am California magic". So I want to get away
from these kinds of caricatures because we are not
going to get anywhere with them. That is number one.
Number two: for
you to plead ignorance of ideas that are in current
use, does not make me an intellectual and you not,
or vice versa; it means that you are interested in
your cosmology, and I am interested in mine. So that
is a wash. I did not come here to play "do you know"
and get anxious about things. I am very interested
in the whole self. In the Jungian cosmology, you may
be a feeling type and I may be a thinking type. And
I will never be able to have the kind of feeling
that you have, and vice versa. We all live with the
tyranny of the opposite. So I don't want to get into
that game, because you win all the time. So why not
start over.
CA: Let's
have a go. That was a very good first round.
PE: I want
to get out of the ring and try again. I came in on
the wrong side. I certainly became the lion and you
the Christian, and I have always wanted to be a
Christian.
CA: I
appreciate the very charming way you are bringing
this into a slightly nicer state. Actually, with
regard to what you said a moment ago, the business
of the feeling type and the thinking type does need
to be talked about. I know something about Jung's
classifications. That we have different make-ups is
probably an undeniable fact. But, somehow, the
substantive core of the matter, to me, is the
essence of what the debate about architecture must
lead to. If you say: "Well, look, you're a feeling
type, and I'm a thinking type, so let's not discuss
that because we are always going to be on different
sides", then it removes from this discussion what I
feel to be the absolute heart and soul of the matter
when it comes to buildings. Now I don't want to deny
at all what you are saying about personalities. But
I really cannot conceive of a properly formed
attitude towards buildings, as an artist or a
builder, or in any way, if it doesn't ultimately
confront the fact that buildings work in the realm
of feeling. So when you say, "Look you're that type,
and I'm this type, and let's agree not to talk with
one another about that fact", what's the
implication? Is the implication that you think that
feeling is not related to buildings? Perhaps you
could answer that.
PE: Of
course, if you are a feeling type, you would
think that feelings are the essence of the matter;
and I cannot help thinking, as a thinking type, that
ideas are the essence of the matter. It is not
something that I can walk away from. We all have a
shadow, and my shadow is feeling. I accept that you
are that way. I am asking you to accept me the way I
am rather than dismissing what I say as not being at
the heart of the matter. For you, feeling is the
heart of the matter, because it is the only way you
can configure the world. I cannot configure the way
you do because then I would not be me, and you would
not want me to do that.
CA: I'm not
so sure about that.
PE: It is
not I who is into tyranny. Let's see if we can
discuss substantive issues. All I am saying is: do
not put people down who cannot get at ideas through
feeling. At least 50% of the people here cannot.
CA: You're
saying to me, on the level of personal decency and
person-to-person respect, let each of us recognize
that we have our different attitudes towards the
world, and let's not mix them up with the central,
substantive matter at hand. That's what you're
inviting me to do.
PE: That's
what I was hoping.
CA: I will
suspend that, if you can deal with that. I fully
understand that what you're saying concerns you, and
I'm quite comfortable with the person-to-person
respect, given our different attitudes and so forth.
The trouble is that we also happen to be dealing
with a matter that I believe intellectually is the
central issue. Intellectually, not from the point of
view of feeling. It's very, very difficult for me to
stay away from this issue because, if I don't talk
about it with you to some extent, I will actually
never know what you're really talking about. So, if
you will permit me, I'd like to go into this matter
and see where we come to. You see, there is a debate
going on here, and there is also a disagreement -- I
believe of substance. I'm not even sure whether we
work in the same way. That's why I would like to
check out a couple of examples, buildings. Now, I
will pick a building, let's take Chartres for
example. We probably don't disagree that it's a
great building.
PE: Well,
we do actually, I think it is a boring building.
Chartres, for me, is one of the least interesting
cathedrals. In fact, I have gone to Chartres a
number of times to eat in the restaurant across the
street -- had a 1934 red Mersault wine, which was
exquisite -- I never went into the cathedral. The
cathedral was done en passant. Once you've
seen one Gothic cathedral, you have seen them all.
CA: Well,
pick a building you like. Pick another.
PE: Let's
pick something that we can agree on -- Palladio's
Palazzo Chiericati. For me, one of the things that
qualifies it in an incredible way, is precisely
because it is more intellectual and less emotional.
It makes me feel high in my mind, not in my gut.
Things that make me feel high in my gut are very
suspicious, because that is my psychological
problem. So I keep it in the mind, because I'm
happier with that.
You see, the Mies
and Chiericati thing was far greater than Moore and
Chiericati, because Moore is just a pasticheur.
We agree on that. But Mies and Chiericati is a very
interesting example, and I find much of what is in
Palladio -- that is the contamination of wholeness
-- also in Mies. I also find alternation, as opposed
to simple repetition. And you said things which are
very close to my heart. I am very interested in the
arguments you presented in your lecture. You said
something about the significance of spaces between
elements being repeated. Not only the element itself
being repeated, but the space between. I'm very
interested in the space between. That is where we
come together. Now the space between is not part of
classical unity, wholeness, completeness; it is
another typology.
It is not a
typology of sameness or wholeness; it's a typology
of differences. It is a typology which transgresses
wholeness and contaminates it. If you say A/B A/B,
that is an alternation of wholes outside of the
classical canon, which tries to take A and B and
bring them into symmetry -- as in B/A/B/A/B. In
other words, there are three B's with one in the
center, and two A's as minor chords. When you have
A/B/A/B/ you have alternating pairs with no center,
closure or hierarchy. A/B/A/B/A is complete. A/B/A/B
is not. What is interesting about serial structures
is the spaces between, not the elements themselves,
but the differences between the two. You were
talking about that last night when you gave an
example of something that was not dealing with
wholeness at all in the classical sense. Maybe we
would benefit from talking more about this. Or not?
CA: I don't
fully follow what you're saying. It never occurred
to me that someone could so explicitly reject the
core experience of something like Chartres. It's
very interesting to have this conversation. If this
weren't a public situation, I'd be tempted to get
into this on a psychiatric level. I'm actually quite
serious about this. What I'm saying is that I
understand how one could be very panicked by these
kinds of feelings. Actually, it's been my impression
that a large part of the history of modern
architecture has been a kind of panicked withdrawal
from these kinds of feelings, which have governed
the formation of buildings over the last 2000 years
or so.
Why that panicked
withdrawal occurred, I'm still trying to find out.
It's not clear to me. But I've never heard somebody
say, until a few moments ago, someone say
explicitly: "Yes, I find that stuff freaky. I
don't like to deal with feelings. I like to deal
with ideas." Then, of course, what follows is
very clear. You would like the Palladio building;
you would not be particularly happy with Chartres,
and so forth. And Mies ...
PE: The
panicked withdrawal of the alienated self was dealt
with in Modernism -- which was concerned with the
alienation of the self from the collective.
CA: However
painful it is, we are doing pretty well right now.
We're not being rude to each other, and things are
moving along really nicely. It does seem to me,
since we have locked into this particular
discussion, that we ought to stay with it.
I want to tell a
story that I told this morning. About two or three
years ago, I was asked by the faculty at Berkeley to
show some pictures of things I had been working on,
and ended up locking horns with some people who were
challenging my work. I recognized that their
comments were coming from a place similar to that
which you were just talking about, because the
things that I make come from a very vulnerable spot.
What happened was, one of the people who has been
most vociferous in this field, a few days later,
whispering privately in a corner said: "You know, I
really shouldn't have said those things to you, but
I've been making plans like this myself for some
time but dare not show them to anybody". And this
is, I have found, in dealing with various men in the
profession over the last 10, 20, years, quite
frequently you have this theme, where there's
actually real fear about simple, ordinary,
vulnerable stuff.
I will give you
another example, a slightly absurd example. A group
of students under my direction was designing houses
for about a dozen people, each student doing one
house. In order to speed things up (we only had a
few weeks to do this project), I said: "We are going
to concentrate on the layout and cooperation of
these buildings, so the building system is not going
to be under discussion."
So I gave them the
building system, and it happened to include pitched
roofs, fairly steep pitched roofs. The following
week, after people had looked at the notes I handed
out about the building system, somebody raised his
hand and said: "Look, you know everything is going
along fine, but could we discuss the roofs?" So I
said: "Yes, what would you like to discuss about the
roofs?" And the person said: "Could we make the
roofs a little different?" I had told them to make
just ordinary pitched roofs. I asked, "What's the
issue about the roofs?" And the person responded:
"Well, I don't know, it's just kind of funny." Then
that conversation died down a bit. Five minutes
later, somebody else popped up his hand and said:
"Look, I feel fine about the building system, except
the roofs. Could we discuss the roofs?" I said:
"What's the matter with the roofs?" He said, "Well,
I have been talking to my wife about the roofs, and
she likes the roofs" -- and then he sniggered. I
said: "What's so funny or odd about that?" And he
said: "Well, I don't know, I ... "
Well, to cut a
long story short, it became clear that ... [Alexander
goes to the blackboard and draws different types of
roofs]. Now, all of you who are educated in the
modernist canon know that as an architect, a
respectable architect of the 1980s, it is quite okay
to do this, you can do this, you can do this, you
can do this, but please [he points to a pitched
roof design] do not do this.
So, the question
is, why not? Why does this taboo exist? What is this
funny business about having to prove you are a modem
architect and having to do something other than a
pitched roof? The simplest explanation is that you
have to do these others to prove your membership in
the fraternity of modern architecture. You have to
do something more far out, otherwise people will
think you are a simpleton. But I do not think that
is the whole story. I think the more crucial
explanation -- very strongly related to what I was
talking about last night -- is that the pitched roof
contains a very, very primitive power of feeling.
Not a low pitched, tract house roof, but a
beautifully shaped, fully pitched roof. That kind of
roof has a very primitive essence as a shape, which
reaches into a very vulnerable part of you. But the
version that is okay among the architectural
fraternity is the one which does not have the
feeling: the weird angle, the butterfly, the
asymmetrically steep shed, etc. -- all the shapes
which look interesting but which lack feeling
altogether. The roof issue is a simple example. But
I do believe the history of architecture in the last
few decades has been one of specifically and
repeatedly trying to avoid any primitive feeling
whatsoever. Why this has taken place, I don't know.
PE: This is
a wonderful coincidence, because I too am concerned
with the subject of roofs. Let me answer it in a
very deep way. I would argue that the pitched roof
is -- as Gaston Bachelard points out -- one of the
essential characteristics of "houseness". It was the
extension of the vertebrate structure which
sheltered and enclosed man. Michel Foucault has said
that when man began to study man in the 19th
century, there was a displacement of man from the
center. The representation of the fact that man was
no longer the center of the world, no longer the
arbiter, and, therefore, no longer controlling
artifacts, was reflected in a change from the
vertebrate-center type of structure to the
center-as-void. That distance, which you call
alienation or lack of feeling, may have been merely
a natural product of this new cosmology.
The non-vertebrate
structure is an attempt to express that change in
the cosmology. It is not merely a stylistic issue,
or one that goes against feeling, or the alienation
that man feels. When man began to study himself, he
began to lose his position in the center. The loss
of center is expressed by that alienation. Whether
understood by modern architecture or not, what
Modernism was attempting to explain by its form was
that alienation. Now that technology has gone
rampant, maybe we need to rethink the cosmology. Can
we go back to a cosmology of anthropocentrism? I am
not convinced that it is appropriate.
CA: Let me
just inject one thing. This is a pretty interesting
subject. I just want to make one thing clear. I am
not suggesting that it would be good idea to
romantically go back and pick up the pitched roof,
and say: "Well, it did a certain job for several
hundred years, why don't we keep it, or use it
again?" I am talking about a totally different
language than that.
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.
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.
PE: What we
have not been able to get at yet is that it is
possible to project a totally different cosmology
that deals with the feelings of the self.
Alternative views of the world might suggest that it
is not wholeness that will evoke our truest feelings
and that it is precisely the wholeness of the
anthropocentric world that it might be the presence
of absence, that is, the nonwhole, the fragment
which might produce a condition that would more
closely approximate our innate feelings today.
Let me be more
specific. Last night, you gave two examples of
structural relationships that evoke feelings of
wholeness -- of an arcade around a court, which was
too large, and of a window frame which is also too
large. Le Corbusier once defined architecture as
having to do with a window which is either too large
or too small, but never the right size. Once it was
the right size it was no longer functioning. When it
is the right size, that building is merely a
building. The only way in the presence of
architecture that is that feeling, that need for
something other, when the window was either too
large or too small.
I was reminded of
this when I went to Spain this summer to see the
town hall at Logrono by Rafael Moneo. He made an
arcade where the columns were too thin. It was
profoundly disturbing to me when I first saw
photographs of the building. The columns seemed too
thin for an arcade around the court of a public
space. And then, when I went to see the building, I
realized what he was doing. He was taking away from
something that was too large, achieving an effect
that expresses the separation and fragility that man
feels today in relationship to the technological
scale of life, to machines, and the car-dominated
environment we live in. I had a feeling with that
attenuated colonnade of precisely what I think you
are talking about. Now, I am curious if you can
admit, in your idea of wholeness, the idea of
separation -- wholeness for you might be separation
for me. The idea that the too-small might also
satisfy a feeling as well as the too-large. Because
if it is only the too-large that you will admit,
then we have a real problem.
CA: I
didn't say too large, by the way, I just said large.
Quite a different matter.
PE: You
said a boundary larger than the entity it surrounds.
I think you said too large.
CA: I said
large in relation to the entity. Not too large.
PE: Large,
meaning larger than it needs be?
CA: No, I
didn't mean that.
PE: Well,
could it be smaller than it needs be?
CA:
Unfortunately, I don't know the building you just
described. Your description sounds horrendous to me.
Of course, without actually seeing it, I can't tell.
But if your words convey anything like what the
thing is actually like, then it sounds to me that
this is exactly this kind of prickly, weird place,
that for some reason some group of people have
chosen to go to nowadays. Now, why are they going
there? Don't ask me.
PE: I guess
what I am saying is that I believe that there is an
alternate cosmology to the one which you suggest.
The cosmology of the last 300 years has changed and
there is now the potential for expressing those
feelings that you speak of in other ways than
through largeness -- your boundaries -- and the
alternating repetition of architectural elements.
You had 12 or 15 points. Precisely because I believe
that the old cosmology is no longer an effective
basis on which to build, I begin to want to invert
your conditions -- to search for their negative --
to say that for every positive condition you
suggest, if you could propose a negative you might
more closely approximate the cosmology of today. In
other words, if I could find the negative of your 12
points, we would come closer to approximating a
cosmology that would deal with both of us than does
the one you are proposing.
CA : Can we
just go back to the arcade for a moment? The reason
Moneo's arcade sounded prickly and strange was, when
I make an arcade I have a very simple purpose, and
that is to try to make it feel absolutely
comfortable -- physically, emotionally, practically,
and absolutely. This is pretty hard to do. Much,
much harder to do than most of the present
generation of architects will admit to. Let's just
talk about the simple matter of making an arcade. I
find in my own practical work that in order to find
out what's really comfortable, it is necessary to
mock up the design at full scale. This is what I
normally do. So I will take pieces of lumber, scrap
material, and I'll start mocking up. How big are the
columns? What is the space between them? At what
height is the ceiling above? How wide is the thing?
When you actually get all those elements correct, at
a certain point you begin to feel that they are in
harmony.
Of course, harmony
is a product not only of yourself, but of the
surroundings. In other words, what is harmonious in
one place will not be in another. So, it is very,
very much a question of what application creates
harmony in that place. It is a simple objective
matter. At least my experience tells me, that when a
group of different people set out to try and find
out what is harmonious, what feels most comfortable
in such and such a situation, their opinions about
it will tend to converge, if they are mocking up
full-scale, real stuff. Of course, if they're making
sketches or throwing out ideas, they won't agree.
But if you start making the real thing, one tends to
reach agreement. My only concern is to produce that
kind of harmony. The things that I was talking about
last night -- I was doing empirical observation
about -- as a matter of fact, it turns out that
these certain structures need to be in there to
produce that harmony.
The thing that
strikes me about your friend's building -- if I
understood you correctly -- is that somehow in some
intentional way it is not harmonious. That is, Moneo
intentionally wants to produce an effect of
disharmony. Maybe even of incongruity.
PE: That is
correct.
CA: I find
that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible.
I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also
feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the
world.
Audience:
(Applause)
PE:
Precisely the reaction that you elicited from the
group. That is, they feel comfortable clapping. The
need to clap worries me because it means that mass
psychology is taking over.
Someone from
the audience: Why should architects feel
comfortable with a cosmology you are not even sure
exists?
PE: Let's
say if I went out in certain places in the United
States and asked people about the music they would
feel comfortable with, a lot of people would come up
with Mantovani. And I'm not convinced that that is
something I should have to live with all my life,
just because the majority of people feel comfortable
with it. I want to go back to the notion of needing
to feel comfortable. Why does Chris need to feel
comfortable, and I do not? Why does he feel the need
for harmony, and I do not? Why does he see
incongruity as irresponsible, and why does he get
angry? I do not get angry when he feels the need for
harmony. I just feel I have a different view of it.
Someone from
the audience: He is not screwing up the world.
PE: I would
like to suggest that if I were not here agitating
nobody would know what Chris's idea of harmony is,
and you all would not realize how much you agree
with him ... Walter Benjamin talks about "the
destructive character", which, he says, is
reliability itself, because it is always constant.
If you repress the destructive nature, it is going
to come out in some way. If you are only searching
for harmony, the disharmonies and incongruencies
which define harmony and make it understandable will
never be seen. A world of total harmony is no
harmony at all. Because I exist, you can go along
and understand your need for harmony, but do not say
that I am being irresponsible or make a moral
judgement that I am screwing up the world, because I
would not want to have to defend myself as a moral
imperative for you.
CA: Good
God!
PE: Nor
should you feel angry. I think you should just feel
this harmony is something that the majority of the
people need and want. But equally there must be
people out there like myself who feel the need for
incongruity, disharmony, etc.
CA: If you
were an unimportant person, I would feel quite
comfortable letting you go your own way. But the
fact is that people who believe as you do are really
fucking up the whole profession of architecture
right now by propagating these beliefs. Excuse me,
I'm sorry, but I feel very, very strongly about
this. It's all very well to say: "Look, harmony
here, disharmony there, harmony here -- it's all
fine". But the fact is that we as architects are
entrusted with the creation of that harmony in the
world. And if a group of very powerful people,
yourself and others ...
PE: How
does someone become so powerful if he is screwing up
the world? I mean somebody is going to see through
that ...
CA: Yes, I
think they will quite soon.
PE: I would
hope, Chris, that we are here to present arguments.
These people here are not people who have rings in
their noses, at least as far as I can see, and they
can judge for themselves whether I am screwing up
the world or not. If they choose to think I am
screwing up the world, they certainly would not come
here. These are open forums. For you to determine
arbitrarily that I am screwing up the world seems
self-righteous and arrogant. I have not had much of
a chance to do so and neither have you. Precisely
because I am uncomfortable with those situations
which you describe as comfortable, I find myself
having to live in New York. I do not live in San
Francisco, even though I think it is a nice place.
There is not enough grist there for me, not enough
sand in the oyster. And my head starts -- it may be
my own psychological problem -- but thank God, there
is a loony bin called New York where eight million
people who feel the way I do are allowed to be!
CA:
Actually, New York is not created by that kind of
madness. New York is certainly a very exciting
place. When you compare it to Denmark or Sweden, I
fully understand what you are saying. And I
sympathize with you. Your observation seems to me a
very reasonable one, objectively speaking. But that
is quite a different matter. It's quite different
from the original question: why should I feel so
strongly, why should I get angry, because you are
preaching disharmony? I was trying to explain to you
why I get angry about it.
PE: I am
not preaching disharmony. I am suggesting that
disharmony might be part of the cosmology that we
exist in. I am not saying right or wrong. My
children live with an unconscious fear that they may
not live out their natural lives. I am not saying
that fear is good. I am trying to find a way to deal
with that anxiety. An architecture that puts its
head in the sand and goes back to neoclassicism, and
Schinkel, Lutyens, and Ledoux, does not seem to be a
way of dealing with the present anxiety. Most of
what my colleagues are doing today does not seem to
be the way to go. Equally, I do not believe that the
way to go, as you suggest, is to put up structures
to make people feel comfortable, to preclude that
anxiety. What is a person to do if he cannot react
against anxiety or see it pictured in his life?
After all, that is what all those evil Struwwel
Peter characters are for in German fairy tales.
CA: Don't
you think there is enough anxiety at present? Do you
really think we need to manufacture more anxiety in
the form of buildings?
PE: Let me
see if I can get it to you another way. Tolstoy
wrote about the man who had so many modern
conveniences in Russia that when he was adjusting
the chair and the furniture, etc., that he was so
comfortable and so nice and so pleasant that he
didn't know -- he lost all control of his physical
and mental reality. There was nothing. What I'm
suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable
in these nice little structures of yours, that we
might lull them into thinking that everything's all
right, Jack, which it isn't. And so the role of art
or architecture might be just to remind people that
everything wasn't all right. And I'm not convinced,
by the way, that it is all right.
CA: I
can't, as a maker of things, I just can't understand
it. I do not have a concept of things in which I can
even talk about making something in the frame of
mind you are describing. I mean, to take a simple
example, when I make a table I say to myself: "All
right, I'm going to make a table, and I'm going to
try to make a good table". And of course, then from
there on I go to the ultimate resources I have and
what I know, how well I can make it. But for me to
then introduce some kind of little edge, which
starts trying to be a literary comment, and then
somehow the table is supposed to be at the same time
a good table, but it also is supposed to be I don't
know what; a comment on nuclear warfare, making a
little joke, doing various other things ... I'm
practically naive; it doesn't make sense to me.
Editors’ Comments
Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture:
The 1982 Debate Between Christopher
Alexander
and Peter Eisenman
Contemporary commentary1
tried to paint this as a clash between East and West
Coasts, intellect vs metaphysics, abstraction
vs empiricism – anything, in fact, to avoid the
substance of it. Surely Alexander was being Socratic
when he professed ignorance of those “French
‘Structuralists” Eisenman was so keen on, before he
asked his opponent to describe what it was they said.
Interestingly, much of what Eisenman then went on to say
could as well have been said by Alexander: for example,
he talks of an “innate structure or order” which is
non-mechanistic; and he is interested in “the ontology …
as opposed to the epistemology of things”. But
Alexander’s retort provides the crux of the debate: that
all sounds very well, he says, but tell me now
what kinds of buildings it leads you to make –
“words”, he goes on, “are very, very cheap”. In saying
this he exposes, at the very beginning of the debate,
the fact that Eisenman’s architecture is based on what
he implies to be empty intellectual discussion: on a new
and fanciful language that fails to connect to the
product.
Remember that Eisenman has now, for forty years, been
turning from one fashionable pretext to another in an
effort to justify his architecture of disjunction,
rapidly quitting them when they get too stale, or too
prone to debunking. His friend Charles Jencks has
described his progress thus:
His early designs in the Cardboard Corbu vocabulary were
derived from processes based loosely on the
transformational grammar of Noam Chomsky. In the
seventies, however, Eisenman turned towards
post-structuralism and has since 1980 picked up on one
nuova scienza after another.2
In his debate with Alexander we catch him equally
“loosely” in post-structuralist mode, with, as yet, not
a shred of “nuova scienza” in sight. His performance
shows us why Reyner Banham called him “a self-annotating
solipsist”.
Of the three Frenchmen Eisenman mentions – two of them
broadly structuralist, the other a post-structuralist –
he seems closest in spirit (if one can use this word in
connection with Eisenman) to Foucault, that denizen of
the margins. In his somewhat leaden description of
Palladio’s Palazzo Chiericati (which conveys only the
most etiolated sense of what that building might mean to
him) he seeks to relocate the marginal aspects of the
building to its centre, describing the quality he
is looking for, in a deliberately provocative phrase, as
that which “transgresses wholeness and contaminates it”.
In fact, for Eisenman, without such transgression,
architecture doesn’t exist: he remembers that Corbusier
... once defined architecture as having to do with a
window which is either too large or too small, but never
the right size. When it is the right size, the building
is merely a building.
He goes on to give an astonishingly lucid description of
the emerging deconstructivist program, in his
description of an arcade in the town hall of Logrono,
Spain by Rafael Moneo (the architect responsible most
recently for the new Cathedral in Los Angeles):
It was profoundly disturbing to me when I first saw
photographs of the building. The columns seemed too thin
for an arcade around the court of a public space. And
then, when I went to see the building, I realized what
he was doing. He was taking away from something that was
too large, achieving an effect that expresses the
separation and fragility that man feels today in
relationship to the technological scale of life, to
machines, and the car-dominated environment we live in.
This expresses Eisenman's idea of order: it is not about
wholeness, but rather the expression – one could say
celebration – of separation and frustration. It is this
“social narrative” which is all that matters to him.
The debate is, therefore – despite the title given to it
at the time, of “Discord Over Harmony in Architecture”3
– more about Order than Harmony: Foucault’s Order of
Things vs Alexander’s Nature of Order.
On the one hand we have Order presented as something
subjective, socially-constructed, with the flavour of
repression about it, and on the other Order as something
objective, a fundamental property of matter, something
essentially generative. Alexander was convinced, as he
had been for twenty years – well before Eisenman got
into bed with any “nuova scienza” – that Order and
Harmony were both objective facts, susceptible to
scientific method, and, since the debate took place, a
number of scientists have begun to come around to this
same position. By contrast, Derrida’s use of science has
now been classed among the
Intellectual Impostures4,
so here in the debate we see the early stages of the
inevitable clash between real science and voodoo science
in architecture, which is only now coming out into the
open in the wake of the publication of Charles Jencks’s
The New Paradigm in Architecture.
Subsequent architectural history shows that Alexander's
“New Paradigm” has been marginalised, as professional
opinion steadily embraced Eisenman's paradigm. Many
question how this could possibly have happened. Why
should people have ignored the sane, reasonable, and
humane vision of Alexander in order to embrace the
transgressive vision of the deconstructivists – a
vision, as Alexander pointed out twenty years ago, that
neglects feeling? But of course the deconstructivists
don't neglect feeling altogether. Theirs is the feeling
generated by abstractions writ large, by the shock of
scale and contrast, by the sensationalism and spectacle
of the new and the bizarrely transfigured – a totemic
architecture of novelty. Eisenman's architecture
turned out to be a perfect fit with a late-industrial
society seeking ever more thrilling forms, new
assemblies, alien geometries – all permutations of the
same limited industrial vocabulary. The
deconstructivists offered this world a highly
entertaining new metallic expression. That it had
little nutritional content was not the point.
In this debate, Alexander does not appear to be aware of
how well the deconstructivists were already organised.
He trusted in the soundness of his ideas to win over the
architectural profession – a technique that works in
science and mathematics, but not often in the
humanities. Alexander clearly did not give sufficient
weight to the extra-architectural forces shaping
architecture, including the force of fashion in a
decaying industrial culture. In a telling exchange, he
is confident that the general public is both interested
in, and capable of, influencing the direction of
architecture.
PE:
How does someone become so powerful if he is screwing up
the world? I mean somebody is going to see through that.
CA:
Yes, I think they will quite soon.
This, of course, never happened. After this debate, as
Alexander became more peripheral – his work confined so
far to the small- and medium-scale – Eisenman rose to
architectural eminence, his buildings becoming ever
larger. In a recent review of The Nature of Order,
Eisenman was quoted as saying that Alexander “sort of
fell off the radar screen.”5
By 1983 (a year before Charles Jencks announced that
Post-Modernism had become a “self-confirming fashion, a
socially-accepted fact”) key players in architecture
schools, the profession, and the media had already
switched their support from modernism to Post-Modernism,
which would ultimately lead to deconstructivism.
Alexander, despite winning over his Harvard audience,
lost the broader impact he could have had on the
architectural community.
And yet, as we have noted, his passionate defense of
Order as a concrete subject – vastly broader than human
social abstractions, and encompassing the subjective and
the qualitative – foreshadowed the direction science
would very soon take. At a time when deconstructivism
holds center stage as the star of the crumbling
industrial paradigm, a new generation of scientists and
artists is busy exploring the new and broader frontiers
of the complex order of nature. And their work
increasingly suggests that Alexander will have the last
word:
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 … [t]he 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.
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 are
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.6
1 We refer to
Georges Teyssot’s ludicrously biased “Marginal
comments” provided at the end of the debate as
published in Lotus International, no.40
(1983), pp69ff.
2
Charles Jencks, “The New Paradigm in
Architecture”, Datutop 22 (absolute
motion), Tampere U. of Technology, 2002,
p.18.
3
(Harvard) GSD News, Jan./Feb. 1983. When
Lotus published it later that year the
title had become “Contrasting concepts of
harmony in architecture”.
4
Sokal, Alan & Jean Bricmont, Intellectual
impostures: Postmodern philosophers’ abuse of
science, Profile, 1998.
5
Curiously, the “Google number” of Alexander – a
web score often cited as an accurate reflection
of intellectual influence – is presently over
50,000, whereas Eisenman’s own is around
20,000. Eisenman may have inadvertently pointed
up how, other than providing occasional
attention-getting entertainment, the
architecture profession itself has "sort of
fallen off the radar screen" of the larger
culture.
6
From the debate text.
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