The debate the world forgot
Here’s a fascinating debate between two important architects of their day, which neatly encapsulates the opposing mindsets and attitudes which have so shaped all our environments, our art, culture and our cultural values. Christopher Alexander espousing an approach to our built environment based on feeling and intuition and Peter Eisenman arguing that our built environment necessarily needed to reflect intellectually the dis-harmony of our world. It’s one of those arguments that humanity so needed to resolve but instead it never even actually had the debate, outside of events like this - the battle was won before it began and as the footnotes elegiacally put it:
“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.”
It’s sad to consider that perhaps the only way we have of resolving questions like this is through failure after failure. Building inhuman worlds for generation after generation, nourishing ourselves on art and culture which mocks us until at some point in the far future, we weakly acknowledge that the freedom to do this, is in itself not enough.
Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture: The 1982 Debate Between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman
