The Debate

Christopher Alexander & Peter Eisenman
The Debate....

what you see depends on where you stand, (read it somewhere), the world is also not all black and all white, infact all shades of color in between...well all the colors are either how much light they absorbe or reflect....
Both the architects come from a very rich experienced background and they have their own veiw about architecture, both feeling that their belief is true...I would like to start with PE statement where he say "this is wash"...

CA is trying to defend his baby and PE trying to make a meaningful argument about architectural practice...I must comment first on PE's effort to make the argument sublime in the first place than viewing the whole thing as "offense and defense" on CA's first reaction to PE's starting statement...
in this world there are people who are feelers, thinkers, intutors and sensors
I am the feeling types... and i do believe in "feeling spaces" ...I would again like to state "what you see depends on where you stand"

The smell of materials, inhabitants, food, surroundings, the fee and texture of materials and surfaces, the sound of echoes and footsteps, all are part of the complete architectural experience. In other words architecture is experienced as a synthesis of many stimuli and is only fully understood in totality. That is what I mean when I say "feeling architecture"
YET, I agree more with PE, my intervention on their discussion:
"feeling(in architecture) is something you see and thinking is something that you look into, kind of reading between the lines"
jung classification about order and form..this theory is i feel very much based on feeling architecture...eclectic...
Chartres has its Gothic accent... sure it practices form and order and harmony...but for sure its boring to me too... I believe more on Venturi's view on complexity and contradiction than a monotonus harmony....Let me give one example here....I was walking through the commercial downtown of St. Austine, a historic downtown and a very beatiful architecture .... all the houses/shops were different and it provided a diffrent view of the tower at the end of the street from each and every nook of the street...there was order in the fenestration, building height ratio to width...every next store bought some characteristic of the neighbouring buildings, this mutation eventually made the first and the last shop completely different and interesting in its own way...it was a very romantic walk i ever had...falling in love with architecture at those nooks and corners of the street....
Lets go to Palladio's Palazzo , a fine example of georgian classical architecture, sure there is harmony and order and at the same time there is contarast. PE's observation on the negative spaces is something that most of the architect tend to over look, the similarity in the fenestrations is also because of the harmony in the spaces between them. "What is interesting about serial structures is the spaces between, not the elements themselves, but the differences between the two.", here thinking is in practice...
Let me come back to Venturies view, where he talked about pitched roof in one of his buildings, a very primitive idea of house, and yet a powerful one, I as a child always drew pitched roof in my drawing classes, well lets not get into the white fenses and the rising sun :)...I disagree here with PE, using a primitive form is not moving back...its probably going back to the basics and emerging out of it! Well Well Well you will get that I am not suggesting to design pitched roofs if you know what i am talking about here...
I agree with CA here "see man and the universe as more or less intertwined and inseparable"
To preset with a theory of human environment in which the built world is seen as a kind of nature unto itself. Like the natural world out of which it is created, the built world operates in response to its own rules, its own means to change and permanence through the interaction of a host of contributing forces. Most important among those interacting forces is our human nature in all its dimensions, including our quest for meaning in the things we create, the fundamental nature of the materials out of which the world we create for ourselves is built, and our idea of nature itself. As we have progressively perfected our world it has moved us farther from the nature that once served as the paradigm for its creation. Seriously my aim is to get as close as possible.
PE says the cosmology in 300 years has changed and CA is asking to go back and revisit ...
Let me go back to Venturi's view, Sanisbury wing, National Gallery a very good example of going back to basic and emerge out of it(Study the Fenestration). A very good example of the argument above!!! not just talks!!