In 1982, the architects Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenmann had a debate about the nature of their craft.¹ Eisenmann, whose style changes year to year, represented a deconstructionist mode, whereas Alexander represented a line of architectural reasoning that, as he sees it, received the full tradition of architecture, ancient and modern. Alexander’s main argument was the spirit of his magnum opus, The Nature of Order, a genuinely philosophical appraisal of architectural history: that harmony places ethical and metaphysical demands on architects, that architecture ought to reflect harmony for citizens, and that this harmony ought to reflect that of the entire cosmos. 

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.²

 Eisenmann disagreed. The gist of his reasons for disagreement, though I am reducing it here, is that harmony causes, or is, a kind of ontological violence. The objective standard of harmony is tyrannical space. But Alexander countered this with a vision of variegated space, in which it is not a uniform expanse: “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.” Alexander goes on, in my favorite part of the debate, to accuse Rafael Moneo (whom Eisenmann defended for the intentional disharmony of his works with its surroundings) of “f—ing up the world.” 

The philosophical and theological content of Alexander’s work has only recently started to attract attention. The brunt of his critiques of modern architecture is primarily about the body in the world. According to Alexander, architecture imposes a form on the human to behave in particular ways (a notion that Merleau-Ponty notes throughout his ouvre), and this form we may call an environment. Our environment draws bounds on the body, it brings the body’s placement and its borders acutely before the light of perception, and it has an effect on behavior. 

The same can be said of other bodies. Simone Weil writes about how we behave in the presence of others:

The human beings around us exert just by their presence a power which belongs uniquely to themselves to stop, to diminish, or modify, each movement which our bodies design. A person who crosses our path does not turn aside our steps in the same manner as a street sign, no one stands up, or moves about, or sits down again in quite the same fashion when he is alone in a room as when he has a visitor.³ 

There is this dynamic fabric that seeps into intentionality and the ecstatic movement of consciousness. This fabric is an amalgamate harmonization between architecture, other bodies, etc. It comes to inform us of how we stand up in the world and even what we are.

Adjacent to architecture is industrial design. Most design today has the achievements in Bauhaus chair design to thank for its core principles (especially Marcel Breuer and his students, Eliot Noyes and Charles Eames), those notions which make up for us whatever it is that is “good design.”⁴ The core principles are form (principally characterized by how a thing looks, and the materials used) and function (how well it accomplishes the task for which it was designed); these principles find their ontological cousins in the material and effective cause (what a thing is made of, and what it can do). 

The reduction of causality to the material and effective naturally led to the reducing of “good design” to an object’s  form and function. But in order to achieve this reduction, the Bauhaus had to make one pivotal and genuinely philosophical gesture: it had to reduce the human body to an abstract factor in the total design process. The body was then, not a human body, but a design principle, a virtual object even.

What do all these little vignettes have to do with each other? Alexander touches on the central theological concern in architecture and design: what we make is not a “pure object” like in American Minimalist art. It stands in a world, and in that world are people. This is so obvious as to be banal, and yet it seems to go on ignored by most of the current architectural line of reasoning, and it has since the 1920s. Architecture and design carry with them implicit theological assumptions, and designing according to those assumptions has very real consequences in our very real world. It forms a kind of feedback loop of disharmony in which abstracted thought informs architecture, which informs bodies, which informs other bodies, which informs thought, which informs architecture – repeated ad infinitum/absurdum. It makes me wonder if one of the central causes of the world’s shattering mental health crisis isn’t this very “heterodoxy of chairs.”

Eisenmann and Moneo, it seems, come to take up implicitly heterodox theological postures towards the world and the body, ways in which the Christian tradition has fought long and hard against. Perhaps it’s time for us to listen more to voices such as Alexander’s and remember that what we make ought to simultaneously heal this world and keep us from displacing it into differential, mathetic abstraction.

‍