Professor Emeritus
School of Architecture
University of Notre Dame
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“A traditional
Batak house,
Sumatra,
Indonesia. (Wikipedia),”
included in
“Alexander’s Classical Tent,”
David Brusssat’s
blog, “Architecture Here and There.”
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Alexander is
certainly right when he states, “If we hold too narrowly to the
pure historical classicist forms, we run a very severe danger that
this could be perceived as an elitist game, not relevant to seven
eighths of the people on Earth, and possibly colonialist in its
meaning if not its intent.”
And he reminds us, “The issue is, it seems to me, that we must renew our attention to forms that have life, and like nature, originate from life and joyfully celebrate life.”
But his writing here and elsewhere does
not note that architecture serves human nature’s aspiration to
enjoy justice. This fundamental principle that binds individuals into
a society is missing from what he writes about the “living
structure” that he posits as the basis of both nature and
architecture. His position appeals to architects who accept the same
modern empiricist approach to (small n) nature that neglected or
disdains Nature that encompasses human nature. This limitation is
revealed in Modernism’s embrace of technology as a means to achieve
undefined ends and its exclusion of architecture as the means a
people use to serve and express the highest end their society seeks,
which is justice. Every society has a different means of serving its
aspiration for justice, which we can understand as the fulfillment of
the human nature of each person. Ours means has a career within the
constantly revised tradition that began with Greeks, Hebrews, and
Latins.
I have not found in Alexander’s work
a recognition that every mature society has a best (i.e., classical)
form for the justice that its civil or religious order (united or
separate) seeks and that its classical (i.e., its best appropriate)
architecture serves and expresses. Those whom he calls “classicist”
architects honor style, not architecture. Imposing “classicist”
architecture would be an act of cultural imperialism, and so would be
(and have been) imposing Christianity, Latin, Greek, or English, or
his “living structure,” which is agnostic relative to the
society’s means of seeking justice.
The aspiration of
every individual to live nobly and well is more than congruence with
“that living structure, and the deep nature of what it is,” that
he argues “must be produced,” arguing that “that is what ought
to guide us and lead us on.” I would rather think that more
important in every society are the millennial traditions and
revisions that have guided its quest for justice, that is, the
adaptation, more successfully done in some societies and eras than in
others, of the principles that produce the beauty in architecture
that is the visible counterpart to justice.
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| Thomas Jefferson, Poplar Forest, Bedford County, Virginia (Photo C.W. Westfall) |
Contributed by Carroll William Westfall
Professor Emeritus
School of Architecture
University of Notre Dame
Alexander is a scientist, and he discovered - rather than invented - that living structure exists in all traditional buildings and cities and works of art, as well as in nature and biology. In other words, living structure is NOT his invention, just as fractal is a discovery rather than an invention of mathematicians. The open letter simply points out a matter of fact of living structure rather than an imposed opinion. In addition, could you explain what you mean by justice? Are you saying that that every one is entitled to do whatever architecture he/she likes? Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI nowhere suggested that he invented rather than discovered what he calls "living structure." He does support it as fact, a term that belongs more to means of living rather than ends for living.
DeleteAnd, justice is sought in Plato's Academy, not in the Abbey of Thelemene.
Great, so we agree upon the notion of living structure. However, I still do not understand your notion of justice, too abstract to me. Do you agree on Michael Mehaffy's interpretation of justice?
DeleteTake a look at my reply to him.
DeleteI looked at your reply to him, and understand justice a bit better. BUT, it is fairly to say that living structure accounts for a majority of architecture (say, 90%). We should not let some trivial parts (say, 10%) to accounthis for the majority of architecture. Just as noted by Alexander, 90% of our feelings are shared, idiosyncratic parts account for only 10% of our feelings. HOWEVER, people tend to use the 10% idiosyncratic parts to account for architecture. This is the failure that modern architecture has experienced.
Delete"Everyone has common sense. Intelligent people, however, have a tendency to overapply their analytical and logical reasoning abilities derived from their general intelligence incorrectly to such evolutionarily familiar domains and as a result get things wrong. In other words, liberals and other intelligent people lack common sense, because their general intelligence overrides it. They think in situations where they are supposed to feel. In evolutionarily familiar domains such as interpersonal relationships, feeling usually leads to correct solutions whereas thinking does not."
Deletehttps://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201003/if-liberals-are-more-intelligent-conservatives-why-are
Maybe architects are too intelligent?
To supplement, living structure is defined mathematically, it exists in space and matter physically, and it reflects in our minds or cognition psychologically; see details in this paper.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/296396310_A_Complex-Network_Perspective_on_Alexander%27s_Wholeness
I have also developed a mathematical model of living structure or wholeness that enables us to address (1) why a design is beautiful, and (2) how much beauty the design has:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272159333_Wholeness_as_a_Hierarchical_Graph_to_Capture_the_Nature_of_Space
I'm gonna comment in the exact same way as the above text was written: full of arrogance. ;)
ReplyDeleteThis is quite The Example of a convoluted interpretation without any solid base supporting it: who stated that architecture is a way to enjoy justice? If this pillar is wrong then all this brainy structure crumbles instantly. The blindly arrogant way used to answer to Alexander's letter points clearly towards a narrow mind and approach to architecture itself.
See? Handful of arrogance
In tribal communities justice was essential, and I think Ross Chapin's "Pocket Neighborhoods" represent some of the same values.
Delete- Pocket Neighborhoods: Building Blocks for Resilient Communities:
http://pocket-neighborhoods.net/SmartGrowth.pdf
I think what Bill Westfall is getting at is not so far from what Chris has in fact argued - although he hasn't recognized it in Chris' work. He is speaking of justice, which is really a kind of harmony achieved between people (as Plato argued in The Republic) and expressed in a range of ways -- in their economic conditions, in their legal processes for resolving conflicts, in their physical ways of living -- and in their architecture and urbanism. As Paul Murrain likes to say, architecture is a political system, it limits our freedoms (if you build a wall, I am no longer free to walk there) but it does it, we hope, in a way that achieves a (near) resolution of our conflicting freedoms. That's justice. (Never fully realized, always imperfectly approaching its full realization.)
ReplyDeleteThis justice is a form of adaptation, then, which is how Chris explains it. Chris does not see that kind of justice as foreign to the natural world, but rather, "supervenient" to it -- we are beings that can choose justice, in ways that others do not or cannot. But justice IS a kind of natural condition. (One could go so far as to say a "natural law" as some Catholic theologians do - although I would not go that far.)
That Classical architecture was an embodiment of this kind of justice is a fair point. That all Classical architects today have managed to really express this justice again, instead of sometimes merely recapitulating its appearance -- well, that question is up for debate, is it not!
But we all have our challenges with recovery and regeneration in these times, and there is a saying about "people in glass houses who shouldn't throw stones..." I am all for the recovery and regeneration project, and the ways that we can support one another in the work...
I am all for Natural Law which, as I explain in my recent book, is the shared foundation of the civil order and of the buildings and cities serving it in the classical tradition. Every nation sees that comity within its own traditions. The United States does so through its adaptation of the classical tradition, using what it builds to serve and express that quest for justice. My reservations about Alexander's argument, like that of Modernists, is that they loose contact with that tradition, confusing the means of using what they find in (small n) nature as an adequate reason for justifying a way to build buildings and cities. They fail to account for architecture as a means to a greater end, namely, the enjoyment of the happiness that comes from each person's fulfillment of their unique nature.
DeleteBill - please look closer, I think you will find in Chris a lot more than the Modernist small-n nature of which you speak. We are indeed special beings with special moral responsibilities. But please don't forget "supervenience" -- we are part of the family of creation, not freaks, or little god-beings, wholly separate from the rest of creation as we once imagined. (Maybe that's just my Deism coming out, and maybe we will never agree on that point!)
DeletePosting on behalf of Bill Buchanan:
ReplyDeleteI certainly had my difficulties with Chris but I completely don get this argument, at least as sketched. An architecture expresses superior "justice" because it is better at intimidating those enslaved by the Roman Empire or in the New World. Surely that projection of power was a major programmatic purpose of Classical architecture revivals? There are many arguments for the forms, but justice? The justice as seen by slave masters?
Posting response on behalf of Steven Semes:
ReplyDeleteThe same architecture was built by abolitionists and is employed in the war memorials for those who died defeating slavery. All architecture projects power of some kind. Classicism has been used by many different types of power, some noble, some repellent. In many cases, the classical has come to represent justice, even if the practice of that justice by the sponsoring power was imperfect at best. I wouldn't push this argument as far as Bill does, perhaps, but the association of the classical with slavery (whether of the ancient or the modern variety) is misdirected.
Posting response on behalf of Bill Buchanan:
ReplyDeleteI'm well aware that the classical has been used to project many things, including the ideas American democratic government, rooted in the perhaps idealized memory of Athenian democracy. But it has also been used to intimidate, and to project superior order to longing for it, whether in the roman or German empires. Some wish to deny the more troublesome uses of the language, but I thing its flexibility is impressive and worthy of serious thought and open-minded appreciation.
Posting response on behalf of Steven Semes:
DeleteBill, I certainly do not want to deny any of the history of the uses people and powers have made of architecture. But you will surely agree that other kinds of architecture have also been used to intimidate, various moderisms in particular. So it is not denial of the history to ask that a critique of the expressive capacity of the forms themselves be used as a balance to the more common critique of those forms based on the "association of ideas."
Indeed, buildings always express the authority of those who build them or use them. The most important uses are reserved for what is considered most important in architecture. Their USE is judged according to standards of things that are done, which are the standards of the good, their quality as architecture is judged according to their achievement in that art. Why else could the Pantheon, the throne room for venerating a pagan divinized emperor be adapted to its many later uses, including a church and a mausoleum for modern kings?
ReplyDeleteFrom the segue in the 4th paragraph it seems the implicit title might be: "Living Tradition" vs Natural Law
ReplyDeleteAnd so it would appear to me that the charge leveled against Christopher Alexander is that he is somehow guilty by a sin of omission, an ignorance or avoidance of the pivotal role of architecture as an expression of justice and when done for the good, a beautiful expression of justice.
I remained unconvinced of the Classical notions of the relation of the good, just and beautiful and their potential physical embodiment in architecture but I'll save that for my own contributing essay. What I would like to point out that I disagree that the living structure Christopher describes can be imposed. Unlike the Modernist focus on form that is imposed upon matter, living structure is cultivated, it grows from a society that is essentially left unencumbered. Human beings living as human beings. Christopher seems likewise concerned with the conditions under which human beings will flourish.
I do think there is a great deal of convergence of thinking between Bill and Christopher on certain points. Fundamentally, each in his own way are taking up the ethical position: how ought we to live (and build)? One point that struck me in Christopher's paper was that of "empty imagery for living structure" and how "deeper structure" was a different activity than "copying the shapes of classicism". I heard similar concerns echoed by Bill recently in person (and Christine Franck) within the practise and theory of classicism itself. The overemphasis on the teaching of the orders but not the building volumetrically, the act of building/construction itself as well as building the society. How do we get past this surface imagery of classicism?