In 1982, Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman, renowned architects and theorists, engaged in a witty, biting, and ironic debate on harmony in architecture — ‘Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture’ — at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The debate was published in the Italian magazine Lotus International n° 40 (1983), and later reprinted in Studio Works 7, by the…
I return to one of the arguments that interested me the most since I entered the spatial debate: the realism of space. This question inevitably connects to the spatial language we use to describe phenomena between concrete and abstract aspects of reality. But, most of all — I will especially argue in the final part of the text — this…
Take a mountain: is it a thing or a place? It is an elemental thing-place. The mountain looms before us as a massive place for things and as itself a thing. It looms as a Thing of things, just as stones and lichen on stones are in turn things of this Thing. Furthermore, just as such determinate things as rocks…
In the introductory note to PART IV – PROLEGOMENA TO A NEW CONCEPT OF NATURE of his 1972 book, The Nature of Physical Existence, the American author and philosopher Ivor Leclerc, explains why he undertook an in-depth exploration of the concept of nature – or the physical existent (from the Greek term ‘physis’, φύσις) –, examining it from historical, linguistic,…
I argue we cannot understand the meaning of the concepts of place and space, and their impact on our understanding of the nature of reality, without considering the meaning of other basic concepts that are co-implicated with and necessary for understanding the very concepts of place and space. That was particularly evident ever since I introduced Julian Barbour’s scientific history…