1. Prologue: A New Vision of Nature ‘Since the mid-nineteenth century, many of the traditional certainties of science began to dissolve under the impact of new discoveries in physics, chemistry, and biology… The rigid boundaries separating these disciplines started to blur as a convergence emerged between the physical, biological, and even social sciences. Researchers began to observe striking similarities between…
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…
… it is helpful to think of architectures as ‘archi-textures’, to treat each monument or building, viewed in its surroundings and context, in the populated area and associated networks in which it is set down, as part of a particular production of space. HENRY LEFEBVRE, The Production of Space This article explores how the concepts of space and place shaped…
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…