the debate that never ends

[pynchonoid]

http://www.katarxis3.com/Alexander_Eisenman_Debate.htm#Introduction

Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture:
The 1982 Debate Between Christopher Alexander and
Peter Eisenman
An Early Discussion of the "New Sciences" of Organised
Complexity in Architecture

[...] Up until about 1600, most of the world views
that existed in different cultures did see man and the
universe as more or less intertwined and inseparable
... either through the medium of what they called God
or in some other way. But all that was understood. The
particular intellectual game that led us to discover
all the wonders of science forced us to abandon
temporarily that idea. In other words, in order to do
physics, to do biology, we were actually taught to
pretend that things were like little machines because
only then could you tinker with them and find out what
makes them tick. That's all fine. It was a tremendous
endeavor, and it paid off.

But it may have been factually wrong. That is, the
constitution of the universe may be such that the
human self and the substance that things made out of,
the spatial matter or whatever you call it, are much
more inextricably related than we realized. Now, I am
not talking about some kind of aboriginal primitivism.
I am saying that it may actually be a matter of fact
that those things are more related than we realize.
And that we have been trained to play a trick on
ourselves for the last 300 years in order to discover
certain things. Now, if that's true -- there are
plenty of people in the world who are beginning to say
it is, by the way, certainly in physics and other
related subjects -- then my own contribution to that
line of thought has to do with these structures of
sameness that I have been talking about.[...] 

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