23terrelated and inseparable. Modernity, perhaps unwisely, departed from that idea.
Alexander suggests that “the constitution of the universe may be such that the hu-
man self and the substance that things are made out of, the spatial matter or what-
ever you call it, are much more inextricably related than we realized.”^34 In Alexander’s
view, it is the task of architecture to offer human beings experiences of harmony that
are rooted in the “hidden order” that he postulates.
Eisenman’s objections to this notion are sweeping. He argues that it is not re-
ally perfection that appeals to our deepest feelings and that perfection can only exist
through that which is imperfect. The imperfect—the fragment, the incomplete, that
which is too large or too small—might in fact more easily relate to our feelings of
fragility and vulnerability and thus form a more effective expression of the modern
condition. Modernity has to do with the alienation of the self from the collective, and
with our resulting sense of unease. Architecture cannot afford to ignore experiences
of this sort; on the contrary, its task is to acknowledge them, confronting them on
their own terms.
These divergent viewpoints—the nostalgic and utopian one of Norberg-Schulz
and Alexander, and the radical and critical one of Cacciari and Eisenman—give an ad-
equate picture of the dilemmas that architecture has to face. Cacciari and Eisenman
base themselves on the experience of anxiety that is inherent in modernity, and they
give a logically consistent description of its implications for architecture. There is,
however, a certain rigidity in their stance that makes it hard to accept their conclu-
sions without question. An architecture that complied with their drastic require-
ments of negativity and silence would inevitably make an abstraction of the concrete
needs and desires of the actual people that would have to use it and dwell in it. One
might well ask whether that is appropriate. What both Cacciari and Eisenman are in
fact doing is transposing notions from the realm of arts and literature to architecture.
One cannot, however, do this without making certain adjustments. Adolf Loos
warned that a house is not a work of art. A painting hangs in a museum, a book is
something that you can close when you have read it, but a building is an omnipresent
environment for one’s everyday life: it is intolerable for it to be critical and negative in
the same way as modern art and literature.
The views of Alexander and Norberg-Schulz are even more vulnerable to criti-
cism. Alexander’s holistic metaphysics is untenable if one bears in mind the philo-
sophical developments of the last century. If these have any single characteristic in
common, it is the notion that we live in a “post-metaphysical” epoch, that meta-
physics, in other words, has lost all credibility. Alexander’s “theory” tends toward
mysticism and has unmistakably totalitarian tendencies. In his world view there is no
room for heterogeneity or difference. According to him everybody is familiar with the
same “universal” feelings^35 and everyone’s experiences are basically similar. These
are extremely questionable assumptions on which to base a theory.
Similar objections can be made to Norberg-Schulz’s theory. Norberg-Schulz in-
terprets Heidegger in a fairly simplistic and instrumental way, by which the Spirit of22