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Figure 4.13.
the linz café. source: alexander 1983, 48.
he was writing about the brain, but Alexander immediately extended Ashby's
discussion of connectedness to a continuing program in architecture and de-
sign, a field that Ashby never systematically thought about. We can thus take
both Alexander's distinctive approach to architectural design and the actual
buildings he has designed as further exemplars of the cybernetic ontology in
action.
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Finally, we can note that Alexander's architecture is by no means
uncontroversial. Alexander's “Linz Café” (1983) is an extended account of one
of his projects (fig. 4.13)
that includes the text of a debate at Harvard with
Peter Eisenman. Alexander explains how the cafe was constructed around his
“patterns” (58-59) but also emphasizes that the design elements needed to be
individually “tuned” by building mock-ups and seeing what they felt like. The
goal was to construct spaces that were truly “comfortable” for human beings.
This tuning harks back to and exemplifies Alexander's earlier discussion of
how problems can be and are solved on a piecemeal basis in traditional archi-
tecture, and the last section of his article discusses resonances between the
Linz Café and historical buildings (59). In debate Eisenman tries to problema-
tize Alexander's comfort principle and suggests a different, less harmonious
