Subdued brilliance: a study of life and order in the cosmic vision of Christopher AlexanderTools Irwin, Jay (2025) Subdued brilliance: a study of life and order in the cosmic vision of Christopher Alexander. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
AbstractThis dissertation is an original presentation of the work of architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander, with particular attention to his four-volume opus The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. Alexander is one of the 20th century’s most well-known architects, but the metaphysical foundations on which he establishes his ideas are often ignored or dismissed as controversial or irrelevant. In this study, I defend the necessity of these metaphysical foundations as central to his work and theory. With an emphasis on his main themes of “life,” “centers,” and the “personal,” I take up his challenge to the material-mechanistic worldview, along with his alternative proposal of a “modified physics.” The inversion the latter asserts transforms a neutral, valueless, dead world into one in which all things abide in life and soul, best understood, as I argue, in the Christian Platonic theme of Sophia. In this way, I am able to describe the “form-language” of his “fifteen properties” as an expression of sophiology, or a wisdom ontologically present to every successful “living” form. The originality of this dissertation comes in the wider breadth and intensification I bring to Alexander’s metaphysics—lending his work strength through that of Ravaisson, Goethe, Cusa, Bulgakov, Michel Henry, Plato (and others)—while also offering Alexander’s own insights, framed within his affective epistemological emphasis, as contributions which likewise strengthen philosophical understandings of form.
Actions (Archive Staff Only)
|
Tools
Tools
