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Book review:
Is There an Object Oriented Architecture? Engaging 
Graham Harman 
edited by Joseph Bedford
Bloomsbury Academic, 2020
194 pages, Hardcover $103.50

reviewed by Tom Spector

      The application of Graham Harman’s theory 
of things in the world, given the moniker Object 
Oriented Ontology (or OOO), is in its nascent 
period in architecture. Is it nascent because people 
don’t yet know what to do with it, or is the inability 
to make use of it what keeps it nascent? This is a 
fundamental question that editor Joseph Bedford 
seeks to shed light on with contributions by Harman 
himself, and authors Adam Sharr, Lorens Holm, 
Jonathan Hale, Peg Rawes, Patrick Lynch and Peter 
Carl. The authors came together at the Swedenborg 
Society event devoted to discussing OOO in 2013. 
Towards this end, much credit must go to the book’s 
editing and organization which allows for essays 
interspersed with responses by Harman and further 
give-and-take discussion that does much to clarify 
what OOO entails and points to how it could be 
applied. This admirable organization gives the book 
a pleasant variety and rhythm often lacking in such 
compilations.  
       Harman’s premise is that objects have existences 
that always exceed our ability to quantify, narrate, 
use or otherwise apprehend them. This recognition 
of an existence that always “withdraws” therefore, 
from human understanding, is supposed to promote 

Book Review



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a certain attitude, a certain humility, towards objects. This humility is 
born of, he asserts, a rejection of Heidegger’s (and his inheritors’) idealism 
towards the primacy of the human, as opposed to Harman’s “realism” 
which “by contrast, promises to shift the balance between humans and 
non-humans towards an equitable centre ground, in which philosophy 
addresses all things in the universe with equal weight and promises a new 
ethical accounting as a result.” (5) –a pretty tall order. This important 
realist feature of Harman’s outlook also makes it at least somewhat hostile 
to traditional phenomenology, which may start out from an equally 
humble wish to take in the world as it presents itself, but tends then to 
privilege those elements which present themselves to us while neglecting 
the properties of objects, and their interactions with one another, that are 
proper to them. Harman’s insight regarding objecthood which escapes our 
human schema is well-placed as a corrective to theories, such as Latour’s 
Actor-Network Theory, which tend to collapse things into effects and 
relationships. He wants us mindful that the thing has an existence which 
exceeds effects on other things. 
       This is fine as a critique of philosophy and possibly social theory, but 
does it promise anything for architecture? While architects will tend to want 
to try out these ideas on the objects of their infatuation, namely, buildings, 
Harman is quick to emphasize that the concept of an object can span a 
wide gamut, from buildings, to be sure, to works of fiction, to characters 
within those works of fiction, to interpretations of those characters within 
those fictional works, to criticism of those interpretations, and so on, in 
what clearly risks vertigo of objecthood.  
       To go a bit deeper into Harman’s critique and his assertions about 
OOO, Harman thinks that much modern thought makes the mistake 
of either undermining objects by dissembling them into their most 
fundamental constituent parts—to the point where they cease to be 
recognizable, or else they tend to “overmine” them by relegating them 
to their effects as events, or networks, or power relations. (or sometimes 
both at the same time.) An object, he concludes, “is simply that which 
cannot be reduced downward to its pieces or upward to its effects.”(79) 
These rejections, then, (and a penchant for list-making) form the basis for 
holding that non-human objects always have a degree of existence that 
is immune from analysis either as a form of withdrawal from our ability 
to ensnare them in conceptual schemas or else as a degree of internal, 
inaccessible finitude. This recognition should be reason enough to strive to 
overcome anthropocentrism in our relations to objects.
       Anthropocentrism has certainly been a favorite target from a 



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variety of philosophical disciplines for some time. 
Environmental philosophers credit it with leading 
to an instrumentalist attitude towards nature that 
gives rise to such aporia as global warming. Nietzsche 
liked to emphasize it as the end of ethical certainty. 
And Graham Harman has made its rejection a 
tent-pole of OOO by insisting that the human 
perception of things not only provides no direct 
correlation to understanding them but also is only 
one legitimate perspective among many. But living 
without some mild form of anthropocentrism is 
tough, and it’s often worth questioning whether the 
alternatives aren’t worse than the problem. This is 
true of Nietzsche’s gleeful insistence that humanism 
provides no moral touchstones or the tendency of 
anti-anthropocentric environmentalism to lead into 
a conceptual thicket. In any event, there is a massive 
difference between normative anthropocentrism 
which insists that only humans convey value on the 
world and epistemic anthropocentrism which holds 
that adopting the point of view of non-humans is at 
best a guess. How we could know that objects have 
their own finitude without projecting some good 
ol’ anthro- on them remains unclear. Because if we 
assert that we know, or can observe their independent 
existence, then BANG!-an anthropocentrist-
generated concept has just been launched. A more 
thoroughgoing anti-anthropocentrism would seem 
to require us to hold that objects may or may not 
have such finitude, but we can never know for sure. 
The anthropocentric starting point for knowing 
things is far from foolproof, far from being able 
to exhaust the existence of things, and certainly 
subject to bias, but despite these handicaps is, as 
best as we can tell, more reliable and less speculative 
than other starting points. Harman sees this as a 
battle between anthropocentric idealism and object-
oriented realism. OOO tends to treat its realism as a 
hard-won achievement.1  
       Harman believes he has charted a way out 
of anthropocentric idealism. He thinks that there 

  Harman 
is quick to 

emphasize that 
the concept of 
an object can 

span a wide 
gamut, from 

buildings, to be 
sure, to works 

of fiction, to 
characters 
within those 

works of 
fiction, to 

interpretations 
of those 

characters 
within those 

fictional 
works, to 

criticism 
of those 

interpretations, 
and so on, in 

what clearly 
risks vertigo of 

objecthood.

“

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must be more to objects than their constituent parts or their effects, a third 
way of conceiving them that allows them their own independent, and only 
partially or indirectly knowable, existence. Now, here’s where Harman’s 
theory for some jumps the shark from a reasoned critique of 19th and 
20th century philosophy to a normative theory of how we should behave 
towards things. From the recognition that things have an independent, 
though largely unknowable existence, he writes, “I think we need to place 
the human-world relation on the same level as the world-world or object-object 
relation.” (emphasis his, 20) and by this he doesn’t mean epistemologically 
only, but also morally. This idea has been attractive to environmentalists, 
who struggle to overcome anthropocentric instrumentalist views towards 
nature and want us to value nature on its own terms. One can also see the 
immediate attraction to architects of such an idea, for now they can assert 
moral standing to their products independent of those products’ utilitarian 
benefits for humankind. (The moral standing of artworks, of course, has 
long been an interesting seam of study between ethics and aesthetics.) 
But more than that, as Adam Sharr asserts in his chapter, “The Circus, 
the Canon and the House with One Wall,” OOO is attractive because its 
decentering of the human “offers a series of productive fables that allow 
us to imagine our surroundings differently. This is exactly the kind of 
storytelling – the production of imaginative worlds – to which architects 
devote their work lives.” (40) Sharr recognizes, however, that “while 
architects, who deal in the design of things, might be comfortable with 
a world where objecthood is paramount, this is where Harman’s cosmos 
seems most challenging to many academics,” (44) precisely because of the 
flattening of ontological and moral distinctions between the human and 
other objects. Nevertheless, Sharr applauds the ability of OOO to spark 
the imagination and enable a “heightened reality.” He writes, if OOO “can 
help us to sharpen our appreciation of those objects and their effects, then 
it is certainly worthy of architects’ attention.” (55)
       Lorens Holm’s chapter “Architecture and Its Objects” brings up the topic 
of space as a thing. This topic is certainly well-placed and in need of further 
explanation in OOO because we architects can think of and employ space 
in so many different ways: as the absence of things, as the distance between 
things, as figure-ground, as an axis, as perspective space, as a picture plane 
within a perspective, or as a thing in itself. But conceiving it as a thing that 
can withdraw into itself, even under the generous terms Harman grants 
things’ existence, is dilemmatic. Did it become a thing when we thought 
it into existence? Did the “thingness” of space exist before a human 
recognized it? Does this way of thinking help us, as Sharr would ask, to 
tell stories around it? Perhaps, we might hope, the questioning it generates 



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is service enough. But we should resist the urge to 
assert that, since architecture is vitally interested 
in space, and Harman extensively employs spatial 
metaphors, we therefore have correspondence and 
ultimately relevance. Ultimately, Holm finds OOO 
at least potentially useful “because if you could 
understand your allegiance to objects, the ones you 
are designing for and the ones you are making, and 
find the integrity of your work in the contemplation 
of the object as opposed to always having to outside 
the object, looking over your shoulder to the user, 
we would probably have a more beautiful world, 
and more importantly, one that works better 
for users.” (86)—thus constructing an indirect 
utilitarian argument for taking OOO seriously. 
    Jonathan Hale’s “Buildings as Objects and 
Buildings as ‘Tool-Beings’” takes a more directly 
critical approach. He thinks that Harman misses 
something important to architecture in its binary 
lack of appreciation of the transitions between 
pure utility or pure sensory qualities on the one 
hand and the object’s mysterious core on the other. 
Hale thinks much of architecture is appropriately 
concerned with cultivation of that transitional 
strangeness—not entirely withdrawn objects, but 
not entirely reduced to smooth facilitators of utility 
either. Hale doesn’t worry much about the intrusion 
of usefulness into consideration of objects because, 
he reasonably proposes, “Perhaps this is the closest 
we can ever get to understanding objects as they are 
in themselves – by using them and re-using them 
we continue to explore their inexhaustible depths.” 
(96) Hale also worries that, at least in instances, 
OOO requires privileging non-human agency over 
human agency. Harman thinks this a non-problem. 
It only requires “treating them both in the same way 
ontologically, not politically.” (99) and therefore 
substantive value judgments have been avoided. 
But have they? Isn’t asserting ontological parity 
itself a value judgment? Can you simply point out 

The point 
is to see 

that architects 
have 

always been 
dealing with 

objects more 
urgently than 

philosophers 
have. ”

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that things have extra-human existence and then make it a mere factual 
observation that makes them ontologically on par? For many, deciding to 
place things on par with humans is itself a value proposition. It is easy to see 
how this would be so for architects. For many, this question is something 
worth arguing over. Defining it out of existence will seem high-handed. 
       The final three sections, each in their own way, make little effort to 
directly engage Harman’s theory. Peg Rawes’ “Non-Human Architectural 
Ecologies” opts instead for a feminist outflanking of his approach as lacking 
the kinds of differentiations feminists bring to the discussion. She cautions 
that while we may be inclined to think that OOO opens up a multiplicity 
of voices by allowing all kinds of things their own agency, there may be 
both good and bad agency. The bad perpetuates universalist assumptions 
about objects that all too often serve to silence other voices. She thinks 
we need a triple-O that welcomes and unlocks those other perspectives 
and notes that “object-oriented practices already” exist in architecture 
and they are not always forces for emancipation. “As it stands, much 
environmental architectural discourse, especially, technological, biological 
and computational forms, perpetuates” the repression of difference. (113) 
From this essay, it’s not clear that she has actually done much reading of 
Harman, which is a hazard of invited panels. Sometimes the panel member 
is too keen to discuss his or her favorite topics to spend much time on the 
subject at hand. When Rawes observes that the aims and objectives of 
architecture and philosophy “should not just be mapped onto each other.” 
(129) the reader may wonder who actually thinks this. Harman tries to 
defuse the argument by replying that “the point is not for a philosopher 
of objects to force architects to think about objects against their will. The 
point is to see that architects have always been dealing with objects more 
urgently than philosophers have. On this point philosophy is the student 
and architecture the teacher.” Gratifying to architects, but to what result? 
Surely it’s a demonstration project with mixed results. Both Patrick Lynch 
and Peter Carl in their sections prefer to critique Harman’s interpretation 
of Heidegger than directly engage his original thought. Lynch objects to 
conclusions Harman draws from Being and Time, while Carl argues that 
Harman’s unique interpretation doesn’t do justice to the thought of such 
Heidgger inheritors as Latour. Since Harman has a large intellectual debt 
to Heidegger, there is some common ground for discussion even though 
not much opportunity for productive dialogue. In a symposium about 
Harman’s thinking, one wonders why a contributor doesn’t at least try to 
link his or her prior interests to the topic at hand. It’s perplexing, but this 
sort of thing does happen at academic conferences. Unsurprisingly, neither 
exchange takes us close to architecture. 



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       Happily, Harman gets the last word, actually 
an “Afterword,” that attempts to draw out a few 
lessons that OOO may hold for architects. Works 
of architecture have depths and connections that 
cannot be reduced to performance measures nor 
to relationships because there is always something 
important remaining after all the relationships 
have been unearthed and performance measures 
analyzed. For these reasons, architectural works make 
paradigm examples of object oriented ontology. 
Further, he thinks that architecture and OOO share 
an orientation to the renunciation of the distinction 
between pure thought and material works—there is 
no priority nor superiority to thought. This may all 
be both true and interesting. But is this sympathetic 
orientation enough to generate an architectural 
difference? I’m not hopeful on this point, but that is 
the question to be worked out over time. It remains 
to be seen whether Harman successfully “makes the 
petition for OOO as a practical philosophy and 
social theory that may provide novel avenues for the 
ails of our times.”2 

Endnotes

1. Harman calls his position “ardently realist” in 
Manuel Delanda and Graham Harman, The Rise of 
Realism. Polity Press, 2017, 3.
2. Steven Umbrello, “A Theory of Everything?” 
Cultural Studies Review v24 n 2, 2018, 184-86. 186.


