






































Architecture Philosophy is the journal of the International Society for the Philosophy 
of Architecture (ISPA). The society was founded in 2009 by Carolyn Fahey, and 
the journal was first published in 2014 by Tom Spector, Carolyn Fahey, and Stefan 
Koller.

Architecture Philosophy proudly acknowledges the financial support from the 
Oklahoma State University School of Architecture and the College of Engineering 
Architecture and Technology that makes free distribution of print copies possible. The 
journal also acknowledges the support from the Oklahoma State University Library 
for making the submission management software, the journal’s online presence, and 
its indexing in academic search engines a reality. 

Architecture Philosophy (ISSN 2372-0883) is published semiannually. Two 
parts form a volume. The subscription is free for digital copies, and print copies 
are available to society members. Visit isparchitecture.com for digital access to the 
journal’s content. 

The graphical layout of the journal and the cover design are by Carolyn Fahey. 

Copying
This journal is copyrighted by Oklahoma State University. For permission requests 
please contact the ISPA at isparchitecture@gmail.com.

© Oklahoma State University

Printed in the United States by Oklahoma State University.



Essentialism and Spatial (Re)Production
Benjamin Bross

Non-Projects for the Uninhabitable: Lyotard’s Architecture Philosophy
Ashley Woodward

Interview with Graham Harman
Simon Weir

Book Review: Is There and Object Oriented Architecture? Engaging 
Graham Harman

reviewed by Tom Spector

the journal of the International Society 

for the Philosophy of Architecture

volume 5

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volume 5   number 2



Architecture Philosophy is the journal of the International Society for the Philosophy 
of Architecture (ISPA). The society was founded in 2009 by Carolyn Fahey, and 
the journal was first published in 2014 by Tom Spector, Carolyn Fahey, and Stefan 
Koller.

Architecture Philosophy proudly acknowledges the financial support from the 
Oklahoma State University School of Architecture and the College of Engineering 
Architecture and Technology that makes free distribution of print copies possible. The 
journal also acknowledges the support from the Oklahoma State University Library 
for making the submission management software, the journal’s online presence, and 
its indexing in academic search engines a reality. 

Architecture Philosophy (ISSN 2372-0883) is published semiannually. Two 
parts form a volume. The subscription is free for digital copies, and print copies 
are available to society members. Visit isparchitecture.com for digital access to the 
journal’s content.

The graphical layout of the journal and the cover design are by Carolyn Fahey. 

Copying
This journal is copyrighted by Oklahoma State University. For permission requests 
please contact the ISPA at isparchitecture@gmail.com.

© Oklahoma State University

Printed in the United States by Oklahoma State University.



Managing Editor
Tom Spector, Ph.D., University of California - Berkeley

Editorial Board
Philosophy
Rebecca Bensen-Cain, Ph.D., University of California - Santa Barbara
Rafael de Clercq, Ph.D., Catholic University Leuven 
Noël Carroll, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago
Paul Guyer, Ph.D., Harvard University
Christian Illies, Ph.D., University of Oxford
Jeff Malpas, Ph.D., Australian National University

Architecture
Andrew Ballantyne, Ph.D., University of Sheffield
Ufuk Ersoy, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
Helen Mallinson, Ph.D., London Consortium
David Leatherbarrow, Ph.D., University of Essex
Graham Owen, M.Des., Harvard University
Nicholas Ray, M.A., University of Cambridge
David Leatherbarrow, Ph.D., University of Essex 
Graham Owen, M.Des., Harvard University
Nicholas Ray, M.A., University of Cambridge

Contact
Web isparchitecture.com
Email isparchitecture@gmail.com
        tom.spector@okstate.edu



CONTENTS

5Editorial

9Benjamin BrossEssentialism and Spatial (Re)
Production

33Ashley Woodward Non-Projects for the 
Uninhabitable: Lyotard’s 
Architecture Philosophy

53Simon WeirInterview with Graham Harman

Book Review:
Is There an Object Oriented 
Architecture? Engaging Graham 
Harman, edited by Joseph Bedford

Tom Spector

reviewed by 
Tom 
Spector

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Those of us who had given up on talk of essences, 
because they always seem to depend on some 
inaccessible, mystifying core, are in for a pleasant 
reawakening. Essence(s) is(are) back. In retrospect, 
this turn was inevitable. Continential philosophy’s  
militant perspectivalism, starting with Nietzsche, 
was bound to invite a backlash. Meanwhile, an 
influential cohort of architects has become frustrated 
“that architecture is increasingly justified solely 
by its relations and not by its own particular and 
autonomous qualities.”1 That is to say, to the degree 
that architecture is justified by its performance, 
it recedes into the background as a mere tool, as 
‘equipment’ in Heideggerian terms, and it loses its 
potential as a foreground element in the process. 
     Concerns for architecture’s autonomy 
usually emanate from economic recessions, but, 
interestingly, not this time. Times are good in the 
profession, architects have plenty of work, and yet 
their ambitions for their work are still frustrated.   
This suggests that something else is afoot. That 
something else may be the sheer oppressive weight 
of performance expectations these days: climate, 
social betterment, profit motives, work productivity, 
context, and more besides that coalesce to crowd out 
conceptions of what architecture can be by those of 
what it facilitates. Those pushing the performative 
aspects of architecture think that giving up a little 
autonomy for a lot more relevance is well worth the 
trade. But it is a question of degree.
       Thus, architecture and philosophy have found 

editorial:  Essence and architecture

tom spector 



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new common ground. Each author in this volume approaches the topic 
of essence uniquely in order to demystify what they see as a thoroughly 
useful concept.
 The opening essay, Benjamin Bross’s Essentialism and Spatial (Re)
Production, argues that the essence of space and place does not have to 
be approached holistically but can be usefully analyzed into component 
parts without losing the overall in the process. So, for example, a door: It’s 
formal properties are an obvious source of its essence. But also, What is its 
final cause--what was it brought into the world to do? What is its efficient 
cause--who creates it and how do they do this? And what are its temporal 
properties both in its production and its use over time? Taken together, 
he thinks, these properties tell us the door’s essence in a way that becomes 
normative. That is, they help us tell a good one from a bad one. 
 Clearly, Bross is attempting an essentialism  quite different from 
the one the Pragmatist tradition  sought so strenuosly to put to bed. 
Pragmists disliked essences because they seemed to presume a metaphysics 
of objects beyond all human  intentions that in turn required a complicated 
epistemology merely to explain how we come to know of these essences. 
Bross’s project is perhaps better thought of as determining an object’s 
functional essence—a much more tractable problem. His ultimate purpose 
is to identify the “essential parts (that) can contribute to the continuation 
and innovation of spatial production.”
 In Ashley Woodward’s explanation of Jean-François Lyotard’s 
thoughts about architecture, it is the keenly felt absence of what at one 
time, and in a more hospitable context, were the essential boundaries of 
domesticity and of the town that drive his thinking about architecture. In 
the face of an example such as Southern California, Woodward explains, 
Lyotard is dismayed that “Space is no longer between a ‘here’ (home) 
and ‘elsewhere’ – the border zone seems to have expanded indefinitely, 
such that ‘there is nothing left but surroundings.’” Dismayed, and yet 
simultaneously (and so typically Lyotardian) he is suspicious that nostalgia 
for those idealized enclosures may lead to violence against perceived others. 
Certainly, recent refugee crises at the U. S. Border with Mexico and across 
Europe testify to the reality of such suspicions. Since idealizations of cities 
are inherently suspicious in his view, architects should eschew projects that 
trade in such wishful thinking in favor of “non-projects” born out of an 
attitude of non-domination over others.
 In case Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), as promoted by 
Graham Harman and others, has passed underneath the reader’s attention, 
the conversation here transcribed between Harman and Simon Weir will 



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serve as a good introduction to the thought of SCI-
Arc’s Distinguished Professor of Philosophy (and 
more recently, the school’s Liberal Arts Coordinator.) 
Among the tenets of OOO is that objects have 
qualities, but they cannot be reduced to their 
changeable qualities, hence they have an essence. 
Humans are also objects--a realization that should 
lead to collapse of the subject-object distinction 
and towards a de-anthropocentric outlook. Harman 
recognizes the roots of these ideas in Aristotle, but 
also that he departs from Aristotle. “I emphasize 
the inaccessible elusiveness of real objects, and 
while Aristotle has more awareness of that than 
many people realize, he does not emphasize the gap 
between the mind and the object to the same extent 
that OOO does (coming as we do after both Kant 
and Heidegger).”
 An important interest in OOO for 
architects should come from its promise of restoring 
a degree of non-instrumental dignity to buildings. 
Although created by humans and for humans, once 
created, buildings have their own trajectories that 
are impossible to reduce to the intentions of any 
particular human constituency. As Harman asserts, 
“you just can’t reduce any object, including an 
architectural one, to its backstory as a project.”As 
Mark Foster Gage observes of the attraction of 
OOO: “That architecture and discrete buildings are 
connected to the larger world is not in dispute,  but 
whether buildings can be legitimized as architecture 
by these relations should be.”2 Take, for example, a 
building’s LEED score, carbon neutrality or other 
measures of its environmental performance. No 
level of environmental sensitivity it exhibits could 
actually justify its existence, because the ultimate 
environmental sensitivity is to not exist in the first 
place. The reasonable conclusion to draw then, 
is that a work of architecture must justify itself 
qua architecture—assuming we understand and 
can defend what that means. Because a work of 
architecture’s essence exceeds (or withdraws from)all 

      HARMAN 
RECOGNIZES THE 
ROOTS OF THESE 

IDEAS IN ARISTOTLE, 
BUT ALSO THAT 

HE DEPARTS FROM 
ARISTOTLE.

“

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attempts to definitively encapsulate it, including attempts by its creators, it 
is suggested that architects do well to allude to what it might be. 
     A further aspect of the interest in OOO for architecture, however, 
is not so much in the building objects themselves, but in what Harman 
postulates happens when two objects collide or otherwise make contact. A 
sensual object functioning as an intermediary emerges from these collisions. 
Architects are dreamers of both types of objects.  To round out this foray 
into the thought of Graham Harman is a book review of a volume edited 
by Joseph Bedford on the relevance of OOO for an architectural audience 
entitled Is There an Object Oriented Architecture? Engaging Graham Harman. 
 Taken together, the pieces in this issue begin to explore both the 
benefits and hazards, what is potentialy gained and what may be lost, when 
architecture deals in essences and when essentials are applied to architecture. 
While each essay chips away at the mystique that often accompanies talk 
of essences, and in the process allays some concerns, what is not yet settled, 
however, is whether those concerns can be dispelled altogether. 

This issue, 5.2, with fewer essays than past issues, has given Architecture 
Philosophy a chance to experiment with longer-form pieces. It’s production 
also crosses paths with the 5th biannual ISPA conference (postponed 
one year by Covid) held at Monte Veritá overlooking Lake Maggiore in 
Ascona Switzerland. Despite travel restrictions and other uncertainties, the 
conference was an impressive demonstration of both ISPA’s staying power 
and its creativity. By the time this issue is in print, work will have begun on 
readying the thoughts and ideas for print emanating from that successful 
event. 

ENDNOTES

1. Mark Foster Gage,  “Killing Simplicity: Object-Oriented Philosophy in 
Architecture,” Log 33. 2015, 95.
2. Gage, 100.

 



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essentialism and spatial 
(re) production

Benjamin Bross

introduction

The phenomenon of Globalization continues 
to strengthen and spread across socio-cultural 
community boundaries, resulting in homogenized 
cultural landscapes.  As Henri Lefebvre pointed 
out, spatial production1  exhibits a society’s value 
systems through the spaces (and places) it produces. 
One of the principal effects of a technology-driven 
flow of information on spatial production is that 
it has increasingly become a binary proposition: 
either design practice contributes to a sense of place 
by being rooted in place-based iterative socio-
historical spatial production processes or, it follows 
Modernism’s rejection of history and tradition 
in order to disrupt consciously the socio-historic 
context. The former asserts the continuation of 
localized spatial traditions and the latter producing 
design that participates in a larger globalized 
contemporary aesthetic. Yet, if spatial production 
is to (re)produce spatial traditions, how do we 
recognize what is essential to the identity of space?

 The purpose of this essay is to produce an 
analytical approach that examines site-specific 
spatial design that results in placemaking: a 
unique physical spatial experience defined by the 
relationship between various spatial objects and 



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their properties. Together, these objects, usually typological spaces, and 
their qualities produce a sense of environmental and geographic spatial 
identity that distinguish a place from other spaces. The spatial production 
of objects that acknowledge and utilize their contexts help counteract the 
increasing homogeneity of globalized space. The question is then, how do 
we determine if a spatial product (a door, a house or a city plaza) belongs 
to, and hence continues, a specific spatial production tradition or context? 
How do we answer the question: What is it? What follows describes spatial 
products as knowable by the nature of their properties. 

 This article uses the philosophical concept of essentialism to develop 
a framework to analyze and generate designs that are rooted in context 
and history. The paper explores “Aristotelian” essentialism, focusing 
on the efficient and final causes, to define the nature of a spatial object. 
The essay continues by explaining the role of time in identifying spatial 
products. Finally, anchored in the previous analyses, the essay proposes 
three modes of spatial production: discontinuity, continuity, and innovation, 
that describe contemporary spatial production based on the deployment 
of essential properties of an object. These three modes allow designers to 
reflectively engage in the practice of spatial placemaking.

ESSENTIALISM

Introduction to Essentialism
 Modern essentialism, as part of part of the “scientific realism” tradition, 

can be applied to explain the nature (see below) of objects. First, it is 
important to remember that as Lefebvre notes, “nature creates and 
does not produce.”2  This is important to note because my essentialist 
argument focuses on the essential qualities of produced objects and not 
that of created things of Nature. Hence, the essay is not about natural 
kinds, but rather, about the essential qualities of produced spatial objects. 
This philosophical approach seeks to document qualities including 
those that go beyond the “appearances in order to discover the hidden 
causes of things.”3 Thus, objects are defined by characteristics/properties 
that are bound in the essence of the object.  Essentialism requires first an 
affirmation of the object’s characteristics/properties and thus distinguishes 
those properties that are intrinsic and necessary for being the object from 
those which are accidental; the latter defined as a “property of an object 
…. it happens to have but that it could lack.”4  Necessary properties, in 
turn, are “primary or secondary qualities” where “primary qualities are 
properties of the objects themselves. The secondary qualities are manners 
in which we are affected by things in the process of perceiving them.”5  



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Hence, all essential properties are intrinsic, but not 
all intrinsic properties are essential. Moreover, as 
Leibniz6  argued, and more recently Baruch Brody,7  
intrinsic properties can only be essential if they 
are possessed at all times by the object. Therefore, 
attitudes towards spatial objects are in themselves 
accidental, that is, susceptible to the passage of time 
and the concurrent evolution of value-systems. 

 An attempt to describe an object by what it is 
not would ultimately be fruitless, because all objects 
lack an infinite number of properties. Rather, it is 
imperative to search for properties, characteristics, 
or qualities that the object must possess to be 
categorized as a part of a specific spatial production 
tradition. The question then becomes, how do we 
identify the essential qualities of a spatial product?

ARISTOTLE’S CAUSES 

 Aristotle’s “causes”8  provide an important 
approach to applying essentialism to spatial 
production. Aristotle proposed “four categories of 
cause” that explain physical reality and the nature 
of things: material, formal, efficient and final.9  The 
material cause, as the name suggests, explains the 
material content of the object; the formal cause 
explains the shape of the object.  With efficient 
cause, Aristotle attempted to describe qualities that 
are not necessarily revealed at the surface of the 
object itself but are imbued into the object during 
its production. These qualities include socially 
constructed value systems acting through the 
individual or groups producing the object: rituals of 
production, skillsets, aesthetics (value judgements 
of beauty), logistics (including location, tools and 
facilities) and temporality (duration and time 
frame).  The final cause, or the purpose of the object, 
is the designed purpose or function of the object. 
Because material and formal causes are somewhat 
self-evident, the essay focuses on the role of efficient 
and final cause in determining spatial essence.

all essential 
properties are 

intrinsic, but 
not all intrinsic 

properties are 
essential

“

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EFFICIENT CAUSE

 In an Aristotelian context, one of the ways we can explain essential 
properties of the object is by understanding the object’s efficient cause 
or its process of production. First, efficient cause explores who produces 
the object, and more importantly, how. Under this interpretation, efficient 
cause is the combination of the producer and the process (steps) of 
production itself.10  At its most expansive scope, a culture is defined by its 
traditions and rituals (what it does), and at its most granular, fabricators 
are defined by their knowledge; hence the carpenter is identified as the 
carpenter because she knows how to do carpentry. 

 Efficient cause analysis requires the development of identifiable 
proprietary sets -a group based on identified shared properties. Who 
may start with a general category, for example, an ethnic, national, or 
other productive group, i.e. “the French”, and can finish with definitive 
specificity, such as a particular or individual producer -i.e., Jean Nouvel.  
As in Set Theory, related groups of specific examples are part of the 
greater general set, with each set containing kinds.11  Specificity in the set 
is only as relevant as required by the analyst to demonstrate the validity 
of the general set’s essential and related properties.12  Who produces the 
object is then an essential property of the object itself -even anonymity 
of production is an identifiable property of the object (i.e., when we do 
not know or cannot know who made the object, when anonymity is a 
requirement of production, or when anyone can produce an object). As 
Walter Benjamin13  noted, who or what produces an object is a fundamental 
property when determining authenticity (see replication below), hence it 
is an essential component of identity. The appearance of “Black Swan”14  
exceptions to any specific set, do not invalidate the original set, but rather, 
create a new independent subset within the larger general set or alternately, 
widen the sorting criteria.  Identifying who produces the object is limited 
only by the Venn diagram-like qualifiers that are used to form a kind set: 
i.e., profession, religious or hierarchical status, socio-cultural and political 
membership, etc. When analyzing a spatial product, such as a church, we 
might investigate who designed, built, blessed, and funded the product, 
noting that each of these producers had a specific role because of their 
knowledge in the process of production. We might further investigate 
requirements to participate in these roles, for example, to bless a religious 
shrine, it is a requirement to be an ordained priest of that religion.

 Another aspect of efficient cause is the ‘how’ or the process of 
production. In essentialism, the object’s essential identity may embody 
the processes of production if deemed relevant by the individual maker 



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or society as a whole. These processes include but 
are not limited to rituals or traditions and their 
associated codes (rules) of execution. For example, 
it may be essential that the object be produced 
following specific manufacturing steps or associated 
rituals that may or may not be visible in the object 
itself; at specific periods of time, such as the first 
full moon of the year, or when a comet appears in 
the evening sky. As we shall see below, these codes 
of production, may significantly overlap with the 
final cause, i.e. the designed purpose, as often how 
something is produced is part of why an object is 
produced. Hannah Arendt15  has argued that the 
how also includes socio-political value systems, 
including capital production contexts, codes, 
and working conditions. Like production rituals, 
these characteristics may or may not be visible in 
the product itself, and overlap at times with other 
Essentialist Causes. For example, a church façade 
may be made of the stone of a specific quarry, such 
that its Material Cause is stone, but its efficient 
cause is that the stone must be from a particular 
quarry associated with a sacred mountain. Finally, 
efficient cause might incorporate “constructal”16  

logic, where the object is the natural (that is obeying 
Natural Laws) result of a production process.  Once 
again, it is necessary for the analyst to propose 
and bound the relevant parameters in developing 
identity sets. 

FINAL CAUSE

 Aristotle describes final cause as the object’s 
purpose or telos. Purpose can be divided into 
two parts: what it should do, for example “a 
house should provide shelter”; and what it can do 
(beyond its primary purpose) because of its intrinsic 
properties, such as materiality, shape, dimension, 
volume, color etc., for example, “a house can be a 
museum.” The should makes explicit intent, while 
can acknowledges an object’s possibilities, but is 

 Like production 
rituals, these 

characteristics 
may or may not 
be visible in the 
product itself, 

and overlap at 
times with other 

Essentialist 
Causes.

“

”



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void of designer intent. As we shall see below, this is a critical idea as 
it lays the foundation for a constructed system of values. Furthermore, 
fundamental to the idea of what an object does, is an incorporated history 
of all previous actions, which taken as a sum, enable present and future 
actions of the object (hereafter, called functions). These historic, present 
and future functions become the “signs” by which semiotic analyses ascribe 
various degrees of meaning and ultimately the collective memory inherent 
in the social contexts of spatially produced objects.  

 Another important aspect of final cause exists in an object’s potential 
purpose, such that as the object fulfills its purpose, what was initially an 
extrinsic object quality, thereafter transforms the object’s essence, and now 
forms part of its intrinsic properties. It is important to note that regardless 
of the transformation, the object retains its initial properties even while 
gaining new qualities.17  In that sense, the object acquires new purposes, 
that are fundamental for describing the object’s nature. This is especially 
important when the object must then be able to perform the new intrinsic 
purpose as its reason for being. While considering an object’s purpose—
and hence describing it—space-time contexts must be identified clearly: 
What the object has been, what it is, and what it could be are properties of 
the object. These contexts are necessary to establish categorical boundaries 
of being. 

 To illustrate this point, let us examine the “Western Wall”18  in Jerusalem. 
(figure 1) As a material cause, the wall is made of limestone “Jerusalem 
Stone” blocks quarried near the site.19  Turning to the wall’s efficient cause, 
the wall’s stone blocks were placed side by side to form long courses, with 
each successive course rising away from its bedrock foundation. Though 
parts of the wall have been built and rebuilt by different rulers and their 
corresponding subjects over the last 2000 years, historic records show that 
King Herod ordered the initial construction20  of the wall; hence, members 
of Judean society ranging from priests to slaves initially built the wall. At 
each instance, the tools and technology that were used to construct the 
wall correspond to the time and cultural corpus of the people working on 
the wall. In terms of its final cause, the wall was designed and erected as a 
structure capable of holding back soil in order to support a large temple 
surrounded by ceremonial grounds. 

 Once the wall was finished sometime between 19 BCE and the end of 
construction of the Temple Mount in 64 CE, it fulfilled its telos. Yet in 
70 CE, 6 years after the Temple Mount was finally completed, the Second 
Temple was destroyed.21  After the destruction of the Temple by the 
Romans, only portions of the retaining wall and Temple Mount were left 



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–though eventually the latter were also removed.  
However, as F.M. Loewenberg notes,22  the portion 
of the retaining wall that did survive, did not acquire 
an “aura”23  of symbolic and theological importance 
until nearly 1500 years later; that would happen 
four years after the 1546 earthquake, when houses 
and other lean-to structures collapsed and revealed 
the original retaining wall. Sultan Suleiman I, the 
Magnificent, instructed his engineers to clear away 
debris and prepare a prayer site for Jews. Thereafter, 
the once extrinsic property –its spatial relationship 
to the Holy of Holies- became an intrinsic quality, 
i.e. no longer was it simply a retaining wall, but 
rather, as a physical remnant of the Temple and its 
grounds, over the centuries increasingly becoming 
Judaism’s holiest site. 

CRITIQUES OF ESSENTIALISM

 In his essay, “No Route to Material Origin 
Essentialism?”24  Nic Damnjanovic critiques 
Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, pointing out 
arguments made against essentialism’s apparent 
inability to determine the “sufficiency” or minimum 

figure 1:

western wall, jerusalem



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properties that an object must possess to be considered essentially that 
object. First, it is important to note his criticism is primarily directed 
at material cause, and concludes “any argument for (EMO) [material 
origin essentialism] that relies on a sufficiency principle is bound to 
fail.”25  Damnjanovic notes that any essentialist argument that depends on 
exclusive material properties of objects alone is not enough to identify an 
object as unique, or belonging to its own set.  Instead, an object’s identity 
essence is derived from material, the other three causes, and its resulting 
intrinsic compossibility.26  Simply stated, an object´s essence does not rest 
alone on its materiality, but in the sum of the properties that are present 
in its production, and its ability to sustain relationships (interactions) with 
other objects.

    Other critics note that essences do not seem to be observable and 
hence verifiable. David Oderberg, citing Locke as the source of the 
confusion, counters that the fundamental question that must be answered 
is “what is meant by observability.”27  He continues by discussing an 
object´s quiddity, pragmatically noting that objects do possess intrinsic 
properties that do manifest themselves extrinsically. As such, these intrinsic 
properties cannot be separated from the object, and hence flow forth from 
it, revealing its essence. He writes “…what a thing is does determine how 
it is –in the traditional terminology, function follows essence. Essence 
just is the principle from which flows the characteristic behavior of the 
thing. And a thing´s numerical identity as particular member of a kind 
determines its particular behavior…”28  Objects must be evaluated by what 
they are and do, and on that basis, analyses reveal how and why an object 
behaves as it does. Therefore, designers can utilize modern essentialism 
to identify spatial production traditions not only by their form, but also 
equally as important, by what they do, and how they achieve designed 
functions.  As we shall see below, this is of paramount importance when 
attempting to avoid “pastiche” aesthetics. 

THE ROLE OF TIME

 In the reductionist tradition, Time is a descriptive property of a spatial 
product (object) indicating the specific status of being (existing) in an 
object’s production, use and relationship with other objects. In this sense, 
an object possesses five distinct (but related) qualities of time: embodied, 
existence, contextual, production, and use.

  Embodied time describes the passage of time incorporated since the 
object’s creation.29  For example, in the case of the Itsukushima Torii30  

(figure 2) the columns are made from Camphor tree trunks. These 



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Camphor tree trunks are at least two hundred years 
old before they were cut down. The embodied time 
property is neither accidental nor incidental, as 
width, height and loadbearing requirements for the 
Itsukushima Torii necessitate trees that must be at 
least 200 years old to fulfill its final cause in the 
same way as past Torii iterations. 

  Existence time is the descriptive characteristic 
of the object’s age from production inception going 
forward. This is because objects can be said to be 
in existence once they have been produced and 
function (see final cause). Existence time criteria is 
fundamental to understand the value systems which 
are imbedded in the production of spatial product. 
For example, use may be the primary production 
criteria when choosing materials prioritizing 
their point of obsolescence, thus enabling future 
market-oriented consumption.  The Itsukushima 
Torii’s existence time begins once the tree trunks 
are transformed into columns, and all other 
components are integrated to form the new whole 
object of the Torii. In this way, we describe the age 
(measured flow of time) of the components either 

figure 2:

Itsukushima Shrine Torii  



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as independent of human interaction (created), or dependent on the 
production process.31 

  Contextual time is determined by the occurrence of other events that 
demarcate the beginning, continuation and end of specific periods. In 
contextual time, we note referential time points, as in the past, present, and 
future, but more importantly, by a proposed generally accepted historic 
identifier such as Neolithic or Roman. Contextual time is indispensable to 
understand spatial identity as belonging to an identifiable set of criteria 
to which the spatial product belongs, and as such, denotes and connotes 
particular spatial identity; it allows us to examine the characteristics of 
the social, cultural and political contexts in which an object has been, is, 
and will be produced. Contextual time is often considered the prevalent 
criteria for membership in an identity group, as we often refer to qualities 
of context when describing an object’s identity. As such, we state the object 
belongs to, emulates (simulates, but is not authentic), and disrupts the time 
qualities of objects belonging to the same identity groups. If matched with 
efficient and final causes, we derive a cross-reference of who, how, and why, 
as related to the contextual time frame in which they are produced. Who 
in contextual time, may reference the larger set of people whose cultural 
spatial making is identified with the production of an object, such as the 
“Edo” or “Meiji” periods.  Equally importantly, is the iterative nature of 
contextual time, since the production of an object reinforces the notion of a 
specific period of production: for example, when archeologists suggest that 
a ruin dates from a specific time frame because its physical characteristics 
match those of other objects known to have been produced in that time 
context.

  Production time refers directly to the time that is necessary to produce 
an object. For example, one salient characteristic of Fordism32  is the mass 
production of consumable products in a specific calibrated amount of 
time. In this manner, we can describe the time it takes to produce a spatial 
object as a specific, descriptive quality.  In the case of a Torii, we could 
distinguish within the context of efficient cause, between those that are 
handmade (longer periods of time and labor intensive) and those that are 
machine-made (rapid production and serially made).

  As the name suggests, use time describes the measured amount of time 
an object performs its functions. Whereas existence time is a measure of the 
passage time of the object, use time measures the duration of each function. 
Recalling that function applies equally to what an object should and can do, 
we can similarly note that use time applies to the carrying out of activities 
that are intended and unintended. At first sight, the latter might suggest an 



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extraneous consideration, yet if we recall the example 
of the Western Wall, construction of spatial myth is 
often the result of built environments performing 
time-based unintended activities. Such activities 
become fundamental in understanding the shaping 
of human perception derived from the essence of 
the spatial product. For example, a farmer’s field 
that temporarily becomes a brutal battlefield; 
though comparatively insignificant to the existence 
time of the field, the use time of the Rummel 
Farm33  as a battleground during the U.S. Civil 
War transformed the farm into a spatial component 
of the Gettysburg National Military Park.  Such a 
spatial transformation includes the corresponding 
changes to site’s spatial essence legibility.

DEVELOPMEN OF SETS

 Sets are collections of objects that share criteria-
based common properties. To apply essentialism as 
sorting criteria requires considering objects’ intrinsic 
properties. Sets are made through the analyses of 
spatial production for identification purposes based 
on the cause properties (discussed previously) of the 
objects. For example, “Set Doors” is composed of 
the physical object “doors,” such that all doors are 
contained in “Set Doors.” As a first step, the designer 
defines a door through its final cause essence: What 
does a door do that makes it a door? What must a 
door perform to be considered a door? A second 
step is to sort doors by efficient cause, answering who 
must produce the door, and how must they produce 
it to be perceived as a door, and more specifically a 
particular type of door? A third, but certainly not 
final step, would be to generate time criteria that 
further restricts set membership: in what context time 
is the door produced, and what is the use time for a 
particular door? One possible next step is to identify 
what is a door by formal properties: dimensions, 
materials, configurations, ornamentations, colors, 
components, etc. Each answer generates additional 

   use time 
describes the 
m e a s u r e d 
amount of 
time an object 
performs its 
functions. 

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sets defined by commonalities between member objects, and differences 
with objects of other sets, while all objects are generally still considered 
doors. Taken to its logical end, we can visualize how on one hand increasing 
complexity leads to increasing differentiation and ultimately uniqueness 
in an object, while on the other hand, we can determine as many sets as 
necessary to establish what is essential in a spatial identity set. At the larger 
scale, the quantified and qualified identification of sets allow observers 
to assert that an object belongs to a specific tradition of spatial practice 
because of its essential properties. 

 Once a set has been determined by specific criteria, essentialism 
becomes normative when applied to generate design.  First essentialism 
describes what is, and then, what it should be based on established rules 
of belonging to the set. The more limited the set of explanations available 
for each property, the easier it is to identify the uniqueness of the type 
to a society, and in some cases, the singularity of the object itself. These 
properties are often expressed as normative regulations: to be considered 
a part of an object’s set, a shared minimum of characteristics must be 
evident. The more specific the set, the clearer the revelation of the essential 
nature of the object to a society, and within a society’s total production. 

Set development reveals constructed value systems not only for the set, 
but for the set developer as well. A central aspect of set development is 
the privileging of some properties over others to generate a set identity. In 
other words, why properties are chosen is as important as what properties 
are chosen. The deconstruction of property privileging reveals meaning 
through semiotics. For example, Amos Rapoport (following Hall) 
categorized human spatial production based on their physical permanence 
into fixed, semifixed, and non-fixed components.34  In his methodic 
approach, he proposes a system that identifies the object’s essential final 
cause properties in terms of its existence time to derive meaning. Designers 
can utilize his system to generate spatial production that follows the 
essential property rules to generate similar objects.

As we shall see next, such an approach presents an opportunity for 
designers to continue a spatial tradition by (re)producing that which has 
been classified as belonging to a pre-existing contextual set; or, innovate 
designed components rooted in context or history yet exemplifying 
contemporary expressions of functions, materiality and/or form.

DISCONTINUITY, CONTINUITY AND INNOVATION

Having described essentialism as analytical tools to examine the identity 



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of spatial products, we can now propose how these 
analyses are applied through design. Generally, 
we understand spatial production through three 
general modalities: Discontinuity, continuity, and 
innovation. Each of these modes of production 
display varying degrees of commonality, from none 
to total, with the latter a high reliance or emulation 
on the proprietary qualities of contextual spatial 
production. Specifically, we are able to categorize 
spatial objects because sets (see above) contain 
objects that relate to each other through causal 
qualities at the exclusion of objects that do not share 
properties. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, citing Thomas 
Kuhn, explains that: 

According to Kuhn’s theory, references of 
kind terms are determined through a network 
of similarity and dissimilarity relations, which 
specify what properties an entity can and 
cannot have in order to qualify as that kind. 
Similarity-dissimilarity sets do not entail any 
principled distinction between essential and 
superficial properties. Although the original 
formation of sets does not require any 
description, the descriptive content stored in 
the sets is subsequently needed to keep the 
boundaries between kind categories sharp.35 

Because sets are determined by selecting 
specific parameters, designers must engage in the 
selection of properties that may be produced or 
re-produced during object production. Obviously, 
certain parameters are impossible to replicate, 
such as contextual time. Yet, as we will see below, 
the inability to possess the same contextual time 
disqualifies continuity only as far as it limits an 
object´s authenticity for a specifically bounded 
time context, but not in its tradition of making or 
embedded value systems (i.e. building codes). 

having 
described 

essentialism 
as analytical 

tools to 
examine 

the identity 
of spatial 
products, 

we can now 
propose how 

these analyses 
are applied 

through design

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DISCONTINUITY

With the rise of Modernism in the 19th century and onward, as 
exemplified by Adolph Loos’ treatise Ornament and Crime, designers and 
artists willfully turned away from the past and its traditions. Moreover, 
contemporary spatial production practices, even in the Postmodernist 
period, continue to question the value of establishing a continuity or 
innovative relationship with historic and contextual environments.  
Lebbeus Woods had gone so far as to declare “I am at war with my 
time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened 
forms.”36    It is this rejection of spatial history and context that creates 
spatial discontinuity, as it privileges objects that are dissimilar to their 
environment. Discontinuity is a modality of spatial production where 
contextual essential qualities are obviated in favor of the production of a 
consciously differentiated spatial product.  

Discontinuous spatial production exhibits the absence of the various 
properties of the spatial products such as time, materiality, history, 
purpose, and value systems. Differentiated objects exhibit contextual 
relationships that are limited to either their physical presence, enforced 
embedded value systems, or functionality. Perhaps one of the best examples 
of discontinuous spatial production is Adolf Loos’ Steiner House. Built in 
1910 in a Viennese suburb, it radically differentiates itself in its façade 
design and plan development, a precursor to his raumplan,37  from the 
neighborhood’s preexisting houses. 

 For the purposes of our discussion, spatial production requires that 
objects occupy physical space over time.38  Because of the physical 
relationship between objects, there is an ontological reality of perceived 
existence, regardless of the design intention of the produced objects. 
Simply stated, a new office building whose design embraces a differentiated 
essence and hence façade from its context, has a relationship with all the 
other buildings in its proximity by virtue of its physical existence, during 
the time that buildings in proximity exist. It is this condition of physical-
time existence that allows our built environment to be understood as a 
palimpsest: layer upon layer of spatial production that in summation 
exhibits Aldo Rossi’s “genius loci.”39  

 Another baseline shared relationship is the enforced embedded value 
systems during the production of spatial objects. Discontinuous objects 
share imposed values systems, such as fire codes, ADA, setbacks, design 
review directives, or other legislation that all objects must obey. In that 
sense, all spatial products of a specific time and place exhibit the constructed 



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value systems of the participative groups who enact, 
promote and enforce codified production rules. 
Yet, other constructed value systems are often 
suppressed or removed from the production process 
itself, diminishing or eliminating bonds between 
objects. Finally, discontinuous objects tend to relate 
to other objects by their functions. Hence, we can 
see how houses built in the 18th century through  
the 21st century should provide shelter but, often do 
so at such differentiated processes that the function 
provides any meaningful relationship across time 
and space.  Altogether, discontinuous spatial 
production generates environments of disconnected 
spatial objects, standing silently apart from each 
other, in the same space, but without a sense of place. 

CONTINUITY

Continuity is the act of producing objects that 
directly exhibit object-property kinds revealed by 
the essentialist qualities of an existing environmental 
context. This production can occur by either 
replacement, replication or resemblance. The intent is 

figure 3: Ise jingu shrine



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to go beyond surface-first qualities and define design composition through 
essentialist frameworks in the way of making that embed value systems 
associated with spatial production.  

To replace, is “to take the place of,”40  and –ment, indicates the action itself. 
Replacement is literally an action where an object´s spatial component are 
exchanged in situ by components whose qualities are materially identical to 
those that are being displaced. Component qualities obey causes with the 
possible exception of contextual time. Because components are bound to 
the historic period in which they were produced, all objects not produced 
at the same time as the original components can be determined to be 
different, unless the period is expansive enough to be considered part of 
one space-time continuum.41  

 Replacement components themselves are subject to further analysis: 
they may have been produced at the same time as the original components, 
but stored for later use, maintenance and upkeep. For example, roofing tiles 
might be produced and stored specifically for later use, at the same time 
as a first set of tiles are installed; these stored tiles are then used to replace 
older tiles as these reach the end of their useful life.  The replacement 
tiles, though installed years or decades later, would still belong to the same 
contextual and production time as the first installed tiles. Alternatively, 
identical components may be produced millennia later, to replace failing 
components. The question in this case is a larger one, when we consider 
who installs them, and how they install them. This analysis becomes 
relevant to those who seek to establish parameters of authenticity. Who? is 
not an innocent question, as it identifies groups that seek to appropriate 
or consolidate socio-political power through the affirmative control of 
historic spatial products.  How must be understood too, as we analyze 
forces of capital and labor involved in production and replacement: 
we must consider the final cause of replacement itself, especially when 
accounting for social, cultural and political agendas.  

Replication is a spatial production process by which an object´s physical 
components are produced in an identical manner to the original but, 
in a separate physical space and time. Unlike replacement, replication 
production does not occur in situ. Similar to replacement components 
and objects, replication products are bound by the specificity of their 
time qualities. For example, the Jingu Shrine in Ise is replicated during 
the Shikinen Sengu ceremony occurring every 20 years (figure 3).  Junko 
Edahiro notes,  

Its underlying concept—that repeated rebuilding renders 



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sanctuaries eternal—is unique in the world. 
In the occidental way of thinking, creating 
something durable would normally involve 
building a structure with robust stones, bricks, 
and concrete. At this shrine, however, the 
structures are made exclusively from wood 
and, by being rebuilt over and over again, can 
last forever. Also, in the process of rebuilding, 
the skills of shrine builders and craftsmen in 
various fields (carpentry, sacred treasures, 
apparel, etc.) are also passed on from generation 
to generation.42 

Viewed as part of the final cause, the Jingu 
Shrine object’s use time prescribes that its Torii 
pillars be used in the sanctuary for twenty years; 
once dismounted from within the main shrine, 
they are used another twenty years as gates at the 
Uji Bridge. While any variation of this use time 
may not eliminate the Torii essence of the object, it 
would however, prevent it from being considered 
specifically an Ise Grand Shrine Torii, because the 
deviating iteration would  no longer be bound by 
the required use time characteristics.

Mass replication (in series or concurrently) by 
non-mechanical and non-automated means of 
production, precisely because of implied labor 
concentration in production time, evokes the sense 
of a process-centered spatial production unity. In 
mass replication, spatial production is accretive 
to the individual maker at the personal level, but 
also accretive to the larger scale society. Specifically, 
production by replication connotes membership 
in the larger group. Presently what we mostly 
see, however, is mass replication by mechanical 
and automated processes that obey the logic of 
capital as its main identity. This continuous spatial 
production approach is prevalent in projects that 
produce large amounts of units in a standardized 
and rapid manner (thus providing the largest 

“

”

production by 
replication 

connotes 
membership 

in the larger 
group



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number of costs efficiencies). For example: mass housing projects whose 
constituent components, entire buildings, and even neighborhoods, are 
produced identically and serially (except for their physical location within 
the overall urban project). 

On one hand, as Walter Benjamin43  noted,mass replication has 
provided unprecedented access to all types of works and spatial products 
for the largest number of people. Yet, Benjamin points to the failures of 
mass replication, where spatial production is driven by the logic of capital, 
leading to vanishing authenticity. Similarly, Aldo Van Eyck has pointed 
to mass replication in urbanism as its main challenge in placemaking. He 
notes “[w]e must continue the search for the basic principles of a new 
aesthetic and discover the human meaning of number. We must impart 
rhythm to repetitive similar and dissimilar form, thereby disclosing the 
conditions that may lead to the equilibration of the plural, and thus 
overcome the menace of monotony.”44,45  

There is a final mode of continuity, that neither replaces, replicates, 
but relates to the context: resemblance. Michel Foucault recalls that until 
the “end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role 
in knowledge of Western Culture. It was resemblance that largely guided 
exegesis and the interpretations of texts; it was resemblance that organized 
the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, 
and controlled the art of representing them.”46  At first glance, reaching 
back to the sixteenth century and its Aristotelian tradition47  might seem an 
anachronistic approach, but attempts to contemporize once archaic forms 
of understanding yields fruits in present postmodern discourse. Spatial 
production is perceived as continuous because it resembles preexisting 
contextual components. Though varying from object precedent/context, 
they do so in such a way as to present the observer a sense of unity or 
belonging to a greater group of objects. Resemblance in objects requires 
the development of parameter-defined kinds criteria; individual essential 
properties that permit identification of the object, or what Foucault calls 
the “signature.” Moreover, resemblance joins spatial objects to each other, 
over distance and time, creating what Foucault names sympathetic links 
-rendering contextual time a non-essential quality of the product.  In 
resemblance, spatial products with similar fundamental properties form sets 
whose objects exhibit specimen variations to generate object individuality, 
while retaining membership through what Wittgenstein called “familiar 
relationships.”48  For example, we can readily recognize a brownstone 
neighborhood in New York, but we can also distinguish individual 
dwellings frome each other. Wittgenstein notes that we as observers 

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recognize similarities between objects, writing 
that “we see a complicated network of similarities 
overlapping and crisscrossing; sometimes overall 
similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.”49  

INNOVATION

The third major modality is that of innovation. 
Unlike resemblance, where properties may vary 
superficially or minimally from object to object, 
but retain essential familiar similarities and hence 
belong to the same “set,” innovation represents a 
wider variation in material cause and an outright 
departure from an object’s historic efficient cause 
essence.  Often, changes in material realities are 
catalysts for changes in production processes. How 
and who exhibit contemporary labor, production 
technology, and social value systems while 
maintaining essential formal and final causes. By 
modifying the efficient cause properties, designers 
propose spatial relationships that simultaneously 
relate to the contextual precedent, while 
modifying an object enough to imbue it with a 
sense of contemporaneous production –i.e., the 
zeitgeist. Thus, objects are produced with essential 
modifications that address new or contemporary 
social, cultural and political contexts. 

 This looking back to history but being part 
of the present is the hallmark of innovation. In 
Koestler´s Ghost in the Machine, he relates a story 
describing the process of production attributed 
to Bios.50  However, where Nature evolves, spatial 
producers innovate. Following his narrative, spatial 
production processes innovate by incorporating 
simpler processes into the production of increasingly 
complex objects. We can directly relate the original 
production process and its resultant spatial product 
with each new iteration because of contextual time 
and the changing efficient cause of an object to 
achieve intended functions. Innovation allows for, 
even promotes, the notion that design can reveal the 

i n n o v a t i o n 
represents a 
wider variation 
in material 
cause and 
an outright 
departure from 
an object’s 
h i s t o r i c 
efficient cause 
essence. 

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contextual essence of things, and still be produced in its own time context.

Critical Regionalism, for example, as defined by Kenneth Frampton, 
approaches place making through innovation that seizes on the essential 
aspects of spatial production and steers away from what he calls “nostalgic 
historicism” and “sentimental” attachments to place. Instead, Frampton’s 
focus is on “elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a 
particular place.”51  Confronted with the inability to match contextual 
time, selected properties are extracted, decanted from contextual objects, 
to reveal causes that create sympathetic commonalities from spatial object 
to object. Essential components are not formed from the impulse of 
replication, but rather, from the material cause of location, the efficient 
cause of the producer, and the final cause of its functions.  Where focus 
is placed solely on the form as perceived, with disregard for other causes, 
spatial production becomes “pastiche,” and ultimately void of any content 
other than the act of aesthetic continuity resemblance. 

An example of spatial innovation is Urbanu’s Tulou Housing (2005-
2008) (figure 4) in Guangzhou, China. Hakka migration between the 
12th and 20th century produced the “tulou …. a dwelling type unique 
to the Hakka people.”52  The oldest examples are “O” shape building 
typology, built with compacted earthen walls that look inward in fortress-
like relationship with their exterior context. This meant that living units 
faced inward. That orientation, along communal programming in the 
central courtyard, provides a rich social environment. After studying 
traditional Hakka dwellings in the Chinese provinces of Jiangxi, Fujian 
and Guangdong, Urbanus developed a housing project that innovated 
on the traditional typology. While preserving the final and formal 
causes (cantilevered roofs over a circular housing block with centralized 
programming) they also embraced contemporary construction processes 
and materials such as poured reinforced concrete walls and slabs and steel 
guardrails.

CONCLUSION

The above text is an attempt to explain an essentialist design approach 
to spatial production in order to achieve context-based placemaking. The 
sum of essential qualities is the spatial identity of the essential components 
of a society’s secretions. As Globalization continues to strengthen and 
spread across socio-cultural community boundaries, places are reduced 
to geographic accidents: increasingly, locations fail to reveal the essence 
of cultural spatial production, and therefore, they fail to reveal their 
uniqueness. 



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 Ultimately, all spatial production reveals 
embedded value systems: what is important in the 
production of space. For those who prioritize not 
only preserving but also enhancing the qualities of 
place, especially in the context of contemporary 
market-driven considerations, the practice of spatial 
production requires the capacity to go beyond the 
surface image of objects.  It requires the ability to 
peel away each layer to reveal Aristotelian causes that 
define design criteria sets of proprietary qualities 
and functions –and then apply them. These sets, 
each with their own object-derived properties, form 
the basis of the sum of the parts to create a greater 
sympathetic whole. Each object, be it a teakettle, a 
house, or city park, is then the sum of its essential 
parts and can contribute to the continuation and 
innovation of spatial production. 

If Modernism’s, and Postmodernism’s rejection 
of the past, including its traditions, and context 
continues, and what is valued and therefore 
prioritized is the differentiated spatial object, we 
will eventually be confronted with a world where 
little or no cultural production differences exist.  
The long shadow of homogeneity will have spread 

figure 4:  Tulou Housing



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over our communities, and we will only find the mythical trace of what 
was once place through the nostalgic science of archeology.

Endnotes

1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Malden, MA, Blackwell 
Publishing) 2011, 15
2.  Lefebvre, 70 
3. Brian Ellis, The Philosophy of Nature, a Guide to the New Essentialism, 
(Montreal, Quebec:McGill-Queen´s University Press, 2002), 24-25.
4.https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/essential-accidental/
5. Op. cit. Ellis, 41-42.
6. Gallois, Andre, “Identity Over Time”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Phi-
losophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://
plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/identity-time/>.
  7. Baruch A. Brody, Identity and Essence, (Princeton, N.J: Princeton 
University Press, 1980.)
 8. Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, Physics, edited by Jonathan 
Barnes, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 315-446.  
9.  “The Four Causes”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 
accessed on July 2, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
aristotle-causality/#FouCau
10.Aristotle. Physics, Book 2:3, p.332-333
11. “Natural Kinds” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed on July 
5, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/ for additional 
explanation of kinds.\
12. “Essentialism”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed July 
2, 2018 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/#Ess, 1.3 
Essentialism.
13. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Repro-
duction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. (New York, NY, 1969), 
217-251.
14. Past experience and/or observations fail to predict the emergence of 
new objects or events.
15. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago, IL: University of 
Chicago Press, 1998),141-144.
16. Adrian Bejan, and J. Peder Zane, Design in Nature: How the Con-
structal Law Governs Evolution In Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social 



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Organization, (New York, NY. Anchor Books, 2013), 1.
17. “Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Properties.” Stanford Encyclopedia of 
Philosophy, accessed November 20, 2019 at https://plato.stanford.
edu/entries/intrinsic-extrinsic/
18. Also known as the “Wailing Wall.”
19. Ilana Teitelbau, “A Stone’s Throw From the Quarry,” Jerusa-
lem Post, Accessed on January 25, 2020. https://www.jpost.com/
Local-Israel/In-Jerusalem/A-stones-throw-from-the-quarry
20. Evidence exists that the wall itself was finished after Herod’s 
death. See Yadin Roman, “Who Built the Western Wall,” accessed 
on January 22, 2020, http://www.zfa.com.au/wp-content/uploads/
Who-built-the-Western-Wall.pdf.
21.  Ibid. 
22.   Loewenberg, F.M. 2017. “Is the Western Wall Juda-
ism’s Holiest Site?” The Middle East Quarterly 24 (4). http://
search.ebscohost.com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/login.
aspx?direct=true&db=jph&AN=IJP0000182628.
23. See Walter Benjamin’s definition of authentic.
24. Nic Damnjanovic, “No Route to Material Origin Essential-
ism?” Erkenntnis (1975-), Vol. 72, No. 1 (Jan., 2010), pp. 93-110, 
Springer.
 25. Ibid. p.102
 26. Compossible: able or possible to coexist with another. See 
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/compossible
 27. David Oderberg, Real Essentialism, (New York, Routledge 
Studies in Contemporary Philosophy, 2007), 22.
28. Ibid. p. 23
29. Nature creates, humans produce.
30. Shinto shrine gateway in southern Japan
31. Theseus’ Ship Paradox demonstrates an object’s embodied time 
is paramount in identifying questions of component and object 
authenticity.
32. “Fordism”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed on August 27, 
2018, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fordism.
33.http://gettysburg.stonesentinels.com/battlefield-farms/
rummel-farm/
34. Amos Rapoport, after Hall, The Meaning of the Built 



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Environment: A Nonverbal Communication Approach, (Tucson, AZ: The 
University of Arizona Press, 1990), 87-101.
35. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, “Kuhn on Essentialism and the Causal 
Theory of Reference*”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 77, No. 4 pp. 544-564, 
The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science 
Association, October 2010, p.546
36. Lebbeus Woods, War and Architecture, Pamphlet Architecture series 
#15, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002, p.1
37. Cynthia Jara, “Adolf Loos’s Raumplan Theory,” p.185
38. Mental space is beyond the paper’s scope.
39. Aldo Rossi, Architecture of the City, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 
1999), 103.
40. https://www.etymonline.com/word/replace
41. In this way, replacement time bounding resolves the Paradox of The-
seus’ Ship.
42. Junko Edahiro, “Rebuilding Every Twenty Years Renders Sanctuar-
ies Eternal -the Sengu Ceremony at Jingu Shrine in Ise City”, accessed 
October 1st, , 2018, https://www.japanfs.org/en/news/archives/news_
id034293.html
43. Benjamin, 1969.
44. Aldo Van Eyck, “Steps Towards a Configurative Discipline”, accessed 
on November 1, 2018, https://hts3.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/van-
eyck_steps-towards-a-configurative-discipline.pdf. p.333
45. For van Eyck, “number” means “harmony in motion.” 
46. Foucault identifies four types of resemblance: Convenientia, aemu-
latio, analogy, and sympathy. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An 
Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994), 
17. Italics mine.
47. Op. Cit. Aristotle, Categories, edited by Barnes, 3-9 
48. “Ludwig Wittgenstein”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 
October 10, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#Bib 
49. Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, Philosophical 
Investigations (Oxford, UK, Basil Blackwell, 1958, 1986), 33, 66.
50. Op. cit. Koestler, 45
51. Kenneth Frampton, From “Towards a Critical Regionalism”, accessed 
on October 11, 2018, http://designtheory.fiu.edu/readings/frampton_
regionalism.pdf
52. “Tulou Collective Housing 2008,” Urbanus. Accessed on 
December 10, 2019. http://www.urbanus.com.cn/projects/
tulou-collective-housing/?lang=en



isparchitecture.com

non-projects for the 
uninhabitable:
lyotard's architecture 
philosophy

ashley woodward

       Jean-François Lyotard remains best known for 
his association with the postmodern, and in many 
circles there is little awareness of the significant 
difference between the way he used this term and 
other influential uses of it. Also little known are 
Lyotard’s writings on architecture, despite some 
casual recognition of his apparent relevance to this 
field due to the prominence of postmodernism in 
architectural theory.1  My aim here is to provide 
an introduction to Lyotard’s practically unknown 
contributions to architecture philosophy, and 
to suggest two ways in which his work might 
be thought to make an original and interesting 
contribution to the field. First, Lyotard critically 
intervenes in phenomenology, which has had an 
influential place in the philosophy of architecture. 2 

He challenges the values that tend to be accorded to 
the relations of the body to space in this tradition, 
celebrating dislocation over location, on the grounds 
that architecture should be understood as an art 
and should challenge the body to new experiences. 
Second, Lyotard’s understanding of the modern and 
the postmodern cuts across the way these terms are 
typically deployed in architectural theory, inviting 
a fresh perspective through the reorganization of 
critical categories. 



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       Lyotard’s writings on architects and architecture are relatively scant: 
there is an essay on Le Corbusier, a couple of pieces on Arakawa and Gins, 
an interview, a dialogue with the architect Piero Derossi, and a short 
contribution to a group dossier in an architecture journal.3  However, 
this field is broadened if we also consider reflections on the nature of the 
city and the built environment in general,4  which we can find in various 
forms throughout Lyotard’s writing career, from his early discussions of the 
political space of the “ideal city,” through his writings on the notion of the 
pagus, his reflections on California, and on ideas such as the oikos, domus, 
and megalopolis. I will focus here, first, on some of these main general ideas 
about space, the built environment, and human habitation, before moving 
on to a review of the main ideas which emerge from Lyotard’s writings 
on architecture as an art. These themes will then draw together with the 
critical comparisons with phenomenology and postmodernism which help 
to situate Lyotard’s reflections on architecture. As with Lyotard’s treatments 
of other arts—most famously, “the unpresentable” of postmodern sublime 
art5—he signals his point of interest in architecture with privative terms, 
in particular the uninhabitable and the non-project, for reasons which will 
be elucidated. 

Spaces: habitus, megalopolis

       Lyotard develops a thesis on the transformation of our lived space, the 
space inhabited by human beings, broadly consistent with his reflections 
on postmodernity in its other manifestations.6  This is a transformation 
from a rural or agrarian way of life and the villages or cities it involves, 
through the development of modern metropolises, to the postmodern 
“megalopolis.” Lyotard’s primary thesis is that this last is not simply a 
quantitative extension of the metropolis, but a qualitative transformation. 
Employing a device typical of continental philosophers, Lyotard elaborates 
these ideas using classical terms, drawing out suggested meanings in his 
own unique way. The value of doing this is that it gives the concepts an 
ontological status, and resists a simple reduction to the empirical which 
might be risked by using contemporary language. Lyotard conceptualizes 
a “traditional” way of inhabiting space under the various names of oikos 
(Greek), domus, and habitus (Latin). While oikos and domus could literally 
be translated as “house,” Lyotard uses these terms to indicate a manner of 
inhabiting space, a way of life or being much more general than the term 
“house” tends to invoke, and which can be understood to apply to spatial 
situations which are not literally houses.



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      We find an evocative description of the way of 
life indicated by the terms oikos, domus, and habitus 
(which Lyotard tends to use interchangeably) as a 
kind of domestic idyll in the essay “Domus and the 
Megalopolis”:

Let's suppose that it's pretty hot outside. The 
courtyard is surrounded by walls and farm 
buildings. A large tree of some kind, willow, 
horse chestnut, lime, a clump of pines. 
Dovecots, swallows. The child raises its eyes. 
Say it's seven o'clock in the evening. Onto the 
kitchen table arrive in their place the milk, the 
basket of eggs, the skinned rabbit. Then each 
of the fruges goes to its destination, the dairy, 
the cool scullery, the cooking pot, the shelf. The 
men come home. Glasses of fresh wine. A cross 
is made in the middle of the large loaf. Supper.7  

In this “domestic” model of space, there is a border 
between the inside and the outside. It is porous and 
non-exclusionary: strangers may be welcomed into 
the domestic space and offered hospitality. This 
extension of hospitality is in fact characteristic of 
the space of the oikos, domus, or habitus. 
       On this traditional model of the space of the 
human environment, outside the habitus is the 
pagus – the surrounds of the village which acts as a 
permeable boundary. Lyotard explains:

pagus always means the country, the region, the 
opposite of Heim, of home, that is, of village. 
It is moreover a very beautiful word, the word 
that gives us pax, companion, etc. It is precisely 
the place where one forms pacts with something 
else (it is the same root; let’s from time to time 
put up with parody-etymologies; this one in 
any case is “true”); it is a place of boundaries.8  



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       The pagus is described elsewhere by Lyotard as the zone; it refers to 
the area surrounding the village or city walls, which acts as a “zone of 
contact” between those belonging to the habitus, and strangers who come 
from other regions.9  The main distinction organizing this space is that of 
home/elsewhere, which can also be formulated as culture/nature, or more 
generally as inside/outside. The idea of nature is key to this traditional, 
rural, pre-industrial mode of existence: the domus is “[a] mode of space, 
time, and body under the regime (of ) nature.”10  It is a way of habitation in 
which domesticating a powerful, often hostile nature, and organizing life 
according to its rhythms, is the predominant concern.
       The great mutation in this model of space that Lyotard identifies is not 
between the rural village and the metropolis—he understands the latter 
as maintaining intact the inside/outside, and the border between them. 
The metropolis is only a “complication” of the space of the domus insofar as 
different suburbs become their own center, and the borders between them 
act to both link and separate them in relation to other suburban centers. 
The change, rather, comes with the transformation of the metropolis into 
the megalopolis. Lyotard has in mind here most specifically California, 
which he understands as a new model of space, one that has undergone a 
qualitative change. It is a model spreading to span the world: 

Through means of communication and of telecommunication, the 
great urban conglomerations extend like a dense network along the 
coast of California and will soon cover the globe, from San Francisco 
through Yokohama and Singapore as far as Ankara and Milan, and 
from Milan through the Ruhr, London, and New York as far as Los 
Angeles.11 

California is a space of “conurbation”: suburbs connected by highways, 
one after the other, without reference to any urban center. As the quote 
above suggests, technologies of communication and information also play 
an important role, as they liberate ties to fixed physical times and spaces, 
and connect things in a decentralized, “free” manner.12 
       The transformation Lyotard sees here is the displacement of the border 
and the decentering of the center. Human community is similarly diffracted 
and dispersed. Space is no longer divided between a “here” (home) and 
“elsewhere,” an inside and an outside – the border zone seems to have 
expanded indefinitely, such that “there is nothing left but surroundings.”13  
The “outside,” understood as nature, or as the place where the stranger or 



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the other dwells, also disappears. The implication 
is that there is no longer an idea of an external 
reference point, a nature which would provide a 
rhythm to regulate the ordering of the habitus. The 
space of the megalopolis is entirely artificial, if that 
term even continues to have meaning. Relations 
between different human groups are no longer 
structured through a mediating border which allows 
hospitality: while we might say that the megalopolis 
is certainly a space of integration or assimilation, of 
peaceful multicultural coexistence, Lyotard in fact 
emphasizes that the relations with other cultures in 
the megalopolis are also often “based on distrust, 
on conflict, on a latent state of war that explodes, at 
times, into violence.”14 
       What interests Lyotard is how the minorities, 
outsiders, or “remainders” of human communities 
are positioned in these different organizations, 
representations, or structurings of space. This leads 
him to a characteristically complex position on 
the relation of the domus to the megalopolis, in 
which neither is unambiguously touted as better 
than the other. First, Lyotard asserts that, contrary 
to what one might think, a space for otherness or 
the remainder is better preserved in the traditional 
domus than in the contemporary megalopolis. 
There, otherness not only existed outside, in the 
pagus or beyond, but was welcomed into the home 
as a guest. Moreover, Lyotard points to the otherness 
at the heart of the home, of domestic life, in the fact 
that it is the traditional location of the intrigues and 
dramas represented in tragedy.15  In this manner, 
in the privacy of the oikos a certain otherness or 
remainder is secluded and protected from the public 
life of the polis. In the megalopolis, by contrast, 
everything becomes a matter of public exchange, 
and there is no longer a space removed from this 
circulation, public scrutiny, and transparency. 
This accords with the capitalist economy in which 
everything can be translated into exchange value 

 

California is 
a space of 

“conurbation”: 
suburbs 

connected 
by highways, 

one after the 
other, without 

reference to 
any urban 

center.

“

”



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and sold on the market, and also to the all-pervasive sphere of human 
rights in which every aspect of life is expected to have a rational accounting 
and legitimate defense.16   The idea of the habitus, Lyotard suggests, today 
arouses our nostalgia, and this nostalgia can act as a kind of resistance to 
the contemporary system and a spur to thought and creativity. 17 
       However, Lyotard also maintains a strongly critical and vigilant attitude 
towards such nostalgia. First, he acknowledges that it is probably nostalgia 
for something which never really existed; a projection from the position 
of the contemporary megalopolis.18  Second, he warns of the danger of 
believing that the world of the habitus could be restored, aligning such 
a belief with Heidegger and the politics of National Socialism. He thus 
sees danger not in the old organization of space and society itself, but in 
the nostalgic desire to restore it. (“Homo re-domesticus in power kills in 
the street shouting ‘You are not one of ours: He takes the visitor hostage. 
He persecutes anything that migrates’.”)19 The task for thinking in the 
megalopolis is, for Lyotard, to resist the homogenization of thought along 
with the homogenization of space. In this way he sees a parallel between 
philosophy and architecture.

Architectures: project, non-project

       In a conversation with the architect Piero Derossi, Lyotard suggests 
that the task of both philosophers and architects has changed with the 
shift from the habitus to the megalopolis. Modern philosophers (and here 
the quintessential model is Descartes’s Discourse on Method) assumed an 
architectural model of thought. Descartes describes how thought was like a 
city which has been built up through generations, with conflicting designs, 
and what is needed is to raze the city to the ground, to begin again and, 
on a secure foundation, to build a city according to a consistent rational 
plan. Modern philosophers also thought that they could give prescriptions 
to architects and urban planners in terms of a general representation of an 
ideal city which would instantiate an ideal human community. Similarly, 
modern architects followed the model of believing that everything human 
beings need for dwelling well together can be rationally planned out in 
advance, and given to a population which will be perfectly suited to its 
use. We can recognize here the great modernist architectural projects of the 
early to mid-twentieth century, such as those of Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, 
Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and so on, in which cities are 
planned, all ornamentation is sacrificed to function, and a single style is 
imposed everywhere (the International Style). In painting, Lyotard notes, 
there is also an analog insofar as urban planning has been represented using 



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a uniform organization of space – such as in “The 
Ideal City” by the school of Piero della Francesca 
(circa late 15th century), one of the first to apply 
the principles of perspective prescribed by Alberti’s 
On Painting.20

       Today things are quite different in philosophical 
thought, first of all because modern philosophy 
—in the sense of a project of finding a secure 
foundation for thought, and building a consistent 
and homogenous structure of knowledge upon it—
has been radically cast into doubt. Along with this, 
the possibility of political philosophy presenting an 
ideal for human community has also been seriously 
questioned. According to Lyotard, the philosopher 
today is no longer in a position to be able to prescribe 
to the architect a project, understood as a model of 
human community which could be followed as a 
guide for what to build to ensure an ideal being-
together.21 More strongly, Lyotard suggests that 
this term “project” implies a control or domination 
over “the totality of phenomena in the world and 
over human phenomena.”22 Such an attitude of 
mastery and control has also been subjected to 
extensive critique (as, for example, in Adorno 
and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, or 
Heidegger’s reflections on technology).
       Lyotard suggests that the architect, now in a 
similar position, can no longer believe that design 
for a human community is something that can be 
entirely thought out in advance. Both philosophers 
and architects are united in asking the question, 
“What can a community be today?” and in not 
knowing how to give an answer to this question.23 

Without a concrete answer, the model of the ideal 
city must be abandoned, and along with it the very 
idea of a “project” as something that the architect 
can plan from scratch. The architect must then 
find a new way of working, which Lyotard suggests 
might be something like a “non-project”:

 

 Lyotard 
suggests 
that the 

task of both 
philosophers 

and architects 
has changed 

with the shift 
from the 

habitus to the 
megalopolis.

“

”



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As you see we are dealing with a project that in the end is not even 
a project. Rather it is a sort of attitude, a frame of mind, that is, to 
be precise, an attitude of non-domination over the thing to be built 
or thought. We could say, a sort of passivity, or better still passibility, 
that seems to me an essential part of art, of the artistic attitude, and 
certainly of thought as well. I do not know whether we can still give 
everything the name of project, project of the non-project.24 

While fleeting and tentative, these suggestions put the architect in a 
position closer to that of the painter or the musician, insofar as they must 
open themselves to a “passibility,” as he says here – that is, to trying to feel 
and make judgements about what is to be done which are not based on 
any predetermined rule. No doubt there has always been much of this in 
architectural invention, but Lyotard’s model of the megalopolis suggests 
that this aspect of architecture must be accentuated today. Architects must 
become artists, because they can no longer work with an ideal model of 
human community. When they engage in (non-)projects, they must be 
attentive to the contingencies of the situation in which they build, the 
conditions which already pre-exist, the complexities of the communities 
they build for, and they must be willing to be open to the possibility that 
the effects their buildings will have, once actualized in the community, will 
be to a significant degree unpredictable. 

Architects: Le Corbusier, Arakawa and Gins

       Let us consider now some of the architects Lyotard discusses explicitly, 
and treats as artists. Despite his opposition to the modernist architectural 
project of the “total plan,” this does not prevent Lyotard from seeing a 
tendency contrary to total planning—and thus, the artistry—in the late 
work of Le Corbusier, one of the dominant figures of modernist architecture. 
In an essay on Le Corbusier—“Conventus,” from 1994—Lyotard repeats 
but also reconfigures some of the main ideas he had previously made in 
his fleeting encounters with architecture. Lyotard’s focus for the essay 
is a single work by Le Corbusier—the convent at La Tourette in Lyon, 
completed in 1961 (figure 1)—yet the scope of this short piece is ultimately 
much broader. Although the term is not used, we see the great modernist 
Le Corbusier positioned here as an architect of the non-project, insofar as 
he opposes his “free plan” (plan libre) to "the project." The idea of “the 
project” is here described in terms of an “Egyptian” ideal of space, where 



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all of urban planning is centralized in and unified 
by the fixed “block” of the pyramid: “Geometric 
plan, blind facades, identical in all directions, tons 
of amassed stone weigh on the land of the living. 
[…] All this crushing of time and space …”25  “The 
project” is evident here as a fixed and homogenous 
idea of space which is imposed on all space and 
lived relations in a dominating way. 
      In contrast, Lyotard presents Le Corbusier’s 
architecture as led by the ideal of a “free plan,” which 
he describes as a “variable” space conceived in terms 
of waves or vibrations: “Question of frequency. This 
is a variable of vibration: it’s the number of times by 
unit of time that a mobile object animated by a wave 
movement passes on the axis of its propagation.”26  

Despite this apparently precise physical definition, 
the use of the terms “waves” and “vibrations” 
is largely metaphorical, and concerns space as 
conceived and lived. These terms work simply to 
open architecture to alternative ways of conceiving 
the nature of materials and the experiences of bodies 
in space. 
       Le Corbusier decomposes the supposed unity 

Figure 1: 

La Tourette



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of space into component volumes, and considers these as having a “free” 
relation to each other, a relation not determined in advance. The emphasis 
in this essay appears largely to fall on the habitus, the problem of the 
habitation of space; of how architects can design buildings in which we 
can feel ourselves to be at home (thus recalling oikos and domus). But with 
Le Corbusier—or at least, Lyotard’s interpretation of him27—this turns 
out to be a matter closer to what he will call “the uninhabitable.” With 
the decomposition of the plan and the consideration of space in terms of 
vibrations, the question of habitation becomes one of the “resonance” of 
the body with the built environment, of the sensing body and the sensed 
architectural space: “In order to be my home, it need only resonate with the 
vibrations of my whole body. I only need it’s resonance with my rhythms 
in order to inhabit it.”28 

       To explain this idea of resonance, Lyotard plays on the similarity 
between frequency and frequentation.29  To be at home in a space is not a 
matter of inhabiting it in the manner of a homogenous body’s fixed relation 
to a given space, but of a variable relation, in which frequencies would be 
“modulated” by the body’s frequentation, its comings and goings, in that 
space. Describing the way we might get up in the night, half asleep, to 
get a glass of milk, and successfully navigate the space without turning 
on the lights, Lyotard writes that “[t]here, where I can be a sleepwalker 
without error, is my home.”30  Yet in posing the “at home” in terms of 
frequencies and frequenting, there is something which is never truly at 
home, at least as conceived on the old model of a natural fit between a 
given body and a given space. In this sense, being at home is a matter of 
“inhabiting the uninhabitable”—a degree of habituation to a space that 
will never settle into a fully tamed habitus, because it is always a matter of 
variable resonance between bodies and spaces which are never completely 
stable of fixed. 
       We can note here a first contrast with phenomenology. While 
schooled in the phenomenological tradition and a some-time follower of 
Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard criticized the latter for an overly harmonious view 
of the relations between the body and space, which he believed limited 
both the phenomenologists’ ability to explain disharmonious experiences 
(such as sleep and orgasm) in which the body doesn’t make sense of its 
surroundings, and art as the creation of the new.31  If art is understood as 
witnessing “the birth of perception,” as Merleau-Ponty contends, then this 
limits the scope of what kinds of art are viewed as legitimate. For Lyotard, 
art—and this includes architecture—should destablize the body’s habitual 
relations to the world by giving it disharmonious, challenging experiences. 



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It should dislocate the body in space, not simply 
help it to feel located. In the context of architecture, 
this disharmony and dislocation which produces 
new aesthetic sensations is precisely what he calls 
“the uninhabitable.”
       The uninhabitable is more heavily accented in 
Lyotard’s treatment of the experimental architecture 
of Shusaku Arakawa and Madelaine Gins. In their 
collaborative architectural projects – such as the 
Site of Reversible Destiny (Yoro, 1995), the Reversible 
Destiny Lofts (Mitaka, 2005), and the Bioscleave 
House (New York, 2008)32  – Arakawa and Gins 
seek to “reverse destiny” with respect to the human 
body. They created spaces in which the body will 
decidedly not feel at home, in order to provide it 
with constant stimulation. This sensori-motor 
stimulation is thought, in turn, to stimulate the 
brain and the immune system, and to keep the body 
young and healthy by promoting brain plasticity 
and freedom from disease. In their avant-gardist 
hyperbole, Arakawa and Gins announce a hope 
for defeating mortality through an appropriate 
architecture: “We Have Decided Not To Die” and 
“Making Dying Illegal” are two of their slogans.33 
What interests Lyotard in their work is not this 
rhetoric of immortality, but the dehabituation of 
the body as conducive to provoking an aesthetic 
experience.
       Arakawa and Gins develop the concept of the 
“architectural body,” which is the body considered 
as ontologically continuous with, and shaped by, its 
architectural environment.34  What interests Lyotard 
is the way that they conceive architecture as having a 
direct effect on the body, and of its capacity to make 
art of inhabitable space. Lyotard conceives of their 
work as a mutation of three-dimensional space, just 
as painting is a mutation of 2-dimensional space, 
or of color itself. This mutation, which is an artistic 
event in lived space, is precisely the uninhabitable: 
“For one instant, the body, the everyday body, 

 Despite his 
opposition to 

the modernist 
architectural 

project of 
the “total 

plan,” this does 
not prevent 

Lyotard 
from seeing 
a tendency 

contrary 
to total 

planning—and 
thus, the 

artistry—in the 
late work of Le 

Corbusier

“

”



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the body of the habitus, is exposed to the uninhabitable.”35  In order to 
feel the effects of this mutation, the body must undergo an “ascesis” in 
relation to the habitable36—its habits and habituations must be undone. 
Arakawa and Gins seek to produce this ascesis, for example, by making 
space difficult to navigate – introducing steep inclines, or placing barriers 
in unexpected places. (figure 2) The functional approach of modernist 
architecture is reversed. The aim is not to obliterate all function, however, 
but to introduce difficulties to be overcome by the body in its attempts to 
achieve its goals. Summing up and generalizing these conclusions from 
Arakawa and Gins’ work for all architecture, Lyotard writes:

[A]rchitecture seeks to transfer into inhabitable space a power of 
habitation that is not itself inhabitable. This art cannot offer human 
beings any topos where they might live and be sheltered, that is to say, 
where they might escape from this elsewhere.  Architecture as an art 
cleaves space-time in such a way that there and then are at home here 
and now while still being far away.37 

Riffing on Lyotard’s well-known theme of “presenting the unpresentable,”38 
the problem or stake of architecture as an art would then be how to 
“inhabit the uninhabitable.” The question for the architect would be: how 
to construct a habitation in which the uninhabitable can be encountered?

Comparisons: phenomenology, postmodernism

       Now that we have surveyed Lyotard’s relevant texts, we are in a 
position to draw out the critical contrasts announced at the outset. We 
have already noted Lyotard’s relation to Merleau-Ponty, but his challenge 
to phenomenology may also be extended to Heidegger, whose writings on 
dwelling have been highly influential in architectural theory. In a rare text 
on Lyotard’s writings on architecture, Rob Shields notes some similarities 
with Heidegger.39  However, there is also an important contrast to be made 
between Lyotard and the German phenomenologist. In short, we might see 
the Heideggerian perspective as expressing a nostalgia for the habitus, as 
Lyotard’s referencing of Heidegger in this regard suggests.40  While we have 
noted that Lyotard does not believe this mode of dwelling in itself, nor a 
nostalgia for it, signal anything worrying, we also saw that the same cannot 
be said for the attempt to reimpose it. And so we might well think that 
for Lyotard, any architectural model based on the Heideggerean notion 



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of dwelling will 
risk being out 
of step with the 
transformations 
of time, space, 
and being-
together that 
the megalopolis 
has effected.41  
At worst, such 
a r c h i t e c t u r a l 
projects might 
be conceived as 
conservative, even 
“fascistic,” in their 
attempts to make 
the body feel at 
home in a fixed 
place, with others 
who are part of an 
autochthonous 
c o m m u n i t y , 
while keeping 
strangers beyond the borders (or welcoming them 
only on the strictest conditions). 
       Although there are no explicit references to 
this in Lyotard’s writings (as far as I’m aware), 
it is easy to see his notions of space as linked far 
more closely to Emmanuel Levinas.’ In his essay 
“Heidegger, Gagarin and Us,” Levinas bemoans 
the Heideggerean notion of place, with its fixed 
horizon, as ethically problematic, and instead 
celebrates the exposure of Gargarin—the first 
person to space-walk—to a space without fixed 
horizon as analogous to the nomadism of the Jewish 
peoples.42 Certainly Lyotard’s comments about 
Husserl’s notions of Earth, body, and space in his 
short text “Habitus” seem to head in this direction. 
According to Husserl, the relativistic discoveries 
of physics regarding time and space do nothing to 
change our body’s perception that “the earth does 

figure  2: 

site of reversible 
destiny--arakawa and 

gins



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not move,” the existential truth that we are grounded on an Earth with a 
fixed horizon.43  Rather than opposing the existential truth of the body to 
the scientific truths of reason, Lyotard instead asserts:

There is no need for the bodies to form a nature that would hold the 
secret of distances, and still less that the focal point they form should 
be a home. On the contrary, the failure of this metaphysics liberates 
another truth, one that can be reconciled with the relativism of the 
physicists. The focal point of the field is in the field and does not stop 
moving, just like everything that is in the field.44 

For reasons that are both ethical and political, then, as well as artistic, 
Lyotard challenges the dominant phenomenological views of the body and 
space.
       Because of Lyotard’s own deep association with the postmodern, 
there is the obvious need to compare his views with those of the famous 
postmodern architectural theorists, such as Robert Venturi and Charles 
Jencks. The latter is an especially interesting comparison to make, since 
Lyotard explicitly sought to distance what he meant by the postmodern 
from Jencks’ use of the term. For example: 

As for the 'trans-avantgardism' of Bonito Oliva and the similar currents 
one can observe in the USA and (including Jencks's 'postmodernism' 
in architecture, which the reader will do me the favour of not confusing 
with what I have called 'the postmodern condition'), it is clear that 
behind the pretext of picking up the tradition of the avant-gardes, this 
is a pretext […] to encourage the eclecticism of consumption. Mixing 
the same surface neo- or hyper-realist and abstract, lyrical or conceptual 
motifs means that everything is equivalent because everything is good 
for consumption. […] What is called on by eclecticism are the habits 
of magazine readers, the needs of the consumer of standard industrial 
images - this is the spirit of the supermarket shopper.45 

       As Lyotard makes abundantly clear here, he sees Jencks’ architectural 
postmodernism as nothing more than a market-driven eclecticism 
consistent with trans-avantgardism in painting (which was also sometimes 
called postmodernism). Certainly, if we compare some of Lyotard’s ideas 
on architecture which have emerged above with those of Jencks and other 
representatives of the “popular” form of architectural postmodernism, 



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we can identify at least some significant points of 
similarity. Most notably, with both we see a critical 
break with the modernist ideal of total planning for 
an ideal community. Jencks famously proclaimed 
the death of modern architecture and the birth of 
the postmodern with the demolition of the Pruitt-
Igoe housing estate in St. Louis, USA, at 3:32 pm 
on 15 July, 1972. For him, this demolition of a 
characteristically modernist project after the years 
of social dysfunction it had housed signaled the end 
of the modernist dream of planned community, and 
ushered in a new era, in which ornamentation and 
locality-specificity returned.46   
       However, Lyotard rejects this kind of clear linear 
periodization which seeks to delineate the modern 
and the postmodern, and—as we have already seen 
with the example of Le Corbusier—his concerns 
with the arts incorporate much that is usually 
delineated as “modern.” Briefly glossing a complex 
topic, Lyotard extols the virtues of experimentation 
in the arts, and highly values this dimension of 
modernism, but he critically rejects the tendency 
of modernism to construct a narrative of progress, 
with a particular style and an ideal of purification or 
perfection. Rejecting such notions does not mean 
for him the end of new developments in the arts 
and a pastiche of past styles, but a free pluralism 
of experimental creation.47 Lyotard’s approach to 
the postmodern then invites a more nuanced view 
of how different architectures might be understood 
and judged. 

Endnotes

1. See for example William M. Taylor and Michael 
P. Levine, “Philosophy of Architecture,” The Internet 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://iep.utm.edu/
architec/#SSH3ci
2. As noted by both Taylor and Levine “Philosophy 

   (Lyotard) 
sees Jencks’ 

architectural 
postmodernism 

as nothing 
more than a 

market-driven 
eclecticism 
consistent 

with trans-
avantgardism 

in painting

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of Architecture” and Saul Fisher, “Philosophy of Architecture in Historical 
Perspective” (supplement to “Philosophy of Architecture,” The Stanford 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
architecture/perspective.html 
3. These texts are, respectively: “Conventus” in Misère de la philosophie 
(Paris: Galilée, 2000); “Reserves of Spatial Events” and “Dear Neverending 
Architectonic Reflective Wherewithal” in What to Paint?, ed. Herman Parret. 
Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists 5 (Leuven: Leuven University 
Press, 2012); “Dwelling and the Postmodern: A Conversation with Jean-
François Lyotard,”  Skala 22 (1990): 36-41; “What Are We Looking For?: 
A Conversation Between Architect and Philosopher,” Lotus International 
73 (1992): 67-75; and “Habitus” – contribution to “Il paradiso perduto = 
Paradise Lost,” Lotus International 79 (1993): 102-131.
4. Following for example Le Corbusier, who writes: “I consider architecture 
and city planning together as a single concept.” Precisions: On the Present 
State of Architecture and City Planning. Trans. Edith Schreiber Aujame 
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991), p. 70.
5. See for example Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is 
Postmodernism?” in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 
Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press, 1984).
6. Most famously in The Postmodern Condition.
7. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey 
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 191.
8. Jean-François Lyotard with Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming. Trans. 
Wlad Godzich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 42.
9. See “The Zone” in Lyotard, Postmodern Fables. Trans. Georges Van Den 
Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Previously 
published in The Dimensions of Play: Ways of Thinking Architecture and the 
City. ANY : Architecture New York, 12. New York: Anyone Corporation, 
1995.
10. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 192.
11. Lyotard, “Habitus,” p. 110.
12. For Lyotard on these effects of communication technologies, see for 
example “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy” in The Inhuman.
13. Lyotard, “Habitus,” p. 110.
14. Lyotard, “Habitus,” p. 110.
15. See the essay “Oikos” in Jean-François Lyotard: Political Writings. 



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Trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 1993). And in 
“Domus and the Megalopolis” we read: “In the 
lowest depths of the domus, rumour of anti-nature, 
threat of stasis, of sedition. Father, mother, child, 
female servant with the heart of gold, niece, old 
man-servant, shepherd and ploughman, gardener, 
cook, all the figures of wisdom, the corner of 
the park under the fig tree, the little passage for 
whispering, the attic and its chests – everything is 
matter for obscene crimes. Something in the domus 
did not want the bucolic.” Lyotard, The Inhuman, 
pp. 195-6.
16. See Lyotard, “The General Line” in Postmodern 
Fables. 
17. Lyotard, “Domus and the Megalopolis” in The 
Inhuman.
18. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 201.
19. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 197.
20. See Lyotard’s discussion of this in “Painting as 
a Libidinal Set-Up,” translated by Kieth Crome, in 
The Lyotard Reader and Guide. Ed. Keith Crome and 
James Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University 
Press, 2006).
21. Derossi and Lyotard, “What Are We Looking 
For?,” p. 70.
22. Derossi and Lyotard, “What Are We Looking 
For?,” p. 69.
23. Derossi and Lyotard, “What Are We Looking 
For?,” p. 70.
24. Derossi and Lyotard, “What Are We Looking 
For?,” p. 72.
25. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie, p. 199. 
Translations from this text are mine.
26. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie, p. 200.
27. Lyotard openly acknowledges that his 
interpretation takes a great deal from that of Jacques 
Lucan. See the latter’s “Tout a commence là” in Le 



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Corbusier, une encyclopedié. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987.
28. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie, p. 201.
29. “Fréquence” and “fréquentation” in French.
30. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie, p. 201.
31. On Lyotard’s relation to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, see 
my article “Lesson of Darkness: Phenomenology and Lyotard’s Late 
Aesthetics,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology vol. 50, no. 2 
(2019): 104-119.
32. Some of these projects were realised only after Lyotard’s death, but 
embody earlier ideas on which he commented.
33. See Arakawa and Gins, Pour ne pas mourir / To Not To Die (Paris: 
Éditions de la difference, 1987) and Making Dying Illegal (New York: Roof 
Books, 2006).
34. See Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa: 
University of Alabama Press, 2002).
35. Lyotard, What to Paint?, p. 407. 
36. Lyotard, What to Paint?, p. 391.
37. Lyotard, What to Paint?, p. 407.
38. See Lyotard, “Answering the Question.”
39. Rob Shields, “Oblique Views and Heterodox Spaces: Le Corbusier’s 
Conventus” in Rereading Jean-François Lyotard: Essays on His Later Works. 
Ed. Heidi Bichis and Rob Shields (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), p. 111.
40. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 195.
41. See Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” in Martin 
Heidegger: Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper 
Collins, 1993). A key distinction here that could be pursued is that of the 
boundary, which is essential to Heidegger’s account of space, locale, and 
dwelling, and which is the distinctive feature that disappears in Lyotard’s 
account of the space of the postmodern megalopolis.
42. Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us” in Difficult Freedom: 
Essays on Judaism. Trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 
Press, 1990).
43. See Edmund Husserl, “Foundational Investigations of the 
Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary 
Ark, The Earth Does Not Move.” Trans. Fred Kersten in Edmund Husserl: 
Shorter Works (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1978).
44. Lyotard, “Habitus,” p. 111.

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45. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 127.
46. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern 
Architecture, 4th edn. (London: Academy Editions, 
1984), p. 9. In a later interview, in fact, Lyotard does 
seem to present Jencks’ architectural postmodernism 
as broadly in line with his own thinking of the 
postmodern insofar as both reject the tabula rasa 
approach of modernism, and instead connect with 
tradition. See “Dwelling and the Postmodern.” This 
would be a point from which to take up further 
comparison.
47. On this topic, see my article “Lyotard on 
Postmodern Music,” Evental Aesthetics 5.1 (2016): 
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Architecture and object-oriented 
ontology

simon weir in conversation with graham harman

What is, and what isn’t, an ontology ?

SW: Ontology is a word that, wherever it goes, 
changes its meaning. So, to avoid unhelpful 
confusions - some confusions are generative - what 
is an ontology? I tend to think of an ontology 
mathematically, as the set of all things with nothing 
outside the set.

GH: Whereas metaphysics is an Ancient Greek 
term famously coined by Aristotle’s editors, the 
word “ontology” first appeared as recently as the 
17th century. One aspect of my relation to language 
is that I like to have a number of synonyms 
available for every philosophical term in order to 
avoid repetition. I don’t like the sort of pedantic 
precision which demands that each term have a 
single meaning that the author is obliged to define 
exactly at the outset. As an example, many people 
draw a sharp distinction between “object” and 
“thing”; Heidegger is the most prominent of these, 
using “object” in a pejorative sense and “thing” as 
a more positive term. But I prefer to use object, 
entity, thing, and unit interchangeably. I also use 
metaphysics and ontology to mean the same thing, 
though Heidegger and Derrida have turned the word 
“metaphysics” into a kind of insulting nickname for 
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SW: To frame object-oriented ontology’s position, let’s begin with realism. 
Most people understand realism: we are in direct contact with the things 
we touch. Once we recognise there are sounds we can’t hear, lights we 
can’t see, and that there are all sorts of illusions and misapprehensions, we 
might easily accept that our view of reality is not so direct, but mediated. 
We produce some kind of image of reality within us, so it might be called 
representational realism. What may be surprising to readers without 
philosophical training is that this too is rebuked by the philosophical 
tradition of anti-realism.

GH: My position obviously isn’t a form of direct realism, since for me 
it is not only humans who cannot make direct contact with reality: the 
same holds true even for inanimate entities. Object-oriented ontology 
(OOO) is better described as a form of what you call representational 
realism, with the surprising proviso that not only humans and animals do 
the representing. When two inanimate objects make contact, they cannot 
do so directly, since neither has direct access to the features of the other. 
The idea behind OOO’s realism is that reality is so real that it can’t be 
exhausted by any particular depiction of it.

Realism is usually defined as a “belief in a world external to the mind.” 
But this way of putting it betrays an anthropocentric bias: why should 
the mind be the only thing with an outside? Realism should be treated, 
instead, as a general theory of objects and relations, such that objects are 
always withheld from these relations and need a vicarious third term to 
make relations possible. Insofar as reality withdraws from all relation, 
object-oriented realism might also be called an infra-realism.

SW: So object-oriented ontology is an infra-realism. Since the real is 
withdrawn, how do we know it’s there, or how have you induced the 
presence of a real that cannot be touched directly?

GH: This is the same question that led the German Idealists to abandon 
Kant’s thing-in-itself: “If we claim to think a thing outside thought, 
isn’t this already a thought? Therefore, there is nothing withdrawn from 
thought.” In this way, the thing-in-itself implodes into something internal 
and negotiable, whether in the form of a mere external shock or trauma 
(Fichte, Lacan) or in terms of a provisional and immanent limit eventually 



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overcome by the labor of the negative through the 
course of history (Hegel).

The problem with this popular assault on the realism 
of the in-itself is that it forgets what philosophy is 
about: philosophia, meaning the love of wisdom 
rather than wisdom sensu stricto. Socrates does not 
jest when he says that he only knows that he knows 
nothing, that he has never been anyone’s teacher, 
and so forth.

Readers of Plato may recall “Meno’s Paradox,” in 
which Meno repeats the old Sophist’s argument 
that you can’t look for something if you already 
have it (because then there is no need to look) and 
you can’t look for it if you don’t have it (because 
then you could never recognize it if found). Socrates 
responds with what is really the foundational insight 
of Western philosophy: you never really have or fail 
to have something absolutely, but you have it to a 
certain degree and are called upon to enter further 
into its depths.

According to object-oriented philosophy, there 
are a number of ways in which we can know the 
real without knowing it directly. This happens 
in cases where the real falls out of joint with its 
surface qualities: as in Heidegger’s case of the 
broken hammer, or in metaphor where the object 
is ascribed strange properties and therefore becomes 
unknowable yet vaguely compelling. Language is 
often used to hint or insinuate rather than to state 
directly, though the modern era hates rhetoric so 
much that it forgets how crucial insinuation and 
innuendo are to everyday speech. The arts, too, 
are well aware that many things must be hinted 
at subtly rather than stated in literal terms. Lovers 
know this as well when sending alluring messages, 
and comedians know it when telling jokes. To spell 

 

Heidegger 
and Derrida 

have turned 
the word 

“metaphysics” 
into a kind 

of insulting 
nickname for 

everything 
that ought to 
be left behind.

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things out in literal terms is just one of the tools of human cognition, and 
not the one most important for philosophy.

Causation and perception

SW: Some of the principles of OOO are: there are objects everywhere, all 
objects are inside other objects, all objects have objects inside them, objects 
have qualities, but objects are not only their qualities, it is not possible to 
encounter a quality without an object bearing that quality.

GH: That’s a nice list. I would add that humans also count as objects, even 
if objects of an unusually interesting sort; for this reason, “objects” do not 
exist in opposition to “subjects.” Also, objects and qualities both come in 
two kinds (real and sensual), and both kinds of objects can have both kinds 
of qualities (again, real and sensual) so that reality consists of four possible 
object-quality pairings. On top of this, objects have only a loose relation 
with their own qualities. Aesthetics is first philosophy because it studies 
these loose relations: how they are generated and under what conditions 
they break apart. Real objects cannot make contact unless mediated by 
a sensual object, and sensual objects only make contact when mediated 
by a real one. This still isn’t a complete list, but I can never remember 
everything at once. As our conversation progresses, more features of objects 
will undoubtedly arise.

SW: Are qualities objects? 

GH: The short answer is “no.” It goes back to one of the many valid 
insights still to be found in Aristotle’s philosophy. He tells us that whereas 
sad is always sad and happy is always happy, Socrates can be sad one 
day and happy the next. That’s one major indication that Socrates is a 
substance. A substance remains what it is even if – within certain limits, of 
course – its qualities vary widely. By “primary substance” Aristotle means 
individual things. My parallel term is “real object,” which also refers to 
individual things. Of course, there are a number of differences between 
the two phrases. First of all, I emphasize the inaccessible elusiveness of real 
objects, and while Aristotle has more awareness of that than many people 
realize, he does not emphasize the gap between the mind and the object 
to the same extent that OOO does (coming as we do after both Kant 
and Heidegger). Second, Aristotle is more comfortable with natural than 
artificial things as primary substances, whereas I don’t think the natural 



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vs. artificial divide matters very much: an airplane 
or a city are real objects no less than a raindrop. 
Third, Aristotle does not think there can be primary 
substances inside of primary substances: he holds 
that the parts of a substance are only potentially 
individuals, not actually so. For OOO, however, 
composition in the part/whole relationship does not 
negate the individuality of the parts, which remain 
real objects in their own right even while belonging 
to larger wholes. Despite these differences, OOO is 
a philosophy of individuals in the same Aristotelian 
line that passes through some of the Islamic 
philosophers, some of the Medieval Christians, and 
Leibniz.

But the long answer to your question is that 
anything can become an object. That is to say, any 
quality can turn into a sensual object as soon as 
we treat it as something enduring that undergoes 
variation in details. For example, the red of my 
Mazda CX-5 is initially a quality of the car that can 
be changed without destroying the car or giving it a 
new identity. But I could focus instead on the rather 
unique metallic red that Mazda came up with for 
this car, and substantify it by focusing on current 
variations in the red across the car’s outer surface, or 
by variations over time when we compare the car’s 
red when straight from the factory as opposed to 
now, four years later. Furthermore, there is always 
a point at which sensual objects can become real, 
often through the mechanism of social acceptance. 
The Joker was initially a sensual object, but is now 
a real one: not in the sense that such a character 
actually lurks in the night of New York, but in the 
sense that movie audiences are able to judge which 
actor’s portrayal of The Joker is the most true to the 
character, which ones are completely insufficient, 
and so forth. In this respect even qualities such as 
“green,” “strong,” or “macho” become real objects 

 

Object-oriented 
ontology 

(OOO) is better 
described as a 
form of what 

you  CALL 
REPRESENTATIVE 

REALISM 

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that even have their own social histories.

SW: Causation in the OOO schema is the interaction of two or more real 
objects. Whenever real objects causally interact, a sensual object is generated 
by their contact, and this sensual object acts as the intermediary between 
the real objects. This is known as vicarious or occasional causation. Also, 
causation can be symmetrical or asymmetrical. Symmetrical causation is 
all kinds of contact and causation as we normally think of it, and is well 
described by Newtonian physics; asymmetrical causation is perception. 

GH: Actually, causation in OOO can only have two terms. The reason is 
that all causation begins with the interface between one real object and 
one sensual object, which is then modified in such a way that there is an 
indirect influence of one real object on another or of both on each other. 
I’m aware that people like to give seemingly subtle analyses in which there 
are multiple causal factors for any event. These days, multiplicity has a very 
good press and duality a very bad one, so it’s not surprising that everyone 
goes running for the multiple and the many whenever philosophy is being 
done. But in fact, when there are multiple factors they must combine 
beforehand in such a way that only two objects end up confronting each 
other.

SW: This multiplicity is understandable. When I (a real object) am 
watching (asymmetrical causation) a movie (a real object), the factors are 
combined. Yet when I consider myself as comprised of subcomponent 
objects, my ears hear the sounds, and my eyes see the images, et cetera. 
It may be the case that all causal events are multiple causal events, and 
vice versa. The singularity or multiplicity of causal occurrences looks like a 
question of perspective.

GH: As for symmetrical causation, yes, so-called “physical” causation 
provides all the easiest examples of this. In fact, I think the symmetry of 
causation is the important factor here, and what we call physical reality may 
just be a vulgar nickname for symmetrical causation. But no doubt there 
are other forms of symmetrical causation than the kind we associate with 
“matter,” which for me is an almost worthless concept. No one really has 
any idea what matter would be; for OOO there are only forms. Likewise, 
the human realm provides most of the clearest examples of asymmetry: I as 
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even though I can’t possibly affect them in turn. But 
there are probably asymmetrical phenomena even 
in the so-called physical world. In short, I suspect 
that the overworked boundary between physical 
and mental is an accidental product of modern 
philosophy: not because “all is one,” but because the 
most important dividing lines are located elsewhere.

SW: My work in OOO has been drawn from 
perception to the problem of memory and 
consciousness.1  Consciousness can turn sensual 
objects into real ones by making memories of them, 
and vice versa. Consciousness is a machine for 
making post-sensual objects into real objects. When 
we think about asymmetrical causation, about 
perception, the difference between a real object and 
the sensual object of its perception would vary a 
tremendous amount depending on the real object. 
Looking up at the night sky, it’s obvious that our 
sensual object is an infinitesimally small thing, and 
a profoundly different thing, compared to the real 
object that is out there. But with much simpler 
objects like the number 5, for example, what would 
you say are the differences between the real 5 and a 
sensual 5?

GH: Let me first say that I wouldn’t agree that when 
looking up at the night sky the sensual object is an 
infinitesimally tiny thing. This is true only in the 
limited sense that our field of vision doesn’t cover 
much of the sky and can’t penetrate any further 
than a small portion of the Milky Way. The sensual 
object, for me, isn’t limited to what is covered by the 
senses. The term is “sensual,” not “sensible,” after all. 
Edmund Husserl is the one who says that the senses 
can only experience the shifting adumbrations of 
perceived objects while the intellect is able to dig all 
the way down to the essential properties. For OOO, 
by contrast, the senses and the intellect are both on 
the sensual side of the equation rather than the real 

 
 Whenever 

real objects 
causally 

interact, a 
sensual object 
is generated by 

their contact

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side.

As for the number 5, I can’t say that there is a fully developed object-oriented 
model of mathematics at this point. I do agree with most mathematicians 
that mathematical objects have real existence (this is one of the few points 
where I am a Platonist). But I would not agree that we have some sort 
of Cartesian intellectual intuition that allows us direct contact with the 
real number 5; that’s Quentin Meillassoux, not me. The question, then, 
is how we would describe the supposed difference between the real and 
the sensual 5. One possible path is shown by Imre Lakatos in Proofs and 
Refutations, where he argues –among other things– that mathematical 
definitions have to be revised in light of mathematical experience, which 
suggests that mathematics is more similar to natural science than we might 
expect.2  If we start to view mathematics in those terms (and I will admit 
there are certain problems in doing so) then it is easier to see why direct 
access to the number 5 is less plausible than one might think, just as direct 
access to gravity or electromagnetism is refuted (in my view, at least) by 
continued revolutions in these areas.

SW: In causation, sensual objects contain real and sensual qualities, so is it 
possible that causation involves the transfer of some real qualities? Can we 
reliably infer the real from this?
In the case of some real objects, like the number 5, are they simple enough 
that we can locate the real qualities within the sensual object? If I add two 
5s in my mind to make a real 10, have real qualities been engaged and 
retained? Do we have a situation where there is no meaningful difference 
between a real quality and a sensual quality?

GH: All sensual objects have both sensual and real qualities. It was Husserl 
who first gave technical precision to this idea. Imagine that I rotate a tennis 
ball in my hand, at different times of day and in various fluctuating moods. 
These are “adumbrations,” as Husserl puts it: the German Abschattungen. 
No matter what the adumbrations of the ball may be at any given moment, 
I continue to recognize this ball as one and the same. Since we are simply 
talking about experience here, not about reality, I am the one who decides 
whether or not it is the same ball. If it turns out later that I was wrong, 
that someone quickly replaced the ball with a different one while I wasn’t 
paying attention, then this pertains to the level of the real object, which is 
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But along with the sensual qualities or adumbrations 
of the tennis ball, it must also have real qualities. 
There are certain features that could arise that 
would convince me that it’s not the same tennis 
ball I initially thought it was: I might realize that 
my roommate replaced It with another, or maybe 
it turns out to be a fake tennis ball produced by 
an artist, or perhaps other such scenarios. Husserl’s 
great error was to hold that the senses give us the 
adumbrations while the intellect gives us the real 
qualities. This is merely a symptom of Husserl’s 
rationalist and mathematicist prejudices: he found 
it inconceivable that there could be any layer of 
reality impenetrable even to the intellect.

Returning to your question, there is no possible 
case where real and sensual qualities are one. This is 
only possible if we believe in intellectual intuition, 
which I do not. Why not? Because I hold that any 
intuition requires a translation of form. Here’s what 
I mean. People who think that intellectual intuition 
is possible think that we can clearly and distinctly 
see, before the mind’s eye, the essential properties 
of a tennis ball or a dog. Now, such people would 
never claim that they are bringing the actual ball 
or dog into their brains. What they are saying, 
most often, is that they are extracting a knowable 
form from an object and bringing it into the mind, 
leaving behind only the “matter” of the object. 
But there is no proof that anything like formless 
matter exists. In fact, the notion of matter was only 
invented as a crutch to prove the existence of direct 
intellectual access! That is to say, the difference 
between a tennis ball in reality and the tennis ball 
in the mind is said to consist in the lack of “matter” 
in the second case, but this is a mere alibi that 
allows us to think that the form remains the same 
when extracted and removed from an object. Yet the 
form always undergoes translation, and this is why 

ALL 
SENSUAL 
OBJECTS 

HAVE BOTH 
SENSUAL AND 

REAL QUALITIES. 
IT WAS HUSSERL 
WHO FIRST GAVE 

TECHNICAL 
PRECISION TO 

THIS IDEA.

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intellectual intuition is impossible. In the words of Bruno Latour: “There 
is no transport without transformation.”3  There is always the question of 
whether mathematical objects are a special case, whether they alone permit 
of direct intuition. I suspect not, but all I can do at the moment is suggest 
this, not prove it.

SW: Yes, certainly. It is only in the axiomatic case of simple numbers that 
I cannot see any difference between some of the real and sensual qualities. 
Unlike all other objects, they seem to be stripped of all depth. Continuing 
with perception, since we, as individuals, are real objects, we only have 
access to sensual objects which are created by contact with other real 
objects, and therefore we are truly surrounded by the unreal. Even when 
we look at ourselves, we can only see a sensual object. It seems as if those 
Buddhist and Hindu expressions - see without seeing, hear without hearing 
- are onto something. Without such effortless, causeless perception, we are 
truly imprisoned in a simulacra wrapping the withdrawn real. This isn’t 
what Baudrillard meant by the term simulacra - since he is a nihilist anti-
realist - but in the context of infra-realism, the simulacrum would be the 
enveloping sensual world around every real object.

GH: Baudrillard meant a lot to me when I began graduate study. And even 
though I am now a hardcore realist, I’m still impressed by him. His denial 
of reality doesn’t bother me that much; in a sense, Husserl was already a 
theorist of simulacra. But there is a reality in Baudrillard nonetheless– the 
reality of the one who observes the simulacra and is seduced by them. We 
must always remember that Baudrillard is the philosopher of seduction no 
less than of simulation. And what’s so important about seduction? The point 
is that when we become fascinated by something, we grow so attached to it 
that we and that thing form a new object, a compound made of ourselves 
and the thing. Why do I call that relation a new object? Because it meets 
all the criteria of objecthood established by object-oriented philosophy: 
it has emergent properties not found in either me or the thing separately, 
it is impenetrable to outside description or understanding, and it can 
have different features at different times. In short, the world of simulacra 
becomes a realist world as soon as the observer starts becoming personally 
involved with it, and that’s what aesthetics is all about.

SW: If the simulacra become real by becoming a compound with the 
observer, is that an ontological solipsism? It sounds like psychological 



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growth, and broadening experience, makes more of 
the world real, which certainly seems to accord with 
our experience.

GH: It’s not solipsism, since my experience of an 
object and yours are still referring indirectly to the 
same real object. But there is the same difficulty here 
as with theories of autopoiesis (Maturana, Varela, 
Luhmann) since we need a clearer understanding 
of how the real object, despite being cut off from 
the sensual realm, is nonetheless able to affect and 
possibly be affected by the new object that is the 
compound between simulacrum and observer.

Philosophical de-anthropocentrism

SW: One of the aspects of your work that has been 
broadly supported is its anti-anthropocentrism, 
the refusal to accept anti-realism’s separation of 
everything into two categories, human and other.

GH: We have learned much about the vast size of the 
universe. On top of that, there are now reasonable 
musings about possible other universes, whether on 
the interiors of black holes or in other dimensions 
invisible to us here. All of this tends to indicate that 
our species and planet, even our entire galaxy, are 
fairly minor constituents of reality. By contrast, 
modern philosophy revolves around the centrality of 
humans. The reason, of course, is that it is thought 
we have direct certainty of human experience but 
only mediated access to everything else, which 
suggests a crucial status for human thought. In 
this way, there is a contradiction between the royal 
importance of humans on the one hand and our 
speck-of-dust cosmic tininess on the other. 

SW: I’ve never been sure what to make of the 
assumption of direct access to experience; my 
own experience never seemed direct to me. I used 

 WE MUST 
REMEMBER THAT 

BAUDRILLARD IS 
THE PHILOSOPHER 
OF SEDUCTION NO 

LESS THAN OF 
SIMULATION. 

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to presume that maybe some other people, like Descartes, actually had 
direct experience, but later after learning some sleight of hand magic, you 
see that there are always presumptions built into perception, and these 
presumptions can be activated and challenged.4  

GH: The other day I saw an amusing remark on Twitter. When Hollywood 
depicts interracial couples, so the person asked, why does there always have 
to be a white person in the couple? Analogously, I would ask of philosophy 
since Kant: when philosophy discusses a relationship between two entities, 
why does a human always need to be one of them? The answer is that 
it doesn’t need to be. The relation between two inanimate objects isn’t 
different in kind from the relation between a human and an inanimate 
object. The latter sort is not in any way clearer or more immediately given. 
Our access to our own experience is also mediated rather than direct. But 
since the days of Kant, Alfred North Whitehead is one of the few major 
philosophers to have seen this point clearly.

Let me just add the following response to some of OOO’s critics, who 
make the political complaint that OOO shifts its focus away from human 
subjectivity at the precise moment that previously subaltern humans are 
finally gaining full dignity: as if OOO were pulling the rug out from under 
the feet of the previously oppressed in their very moment of triumph. 
I would say that this remark is counterintuitive in the bad sense of the 
term. When OOO shifts the scope of inquiry from humans to the cosmic 
vastness of all entities, are human differences of race, culture, and gender 
not shown to be rather minor, and therefore isn’t our human equality more 
emphasized than ever before? By contrast, if we stick with the modern 
focus on the human subject, it seems to me we are destined to dwell in 
the narcissism of small differences, to revel in all sorts of micro-hierarchies 
within our tiny human sphere.  

SW: There are a lot of assumptions packed into the political critique of 
OOO’s infra-realist anti-anthropocentrism that require longer discussion. 
Politics typically engages in motivated reasoning, looking for effective 
language. But philosophy, like many forms of research, is often focussed 
differently, looking for something resembling truth, whether truth defined 
as logical consistency or paradigmatic coherence or something else. In The 
Rise of Realism you discussed Lee Braver’s 2007 book, A Thing of This 
World with Manuel DeLanda, and you both disagreed with the traditional 



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realist axiom that truth is correspondence with the 
external world.5 How would you describe truth in 
the context of OOO?

GH: I’m interested in reality rather than truth. 
People who favor the word “truth” are usually the 
ones who think they already have it, and what 
they call truth becomes a cudgel to beat up those 
who disagree. Reality interests me more because it 
implies that there is something with which we make 
peripheral contact: something that disrupts our 
current model of the world without it being entirely 
clear what is happening. There are multiple ways 
to do justice to any reality we encounter, whereas 
a focus on truth implies that there is only one way. 
Certain portions of mathematics and logic seem to 
have a very strong claim to truth, but these results 
are often overexpanded in an effort to formalize the 
whole of reality in ways that aren’t very successful.

SW: You have mentioned that you borrowed the 
term “ontography” from a fictional character, 
Parkins, a Professor of Ontography. Parkins 
practices anthropogeography, and diagrams the 
relationship between humans and their landscapes, 
an example of anthropocentric philosophy mapping 
human-object relations without attending to 
object-object relations. Noting the diagramming 
aspect of Parkins’ work, it seemed that ontography 
could also describe any ontology-oriented art. 
This is similar to what inspired Ian Bogost about 
the term. For a while you both were doing these 
poetic ontographs called Latour Litanies, these 
poetic strings of ostensibly unrelated words, like - 
to make one up on the spot -  box jellyfish, love, 
gravel, jedi, street lighting, asteroids. The aim, and 
correct me if I am wrong, was to produce a list 
where the objects could not be associated with each 
other, so humans were not presented as central to 
all relations, and this was an expression of a flat, 

 I WOULD ASK 
OF PHILOSOPHY 

SINCE KANT: 
WHEN 

PHILOSOPHY 
DISCUSSES A 

RELATIONSHIP 
BETWEEN TWO 
ENTITIES, WHY 

DOES A HUMAN 
ALWAYS NEED TO 
BE ONE OF THEM? 

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non-anthropocentric ontology. With my long immersion in surrealism, I 
immediately recognised the careful systematization of these lists. As Freud 
supposedly said, in a classical painting I always see the unconscious, in a 
surrealist painting I only see the conscious. So before reading your later 
work, I associated the word ontography with these poetic practices with a 
very personal and slight surrealist flavour to them. You don’t seem to have 
used these litanies recently. Has your feeling about them changed?

GH: I am utterly stunned by how stirred up and annoyed some people 
become by these Latour Litanies. For instance, there are critics who say that 
we do nothing more than produce random lists of objects, or who assert 
that “a list of objects is not an argument.” Of course not. The Litanies are 
simply a useful rhetorical technique, and I mean “rhetoric” in the good old 
classical sense of addressing people’s background assumptions, not in the 
trivial modern sense of devious manipulation. Latour Litanies are useful 
for reminding the reader of how many different types of non-human 
entities exist, and that’s the purpose they serve whenever they appear in a 
OOO text.

ARCHITECTS AND PHILOSOPHY

SW: In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche famously stated that architecture 
is the expression of power and that architects are enamoured with 
power, which appears to have a subservient tone until you see that in 
the unpublished Will to Power, everything is an expression of the “will to 
power,” so architecture is not special in this regard.

GH: I’ve never been all that interested in the concept of power, other than 
in high school when I was reading Nietzsche and taking him too literally 
like everyone else at that age. Maybe that’s because the most interesting 
things happen to me when my mind is passive and absorbing unexpected 
insights from others. The intellect is not really about mastery, but about 
finding new drifts or currents or hidden gemstones in the world, and 
letting them compel you to new insights. Believing that one does not yet 
have enough power to do anything is too often an alibi for not doing the 
things already within your grasp.

SW: How do you see anti-realism influencing architecture?



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GH: Primarily in the sense that form and function 
(or program) are usually misread in an anti-realist 
way, in terms of the aspect they present to human 
beings. A realist reconception of form and function 
would have to de-relationize them into “zero form” 
and “zero function,” as I call them.

SW: How do you see infra-realism offering 
alternatives to anti-realism for architectural theory?

GH: We need an improved sense of form that is 
neither purely visual, nor purely conceptual, nor 
purely about the deliberate subversion of function 
(as in some of Eisenman’s houses). But in fairness 
to architects, philosophers repeatedly make the 
same misstep. Husserl draws a distinction between 
intellect and sensation, as though there were really 
such a big difference between the two. Heidegger 
does the same with practical handling on one side 
and explicit looking or theorizing on the other, 
which again isn’t that big a difference. OOO 
demands a difference between reality itself and any 
form of human access. Whether architects find 
significant things to do with this in their work is 
really up to architects.

SW: You have in the past remarked about architects 
making puns of philosophical ideas. I’m not averse 
to the occasional pun, and have even made my own 
OOO pun in the form of occasionalist tectonics, 
taking two elements and sandwiching a wholly 
new formal language between them.6  Sometimes 
visual or formal work that is purely illustrative lacks 
depth and subtlety, but some works of art that are 
truly remarkable started out as illustrations of ideas 
but somehow hold far more allusive and elusive 
qualities. Was your remark pejorative, or is there 
something more to this?

   A REALIST 
RECONCEPTION 

OF FORM AND 
FUNCTION WOULD 

HAVE TO DE-
RELATIONALIZE 

THEM INTO "ZERO 
FORM" AND "ZERO 

FUNCTION"

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GH: It wasn’t meant as pejorative. I was mostly relaying the complaints I’d 
heard from architects I know, who were bothered for instance by the literal 
use of folds on buildings in the period where Deleuze (author of The Fold) 
was widely read in the field. But insofar as puns can verge on literalism, 
that’s a problem. I like your occasionalist tectonics idea, and  also like Tom 
Wiscombe’s idea of half-inscrutable “objects in a sack” hiding behind a 
building’s outer envelope.7  But OOO is really about the tension between 
objects and qualities, and there are some ways of deploying such tension 
that don’t involve anything being hidden in the least.

SW: Yes, Wiscombe’s “objects in a sack” was a lightning strike when I 
first heard it. Probably the most coherent arguments connecting OOO 
and architecture are found in the writings of Wiscombe, David Ruy, and 
Mark Foster Gage, architects I find fascinating. Their ideas might seem 
strange to people outside architecture’s current education system, but are 
very relevant to those inside it.

They all appear to share a fondness for OOO because it provides a rationale 
for valuing architecture for its qualities rather than its associations. 
(This is rather like Eisenman’s concern for architecture’s interiority, for 
what is exclusively architectural. Eisenman’s approach was a kind of 
de-anthropocentrism, but it was framed as anti-humanism, which is quite 
different.) Gage also argues that buildings should be judged as buildings, 
not as diagrams.8  This is apt for architecture education. I wonder if this 
arises from the tension between being an effective academic and the art 
of architecture. When you have a lot of projects to assess, one can feel the 
need to hurry and it helps if you can understand a project quickly, but 
individual works of great architecture are captivating and even mystifying, 
and they refuse our attempts to understand them easily, they require study 
and reflection, and even personal transformation. 

GH: There are a number of other architects who have played around 
with OOO: Peter Trummer is one here at SCI-Arc, and elsewhere I’ve 
had multiple discussions with Ferda Kolatan and Michael Young, among 
others.9  In Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything I 
highlighted Gage and Wiscombe because they represent the two most 
pronounced and opposite tendencies.10  As mentioned, Wiscombe favors 
hidden objects surrounded by palpable surface qualities. Yet Gage isn’t 
about hiddenness at all: he gives us a fiesta-like abundance of qualities 



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inscribed on the surface. In Weird Realism I argued 
that H.P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction uses both of 
these techniques, even though the first is the only 
one people usually mention.11 

SW: What do you think now of Wiscombe’s 
point in “The Object Turn” about an architecture 
inspired by OOO having a suspicion of any form of 
mapping exercises that seem to conjure architecture 
from the context or from the map itself.12  For many 
years, architecture students have been fabricating 
abstract maps of things and using these as visual 
prompts for design. A weakness of this method 
is its meaninglessness, and the insistence to look 
outside architecture. Yet I am ambivalent in this 
critique. Leonardo da Vinci recommended artists 
stare at the infinitely subtle shades and markings of 
rough, stained walls and allow their imaginations to 
inventively see figures, scenes and events. Similarly 
there is a subtly creative act in seeing turtles, 
buildings and faces in the shifting forms of clouds. 
These work as psychological exercises to prompt 
creativity, and even have a little surrealist flair, but 
they belong to the earlier, passive and automatist 
side of surrealism rather than to the later, more 
active side where effects are actively sought. Now 
that you’ve worked in an architectural school for 
a number of years, what observations do you have 
about architectural design processes and the results 
they entrain?

GH: Wiscombe did make that point, as did Ruy 
when he argued against architecture becoming a 
subsidiary of ecology: as if buildings were nothing 
more than local outcroppings of the broader 
environment. I agree completely on this score, since 
no building can be completely site-specific. Certain 
choices have to be made about which aspects of the 
environment to include or exclude. And of course, 
Rem Koolhaas has pointed out that a building also 

There 
are 

a number 
of other 

architects 
who have 

played 
around with 

OOO

“

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presses back against its environment and changes it in turn.

You ask what I’ve noticed after teaching at an architecture school for five 
years. Quite a few things, actually. Architects tend to be very articulate in 
explaining their ideas, even more so than philosophers, in my opinion. 
Architects are under more pressure to innovate, and therefore they have 
their antennae out for new ideas more than philosophers do. On the 
pedagogical level, what strikes me most is that students have a hard time 
defending forms in their own terms. When pressed, they will usually 
give a genetic backstory for how they arrived at the form now before our 
eyes: they started with some everyday object, put it through four or five 
transformations, and this was the result. This just goes to show how hard it 
is to speak allusively or indirectly about something, which is precisely what 
architectural form demands. The best art and architecture critics need to 
have the souls of poets, because in this case literalism won’t do the job.

SW: One of the things you’re known for are the terms overmining and 
undermining.

GH: It is often assumed that the goal of all cognition is knowledge, and 
ultimately there are just two kinds of knowledge. If someone asks me what 
something is, I can (a) tell them what it’s made of, or (b) tell them what 
it does. I call the first of these techniques “undermining” and the second 
“overmining.” 

I mentioned earlier that Socrates practices philosophia (love of wisdom) 
rather than sophia (wisdom). There is no Platonic dialogue in which 
Socrates ends up with the correct definition of anything. Nothing is ever 
quite definable. As Aristotle puts it, things are concrete but definitions 
are made of universals, which means there will always be an imperfect 
fit between reality on one side and thought or language on the other. 
Philosophy fundamentally does something other than produce knowledge. 
and this is even clearer of the arts. There is no way to avoid “mining” in 
direct propositional speech, since this kind of speech (which I call “literal”) 
involves making true statements about the properties a thing possesses. 
But philosophy and the arts are not literalist disciplines, and have more 
to do with producing a gap or fissure between an object and its qualities.  

SW: Often overmining and undermining are misunderstood as critiques. 

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Overmining and undermining are critiques of other 
ontologies, not of thinking or philosophical work 
as such. 

GH: By no means is OOO anti-knowledge. 
Knowledge is good and necessary; it simply gives 
us an incomplete picture of human cognition. 
To know something is to explain it in terms of 
something else: its parts, its history, its uses, its 
effects, its properties, how it looks to us. All of 
this is great. It allows us to create medicines, build 
aircraft, analyze social data, and so forth. But we’ve 
reached the point where many people assume that 
if something isn’t “science,” isn’t knowledge, then 
it’s just rubbish. These days we enthusiastically 
encourage students to pursue STEM subjects, 
while aesthetic taste is left sadly undeveloped. 
This means that the students who are open to it 
end up having to learn it on their own. Granted, 
that’s often the best way to learn things. It’s how I 
learned philosophy, for instance.

SW: Gage has used overmining and undermining as 
critiques of architectural culture and architectural 
education, and this leads us to interesting territory. 
Universities rightly pride themselves on bestowing 
knowledge, but art and architecture are not forms of 
knowledge, yet this fact too needs to be taught and 
understood. How do you think about reconciling 
this dilemma?

GH: It’s probably not something well understood 
enough yet to be codified in the schools. There is 
still some intellectual work to be done in grasping 
the relation between knowledge (which I define 
as detecting the qualities a thing possesses) and 
the very different kind of cognition that includes 
both the aesthetic and the philosophical (defined as 
grasping or producing a gap between any object and 

Overmining 
and 

undermining 
are critiques 

of other 
ontologies, not 

of thinking or 
philosophical 

work as such.

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its qualities). But philosophy is more often guilty of mistaking itself for a 
form of knowledge than the arts and architecture are. 

SW: Back in 2017, you wrote a reply to Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva’s 
actor-network theory of architectural design.13  Have your views on that 
changed?

GH: No, they have not. It’s always stimulating to read an actor-network 
approach to any topic, and the Latour/Yaneva piece is as interesting as 
any.14 But you just can’t reduce any object, including an architectural one, 
to its backstory as a project– which is what they try to do in that article. 
There they are following Latour’s familiar strategy of referring to any object 
as a black box that can be opened, revealing all of the historical complexity 
within. The problem is that a black box doesn’t just hide its internal 
components. It also renders many of them irrelevant, while also having 
new emergent properties that can’t be equated with what’s inside. Stated 
in architectural terms, not all aspects of a building’s history are relevant 
to the final building, and a building has features that its history does not. 
Latour and Yaneva offer a fine vision for an ethnography of architecture, 
but I doubt there is much that actual architects can do with it. And I say 
this as someone who yields to no one in my admiration of Latour, who in 
my view is the most important living philosopher, bar none.

SW: Finally, how do you seen the anti-anthropocentric aspect of OOO 
engaging with architecture?

GH: We’re starting to see more architecture that isn’t aimed directly at 
humans, such as the “Vulkan Beehives” of Snøhetta. But what I’m more 
interested in is de-anthropocentrizing the heart of architectural discourse: 
namely, the concepts of form and function. The irony is that while these 
terms seem to be meant as opposites in architectural history, they are both 
relational in character: the form of a building is supposed to be its visual 
look to the observer or user, and its function is supposed to be the purpose 
it provides for the client. But in a OOO context, the visual look of a thing 
is simply an expression of a deeper form, and the specific use is simply 
one possible incarnation of a deeper functional landscape. What OOO 
looks for can be called “zero-form, zero-function,” as discussed in my 
forthcoming book Architecture and Objects.15 



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ENDNOTES

1. Simon Weir, The Ontographers (Edinburgh: Uni-
versity of Edinburgh Press, forthcoming 2022).
2. Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations : the Logic 
of Mathematical Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1976).
3. Bruno Latour. Aramis, or the Love of Technology, 
translated by C. Porter. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
University Press, 1996), 119.
4. Simon Weir, “Art and Ontography,” Open Phi-
losophy 3/2020, 400-412.
5. Manuel DeLanda & Graham Harman, The 
Rise of Realism (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017).
6. Simon Weir, “Object-Oriented Ontology and 
the Challenge of the Corinthian Capital,” in Make 
Sense, (Sydney: Harvest, 2020), 114-116.
7. Tom Wiscombe, “Discreteness, or Towards a 
Flat Ontology of Architecture,” Project, 3/2014, 
34-43.
8. Mark Foster Gage, “Killing Simplicity: 
Object-Oriented Philosophy in Architecture,” Log, 
33/2015, 99.
9. David Ruy, “Returning to (strange) objects,” 
Tarp 2012, 38-42; Peter Trummer, “The City as an 
Object,” Log, 27/2013, 51-57. 
10. Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A 
New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican, 2018).
11. Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and 
Philosophy (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2012).
12. Tom Wiscombe in: Todd Gannon, et. al. “The 
Object Turn: A Conversation,” Log, 33/2015, 82.
13. Graham Harman, “Buildings Are Not Pro-
cesses: A Disagreement with Latour and Yaneva,” 
Ardeth 01 2017, 113-122.
14. Bruno Latour and Albena Yeneva, “Give me 
a Gun and I will Make all Buildings Move: An 

Latour and 
Yaneva 

offer a fine 
vision for an 

ethnography 
of 

architecture, 
but I doubt 

there is much 
that actual 

architects 
can do with it.

“

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ANT’S View of Architecture,” Architectural Design Theory, 1/2017, 
103-11.
15. Graham Harman, Architecture and Objects (Minneapolis: University 
of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2022).
 



isparchitecture.com

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.



isparchitecture.com

About the Authors

Benjamin Bross is Assistant Professor of Architecture, University of Illinois

Ashley Woodward is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Dundee

DR. Simon Weir is the Undergraduate Director, Educational Integrity Coordinator, 
and Lecturer in Architecture: Design Philosophy, Sydney School of Architecture, 
Design and Planning, University of Sydney

graham harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Liberal Arts Program 
Coordinator, SCI-Arc

tom spector  is Professor of Architecture, Oklahoma State University

Image Credits

Cover: Poppi Castle, Province of Arezzo, Italy. image by Tom Spector

Western Wall, Jerusalem image by David King, Haifa. This file is licensed under the 
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. https://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File:Western_Wall_Plaza_-_Jerusalem_(1291829327).jpg

Itsukushima_Shrine_torii Author: Balon Greyjoy, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:20181111_Itsukushima_Shrine_torii-2.jpg   Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal 
Public Domain Dedication.

Ise Shrine Source  public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ise_Shrine_
Naiku_1953-8-26.jpg

Tulou Housing, courtesy of Urbanus, urbanus.com.cn

Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette image [[File:Domonkos kolostor (Couvent Sainte-
Marie de La Tourette). Építészek- Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis, André Wogenscky és 
Pierre Jeanneret. Fortepan 58029.jpg|Domonkos_kolostor_(Couvent_Sainte-Marie_de_
La_Tourette)._Építészek-_Le_Corbusier,_Iannis_Xenakis,_André_Wogenscky_és_Pierre_
Jeanneret._Fortepan_58029]]

Site of Reversible Destiny image by Kikuhiko Mizusaki  7/4/2008  CC 3.0  Gnu free 
documentation licence v. 1.2  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Inside_office.jpg



AP . vol 5 . No 2 . 2021

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