ABSTRACT
Computers first made their way into architecture as harbingers of “rationality”—a nebulous but pervasive keyword that went hand-in-hand with efforts to formalize design as a logico-mathematical process. Logico-mathematical formalisms were portrayed by their authors as producing complete and universal systems with incontrovertible logical coherence. Aiming to re-assert the cultural and social embeddedness of such formalisms, as well as of their discursive and technical protuberances, this chapter follows the work of architect and mathematician Christopher Alexander from his enrolment at Harvard in 1958 to the publication of Notes on the Synthesis of Form in 1964. It identifies two distinct concerns entangled with Alexander’s quest for “rationality”—one pertaining to decision-making and one to the organization of empirical data—and reads them at the interstices of debates on modern industrial housing and intellectual debates on structural abstraction in the postwar era. It further argues that the specific mathematics that Alexander used enabled him to conceive of a particular regime between rule-based rationality and its perceived opposite, intuition. Ultimately, the chapter tells a story of the construction of a particular image of “rationality,” one inextricably linked with the mathematical technique enlisted to deliver it.
