Nature of Order Webinar: The Eishin Campus in Japan: Enhanced Design and Construction Process, Hajo Neis
This session will be on Thursday, March 20, 2025 at 16:00 UTC. Write to natureoforder@buildingbeauty.org to be included.
I have given several different lectures about the Eishin Campus and its Formation, including the ‘Eishin Campus as Japanese Park and Garden, or Temple Complex, as a Field of Centers, as a Building Process, and most often as Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth.’ As part of a Lecture series in a webinar that discusses ‘Book Three’ of the Nature of Order: A Vision of a Living World, it occurred to me to try something different that I have not done yet.
Since Nature of Order ‘Book Three’ contains many examples from the unfolding of the Eishin Campus in almost every category of the Table of Contents, it might be worth to match most of the topics with examples from the actual project. This becomes more exciting, when one considers that the Eishin Campus was the first and also largest project ever built by CES, that also served as a testing ground for the development and advancement of the theory itself. My attempt so far to capture this symmetry went rather well, still some parts are incomplete or insufficient, even incoherent.
I was asked to specifically emphasize Part 5 of the book which deals with construction, and fine construction, I will focus on this topic along the lines of ‘Construction Elements as Living Centers,’ ‘All Building as Making (allowing feeling),’ and ‘Continuous Invention of Materials and Techniques, encouraging new technology for living architecture.’ I will leave out ‘The Production of Giant Projects,’ because it might be more useful to discuss this point in the context of more relevant topics such as an ‘Amalgam of System A and System B, or the use of AI.
Overall, it was worth the experiment and I hope you all will still get something worthwhile out of it, like a hint or even an insight.
Hans Joachim (Hajo) Neis, is an emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of Oregon. He directed the Architecture Program at the UO in Portland for more than seven years and has directed the Portland (or Pattern) Urban Architecture Research Laboratory (PUARL) since 2006. As a board member of the Center for Environmental Structure, he is involved in CES projects, mainly the Archives Project currently underway. He was a long-time colleague of Christopher Alexander, and was the executive architect on the award-winning Eishin College project in Tokyo, Japan. With Christopher and Maggie Moore Alexander, he is co-author of the book The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth (2012), a case study of the Eishin project, and the book A New Theory of Urban Design (1987), that showed unusual innovations in urban theory, with Christopher Alexander, Artemis Anninou and Ingrid King. He was also intensely involved in development of The Nature of Order (2002-06), the four volume magnus opus of Alexander.
Dr. Neis previously taught at the University of California, the University of Frankfurt, Meiji University in Tokyo, as well as being awarded the DAAD visiting professorship at Technical University of Dresden. He was a tutor for the Prince of Wales Urban Design Task Force Program in Lebanon and Berlin. He is a founding member of the architectural organization ‘School of Seeing.’ His main interest in research focuses on the two vital issues ofthe question of quality and value in architecture and urban structure and, second, the question of process and processes, which have the capacity to create and generate quality in buildings and the urban environment. More recently he is also interested in the contribution of architecture and urban design to solve large and often world-wide problems including refugee research. Currently he is working on ‘The Sugar in the Milk – A Refugee Pattern Language (RPL). As a licensed architect and planner for over 40 years, he is practicing architecture, urban design and planning internationally, with projects in Germany, Japan and the US with Hajo Neis and Associates (HNA).
Mock-up for determining exact position of entrance gate and street with walls, openings and with or without bicycle stands, Photo: Hajo Neis