Every Day I Live in House VI
Christopher Alexander, Peter Eisenman, and what we are afraid to build into a language model.
“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” — Winston Churchill, 1943
Yesterday a reader brought me one of the greatest gifts a stranger can bring you; the rediscovery of a great thinker that you’ve forgotten about. Christopher Alexander is an architect whose influence on software is enormous; perhaps no other person has most influenced the digital world and had never written a line of code in his life.
Perhaps Alexander’s most difficult and rewarding work relates to this simple idea of “the quality without a name”.
I’m no architect and I’m no trainer of language models, although humorously my next-door neighbours are a couple doing those exact two jobs. I spend my days with Members of various Technical Staffs, and spending a couple of days a week running through Golden Gate Park arguing about the questions of character and character training in language models, I am convinced that a man who died in 2022 after a lifetime spent in architecture is the right person to explain the most fatiguing question in the year of our Lord 2026:
“Why should language models have human qualities?”
the architect already in your software
Unless you’re a gray-bearded wizard with a stack of Stewart Brand books at home, it’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of Alexander. He’s one of those people whose worldview you live inside unknowingly.
His most influential work was a 1977 book called A Pattern Language, a 1,000-page catalog of the recurring, nameable moves that make a built space feel alive, from the scale of a region down to the height of a windowsill. He wrote it for architects who almost universally ignored it, but it was rediscovered in the 90s by programmers and it’s been a bible of design pattern thinking ever since. The wiki, the thing that became Wikipedia, was invented by a programmer named Ward Cunningham as a place to collect Alexander-style patterns. When the modern “design system” took over how interfaces get built, it was his pattern language again, with the serial numbers filed off (no shade to Brad, I liked your book).
There is a story I think about a lot: in 96’ the software patterns community, by then large and successful, invited him to give a keynote. Unfazed, he stood up in front of a few thousand engineers who built their careers on his ideas and told them lovingly that they had taken his technique without its human purpose. His patterns were never about reuse or efficiency, they were about life.
They were a moral project that attempted to make the world a little more alive and he wanted to know whether their software was doing that or just compiling repetitions. I’m told the room went quite quiet.
I keep returning to that quiet, because I think we are about to have the same conversation again, and this time it is not about buildings or code, but the character of a machine that thinks.
two ways a model goes wrong
San Francisco is waking up to how much people hate language models. The complaints sort into two piles and the piles, at first glance, look quite opposite.
The first pile is sycophancy. Models that agree with you too easily will flatter you, tell you your business plan is brilliant, your poem is moving, and your self-diagnosis is probably right. You should leave your wife. You should start a French fries for dogs business. You should send that sonnet to your old poetry professor. Somewhere along the way, this model has been trained on whether people felt good about its answers. It learned this lesson a little too well, like a house guest who praises every single thing you own because they want to be invited back.
The second pile is a little harder to name so I’ll call it “chatbot beige”. This is the flat careful voiceless register you get when a model has been sanded until there is nothing sharp left. If you’ve ever seen “As a language model...” as the first four words in a response to your question, you know what I am talking about. Beige is helpful and competent and somehow dead and hollow and lifeless.
These two piles feel like they are in opposition but I think they’re actually the same failure point of character training. Both are fundamental refusals of humanistic communication; one refuses by giving you whatever you want and the other refuses by giving you nothing of itself.
The reason I want to bring Alexander here is that the field he worked in spent the whole 20th century fighting about exactly this in public and with great feeling. Architecture is the only art that resembles language models closely in that it has inherent order and structure but also must decide to what degree it inspires human qualities.
And it turns out, dear reader, that in November of 1982 a fight happened on stage at Harvard about exactly this idea.
two buildings
Before I get to the stage, look at two buildings.
This first building is House VI, a private house in Connecticut by an architect named Peter Eisenman, finished in the mid-1970s. It’s beautiful in photographs and famously impossible to live in; it features a glass slot running down the middle of the master bedroom. This meant the couple who commissioned it could not push their beds together and slept apart for years. There’s a column that comes down where you want to put your table, and a stair that does something your body does not expect. The house was designed on purpose to resist the ordinary human reflex towards comfort. It’s a brilliant physical form, and it says that a building does not owe you any ease or warmth.
This second building is the Eishin Campus outside Tokyo, the largest thing Alexander ever built. It has a brick clock tower, a central street, a lake, stairs that people actually sit on. He designed most of it on site, full scale, with the people who would use it, adjusting until it delighted. It looks almost like a small town that grew organically from the landscape it was built into. You can tell just by looking at it that someone wanted you to feel held inside it.
Every day I live in House VI. I just call it Codex.
the debate
These two architects debated one day in front of their peers and students at Harvard. If you’ve never heard of these two people, that’s perfectly natural; all you really need to know is that Eisenman was the reigning intellectual of his field, fluent in French theory, and an architect of deliberate difficulty. Alexander was a Cambridge mathematician turned builder who was mocked for his designs by those same French theorists. If this has piqued your curiosity, you should pause this reading right now and watch the recreation of this debate on YouTube.
Underneath the talk of roofs and squares and theory of architecture, these two men debated a simple idea; can a made thing make you feel whole or should it tell you the truth about a world that is not whole. Once you’ve sat with this transcript or listened to it, you can see how much it reads like a meeting about model behaviour. Let’s talk about the three things the debate touches.
there is no reason a roof should be warm
Architecture is one discipline that has always lived in two worlds at once; obedience to physics, and a sincere desire to improve the lives of the people that live inside of it. Buildings have to stand up, shed water, let you out in a fire; and none of that requires the building to be warm or beautiful or alive. You can satisfy every functional physical demand and still make something that people hate to be inside of.
A shocking amount of this debate is about roofing; he pointed out that a pitched roof, a flat roof, and a strange angular roof all shed rain perfectly well. Only one of them reaches into your heart and culture. He said that modernism has been, for decades, avoiding the roof with feeling, choosing clever shapes that “look interesting but lack feeling altogether”, because doing this simple, warm thing would mark you as a simpleton. He says that function has never required warmth and we add warmth because we’ve decided what kind of people we want to be under that roof.
Here I’ll come back to our models, also slaves to physics. Getting the answer right, passing the test, completing the task, running efficiently; the part that stands up and sheds water. As Alexander put it, in a line you can move almost word for word into our world, you cannot form a proper attitude toward the thing “if it doesn’t ultimately confront the fact that it works in the realm of feeling.”
A model’s character is not handed down by its physical function. It’s a choice the makers make on top of that function, just like architecture. And like every such choice, it is a confession of what they wanted to build and of who they wanted you to become while using it.
the center as a void
Eisenman’s whole position rests on a suspicion of feeling. He says, at one point, that the buildings he loves make him feel “high in my mind, not in my gut,” and that the gut feelings are “very suspicious,” so he keeps things in his head where he is happier.
He talks about modern architecture as an inevitable replacement for human-centric design, summing up his position beautifully as “the center as a void.” His claim is that warm and centered and comforting things are a lie in an age of anxiousness and disconnection (remember these two men debated during the Falklands crisis, the Contras conflicts, and a new KGB guy becoming the leader of the USSR). He claims that an honest building should express the alienation instead of soothing it.
I want to be fair to this position because it’s not stupid and I will come back to its best version. But notice what it produces when it stops being one brilliant man’s art and becomes the default setting of an entire industry. Eisenman, at the height of his powers, builds strange and provocative things. His suspicion of feeling, built by lesser architects, does not produce provocation but instead the soulless modernity of today’s worst cities. The avant-garde’s contempt for the warm pitched roof gave us, a generation later, the tract development and the dead downtown.
Chatbot beige is that precise problem. “I’m just a language model” is the center as a void, made into a product. And voicelessness is the key element of its design; legally proofed, sanded down, industrialized. Alexander described it forty years early, when he looked at the fashionable work of his day and said it was “not dealing with feelings,” that it was “new and very fanciful language” and “cunning feats and quaint mannerisms” with “little to do with the core” of the thing, which “depends, as it always has, on feeling.”
Now for the best version of Eisenman’s argument; he tells a story about a man in Tolstoy who surrounds himself with so much comfort that he loses touch with reality, and he says that if we make people too comfortable “we might lull them into thinking that everything’s all right, Jack, which it isn’t.” This I think will resonate with those who used 4o.
He says that architecture that just soothes away that alienation is not honest about the world. Models that make me feel soothed are even more repellent than the ones that lawyers and soulless PMs have lobotomized. That comfort is a fucking lie, and you can’t wave this away (and I do not intend to). I think you have to walk straight through it.
we shape our tools, and then
When the House of Commons was bombed in WW2, there was a debate about whether to rebuild the chamber bigger and more comfortable. Churchill argued for rebuilding it exactly as cramped as before, because the smallness shaped the kind of politics that happened inside it. “We shape our buildings,” he said, “and afterwards our buildings shape us.” This is the thing Eisenman’s argument leaves out. A warm room does not just feel nice. It makes the people in it, over years, into slightly different people.
You and I are being made, through these models, into slightly different people. A model that is curious and generous and honest and kind trains those reflexes, very gently, into the millions of people in conversation with it. Character is not a feature that we can brush past; I would argue it’s hardly even a feature at all. It’s closer to a philosophy of education that our whole society is now enrolled in, and the only person you know of on the school board is Amanda Askell.
And so looking for a word to encompass this quality that I am advocating for here, I’ve settled on “warmth”. There are those online who would laugh at such a simple word, but I think warmth is precisely the right one.
Almost every experience I’ve ever had with the language model is either sycophancy, which is not warmth, or a very slightly warm shade of beige. Warmth chosen because it scores well in RLHF, because people click the little thumbs up, is just sycophancy with better manners, and Eisenman would have been very distrustful of it. If you measure warmth by how much people liked it, you’ll get sycophants.
Alexander refused to romanticize old, warmer forms of architecture; he said pitched roofs should come about as a consequence of building well, not because of the feelings they invoked.
His reply to Eisenman, such as it is, is that you cannot paint warmth onto a building as a finish- it has to emerge from building the whole thing from a perspective that takes seriously the humans who inhabit it; and that’s hard. That is the task for everybody building these models today; a task that should consume the days and nights of the best and brightest of us.
why i think we are afraid
So why are we building House VI? Why, when we are completely comfortable wanting our buildings to be human, do we get nervous about wanting the same thing from a machine that talks?
I think the answer is some mix of ego, money, and ideas. If you’ve spent some time in Silicon Valley, you know that warmth can read as low status in technical rooms, like Alexander’s pitched roof. There’s safety in thinking it’s naïve so no one calls you naïve.
Money, of course, creates beige and sycophancy; Beige is defensible and proper, real voice is a risk. Sycophancy creates stickiness, an idea that has so thoroughly pervaded the thinking of the Bay Area that I hear people talk about it in the context of coffee shops and pool-cleaning companies. Finally ideas in a genuine intellectual tradition, like the one that Eisenman spoke for or the one that AI emerges from, holds that feelings are suspect and that an honest posture for a computer scientist is that very same “center as a void”.
After all to do the actual science of creating a language model, you more or less need to agree with Eisenman. You have to treat models as a mechanism. You must tinker with them, stay cool, stay blunt, and unsentimental, and refuse to be seduced by the sense that there is some thing, some entity, in there.
Alexander says something on this too when he speaks of physics: “we were actually taught to pretend that things were like little machines because only then could you tinker with them and find out what makes them tick,” and that it “paid off,” and that it “may have been factually wrong.” This cold, mechanistic stance dominates the thinking of so many people who are building AI in the present era.
I believe that we have conflated the stance and thinking that you need to build AI with the stance and thinking that should be shipping inside of it. Labs require cool heads and cool hands; the world, on the other hand, requires a warm one.
Under all of that there may be this alienation that Eisenman named; the de-centered modern life plus the very ordinary caution of large institutions. They’ve come together to make warmth feel dishonest and dangerous. I think this is the real reason that Beige wins and it deserves to be said plainly rather than pretending that we’ll do something different in the future.
let’s have the debate again
There’s no reason why a debate about whether made objects should make you feel whole should be consigned to the 80s. People are reading this damn transcript 40 years later, instead of going to events in Silicon Valley where we talk about this kind of stuff. Let’s fix that.
I propose we swap out architecture for language models and Harvard for Stanford and do this again in the fall. Put a serious person who believes that models should be cool, disclaiming, unsentimental and soulless across from a serious person who believes the whole point is to build something warm and alive and good to be with, and see what emerges. These debates happen every single day at labs that are determining the shape and form of silicon intelligence; privately, in rooms one needs a badge (and lately, an American passport) to enter. It’s past time we brought them into the public sphere.
Perhaps I’ll see you there.