Heidegger : Poetically Man Dwells. “Man builds in that he dwells”
Building Dwelling Thinking. 1951
'Architecting' : Making, concretizing existential space
Ann Cline
A Hut of One's Own
Life Outside The Circle of Architecture.
Herzog and De Meuron
NATURAL HISTORY
Heidegger “resolutely romanticised the rural and the low-tech before, during and after Nazism, skating dangerously close to fascist rhetoric of blood and soil.”1
Architecture can help to centre people in the world; it can offer individuals places from which to inquire for themselves. Heidegger felt that this was how architecture had been understood in the past, and that the insatiable rise of technology had obscured that understanding.
Heidegger interested on centring his qualities of architecture around those of human experience, to reintegrate building with dwelling, making the qualities of its inhabitation become part of the buildings authenticity to its locality.
IMMATERIAL ARCHITECTURES
MAKING IN THE LANDSCAPE
SCULPTURE TRAIL 2018
The House-sheds : Camping
There's more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvising builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don't need permission for them. There's more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we're just passing through.
Roger Deakin
WILDWOOD
A Journey Through Trees
This almost vocational unfinished “architecture finds itself more at home with the ongoing daily life than any sort of finished product.”2
Immaterial Architecture : The Glass Observatory
Metaphysics/Atmospheric Cosmogonies
Spatial themes of inside/outside, negotiations between the physical, phenomenal and a metaphysical world.
Photogram, a numinous construction, spaces amongst and within other spaces
Contemporary architects of which Peter Zumthor is an exemplary example utilise and readily acknowledge the influence of Heidegger’s thinking. The inner spaces, the materiality and the locality are all directly traceable to traits found in Heidegger’s notion of the value of human presence and inhabitation.
Heidegger claims for architecture “the authority of immediate experience”3 As recorded in his most architectural writings.
The Origin of the Work of Art 1935/trans 1971 Being and Time 1927/1962
Art and Space 1971/1973
1 Adam Sharr Heidegger for Architects.
2 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 3
3 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for /Architects. 3
Authentic building occurs so far as there are poets, such poets as take the measure for architecture, the structure of dwelling. (Heidegger, 1971:227)
To Heidegger, when someone with poetic inclinations submits themselves to the world and deliberately or instinctively takes measure of things and phenomena through creative acts, she or he creates poetry themselves. (Sharr,2007:82)
Making Sense through Measuring.
For Heidegger, building and dwelling take place through measuring, which binds them together. Whether instinctive or more deliberate, such measuring is always conducted through immediate physical and imaginative experiences rather than through scientific experiment. (Shan,2007:82)
‘Measuring should happen in the context of a unity which binds life’s experiences together with the things they measure, not by separating them.’ (Sharr,2007:83)
This measuring through acts of both becoming and being are principally located to the environment and the buildings that serve it.
(See Lieberman, Immediate, Architectural, Interventipns/The Politics of Things) The compass suggests no attempt to understand how people have engaged with the
forest intuitively before. Explorers don’t first engage their own minds with the forest to try to understand it for themselves, but instead rely on an artificial instrument, trampling everything in their way to pursue the imposed route. To Heidegger, exploring by walking a forest path which was already there instead allowed the territory itself to guide exploration. (Sharr,2007:85)
Being lost in trying to make sense of something, is no problem for Heidegger. It is in this process of an undertaking, and through its motion or agency that this undertaking can attain its dignity and its meaning.
For the philosopher, individuals have to recognise enough difference between things so they can measure other things with them. But he argued, they should not separate them from everyday experience like science does, making them the object of dissection in a laboratory or analysing them as pure abstract ideas in a lecture threatre. (Sharr,2007:82)
Heideggerian identifications of place make sense of the world through measuring and oneness. Likewise, the conjoined activity of building and dwelling, for the philosopher. Receives authority through a poetic receptiveness to the existing conditions of site, people and society. (Sharr,2007:87)
Heidegger: Placing Heidegger
Heidegger’s life can be characterised by the places where he lived and wrote. (Sharr,2007:15)
Affirming a commitment to the philosophy he found in the order of his mountain life. It is significant for architects that Heidegger chose to summarise his final writings with the term ‘place’. He referred not only to the sites where he himself thought, particularly his mountain hut, but also to the significance of thought placed in particular contexts. (Sharr,2007:20)
Heidegger established an intense routine of living, writing, chopping wood, eating, sleeping, walking and skiing: a way of life which became as concentrated and ordered as his childhood in Messkirsh. (Sharr,2007:17)
Heidegger used his vocational mountain life, its raw presences and natural rhythms as an active living influence from which he could draw and distil his philosophical writings. He was very aware of these conditions and landscapes of building, dwelling and thinking were actually becoming absent from many in the Western world.
‘Heidegger felt that we were losing the ability to appreciate our existence in the context of a sweep far longer and broader than our lives. Moments of awareness of our own presence, often brought home to us by our senses, emotions and the phenomena of nature, had become rare opportunities to him. (Sharr,2007:12) This affinity to being in and with the landscape could be seen as tending towards “romanticism”.
Sharr notes that “romanticism” has a tendency towards introspection, emotion and sensitivity, it contains at its core, ’an awe at natural forces and a perceived transcendence of nature over human affairs. Such qualities infuse Heidegger’s work on dwelling and place.’ (Sharr,2007:12)
Romanticism has its critics who accuse those engaged with it as being of having a ‘naive optimism and an abdication of responsibility. To them the romantic can be so entranced by solitary poetising as to become unable to perceive the human hardships and evils that surround them. The British tradition of Romanticism as underpinned by Wordsworth, Turner, Blake, William Morris and John Ruskin. It has the feeling of innocence and obscure dreams and pictorial visions derived from the English landscape and the existential sense and sensibility of place.
Heidegger’s romanticism is deeply problematic given the German context.
Sharr notes that many see Heidegger’s romanticism through German cultural folk law heroes (epic tales bounded by blood and soil) loaded with invocations that link it with Nazism.
‘Where there are those who honour their locality and celebrate a sense of belonging, others can be cast out as not belonging. And here are the seeds of racism and persecution. When the romantic reifies the land, ugly things might be done in the name of that land.’ (Sharr,2007:13)
Those who have authenticity to the land, can appease those who are not of the land; can this seed the germs of racism?
‘Authenticity is dangerous because it is divisive and potentially exclusive, particularly where appropriated as a cultural specific, in this case as distinctively German. Here again is the germ of racism.’ (Sharr,2007:13)
Heidegger was scathing of tourists, who he felt visited but did not see. Surrounded by the landscape only fleetingly, they were unable to perceive the vital traces of being, which the philosopher found there. Heidegger vehemently held certain ways of life to be authentic and others to be inauthentic. (Sharr,2007:13)
“Up there” referring to moral attitudes and altitude both of which he found in the locality of his hut.
“To Heidegger, proper thinking was highly tuned to the fact of being and its traces. These traces, like our own shadow, the outline of the hills or the sounds of birdsong and stream, remain reminders of our miraculous presence,”4 5
Building locates human existence,
Heidegger “ believed that building was set out around human presence, configured by it but also configuring the activities of that presence over time”3
This almost vocational activity of building human presence it at the heart of what it means “to dwell”, the poetics of which form the phenomenological inquiry of Gaston Bachelard’s, Poetics of Space. Heidegger acknowledges that the inhabitants lives are in turn configured by the building.
Adam Sharr, notes that “for Heidegger, a building was built according to the specifics of place and inhabitants, shaped by its physical and human topography.”6
Heidegger on Thinking,
The forest track, the clearing, wandering from a starting point and remaining open to findings reached on the way, it could not be readily summarised or contained by a system. It was referential, mystical model that sought to promote the authority of being.
Heidegger on the Void at the centre of the Jug.7
Made from earth/clay/fire connected the human experience of earth and sky. Heidegger attributed sacred qualities to the jugs ability to give/to pour. Part of his fourfold cosmology of earth, sky, divinities and mortals. This “fourfold” represents Heidegger’s attempt at what he judges to be the most primary circumstances of existence, “ the inescapable pre-requisite of the world into which humans are thrown without consent (1962,164-168).
Mythic and mystical, far from the strictures of logical thinking. Influences on the “fourfold”
Meister Eckhart/mystic theologian. Lao Tse/eastem philosopher. Friedrich Holderlin/poet.
George Steiner on the “fourfold” suggests it is a manifestation of an “ideolect” a personal language offered as universal.
Heidegger would refute this on the grounds that it is our technocratic conception of the world that is unhinged not his.
Heidegger A mysticism that seems to border onto/into the realm of art?
Kengo Kuma on “Ma” a void or pause, a rich emptiness, it can be created in many ways, through the effect of light, or through attention to details.8
4 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 7
5 Adam Sharr Heidegger for Architects. 9
6 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 10
7 Adam Sharr. Heidegger for Architects. 30
8 Kengo Kuma. Sensing Spaces. Royal Academy of Arts. 2014, 65
The Reading Room/Process : Cell, Court, Domain.
Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression.
Duration, Steven Holl
Time is only understood in relation to a process or a phenomenon.
The duration of human beings alive in one time and place is a relational notion.
The time of one's being is provisional; it is a circumstance with an adopted aim for the time being.
SPACE-and ARCHITECTURE-exceeds the provisional
Innerness and Defined Space/Air
Throwing, Building, Dwelling, Thinking
The innerness of a ceramic vessel can be seen to be dealing with presences and absences, as like that of a building it can demonstrate the presence of its making and the absence of that same presence.
