15 March 2015
UCA Farnham.
Working Notes. Visuals and Text
Extracts from Waverley Project/Research Folder, MA Interior Design.
Clay and the Primacy of Being
The Potter and The Philosopher
Innerness and Defined Space
Manifesting the everyday crafts of life in a physical form.
Ceramic Assemblage : White Spaces/The Patina of Objects.
The Potter ( Hans
Coper) and the Philosopher (Martin Heidegger),
Throwing, Building,
Dwelling, Thinking.
Brian Clarke, Stained Glass, Sainsbury Centre.
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.
The Philosopher. Martin
Heidegger.
Building Dwelling
Thinking. 1951
Heidegger “resolutely
romanticised the rural and the low-tech before, during and after
Nazism, skating dangerously close to fascist rhetoric of blood and
soil.”
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.
This almost vocational
unfinished architecture finds itself more at home with the ongoing
daily life than any sort of finished product.”
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”
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
“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,”
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”
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.”
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.
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/eastern
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 site specific art?
Waverley Project 2014.
Spaces and Shadows in
Architecture, Defined Light and Volumes.
In Praise of Shadows.
Junichiro Tanizaki
Architectural Voids/
Spaces only assessable whilst under construction, scaffolding and
specific access points, maintenance and service corridors/rooms.
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.
Being close to things,
Heidegger on Nearness.
“The thing is not
“in” nearness, “in” proximity, as if nearness were a
container. Nearness is at work in bringing near, as the thinging of
the thing,”(1971:177-178)
This spatial complexity
( Critical Spatial Practices) suggests that we do indeed think
through things, this is picked up by Tim Ingold in The Perception of
the Environment (Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill) 2000.
Also see, The Politics
of Things/Immediate Architectural Interventions : Durations and
Effects. Alres/Lieberman 2013.
On building a house.
Ingold.
“The architect, then,
conceives the lineaments of the structure, while the builder’s task
is to unite the structure with the material”0
Simon Unwin defines
architecture as “the determination by which a mind gives
intellectual structure to a building”, whereas building is “the
performance of physical realization”, of which “a building” is
the product. (Unwin. Understanding Architecture 2007)
Inner Spaces/The Quiet Room
The Poetics of Space.
Gaston Bachelard.
An abode of intimate space, it is Blanchot's inner room.
Here everything is simpler, more radically simple.
The cell of myself fills with wonder.
The white-washed wall of my secret.
Pierre Jean Jouve, Les Noces.
Heidegger notes that
“nearness is a fundamental aspect of human experience, and as such
it can be experienced and appreciated through the tactile, cognitive
and sociological familiarity of things”1
It is a this
relationship of nearness to the daily intricacies of living,
being/becoming and dwelling that Heidegger’s philosophy is
appropriated into architectural theory and practice. “Nearness thus
becomes a function of immediacy : in that one is near to what one
finds immediate, however far away it may be.”
For Heidegger, the
definite characteristic of a thing (of a pot) is its possibility to
bring people nearer to themselves, to help them engage with their
existence and the fourfold.2
Heidegger attributed
both the Jug and Buildings the potential to gather up and to be able
to carry connotations of meeting and assembly, the jug and the
building both have a corresponding void, that has the potential to
contain/embody his preconditions of existence (the fourfold). This
sensing space/void/Ma, can be reflected in the interiors of
architecture and can be found within innerness spaces of objects.
The pot like the
building participates in daily life.
This can be further
theorised into the realm of building social spaces.
In Heidegger’s
reasoning by using a table we are in effect constituting ourselves in
the process of dwelling, by moving the table to accommodate the needs
of its users, we are in effect turning the room back into a building.
Heidegger’s building
and dwelling take place together over time, forming ongoing
relationships with the world. Like the Potter in his Studio, these
critical spatial relations inform both the working practice and the
situation and biography of their making.
“Heidegger suggested
that it was this disruption of relations between building and
dwelling, rather than the production of houses, that remained the
most important plight in the contemporary world”3
Piety of Thinking.
1976 (Piety for Heidegger listened to and facilitated the world
around)4
Quietude : Allow and
enabling what is already there.
Silence in Ceramics.
Coper/Rie.
Clay and the Primacy of
Being.
Studio Spaces.
The residents’
dwelling was recorded over time in the fabric of the building and the
paraphernalia of their lives placed there.
For the philosopher ,
buildings are rich in insight, comprising a “workshop of long
experience and incessant practice. 1971,161.5
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