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September 28, 2004
Trevor,
good to see you back. No doubt you have been inhabiting your space and taking stock of yourself.
I want to briefly come back to finish the little series on Heidegger on space and dwelling.It is a philosophical pathway out of the metaphysics of Australian materialism; a pathway that leads away from space as point or location to space as place as an indwelling. Place as an indwelling leads to building.
Though Heidegger does not use the word place the idea of space as indwelling can be called place. It is an important pathway as it leads to questioning we construct our buildings to live in. Heidegger takes us to the everyday--that is the significance of his philosophical pathway out of the scientific metaphysics defended by Australian materialists.
I'm picking up from this earlier post. Heidgegger says:
"Even when mortals turn "inward," taking stock of themselves, they do not leave behind their belonging to the fourfold. When, as we say, we come to our senses and reflect on ourselves, we come back to ourselves from things without ever abandoning our stay among things. Indeed, the loss of rapport with things that occurs in states of depression would be wholly impossible if even such a state were not still what it is as a human state: that is, a staying with things....Man's relation to locations, and through locations to spaces, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken."
Hence we have the idea of the implaced person. This being 'inplace' or staying with things is dwelling.
What we have is a double movement about the relation between location and space and the relation of man and space. Space is not a point with place a part of space---as Descartes, Locke and Newton had insisted. On the contrary, space is a part of place belonging to its history and is implicit in it. Our relationship to place is to go through and stand in them, which we do by staying with things.
This enables us to make some sense of our experience of walking around the Bluff or the beaches with the dogs on the weekends. We experience our movement through this space of the landscape all around by staying constantly with near and remote things--this particular beach over there, this scrub here.
Thinking about this double movement throws a light falls on the nature of the things that are locations and that we call buildings. This is the significance of this pathway: it leads to us re-looking at architectural form from the perspective of dwelling.
Heidegger says that genuine buildings give form to dwelling in its presencing and house this presence:
"....genuine buildings give form to dwelling in its presencing and house this presence. Building thus characterized is a distinctive letting-dwell."
Once we have understood the nature of dwelling, then we have to learn how to dwell and how buildings can give form to dwelling.
"Building thus characterized is a distinctive letting-dwell....As soon as we try to think of the nature of constructive building in terms of a letting-dwell, we come to know more clearly what that process of making consists in by which building is accomplished....The nature of building is letting dwell. Building accomplishes its nature in the raising of locations by the joining of their spaces. Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build."
Heidegger has a conservative---pre-modernist--understanding of this as the example he gives of a building that gives form to dwelling is a 200 year farmhouse in the Black Forest:
"Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the "tree of the dead"-for that is what they call a coffin there: the Totenbaum-and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time. A craft which, itself sprung from dwelling, still uses its tools and frames as things, built the farmhouse."
The equivalent for us in Adelaide would be a 120 year old cottage in the city.
Heidegger is often taken to be 9interepreted as) suggesting that we should return to these old nineteenth century architectural forms, and reject the straight lines, right angles, and grids of modernism, if we are to have a genuine building that lets us dwell. He explicitly rejects this interpretation:
"Our reference to the Black Forest farm in no way means that we should or could go back to building such houses; rather, it illustrates by a dwelling that has been how it was able to build."
I would concur with this going back. My 1890s cottage is a dark cave. Dwelling spaces demand openness, lightness, not the severe and hard boundaries of dark caves. Was middle class suburbia a form of building that let us dwell?
My suggestion over at junk for code is the beach architecture such as this. However, we do need to think about architectural form differently to what modernism has bequeathed to us.
Heidegger concludes the essay by saying that the real dwelling plight is not the inappropriate architectual form--or its lack; rather
"...the real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell. What if man's homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight? Yet as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling."
We have forgotten how to dwell.
Maybe that is not the case with our beach shacks? It is there that we are learning to dwell? We are thinking about dwelling there, but not in the inner city where all the new apartments are being built for people returning to live in the inner city.
start previous.
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