Alberto Pérez-Gómez 01/20/2007 08:35 AM

Alberto Pérez-Gómez
1998_2
Dwelling on Heidegger:
Architecture as mimetic techno-poiesis

1 Heidegger's essay "Building Dwelling Thinking" is today one of the most popular and yet often
misunderstood philosophical texts read by architects in Britain and the USA. Architects' interest in
philosophy is of course not a novelty in the tradition of Western culture and indeed it could be
argued that architectural theory, until the end of the 18th century, always contained metaphysical
concerns, whether explicit in the texts, or implicit in the multidisciplinary nature of architectural
thinking and practice. In the context of the specialized architectural theory and practice of
modernity, however, particularly after the popularization of the instrumental theories of Jacques-
Nicolas-Louis Durand and his followers at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris in the early 19th
century, this philosophical interest became rare, and whenever it appeared it became a sign of
concern about the poverty of a practice dominated by technology and "calculative thinking." In the
last decades, coinciding in fact with the broader critique of European modernism in cultural
studies, this concern has demonstrated a desire on the part of architects to understand the status
of architecture as something different from "mere" pragmatic building or irrelevant bourgeois
decoration.

2 This concern, I believe, is echoed in Heidegger's text. Heidegger, as we know, fleshes out
beautifully the relationship between building and dwelling as poetic, in the sense of poiesis, the
making that is particular to humans. He is also very explicit about the issue that becomes an
explicit concern for architects who, following in the footsteps of Piranesi and Boullée, understand
the difficulty of "building" a poetic architecture, i.e. a significant architecture, in the "new" world of
science and technology. Humanity should dwell poetically in order to fulfill its potential, but since
the final installation of the "age of the world-picture" around the turn of the 19th century, it has
rarely done so. Reciprocally, not every kind of building allows for dwelling, and even the very
possibility of any building of the technological age allowing for dwelling becomes a question. The
issue, which is of course the architectural question par excellence, is to characterize the form of
building that may, however precariously, allow for dwelling, understanding that dwelling is first and
foremost the way human beings are on earth, the authentic way of being human, oriented in
thought and action vis-a-vis our inevitable mortality and our capacity to think the infinite: the limits
that make freedom a real possibility.

3 The question for architecture, we must emphasize from the start, is inherently fraught with
dangers. This is because together with the instrumental methodologies of modernity, Durand also
introduced a delusory relation with history, one that misconstrues our tradition as a material
typology of buildings and offers what seems to be a way out of the dilemma, one that has been
taken by postmodern style architects and conservative ideologues to align with Heidegger's
concern. While architecture, recognizing its status as a cultural (rather than "natural") discipline
since the early 19th century, has by necessity conceptualized its expressive power in terms of
linguistic analogies and its present possibilities though a relationship to history, the tendency has
been to conceptualize formal strategies in terms of merely syntactic (stylistic) responses to
cultural imperatives (usually simply dialectical), leading, for example, to the naive belief that the
whole meaning of a medieval city square or a Corinthian capital may be simply "recovered" in the
practice of contemporary architecture, disregarding the undeniable reality of our changing mental
landscape and our technological flesh.

4 In order to qualify how Heidegger's words might be of interest to architecture in the late 20th

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century, it is my contention that the essay should not be read in isolation. Reading it in isolation
usually leads to a nostalgic and even dangerously mystifying concept of architecture. This
reading, it must be granted, may be the fault of Heidegger himself as he speaks about vernacular
construction or of a seemingly traditional understanding of "place," but read in the context of his
other related writings, alternative readings are more plausible. In Heidegger's favour it must be
remembered that ever since the late 18th century, the great German Romantics had understood
that a position of resistance to the problems of an insufficient reason to account for the major
questions of humanity carried with it potential misunderstandings that nevertheless needed to be
engaged in order to preserve the very possibility of meaning in our personal existence. I propose
that the meaning of Heidegger's critique in "Building Dwelling Thinking" as a non-escapist position
emerges most clearly when understood as a piece of an argument that may be construed
through Heidegger's late work, in particular considering at least four important essays: "The
Question Concerning Technology," "The Origin of the Work of Art" and "The Age of the World
Picture" and "Art of Space".

5 Inthe Western tradition, before the Enlightenment and even, precariously, during the 18th
century, architecture had preserved its capacity to convey knowledge, in the sense of framing and
supporting (ritual) actions that allowed for a radical orientation of human becoming to a
suprasensory Being . Late 18th century architects complained about a profound crisis of meaning
in their discipline. Once a cosmography and a mythology disappeared as socially accepted
realities, the referent of architecture became problematized. This issue is obviously reflected in
the philosophical writings of Heidegger, particularly thought his diagnosis of our loss of a world
given to experience and substituted by a picture or re-presentation. This is of course the story of
modern philosophy, starting with Descartes, and the origins of this problem for architecture may
be traced to the late 17th century and the work of Claude Perrault. After Perrault, architects
became increasingly interested in developing a tactic of architectural expression based on human
culture and institutions, as a mimesis of history, rather than as a mimesis of nature. The early
diagnosis of the crisis of meaning in architecture related the form of knowledge conveyed by
buildings to reading, as in the example of the cathedral understood as the medieval encyclopedia
or biblia pauperum, allowing the individual to understand himself or herself in relation to an order
re-presented by the architecture itself. It is perhaps significant that Victor Hugo, in his "Notre-
Dame de Paris," declared the end of architecture and associated it to the advent of the book. In
his novel, the Renaissance book is made responsible for literally killing the cathedral as a source
of knowledge for society. Although in retrospect Victor Hugo's argument is partial, he begs the
question, indeed crucial since the early 19th century, concerning the very capacity of architecture
to orient us and let us dwell. This is no mere literary fantasy, architecture had fallen into crisis,
closely following the initial crisis of the European sciences as diagnosed by Husserl, and the last
steps of being's occultation as described by Heidegger. Ever since, architects have been
struggling with the very survival of the discipline as a legitimate endeavour, distinct from
pragmatic shelter (engineering and technology), and from a mere aesthetization of shelter to
comply with fashion and the dictates of consumerism or commercialism.

6 Architecture orients, indeed, but its mode of orientation, i.e. what it says, is inseparable from
itself. It orients the body in action, framing the actions, traditionally formalized rituals, that allow
humans to participate in the totality, the wholeness of culture. Precisely because of its status as
the frame for human presence, constituting the space of intersubjectivity where we appear for the
other and therefore appear as ourselves, architecture is intricately related to problems of being in
the world. It is for this reason that the issue of architecture as a clearing for dwelling cannot be
restricted to the cabin in the black forest, or a masonry bridge built by the Romans... Our world
as technology is unavoidable, the only way to determine the quality of a building conducive to
dwelling must be through technology itself. While recognizing the distinctions between traditional
techne and technology as modes of action and the vastly differing relationships they set up
between the imagining self and the world, a building as dwelling must be construed through
technology, using this critical meditation to disclose the "mysterious" origins of technology in
techne and its capacity to embody truth, in the mode of "aletheia." What is at stake is never an
overcoming of technology that might "leave it behind," (Überwindung) but rather a twisting and
healing (Verwindung), a destabilizing that may show that technology is not absolute truth, that

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there are other ways available to humanity for relating to the world, means that need also result
in a self-transformation that is perhaps related to Heideggerian Gelassenheit, strategies other
than power and domination.

7 In architectural terms, this would never amount to a nostalgic return to primitive or classical
forms, nor to the embracing of any a priori mythology or ideology. Rather the issue is an
imaginative "destructuring" that may endanger our presumed existential safety and disclose us as
truly mortal. It is this aspect of Heidegger's reading of the work of art, the "earth" that needs
emphasis in our epoch of nihilism. We are fragile, and life's uncertainty is not merely incidental.
Architecture may open up a space for dwelling if it can use technology to demystify its presumed
hegemonic power over us, perhaps simply by taking seriously the capacity of poetic tropes to
"unconceal," to frame institutions that may put into question the demystification of humanity's
spiritual reality, suffered as a result of positivism and calculative thinking. In order to accomplish
this cultural task, architecture must be humble as an act, yet recognize that it emerges from an
artistic centre, an imagining self, ethical and responsible, rather than from the consensus of
"communicative action." Architectural expression in the space of chora, understood as cultural
space but also the space of human appearance, the space of the city beyond classical
definitions, may thus gather the fourfold in a non-escapist way, revealing the mystery of depth
that makes us human (rather than a prosaic third dimension), the mystery of Merleau-Ponty's
"flesh" (rather than a world split into objective and subjective realms in which space is objective
and time is merely a subjective effect of repetition or a construction of absent instants). An
architecture to reveal humanity not in time but made of time, not in space but radically embodied
and existing in a thick, vivid present, between the earth and the sky, as a unique place in the
universe, always subject to forces larger than ourselves that in fact make us human, call us to
take measure and yet always lay beyond the reach of calculation. In order to accomplish this aim,
architecture must understand itself differently. This is, I believe, the challenge offered by
Heidegger: For architectural theory never to accept its status to be merely equivalent to applied
science; for architecture never to conceive of itself as a resolution of an equation that may result
in efficient "form," regardless of the complexity or sophistication of the equation, nor to
understand itself as "aesthetic object," if we understand this notion in terms of 18th century
categories. Hans-Georg Gadamer, following upon the insights of Heidegger, has convincingly
written about "the relevance of the beautiful," i.e. beauty as truth. Extrapolating Gadamer's
terminology, architecture may be relevant as knowledge and recover its association with "truth" if
we understand it in terms of play, symbol and festival. This involves a recognition of the temporal
dimension of architectural meaning, and of its narrative connections. As a project of a potentially
poetic way of living on earth, the narrative architectural "project" becomes a privileged mode of
construing a true architecture for dwelling. Both "narrative script" and its "formal frame" must
issue from the enlightened imagination of the architect, oriented through history and grounded in
it, as it is only in this manner, and in the sense of Nietzsche's seminal essay "On the Uses and
Disadvantages of History for Life," that true and responsible innovation may come about in our
post-cosmological epoch. The result should never be a pastiche of the past, but the truly novel,
which inspires awe and yet is also recognizable, respectful of our heritage, yet never an act of
mere historic restoration. We could quote in this regard the words of Heidegger, who writes
without ambiguity: "The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can
bring about nothing in itself other than self-deception and blindness in relation to the historical
moment" ("The Age of the World Picture" in The Question Concerning Technology and other
Essays" New York, 1977).

8 Thisargument is futher supported if we extrapolate to architecture the argument Heidegger

makes for sculpture in "Kunst und Raum". The issue is a making of ´place´ rather than the
geometric space of Galilei and Newton, isomorphic and homogeneous; a ´place´ that is neighter
merely ´found´ nor merely ´invented´.
Two excellent examples will serve me by the way of closing: Le Corbusier´s Convent La Tourette
and Daniel Libeskind´s Jewish Museum in Berlin.
Both are special in a deconstructive or untied way. La Tourette, a religious building that speaks
rather about an emptiness that is not nothing -a secular or ecomenic religiousity of nothing.
Conversely the museum is a secular space that is also untied of this category. It is as if the

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sacred/profane dychotomy world is unable to sustain the possibility of dwelling of postmodern

humanity. These two buildings defy those categories and in so doing stand for authentic dwelling
- neighter aesthetic contemplation nor instrumental use - Awareness of mortality works but does
not fit like a glove.

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