Architecture as the Ethics of Climate

Jin Baek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317438007
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

At a time when climate and ethics have become so important to architectural debate, this book proposes an entirely new way for architects to engage with these core issues.

Drawing on Tetsuro Watsuji's (1889-1960) philosophy, the book illuminates climate not as a collection of objective natural phenomena, but as a concrete form of bond in which "who we are"—the subjective human experience—is indivisibly intertwined with the natural phenomena. The book further elucidates the inter-personal nature of climatic experiences, criticizing a view that sees atmospheric effects of climate under the guise of personal experientialism and reinforcing the linkage between climate and ethos as the appropriateness of a setting for human affairs. This ethical premise of climate stretches the horizon of sustainability as pertaining not only to man's solitary relationship with natural phenomena—a predominant trend in contemporary discourse of sustainability—but also to man's relationship with man. Overcoming climatic determinism—regional determinism, too—and expanding the ethics of the inter-personal to the level where the whole and particulars are joined through the dialectics of the mutually-negating opposites, Jin Baek develops a new thesis engaging with the very urgent issues inherent in sustainable architecture.

Crucially, the book explores examples that join climate and the dynamics of the inter-personal, including:

• Japanese vernacular residential architecture
• the white residential architecture of Richard Neutra
• contemporary architectural works and urban artifacts by Tadao Ando and Aldo Rossi

Beautifully illustrated, this book is an important contribution to the discourse which surrounds architecture, climate and ethics and encourages the reader to think more broadly about how to respond to the current challenges facing the profession.

1

TETSURO WATSUJI’S NOTION OF FUDO AND ITS CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE

Positivism fixates our relationship with surrounding things on their instrumental potential as sources of energy preferably with no negative side effects such as pollution. In this context, it is undeniably significant to uncover an environmental philosophy that speaks of what the natural environment is for us beyond the positivistic framing. It is all the more significant if the philosophy operates as a groundwork for the restoration of a broad spectrum of sustainability that takes into consideration the plurality of human living—plurality not in the sense of individualistic and isolated interests of human beings, but in the sense of diverse facets of humanity such as the practical, the ethical and the spiritual. One essential environmental philosophy of this kind is that of Tetsuro Watsuji (1889–1960). His conception of the environment went beyond seeing it as a collection of natural factors—climatic, scenic, and topographical—of a given land. It also overcame the limit of traditional climatology, a field of study that probes into the relationship between the human being and natural phenomena upon the model of force and response, and cause and result, i.e., how climatic features affect the style of living and how the human being in turn overcomes the imposed natural conditions. Distinguishing itself from these approaches, Watsuji’s study uncovered a deeper bond between human beings and climatic features. It illuminated how fudo operates as the metaphor of subjectivity, or “who we are.” Fudo is a context in which not only “who I am” but also “who we are” is found and from which the ‘I’ and others emerge in reciprocity to formulate collective cultural measures in response to climatic phenomena. Watsuji’s fudo reveals an inseparable link between natural phenomena and the ethics of the inter-personal, opening a path for an extended notion of sustainability that joins the relationship between man and nature with the relationship between man and man—that is, the inter-personal as mediated through climatic phenomena. Watsuji’s fudo clarifies that without considering the collective humane characteristics of a natural climatic phenomenon, any sustainable act is inefficient, if not flawed. For this reason, one needs to review and interpret Watsuji’s environmental thinking with the aim of elucidating the nature of the relationship between man and the natural environment, and its intrinsic linkage with the inter-personal.

Beyond Heidegger’s Dasein

Among the thinkers who were influential on Watsuji’s philosophy of fudo,¹ Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) can be singled out as the most significant figure. Watsuji went to Germany in 1927 to study philosophy under the auspices of the Ministry of Education of the Japanese government. This was the very year Heidegger published Being and Time. Heidegger developed his philosophy by criticizing “the Western tradition’s over-emphasis on the individual subject separated from its embedded-ness in everyday life.”² Watsuji adopted the phenomenological embedded-ness of the everyday life from Heidegger. He criticized Heidegger, however, for still being shackled by individualism. In his review of Being and Time, Watsuji saw not only the unique contribution of the idea of Dasein to humanity but also its lopsided emphasis on the dimension of time and the downplay of spatiality of Dasein. Being and Time was tainted with what Watsuji saw as the trait of Western individualism that lays stress unjustly on the individual at the risk of disregarding the thrownness (Geworfenheit) of the person into a location, or the societal and spatial dimension of the human being. For him, “the limitations of Heidegger’s work” is its portrayal of “time not linked with space.”³ Dasein was the being of any place, failing to see the fundamental significance of location in the definition of the character of the human being.

Watsuji later qualified further his critique of Heidegger. He acknowledged Heidegger more fully by claiming that the German thinker brought forward the spatiality “constitutive of the being of the subject”⁴ in the European intellectual history. Watsuji also praised Heidegger’s discussion of “an existential spatiality (existential Räumlichkeit) of “a being there (Dasein), which is regarded as ‘being in the world’.”⁵ Heidegger’s contribution was clear: Uncovering of the pre-presence of the world and the pre-situated nature of the human being before it is abstracted into the subject in confrontation with the object. In this conception of the world and the human being, “space is not inside of the subject nor is the world within space.”⁶ Spatiality emerges “in its concern with what is at hand,”⁷ grounding itself upon man’s relationship with tools that are “in their region (Gegend) at their place (Platz).”⁸ Watsuji wrote, “For this reason, the ontological subject is itself spatial, as a being in the world.”⁹ Heidegger’s thinking, however, still left something to be desired. The primacy in Heidegger’s spatiality consists of the relationship between the subject and tools joined through care, or Sorge, not attending fully to “the relationship of communication among human beings.”¹⁰ For Watsuji, the relationship between man and tool is posterior to the relationship between man and man. Watsuji wrote,

But the concern of I with tools is the very ground out of which the relationship between an individual subject versus the objects of nature emerges immediately as soon as its abstraction is carried a step further. The practical relationship between one human being and another is not a major element constitutive of the “concern” he tried to expound. Or rather, it should have been its major element, but this he failed to grasp. This is why spatiality, even though it was conceived of as that structure which is characteristic of the existence of the subject, still stopped short of being a spatiality inherent in the practical interconnections of human beings. This is why he considered temporality to be of far greater importance than spatiality.¹¹

What is fudo?

Criticizing Heidegger’s Dasein as an individual being characterized lopsidedly by time at the expense of disregarding spatiality, Watsuji brought to our attention the fundamental significance of spatiality of the human being. Here the spatiality does not mean the significance of space in the scientific sense, but what Watsuji called fudo. In Sino-Japanese linguistic tradition, fudo literally means wind and earth. However, Watsuji did not treat fudo as a natural environment, in which biological, physical and geographical features exert forces on human beings, who in turn transform the environment. Watsuji wrote,

I wish to treat this natural environment of man not as “nature (shizen)” but as “climate (fudo) . . . ” What I am concerned with is whether the climate we experience in daily life is to be regarded as a natural phenomenon. It is proper that natural science should treat climate as a natural phenomenon, but it is another question whether the phenomena of climate are in essence objects of natural science.¹²

Watsuji’s point can be accounted for this way. Temporality conditions our concrete experience of the world. As an abstraction of this concrete experience, we come up with time as a concept. The same goes for our spatial understanding. There are spaces first. Then, space emerges as a concept abstracted from our experiences of spaces. Likewise, before there is nature, there is fudo, or climate. Nature as such, or pure nature, is an abstraction. It could be even an illusion that there is such a thing as nature in separation with humanity. Fudo, or climate, seeks to overcome this division between man and nature—this dichotomous framework.

For Watsuji, this manner of thinking in which man and nature are treated as two separate entities misses more fundamental bonds between man and the climatic phenomena, bonds suitably connoted in fudo. First, fudo indicates concrete phenomena in daily life in which, for instance, a physical movement of air is never apprehended as a scientific fact. Rather, the movement appears “as a mountain blast or the cold, dry wind that sweeps through Tokyo at the end of the winter,”¹³ or a spring breeze “which blows off cherry blossoms or which caresses the waves.”¹⁴ Second, and more importantly according to Watsuji, fudo is “the agent by which human life is objectified, and it is here that man comprehends himself; there is self-discovery” in it.¹⁵ It is this reason that “the climatic character is the character of subjective human existence.”¹⁶ His examples included “sabaku,” the Japanese term for desert—one example being the Arabian desert around Aden, which Watsuji himself experienced, and another being the Gobi desert that spans from northern and northwestern China to southern Mongolia. The term “sabaku” is a combination of sand (sa) and bleakness (baku) to signify one single reality. For Watsuji, this coinage indicates the fact that “sabaku” is not simply a physical expanse of sand, but a phenomenon of the human heart—aridity, bleakness and loneliness—creating an empathetic unity between man and the sandy landscape.¹⁷ For instance, the terms lik...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Architecture as the Ethics of Climate
• Praise
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Tetsuro Watsuji’s Notion of fudo and its Cultural Significance
• 2 “Self-less Openness” and fudo: Renewed Sustainable Significance of Japanese Vernacular Architecture
• 3 The Ecology of ‘We’ and Ambient Warmth: Richard Neutra’s Ecological Architecture
• 4 Dialectics Between the Regional and the Trans-regional
• Conclusion
• Index