Heidegger for Architects

Adam Sharr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415415170
• eBook ISBN: 9781134120291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Informing the designs of architects as diverse as Peter Zumthor, Steven Holl, Hans Scharoun and Colin St. John Wilson, the work of Martin Heidegger has proved of great interest to architects and architectural theorists.

The first introduction to Heidegger's philosophy written specifically for architects and students of architecture introduces key themes in his thinking, which has proved highly influential among architects as well as architectural historians and theorists. This guide familiarizes readers with significant texts and helps to decodes terms as well as providing quick referencing for further reading.

This concise introduction is ideal for students of architecture in design studio at all levels; students of architecture pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate courses in architectural theory; academics and interested architectural practitioners. Heidegger for Architects is the second book in the new Thinkers for Architects series.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

Few famous philosophers have written specifically for an audience of architects. Martin Heidegger is one of them. He spoke to a gathering of professionals and academics at a conference in Darmstadt in 1951. Hans Scharoun – later architect of the Berlin Philharmonie and German National Library – marked up his programme with glowing comments, enthusing about Heidegger’s talk to friends and acquaintances (Blundell-Jones 1995, 136). The discussion, which so inspired Scharoun, was later printed as an essay called ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’. Republished to this day and translated into many languages, the text influenced more than one generation of architects, theorists and historians during the latter half of the twentieth century. When Peter Zumthor waxes lyrical about the atmospheric potential of spaces and materials; when Christian Norberg-Schulz wrote about the spirit of place; when Juhani Pallasmaa writes about The Eyes of the Skin; when Dalibor Vesely argues about the crisis of representation; when Karsten Harries claims ethical parameters for architecture; when Steven Holl discusses phenomena and paints watercolours evoking architectural experiences; all these establishment figures are responding in some way to Heidegger and his notions of dwelling and place.

Not that the response to Heidegger has been overwhelmingly positive. Far from it. He remains perhaps the most controversial thinker among those who coloured the last deeply troubled century. Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party, triumphantly appointed rector of Freiburg University on the wave of terror and euphoria which brought the fascists to power in 1933. Whether the philosopher’s resignation of that appointment the following year was the end of his infatuation, or whether he remained a lifelong Nazi, seems to depend as much on individual commentators’ sympathy or antipathy for his philosophy as it does on the hotly contested facts of the case. Without doubt there are unpalatable moments in Heidegger’s biography which should be acknowledged and condemned. However, when eminent architectural critics dismiss the philosopher in no uncertain terms – one has written an article titled ‘Forget Heidegger’ (after Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Forget Foucault’) (Leach 2000) – they do so as much from the battleground of architecture’s politics as they do from the moral high ground. Heidegger’s reputation remains a matter of high stakes in the ivory towers of architectural academe. What is clear is that the philosopher resolutely romanticised the rural and the low-tech before, during and after Nazism, skating dangerously close to fascist rhetoric of ‘blood and soil’. It also remains clear that a good deal of ‘high’ Western architecture – and architectural theory – from the latter half of the twentieth century owes a debt to Heidegger’s influence.

Not that the response to Heidegger has been overwhelmingly positive. Far from it. He remains perhaps the most controversial thinker among those who coloured the last deeply troubled century.

What did this troubling philosopher say, then, about architecture? Why have so many architects listened? Heidegger challenged the procedures and protocols of professional practice, his standpoint on architecture part of a broader critique of the technocratic Western world. In a post-war era when Westerners seemed to justify their actions with increasing reference to economic and technical statistics, he pleaded that the immediacies of human experience shouldn’t be forgotten. According to him, people make sense first through their inhabitation of their surroundings, and their emotional responses to them. Only then do they attempt to quantify their attitudes and actions through science and technology. Whereas others in the construction industry, like engineers and quantity surveyors, trade largely in data, the primary trade of architects is arguably in human experience. For the philosopher, building configures physically, over time, how people measure their place in the world. Indeed, by recording traces of human engagement physically at both large and small scales, buildings set out the particular ethos of every builder and dweller. In this way, 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’s model of architecture thus centred on qualities of human experience. His call to reintegrate building with dwelling – to reintegrate the making of somewhere with the activities and qualities of its inhabitation – celebrated non-expert architecture alongside the ‘high’ architecture of books and journals, finding architecture more at home with ongoing daily life than any sort of finished product. In the 1960s and 1970s, such thinking chimed with the work of architectural writers like Jane Jacobs (1961), Bernard Rudofsky (1964) and Christopher Alexander (1977a, 1977b) who also questioned the authority of professional expertise and sought instead to validate non-expert building. Architectural practitioners valued the challenges which Heidegger’s work offered to the priorities of the industry in which they found themselves, and indeed to the priorities constituting Western society. Architectural academics, through Heidegger’s writing, negotiated productive stories and images about activities of building, its origins and its representations.

Even in this short outline, distinctive characteristics of Heidegger’s rhetoric emerge: a particular morality; a promotion of the value of human presence and inhabitation; an unapologetic mysticism; a tendency to nostalgia; and a drive to highlight the limits of science and technology. This rhetoric has its heroes and villains. The heroes are unaffected provincials, those somehow attuned to their bodies and emotions, and those prone to romanticise the past. The villains are statisticians and technocrats intent on mathematical quantification, professionals bent on appropriating everyday activities through legislative powers, and urban sophisticates in thrall to fashion. Dangers of the milieu of Heidegger’s thinking are already apparent here. The potential for romantic myths of belonging to exclude people as well as include them, and a scepticism of high intellectual debate in favour of common sense, can veer toward totalitarianism. Unchecked, such thinking can lead in the direction of the fascist rhetoric with which Heidegger himself was involved, at least for a short time, in the 1930s.

Heidegger’s work and controversy are seldom far apart. But no desire for controversy prompts what follows. This is an architect’s book, written for architects by an architect. While it deals with philosophical writings, this book does not claim new philosophical insights or hope to solve philosophical questions. Rather, it aims to draw architects’ attention to some of those questions, emphasising aspects of them which seem closest to the activities of a design studio. There are those for whom Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism invalidates his work and, for them, this book is at best wasted effort and at worst complicity with a bad man and his troubling writing. I acknowledge this argument and sympathise with it. However it seems folly to pretend that Heidegger did not hold great influence over post-war expert architectural practice and thinking. He did – many influential practitioners and academics paid his work plenty of attention – and legacies of his influence persist. For that reason it’s important to remember and appreciate the parameters of his arguments. My aim here is to help you approach the philosopher’s texts for yourself. My advice, however, is caution. Keep up your critical guard. Where some architects have encountered productive design ideas and some scholars have found profound insights, others have encountered fundamental difficulties.

This book concentrates on Heidegger’s ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ – first published in 1951 – alongside two contemporary texts which help to amplify its ideas: ‘The Thing’ (1950); and ‘… poetically, Man dwells …’ (1951). Some philosophers would find this focus puzzling. Throughout much of his life, Heidegger enjoyed the calculated display of anti-academic tendencies, inspired by devilment as much as conviction, frequently arguing for the instinctive over the learned dialogue of the academy (Safranski 1998, 128–129). Arguably, these essays of 1950–51 mark his furthest orbit from bookish philosophy, his most vehement rhetoric in favour of unmediated emotion. This is the period in Heidegger’s work that philosophers cite least. However, although he wrote about architecture at other times in his life – notably in the 1935 text ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (translated 1971), as well as in Being and Time of 1927 (1962) and ‘Art and Space’ of 1971 (1973) – the three 1950–51 essays are arguably the most architectural of his writings precisely because it was here that he made amongst his most forthright claims for the authority of immediate experience.

Throughout much of his life, Heidegger enjoyed the calculated display of anti-academic tendencies, inspired by devilment as much as conviction, frequently arguing for the instinctive over the learned dialogue of the academy.

After this Introduction, the book begins with a mountain walk to introduce some of the philosopher’s ideas, which are expanded and referenced in following sections. A short biography precedes a discussion of Heidegger’s essays. My discussion is organised around the structure of each text with reference to other material where relevant. This approach maintains – for better or worse – some sense of the philosopher’s rhetorical tactics and the circular mode of his arguments. It also allows you, should you wish, to follow Heidegger’s texts alongside this book. All three essays are available in English translation in Poetry, Language, Thought, first published in 1971 and still in print, and references are given here to page numbers in that volume. The final section of this book explores how some architects and architectural commentators have interpreted Heidegger’s thinking, organised around one particular example: Peter Zumthor’s spa at Vals in Switzerland.

CHAPTER 2
A Mountain Walk

Heidegger stayed regularly at a hut built for him in 1922 above Todtnauberg in the Black Forest mountains, retreating there when he could. As he grew older, he philosophised about these circumstances: the forest walk became important to his writing and he gave at least one lecture on skiing. He claimed that thinking was analogous to following a forest path, naming one volume of essays Holzwege after forest paths, and another Wegmarken, waymarks, after the signs that help walkers stick to a trail. With this in mind, I invite you on a mountain walk to introduce some aspects of Heidegger’s thinking concerning architecture, and some of its difficulties.

Although the philosopher’s excursions followed paths in his beloved Black Forest, our walk will be in the English Lake District. We start at the small market town of Keswick which, in summer, does not have an air of calm. Its pavements, shops, pubs and tearooms swarm with tourists intent on an enjoyable day out: trippers arriving by coach, and families trying to forget their frustration at how long it took to park the car. Although the hills which surround the town and the adjacent lake of Derwentwater are a constant looming backdrop, their presence recedes behind frantic conviviality. As we head out of town towards the most brooding of the hills on the horizon, the grey mass of Skiddaw, the streets grow less busy, walking begins to calm us and a sense of mild relief takes hold. We turn from main road into side road, which becomes track and then path. Ten minutes later, the town already feels a world away. The next half hour is spent pre-occupied with climbing uphill, which is hard work, and the changing landscape gets little of our attention. But we must have become attuned to it because, when we reach the small overflowing car park at the base of the mountain proper, this tarmac outpost feels like an alien intrusion. We don’t follow other walkers to the main hack up Skiddaw itself, but take a smaller path which curves up gently behind towards the base of a barren mountain valley. Here, we get our last glimpses for a while over Keswick, the car park and the walkers on their way to the peak. Alone now, we start to notice more. Our senses seem to have become more acute, or maybe we’ve just put aside some of our worries, because the birdsong and the adjacent stream seem louder, and shadows cast on the slopes by scudding clouds have caught our attention. We notice our own shadows projected onto the ground and grow more aware of the movement of our own bodies, and the stimulation of our senses.

Heidegger felt that aspects of everyday life, particularly in the Western world, served as distractions from the ‘proper’ priorities of human existence. For him, most of us, most of the time, were missing the point. He remained entranced by human ‘being’, by the question – which no parent can answer for their children – of why we are here or, in Leibniz’s formulation which Heidegger liked, why there is not nothing. To him, the fact of human existence should not be routinely ignored but instead celebrated as central to life in all its richness and variation. Every human activity from the intellectual to the mundane, considered properly as he perceived it, derived authority from, and offered opportunities to explore philosophically, the ever central question of being. Yet, for Heidegger, most people immerse themselves in daily life in order to forget the big and difficult questions. The likes of worrying about parking the car in Keswick, or whether there will be a table in the tea room, were in the philosopher’s view an all too comfortable distraction; a sort of occupational therapy allowing people to avoid confronting difficult questions about the raw fact of existence, and the implications of those questions.

Every human activity from the intellectual to the mundane, considered properly as he perceived it, derived authority from, and offered opportunities to explore philosophically, the ever central question of being.

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. They’re reminders of what a wonderful place the world can seem. To him, when we notice these reminders – when we remember to notice our own being – we achieve a kind of respite. Such moments, for Heidegger, allow people to locate themselves in a bigger picture, in a time span much longer than a life, and find an accommodating distance from petty concerns. The philosopher was prone to adorn his proper thinking with the rhetoric of rigour. He claimed that a disciplined openness was needed to hear and see in detail the veracity of the surrounding world. To think in this way was difficult work, seemingly best done alone. Heidegger was no enthusiast of Socratic dialogue, of the verbal sparring between scholars held up as a model of philosophy.

On our walk, we continue to climb slowly along the valley between the mountains of Skiddaw and Blencathra. The few scudding clouds gradually thicken into a blackening cloak covering the blue. No other soul is in sight, the only traces of movement the birds and a handful of sheep. The distant hills in front start to mist over. We realise that this mist is rain, and it’s moving towards us along the valley. The peaks either side of us disappear. Up here, we can see weather moving around us and toward us. As the skies darken, this looks as though it might be a serious storm. We have time to put on our waterproof clothes. All of a sudden, we realise that the solitude of this walk is less benevolent than it first seemed. We’re about to be a long way from home in a storm. As heavy rain begins, we hope that we won’t lose our bearings.

Alongside Heidegger’s yearning for rigour, he found being to resonate most loudly in contemporary life through moments of high emotion. Anyone who has been lost on a mountainside in mist or rain will appreciate the fear it can evoke. In the face of the elements, human powerlessness is focused sharply. Storms at sea, or earthquakes, or floods evoke similar feelings. To Heidegger, intensities of emotion, like falling in love or the death of someone close, also show how little control individuals have to wield. They indicate how close everyone remains to the immediacies of life and death, of being and nothing. For him, the props and preoccupations of daily life, the scientific and technological support systems over which we do have some control, are seldom of relevance or comfort in circumstances like these. Our being is thrust central to our attention, whether we like it or not, and our favourite distractions are relegated. For Heidegger, being and its alternative should continue to inspire awe among us. According to his thinking, we lose our bearings when we forget the continued presence and potential might of being.

To Heidegger, intensities of emotion, like falling in love or the death of someone close, also show how little control individuals have to wield.

Although it’s scary when the rain envelops us, bouncing off the ground and soaking our waterproofs, the storm isn’t what we feared. It passes quickly, the skies clear and we breathe a sigh of relief. As we walk, the peaks reappear, the valley widens and a distant house surrounded by a handful of windblown trees heaves into view. The long low building with its steeply pitched roof nestles into a south-facing bank with an external terrace levelled in front. The familiar scale of its windows and doors, lined up in two rows, are hugely dominated by the surrounding peaks. As we approach, it becomes obvious that the stone walls are built from the rock of the hills themselves. There is clearly no road to this house, nor any connections to mains services. It’s the only sign of human inhabi...

Table of contents

• Thinkers for Architects
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Illustration Credits
• Acknowledgements
• CHAPTER 1 Introduction
• CHAPTER 2 A Mountain Walk
• CHAPTER 3 Placing Heidegger
• CHAPTER 4 Heidegger’s Thinking on Architecture
• CHAPTER 5 Heidegger and Architects
• Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index