Rethinking Dwelling
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Rethinking Dwelling

Heidegger, Place, Architecture

Jeff Malpas

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eBook - ePub

Rethinking Dwelling

Heidegger, Place, Architecture

Jeff Malpas

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About This Book

Over the last twenty years, Jeff Malpas' research has involved his engagement with architects and other academics around the issues of place, architecture and landscape and particularly the way these practitioners have used the work of Martin Heidegger. In Rethinking Dwelling, Malpas' primary focus is to rethink of these issues in a way that is directly informed by an understanding of place and the human relation it. With essays on a range of architectural and design concerns, as well as engaging with other thinkers on topics including textuality in architecture, contemporary high-rise construction, the significance of the line, the relation between building and memory and the idea of authenticity in architecture, this book departs from the traditional phenomenological focus and provides students and scholars with a new ontological assessment of landscape and architecture. As such, it may also be used on other 'spatial' or 'topographic' disciplines including geography, sociology, anthropology, and art in which the 'spatial turn' has been so important.

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Year
2021
ISBN
9781350172920
Part I
ARCHITECTURE IN TOPOLOGICAL THINKING
Chapter 1
PLACE AND DWELLING
In a series of critically acclaimed films – London, Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins – the British film-maker Patrick Keiller provides an evocative but also critical exploration of themes of place, space, identity and politics as they appear in the post-Thatcherite landscape of England in the 1990s and 2000s.1 The films are of interest architecturally, as well as culturally, since they are largely composed around a series of images of landscapes, both urban and rural, as well as buildings, roads, shops and factories. There are no actors, only a disembodied narrator, who speaks over a series of separate, statically shot scenes. The final film, Robinson in Ruins, produced in collaboration with the geographer Doreen Massey, presents itself as aiming to explore the discrepancy between ‘on the one hand, the cultural and critical attention devoted to experience of mobility and displacement and, on the other, a tacit but widespread tendency to fall back on formulations of dwelling that drive from a more settled agricultural past’.2
The talk of ‘dwelling’ here is clearly intended as a direct reference to the discussion in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’. At one point in the film, the narrator is heard speaking of the main character, Robinson (who is never seen), having visited a local supermarket (a German-owned chain, Lidl, that is common across the UK):
Despite his increasing insubstantiality, Robinson had returned … with two bottles of Putinov vodka, a snow shovel, and several own-brand items, in illustrated packaging, that recalled the dwelling of Black Forest farmers which, for Heidegger, let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals, enter in simple oneness into things. For which simple oneness Robinson began to search by visiting a well.3
What is included here is effectively a quotation from the English translation of Heidegger’s essay: ‘Let us think for a while’, writes Heidegger, ‘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.’4 (see Figure 1.1). In Keiller’s film, Heidegger is thus invoked as exemplary of exactly the tendency to fall back on ideas and modes of thinking that derive, not from the experience of mobility or displacement, but rather ‘from a more settled agricultural past’. As such, Heidegger’s work and the ideas that work expresses are presented as having little relevance to the contemporary world – even to represent an absurd response to it. It is an absurdity and irrelevance expressed in Keiller’s film by the somewhat ridiculous list of supermarket purchases, and of Robinson as beginning his search for Heidegger’s ‘simple oneness’ by visiting a well that turns out, in its contemporary form, to be little more than a barely flowing and neglected stream.
Figure 1.1 Traditional Black Forest (Schwarzwalder) farmhouse, near Triberg, Baden, 50 kms northeast of Freiburg im Breisgau. Neue Photographische Gesellschaft A.-G. Steglitz-Berlin 1904. Wikimedia Commons.
The contrast that Keiller and Massey draw, between the mobile and displaced character of contemporary experience and the settled agricultural ‘dwelling’ of the past, echoes the almost identical contrast that appears in Hilde Heynen’s account of the situation of contemporary architecture:
[The] modern consciousness is that of ‘the homeless mind’, and foreigners and migrants provide a model for the experience of every individual in a modern, mobile, and unstable society. Dwelling is in the first instance associated with tradition, security, and harmony, with a life situation that guarantees connectedness and meaningfulness. Considerations such as these underlie the dilemmas that architecture is faced with.5
The contrast is repeated in Neil Leach’s work, ‘The Dark Side of the Domus’, from the same year. There, Leach offers ‘a critique of the concept of “dwelling”’, which has, he says, ‘become something of a dominant paradigm within architectural theory’. ‘Dwelling’, he argues, is tied to an emphasis on ‘the soil, on the earth’, involving ‘an evocation for [sic] the Heimat, for the homeland’,6 and is associated with ‘the rooted, the nationalistic and the static’.7 Standing in opposition to the urban and the metropolitan,8 ‘dwelling’ is said to be ‘ill equipped to deal with our contemporary cultural conditions’, and so Leach concludes ‘that architecture must look to a more flexible theoretical model, more in tune with the fluidity, flux and complexity of our contemporary modes of existence’.9 In Heidegger for Architects – a work which seems to argue that Heidegger is not really ‘for’ architects at all or should be administered only in very small and controlled doses – Adam Sharr repeats a similar set of conclusions, warning against the dangers of ‘Heidegger’s romantic provincialism’.10
The criticisms that appear in Leach and Heynen, in particular, pick up on lines of argument that are present in earlier architectural discussions. Anthony Vidler, for instance, deals with Heidegger as part of his own exploration of what he calls the ‘architectural uncanny’, and so of ideas of homelessness and the ‘un-homely’ (which is the literal meaning of the German term, unheimlich, usually translated as ‘uncanny’), associating Heidegger with a ‘profound nostalgia’ for a ‘premodern’ form of belonging.11 Mark Wigley takes the image of the ‘house’ in Heidegger’s writings (in a way that itself prefigures aspects of Leach’s account) as representative of Heidegger’s complicity in political violence as well as operating to disrupt and confuse any genuine architectural sensibility – the house becomes a way of withdrawing from the spatial, the public, the modern.12 Heynen and Leach are significant because of their focus on ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, and the specific critique of dwelling that they advance. Of course, not only do their critiques not stand alone, but dwelling alone is not all that is at issue here.
As dwelling is invariably connected with place – is a mode of being-in-place – so the critique of dwelling is also a critique of place, or of much of the thinking that takes place as a key notion. And the sorts of claims that appear in Heynen, Leach and Sharr, as well as being implicit in Keiller, appear in a host of other works in architecture and elsewhere that take issue with a notion of place that is assumed to be no less problematic than that of dwelling. Understood as static, settled, ‘rural’ and past, and as therefore associated, too, with the ‘mythic’ and the ‘romantic’, place is itself frequently contrasted with the supposedly mobile and interconnected character of the modern world, and with a mode of thinking that, as it is tuned to such mobility and interconnectivity, is also associated with the urban and the cosmopolitan, with the real rather than the ‘mythic’, with the contemporary and the futural. This contrast is operative within contemporary architectural discussion – and not only in relation to Heidegger. It seems, for instance, to be at work, if not always in quite these terms, in the famous dispute between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman at Harvard in 1982.13
The contrast at issue here might seem to be a simple and straightforward one, and certainly the terms in which it is presented appear to reinforce that impression (even if things become somewhat more complicated in Heynen’s discussion).14 Yet, as soon as one presses upon it, the contrast starts to become awkward, uncertain, problematic. Indeed, it is remarkable how many different issues and ideas are bound up together here – especially in discussions such as those of Leach and Sharr (and almost whenever Heidegger is directly at issue). They include ideas, not only of ‘dwelling’ as contrasted to ‘modernity’, or of the rural as against the urban (the ‘provincial’ as against the ‘cosmopolitan’15), but also of home and ‘homelessness’, of settlement and exile, of the familiar and the strange, the grounded and the ungrounded, the emancipatory and the oppressive, the conservative and the progressive, the fascist and the democratic. One might wonder whether there are not too many ideas here – too many different terms and issues – than can be conjoined, as it seems they often are, into a set of simple dualities.
At this point, however, it becomes evident that what is at issue concerns not just a particular thinker, a single episode in intellectual history, or even one specific idea taken on its own. Heynen, for one, is quite clear on the way in which the questions that arise out of Heidegger’s discussion of dwelling are part of a much larger constellation of issues that are central to contemporary architecture, and that she presents in terms of architecture’s relation to modernity. So, although the problem of ‘dwelling’ may be situated in an important way in relation to Heidegger’s ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, the problem goes well beyond that text, encompassing place no less than it does dwelling, and raising fundamental questions about the primary orientations of architectural thought and practice.
This first part of this book takes a closer look at the cluster of issues that appear here – exploring the contrast that appears in Heynen, as well as in Leach and Keiller, according to which dwelling is opposed to the modern as well as the urban, but also, and more importantly, examining what is at stake in the idea of dwelling, and of place as connected to this, as it develops out of Heidegger’s work. Chapter 1 focuses on the way ‘dwelling’ has entered into English-language discussion, beginning with the account Heidegger advances in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ as well as the ways dwelling has been taken up thereafter, in architecture and also geography (both areas where the notion has been especially important). Issues of translation loom large here, especially the difficulties that arise from the use of ‘dwelling’ to translate the original German term Wohnen. Although much of the focus is on dwelling, place is equally at issue in the discussion, and much of the analysis of dwelling is directly transposable into the analysis of place, although with one notable caveat. Since dwelling is always a dwelling ‘in’ place, so place must always retain a degree of primacy over dwelling. It may be that place is only known through dwelling, but it is place that, in one important sense, enables dwelling at the same time as it also extends beyond it. Chapter 2 continues in a similar direction but focuses more specifically on the problematic association of dwelling, and so also place, with the rural, the settled and the past. Here, one of the key questions concerns the possibility of a normative component that belongs to dwelling and so the extent to which it can be understood as a critical notion rather than simply as a ‘nostalgic’ reversion to some realm of comforting and unquestioning security. The last chapter in this first part, Chapter 3, takes up various questions of identity and authenticity that stand in the background of much of this discussion, considering them in relation to dwelling and place as well as to related notions of home and belonging. Although seldom interrogated directly, these notions often play a role in architectural thinking and frequently figure in the way architectural notions are articulated and critiqued – not only in connection to Heidegger but also more generally. A central issue here concerns the supposed character of dwelling and place as tied to problematic forms of essentialism or foundationalism that are necessarily exclusionary and even violent.
In exploring the way dwelling has become an issue in recent and contemporary discussions, a key aim is to enable a better understanding of what is genuinely at issue in topology (or topological thinking), especially as it is configured around the ideas of dwelling and place as they might operate in architecture and in thinking about architecture. This first part of the book thus provides a framework for the more focused discussions and explorations that occur in the parts and chapters that follow. These first chapters focus much more directly on the work of Heidegger than do those that follow (Chapter 10 and the Epilogue return the discussion to a more Heideggerian frame). But Heidegger has an important role throughout the volume, and this derives, not only from his significance as perhaps the most influential thinker of the twentieth century – whether for good or ill – but because of the way his work is indeed directly engaged, as is the work of no other twentieth-century thinker, with the very issues of space, place and the human relation to these, that are at the heart of any genuinely topological mode of thinking, and that are also fundamental to the thinking of architecture.
Heidegger on ‘Man and Space’
Most discussions of ‘dwelling’ cite Heidegger as the source for the notion, usually by reference to the discussion in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’.16 Heidegger’s focus on ‘dwelling’ – Wohnen, as it appears in that essay – was a direct response to the theme of the 1951 conference in Darmstadt to which ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ was a contribution. Titled ‘Man and Space’, the conference aimed to focus, according to the organizer, Otto Bartning, on ‘the architectural management of our space of living [Lebensraum]’, which means, he said ‘the comprehensible and incomprehensible, the felt, willed, and creative engagement with the space of living’. And he added that the meeting would also be given over to the question concerning ‘the part of architecture in overcoming homelessness [Heimatlosigkeit], both physical [leiblich] and intellectual/spiritual [geistig] homelessness’.17 Heidegger addresses the questions at stake here quite directly, as well as taking up, no less directly, the larger set of issues invoked in the conference title – concerning the relation of the human (‘man’, Mensch) and the spatial – that are necessarily implicated with homelessness and dwelling, and with place.18
The position set out in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ includes three main interconnecting relations: between building and dwelling, between space and place, and between the human and the world. In each case, Heidegger reverses the usually assumed ordering of those relations – building is grounded in (or secondary to) dwelling, space is grounded in place, the human is grounded in the world. A fourth relation is also implicated, although it comes to the fore only towards the very end of the essay, namely, the relation between dwelling and thinking (this fourth element is one that, for the moment, will be left to one side, but will be taken up directly in Chapter 2). The entire essay is aimed at both opening up the question of ‘what it is to dwell’ as a question, but also setting out an answer to that question – or, at least, indicating the domain in which such an answer is to be found. It is in doing this that Heidegger can be seen as offering an account of the role of architecture in addressing the space and place of living – though this means recognizing that architecture belongs to a much larger task than might have hitherto been supposed.
The problem of homelessness emerges in Heidegger’s discussion in such a way that, to use Bartning’s terms, homelessness as ‘physical’ is always underlain by homelessness as ‘intellectual/spiritual’ – and this accords with the idea that the problem of dwelling comes before the problem of building. It is not that Heidegger considers a lack of housing to be an insignificant problem – his comments indicate quite the opposite19 – but he claims that the mere provision of housing (of ‘shelter’, as one might put it) does not, in itself, address the more fundamental problem of the homelessness that pertains to our very way of being in the world. Heidegger’s discussion is notable for its attempt to engage with the architectural context of the Darmstadt meeting. And, although Heidegger is often criticized for having nothing concrete to say about how one might address the real living conditions in which people find themselves, the fact that his account remains at a general and philosophical level, and does not consider detailed issues of design or take up such issues in relation to specific buildings, is neither surprising nor obviously blameworthy. Heidegger was not an architect and had no strong background in, or knowledge of, architectural practice. He thus approaches the issues, as one might expect, philosophically and from the perspective of his own thinking. The fact that he was able and willing, nonetheless, to engage with the topic at issue is an indication of the way in which questions relevant to architecture –...

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