During the past nine months of COVID-induced isolation, a friend and I have continued our regular series of biweekly conversations on a wide-ranging assortment of topics. During normal times, we’d meet over breakfast at The Original Pancake House here in Eugene, but we now do so virtually. We don’t always know where our tête-à-têtes will lead us, but that is one reason why we find them so appealing. Additionally, both of us are very catholic in our interests. It is far from unusual for our discussions to begin with our thoughts about the latest from the world of sports and effortlessly shift to nattering on about politics, science, world history, religion, culture—or as we did yesterday—the nature of philosophy.
Examining the general and fundamental questions humans have asked for millennia is fascinating. That said, I have never been a diligent student of philosophy. As an undergraduate at the University of Oregon I did enroll in an introductory course about 20th century existential thought and literature, but my primary motivation for doing so was the fact my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) was taking the class. Since then, bafflement is most often the outcome whenever I have tried to learn more about any of the various branches of philosophy.
Inscrutability is the common thread that binds most philosophical treatises. Until the day the perpetual fog my brain resides in lifts, I suspect I will have difficulty truly grasping the principles underlying how humans study the nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. Studying philosophy requires more mental focus and assiduousness than I have so far been able to exercise.
I have always believed certain bases of belief underlie how humans experience and appreciate architecture, regardless of whether the factors prompting the development of our built environment were backed by intentionality. After all, architecture shapes much about our here and now and how it is ordered, and architects do design buildings purposefully to address needs and solve problems. What I am curious about though is the extent to which architecture reflects deep-seated ontologies and the meaning of being.
Proving I have retained a smidgeon of what I learned in PHIL 211: Existentialism, I recall it was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger who distinguished human being as existence from the being of things in the world. For Heidegger, being-in-the-world was a phenomenological construct, so it was the study of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view that mattered to him. The study of phenomenology has been an influential strain within architecture due in no small part to Heidegger’s famous 1951 essay Building Dwelling Thinking. In it, he posed the question of what it means to dwell, and how a building “belongs” to dwelling. He regarded our “being-in-the-world” as essentially a problem of dwelling, and that dwelling goes beyond merely providing shelter or satisfying another functional need. Instead, dwelling is tied to place and situated in a relationship with existence. For Heidegger, dwelling also necessitated an understanding of the aesthetics of public spaces and buildings, and how aesthetics can open our thinking about place and the nature of dwelling on this earth, under the sky, and how it impacts our relations with one another. Heidegger argued architecture’s defining role is to structure how we experience the world around us. Architects loosely grouped under the banner of phenomenology have included Juhani Pallasmaa, Peter Zumthor, Steven Holl, and Charles W. Moore.
Another German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, enthusiastically regarded architecture as an expression of the progressive development of history and a metaphorical communication of spirit. In this regard, Hegel anticipated the early modernists, who upheld the primacy of designs reflecting the spirt of the times.
Before Heidegger and Hegel, Immanuel Kant claimed aesthetic judgments of form should be universal, unequivocally categorizing architecture as art. Kant distinguished the functional, social, and other benefits of architecture from consideration of its formal beauty; however, he also asserted that there should be no large disassociation between a building’s form and function because if there were, we would not find it beautiful. Kant also believed it is important for architecture to express profound ideas and possess a deeper meaning.
Like Heidegger, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre focused upon a phenomenological ontology to explain how architecture is experienced beyond mere perception or recollection from memory. For Sartre, imagination is a critical dimension of architecture—that is, he believed the extent to which a building or place triggers a consciousness of imagination influences how we perceive it, especially if our experience upon encountering it goes beyond its material qualities. In this sense, architecture may address our immaterial needs, giving meaning to our experiences through the application of our imaginations.
More recently, the concept of language as an analogue for architecture held some sway among philosophers, linguists, and contemporary architecture theorists. I learned from my early exposure to the work of Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves and their respective application of the linguistic constructs of syntax (the rules, principles, and processes which determine sentence structure in human languages) and semantics (the relationships between words, phrases, or sentences and what these elements mean or stand for) that how architecture may be understood has parallels in systems of communication. Similarly, the work of Christopher Alexander and his colleagues and the application of an evolved vocabulary of culturally adaptive building and design patterns serves as a model for a philosophy of architecture. The use of language distinguishes humans from most other animals. Architecture likewise sets us apart in its use of systems demonstrating a syntactic rigor that are elaborated through the application of meaning and symbolism.
My appreciation of philosophy is far too limited by my education and upbringing, which was heavily prejudiced by a predominantly Western perspective. Being of Japanese descent there is no small amount of irony in this. I do owe it to myself to learn much more about how other, very different cultures perceive their world—how those cultures have studied or explained basic principles about reality and the essential nature of our existence, and in turn applied those principles to the creation of their architecture.
Though I most likely approach architecture from a phenomenological perspective, I would like to further distill my philosophy about what architecture is and what its role should be. I want to be able to question and answer the bases of my beliefs, and then apply that understanding to both my work and my appreciation of everything I encounter. Architects are distracted by a myriad of considerations—sustainability & resilience, social justice & equity, constructability, rapid developments in building technology, and much more—but we should not lose sight of a primary duty of architecture, which is to help us understand our place in the world and the societies of which we are a part.
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