Dwelling and Architecture

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978-3-86859-012-8
Foreword 6
Rod Hackney (RIBA)
Introduction 8
One 15
On Dwelling and Building
Two 33
Dwelling in the World
Three 49
The Technology Issue
Four 61
Modern Architecture and Traditional Dwelling
Five 75
Earth, Character, Aesthetics
Six 91
The Making of Things
Seven 107
The Building of Dwelling
Eight 121
The Building of Places
Nine 141
Modern Spaces – Contemporary Places
Ten 159
Dwelling Disengaged
Epilogue 172
Quoted Literature 174

Foreword
7 _______
Foreword
Rod Hackney
“A great part of the present evil state of architecture is due to the client – to the man,
(never a woman?), who gives the order, the man who pays.” We are all acquainted
with the big businessmen, bankers and merchants – you know? Those responsible for
the credit crunch, who tell us, “Ah, but I am merely a man of affairs, I live entirely
outside the world of art; I am a philistine.”
Who’s having this whinge? – Another clue! “Never undress in your bedroom. It is
not a clean thing to do and makes the room horribly untidy.” Thus prescribed the
writer of the old testament for architects, still rigidly adhered to by self-respecting
‘Modernist Movement’ designers. Yes if you still haven’t got it, let me tell you, it is
the Swiss/French Architect Le Corbusier’s, ’The Manual of Dwelling,’ in his 1923
book, Towards a New Architecture. The gospel went on, “Keep your odds and ends in
drawers or cabinets,” and the advice extended to keeping buildings off the ground, go
high young man/woman and put the restaurants in the sky to thus avoid, “that fungus
which eats up the pavements of Paris.”
Oh, Heidegger, wherefore art thou? Readers! Get yourselves introduced to a balanced
approach to his views – it might be good for your souls!
Chinese architecture students at Princeton University, with limited English language
speaking skills, are told, “Don’t worry, Heidegger is incomprehensible.” Well, all will
now be revealed, in clear script, as beautifully structured as you could hope for, in the
following chapters. This is a bright, positive, intelligible and warm interpretation of
Heidegger’s architectural thoughts. Heidegger was a poet. This book is poetry.
Arctic Eskimos, who annually move between winter and summer dwellings will understand
it – they are born philosophers. To the Canadian Inuit, Heidegger’s carefully
constructed relationship between building and dwelling is as poetic and skilful as
persuading the visiting polar bear to go and eat somewhere else without having to
shoot the beast.
This work wraps around Martin Heidegger’s 1951 Building Dwelling Thinking – distinguishing
the limitations of modernism/de-humanised environments (when mod-
ernism became no more than a ‘style’), the liberation of individual/society, and human
relationships with nature/locality. Nevertheless, while this writing helped to shape the
arguments against Modernism’s arrogance, not all aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy
were either applicable to architecture nor had they been applied would they have led
to a humanised, tolerant, not repressive and not depressing environment: over 6 billion
people cannot all be hunter-gatherers like the Inuit, can they?
Heidegger trusted human beings more than the proponents of Modernism did. To
him we human types are manifest, warts and all; we revel in untidiness. Dwelling
is not about living in a house; for us dwelling is a verb and the centre of everything
we do. To dwell is not static – it is on the move and even when it stops its journey it
is rarely still. It is there before we journey and there when we arrive, it is not placespecific.
A good home is where we make it, it is where we lie.
The Dutch gypsy, Rem Koolhaas struts his stuff on the other side of the tennis net.
No more unintelligible to some of Princeton’s professors than Heidegger perhaps, but
much more appreciated by the fresh-off-the-international-transport-vehicle Chinese
architectural students. After all Koolhaas’ urban designs are as clear to most as a colourful
psychedelic MP3 cover.
To start with Heidegger and finish with Koolhaas is a rare safari, but the reader may
conclude that it works! Both men believe that proper structures (buildings if you like
– but please include caves, warehouses, shops, public spaces) allow ordinary mortals
to dwell; both agree that a house is not, “a machine for living in” (Le Corbusier again
in 1923), and both agree that God is in the mess of everyday living. Both believe that
human beings are complicated, but they are at the height of the food chain; they are
clumsy, cluttered and puzzling, yet they have produced evocative cities full of charm
and surprise and many without Teutonic planners having had any control of them at
all. Oh, Thank God for the human spirit. Whilst it remains free, complicated and undisciplined,
the future is bright; the quirkiness is fun, the unexpected is what makes
dwelling so magical.
Good architecture is about raising the spirit. It is not a piece of black and white photography
without a human being in sight to interrupt the cold view of the building.
The author of this work has remained true to this debate; academics, lovers of good
design, as well as readers of a good argument, will enjoy this narrative and wellconstructed
theory…. In fact, true to its task, the following chapters will make a good
place to live, a series of ten dwellings perhaps, a home fit for readers.

On Dwelling and Building
Dwelling and Housing
We Dwell by Building
The Truth of Building
The Fragment and the Rock
Is Truth Collective?
Is Dwelling Collective?
Staying with Things
Heidegger’s concept of dwelling: The “gathering of
the fourfold” (i.e., the four components of man’s
world – earth, sky, mortals, divinities). Dwelling
achieved by building (constructing and caring).
Heidegger: Buildings serve dwelling and reveal the essence
of things (with reference to “The Origin of the
Work of Art”). The landscaping around the Acropolis
best appreciated in this context. Revealing the essence
of things is achieved collectively. Dwelling is also
achieved collectively. Man’s involvement with things.
Things are inseparable from space. Things create
places. Dwelling is achieved in places.
One

One On Dwelling and Building
27 _______
Religion and mass culture: the involvement of the faithful with artwork can be collective and intense, albeit
not necessarily extremely thoughtful.

Dwelling in the World
Dwelling in the Past
Dwelling and Awe
Dwelling with Others
Dwelling and Thinking
Building and Buildings
True Buildings
“Vernacular” and “Learned” Architecture
Heidegger’s dwelling achieved before the industrial
revolution. “The plight of dwelling has nothing to do
with the condition of the industrial workers” seen as
referring to Engel’s relevant book and as such contradictory
to Heidegger’s own statements in Aufenthalte.
Was recollection possible in nineteenth century
hovels? Thinking is crucial for dwelling. Building,
important not only as process, but as artefact as well.
Architecture matters. Heidegger: “true” buildings
allow dwelling. “True” meant in specific cultural
environment. The search for “true” buildings since
Vitruvius and romanticism. Vernacular architecture
produces true buildings. Loos.
Two

Two Dwelling in the World
39 _______
The layers of care and neglect are discernible in this palimpsest of human dwelling, which occasionally
took place in this courtyard in Manhattan, New York. Clearly, dwelling cannot be identified with living in a
house.
to enter the museum crowded with visitors as it was.” 5 What annoyed Heidegger was
not merely the supposed commercialisation of the sublime. During his extended visit
to the Parthenon, “the crowd of visitors became larger. Hardly was the obtained staying
to be substituted by sightseeing arrangements … The annoyance with the crowds
was not that they blocked the ways and obstructed access to different places. What
was much more bothersome was their tourist’s zeal, their to-ing and fro-ing, in which
one was, without being aware, included, as it threatened to degrade what was just now
the element of our experience into an object ready-at-hand for the viewer.” 6
The movement of tourists undermined the ability to stay with things, by distracting
the attention, disturbing the intellectual awareness and dissipating the inclination of
the entire Being of the philosopher to identify with them. How could this fail to be
true also of the workers in the first industrial age?
Dwelling and Thinking
Is dwelling, then, exclusively the offspring of contemplation? By thinking, can we
learn how to dwell?
For Heidegger, thinking is certainly of fundamental importance to human beings’
staying with things, which is interlinked with dwelling. Thinking is not a detached
mental activity of a distant observer, but a complex procedure by which man in his
everyday life, involved with things, comes to know the world of which he is part and
his position in it. 7
The natural ease with which “earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple
oneness into things” in the farmhouse in the Black Forest, does not imply a lack of
thinking on the part of its unsophisticated occupants. Nor does the loss of contact
with nature by townspeople preclude dwelling. The contemplative life may compensate
to some extent for the authenticity of dwelling that we have now lost. “We [sc.
we who are assembled in this lecture theatre in Darmstadt] may even be much nearer
to that bridge [sc. in the old town of Heidelberg] and to what it makes room for
than someone who uses it daily as an indifferent river crossing,” 8 he comments. And
later he proposes a way out of the situation of the homeless, “Yet as soon as man gives
thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer.” 9 Thinking is the first step towards
overcoming the dwelling crisis. Thinking may stand in the way of the gradual
unravelling of things and the reduction of daily life to a series of purpose-oriented
activities; that is to say to the ongoing loss of the preconditions for dwelling.

Three The Technology Issue
51 _______
Denis Diderot, Encyclopaedia, the design of a mill. As early as in the eighteenth century, producing bread
was a complex procedure. Personal involvement with things essential to survival had given way to efficiency,
even prior to the Industrial Revolution.
The Power of Technology
Heidegger declares that it is not his intention to encourage us to build farmhouses
like the one he has praised. That would be, in any case, in vain, since the problem of
contemporary homelessness lies in the fact that we do not possess the preconditions
for dwelling, and therefore for building this kind of “true” house. The lack of a true
home is not due to our inability to reproduce the configuration of the farmhouse in
the Black Forest, to construct other, identical farmhouses, but in our inability to stay,
to live there, caring for and fashioning things, full of feelings and thoughts.
Our technological culture itself has undermined this ability, has cut us off from our
world. “The irresistible modern technology together with the scientific industrialization
of the world is about to obliterate any possibility of staying,” 1 concluded
Heidegger on his visit to Greece in 1962: staying meant both individually and collectively,
it may be added.
It may not be wide off the mark to assert that technological advances increasingly individualise
dwelling. In our contemporary world, individuals are not able to survive,
far less flourish or live long and pleasant lives without constantly resorting to products
and accomplishments of technology. People sometimes seem inclined to forget that
technology, like the science that increasingly supports it, is the result of long collective
effort, is pre-eminently a social achievement; they may acknowledge their dependence
on technology, but many refuse to acknowledge their dependence on society. This
paradox is due to the fact that the use of technology nowadays allows the individual
to withdraw into the closed world of his personal daily experience. In earlier times
the need for collective activity – for hunting, for constructing irrigation works and
paths – left little choice to the members of the community but to participate in the
common task. Today the illusion of self-sufficiency is fuelled by achievements made
possible through collective effort. Ironically, then, being-in-the-world is becoming
increasingly individual at a period when large-scale cooperation, a prerequisite for any
advance of science and technology, is more essential to life than ever before, is as much
the cornerstone of human civilisation as it has ever been.
Gods in Danger
Individualisation of dwelling seems to be only part of the problem. Linking technological
progress to our distancing from God, Heidegger warns, “Unavoidable as
it is, this destiny could not, then, but refuse a staying to man, which would have

Modern Architecture and
Traditional Dwelling
The House-Machine
The Demolition of the Past
Dwellings and Dwellers
Le Corbusier and the house-machine. Positivist
approach. Detached approach to the house, quantifiable
criteria for evaluating houses contradicting
Heidegger’s imperatives. Taut: “Houses are built for
people.” Architects criticising modernism turned to
Heidegger, not Taut.
Four

Four Modern Architecture and Traditional Dwelling
65 _______
“Today’s houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but
do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?” asks Heidegger. In each
cultural environment there is a particular concept of what “home” really means. Here, the entrance to a
house in Porto Novo, Benin.
though, as the offspring of rationally formulated design principles. Gropius, too, aspired
to “… express life in his epoch in clear, simplified forms,” following “the dictates
of constructive logic.” 5 Thirty years later Heidegger asked “today’s houses may even
be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but do
the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?” – clearly
a rhetorical question implying a negative answer. 6 His assessment met with the agreement
of a large part of the public, judging by the many modifications made to Le
Corbusier’s houses by their occupants, even after the architect had achieved international
recognition. 7
Like the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier targeted the academic architecture of his day, and his
aim was not to reply in advance to Heidegger’s future objections. In “The Manual of
Dwelling,” contained in his book Vers une Architecture (Towards a New Architecture),
which met with an enormous response over the years, he addresses himself clearly to
people who were able to define for themselves the conditions in which they wished
to live. His visions, however, did not relate exclusively to the upper classes: “All men
have the same physical make-up, the same functions. All men have the same needs …
The house is a thing essential to man,” 8 he said, foreseeing and partly contributing to
the dissemination of the benefits of progress to all strata of society.
The house not only had to be a machine – it had to be seen as such by the public.
According to Heidegger, the reliance that, linked man with tools as things, the feeling
that he could trust them to build his world, the feeling, that is, that he could use his
house to build his dwelling, was now to give way to the cool assessment of the effectiveness
of the machine-dwelling.
The Demolition of the Past
In order to achieve the perfectly functioning dwelling, the demands usually made by
people on their houses had to be dropped. There would have to be an end to tiled
roofs (only flat roofs would be made and planted up), dark basements (buildings
would be supported on stilts), small windows (the interior of the house should be
opened up to the surrounding space), an end to thick walls and plaster decoration.
There would have to be an end to the sitting room that was opened only on the rare
occasion of a family visit; in vogue even in the smallest working-class dwellings since
late nineteenth century, in imitation of the bourgeoisie mansions, this consumed
much-needed living space. Customs and accepted beliefs would have to be demol-

Four Modern Architecture and Traditional Dwelling
69 _______
A rationally designed recycling bin in Strasbourg set against the “primordial” house during Christmas
festivities. Modern architecture was perceived as a detached design and planning philosophy that ignored
man as a historical being and addressed him solely as a thinking being. As such it was incapable of providing
“homes” for real people. Is rationality incompatible with dwelling after all?
Heidegger’s bridge is certainly a different one. Le Corbusier’s houses are reached by
crossing Adam Smith’s bridge, not Heidegger’s.
Dwellings and Dwellers
Le Corbusier’s language may have been very sharp and may therefore have helped to
rally architects to the flag of modernism, contributing in this way to the establishment
of this movement, but his views did not meet with general approval. Colin St John
Wilson has made us aware of the scope of reaction against Le Corbusier by modernist
architects who perceived that he narrowed and impoverished the Modern Movement
from its early years in the mid-1920s. 15
Among the dissidents was Bruno Taut, a pioneer of the working-class housing in the
Weimar Republic, that is to say, at a time when the erection of decent housing had
been generally recognised as the most effective means for blunting the explosive social
inequalities that scourged Europe. Taut foresaw the danger of architecture developing
into a means of imposing views on how people should live; views which, while
enlightened, were foreign to their mentalities. Not wishing to contribute to architecture’s
becoming, once again, a tool for the physical representation of yet another ideal
world, he professed a different kind of positivism – one that showed greater respect
for real, not ideal people.
While in self-imposed exile in Japan and Turkey in the second half of the 1930s, he
wrote his Architekturlehre: Grundlagen, Theorie und Kritik aus der Sicht eines sozialistischen
Architekten (Lessons in Architecture: Principles, Theory and Critique from the
Point of View of a Socialist Architect). 16 What is interesting here is that Taut, who in
1929 had written a book entitled Die neue Baukunst in Europa und Amerika (also published
the same year in English as Modern Architecture), 17 in which he propagated the
then avant-garde movement, defined himself seven years later as a socialist architect,
not as a frontrunner of modernism. With a trace of bitterness, he notes, “Houses are,
of course, built for people. It can only be a joke when various prophets of modernism
speak of a machine-dwelling, referring to the house. We should be aware of the consequences
of the concept ‘machine-dwelling,’ a machine whose product is dwelling, that
is, working, eating, sleeping, bringing up children, company …” 18
This was a direct, and, admittedly, slightly unfair criticism of Le Corbusier. For Le
Corbusier too wanted the house to be “a shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves, and
the inquisitive. A receptacle of light and sun” 19 – that is, he wanted the house, de-

Five Earth, Character, Aesthetics
81 _______
New York. Meatpacking district. The fact that several activities are better served at ground level does not
necessarily mean that contact with Mother Earth is a sine qua non for dwelling.
building. As such, it does not depart (at least not in any significant way) from what
is handed down by tradition, though it is at the same time unique. It belongs to an
architectural type. The features that the farmhouse shares with other similar buildings
confirm that its occupants are members of a community, and moreover of a specific
cultural environment, and its uniqueness affirms their individuality.
Is this kind of individualisation a precondition of dwelling as meant by Heidegger?
If we recall his reaction to mass tourism, the annoyance he felt at what he perceived
as the levelling brought about by people’s group behaviour, we may suppose that
mass production of standardised identical houses would not be his first choice. For
a further reason, too: that standardisation is intertwined with a rationalisation of the
building process. Rationalisation results in detachment, which in itself is not compatible
with the slow, arduous building of a house, and with it of dwelling. 15
One has the impression that individualisation is the essential first step in the creation
of what may be called the identity of a building – or a settlement – which is a
rather ill-defined yet immediately recognisable aggregate of features. Viewed from this
standpoint, Le Corbusier’s attitude that all people have the same needs appeared to
have a significant downside: its justification of the standardisation of housing in order
to facilitate its industrial production would result unavoidably in a lack of identity. Le
Corbusier was by no means alone in his fascination with the industrialisation of housing.
Industrialisation was hotly debated by the utopian architects of the 1960s and
1970s, just as it is pursued by several advocates of hypermodernity today: the breach
with the past often appeared to be linked with the abandonment of the manner of
constructing a building that approached it as unique.
Taut claimed that most of the problems contemporary architecture was faced with
were due to the fact that it was no longer practised as an art, in the sense of arts and
crafts: pursuing the beautiful while solving specific technical problems. 16 The domination
of architecture by technology, by mass-produced, standardised building parts,
and the concomitant transformation of the architect into a production manager and
of the craftsman into a labourer who exercised no initiative in what he did, undermined
architecture, just as much as dwelling was undermined by the treatment of
houses as machines.
Was lack of identity, however, an inevitable consequence of the standardisation (or
even repetition) of the building layout and form and the rationalisation of the building
process? At first sight the answer appears to be positive: one might think of the

Five Earth, Character, Aesthetics
87 _______
Robert Venturi and his team awakened our awareness of the fact that ordinary, “un-heroic” architecture is
founded on generally understood codes of communication; the city thus becomes intimate and the built
environment reflects the relationships between members of societies. However, un-heroic does not necessarily
have to be identified with ordinary. Here the Rosa Luxemburg monument in Berlin; inspired by the
dumping of Luxemburg’s body in the Landwehrkanal, following her assassination in 1919.
Architecture and the Public
Beauty may individualise, but individualisation does not necessarily beautify. The
discussion on beauty may well have been marginalised or even outlawed by post-war
theories of architecture, but the general public still judged the built environment by
that criterion. Le Corbusier’s turn to an almost “sculptural” architecture in the early
1950s offered little help: some of his buildings may have attracted admiration, and
still do, but generally speaking, the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s met with
no enthusiasm. The individualisation of buildings was overshadowed by what was
perceived as ugliness. People would turn their backs on them, whenever feasible. Turn
your back and you cannot see. Highly recognisable buildings were perceived as indifferent,
cities as “soulless,” spaces as lacking interest. 34
These perceptions were deeply rooted and based on hard facts, despite the arrogant
claim architects made that they were the temporary reactions of laymen to the new:
Jane Jacobs was among the first to condemn the destruction of places that were the
venues of the daily routine of city-dwellers, and the dismantling of their micro-environment
in which those social relationships that enriched life developed spontaneously.
The small-scale neighbourhood, with its complex mixture of activities, had
been sacrificed in the name of the sound functioning of the city, designed on the basis
of the separation of dwelling, work, recreation, and circulation. Conventional streets
lined with dwellings and shops had been abolished, to be replaced by highways and
endless tracts of wasteland, neglected leftovers of space squashed between indifferent
multi-storey complexes. Casual, fortuitous social contact no longer had a clearly defined,
tangible field of action. People were left profoundly bewildered, with a feeling
of homelessness.
Jacobs’ book Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, 35 reflected
the mood and gave voice to the views of the general public about their city. It thus
brought the debate on architecture down to earth, and grounded the evaluation of
architecture firmly in empirical evidence, checking its claims against reality. 36 Robert
Venturi spoke a few years later, in 1966, of the contradiction and complexity that
made historical buildings interesting, and in 1972 of the meaning with which ordinary
architecture is charged. 37 Venturi and his team made us aware of the fact that
ordinary, “un-heroic” architecture is founded on generally understood codes of communication,
making the function of buildings and the sociopolitical choices associated
with their erection visible in the city. Thus, one may conclude, the city becomes
intimate and the built environment reflects the relationships between the members
of societies.
Endnotes
1 Futurism was an early twentieth century movement that
sought to take technology to extremes. The proposals of Antonio
Sant’Elia for the città nuova (new city) in 1914 are emblematic
of the movement. Le Corbusier proposed to house
large businesses and also the “working class” on skyscrapers
standing on stilts amidst greenery and to free the ground beneath
them, which was to be devoted to infrastructure networks
and traffic circulation.
2 Ron Herron, “Walking City” project, 1964. In Herron’s designs,
earth is conceived more as wasteland, rather than as
nourishing mother.
3 The garden city movement, founded in 1898 by Ebenezer
Howard, sought to offer an alternative to conventional approaches
to mastering the expansion of cities. Garden cities
were more or less low-density communities surrounded by
greenbelts, consisting of carefully balanced areas of residence,
industry, and agriculture; they provided high living standards.
4 Cf. Taut 1920, 4.
5 Taut 1977, 134 (“Das einfache, sozusagen normale Gefühl,
das sich gegen die Unterbringung von Familien mit Kindern
im 10. oder im 20. Stockwerk…”)
6 Le Corbusier 1927, 54.
7 “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Heidegger 2002, 21.
(“Sie lichtet zugleich jenes, worauf und worin der Mensch
sein Wohnen gründet. Wir nennen es die Erde. Von dem, was
das Wort hier sagt, ist sowohl die Vorstellung einer abgelagerten
Stoffmasse als auch die nur astronomische eines Planeten
fernzuhalten. Die Erde ist das, wohin das Aufgehen alles Aufgehende
und zwar als ein solches zurückbirgt. Im Aufgehenden
west die Erde als das Bergende. Das Tempelwerk eröffnet
dastehend eine Welt und stellt diese zugleich zurück auf die
Erde, die dergestalt selbst erst als der heimatliche Grund herauskommt,”
“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Heidegger
1950, 31). Pikionis’s thought unfolds in parallel with that of
Heidegger; as usual, though, it is tinted with a rather neoplatonic
mysticism, “It was our duty to preserve [Attica’s soil]

Six The Making of Things
93 _______
It is quite clear that Heidegger pointed out some aspects of dwelling that many people recognised as familiar.
In order to assess the validity of his reasoning, we should ask: How do people actually dwell? Here,
a reused colonial house in Porto Novo, Benin.
to dwelling and the construction of lodgings of all kinds in a wide variety of cultural
environments.
According to the predominant interpretation adopted by traditional positivist anthropology,
people dwell in structures that are the product of the transcription of
preconceived designs onto raw matter. As Amos Rapaport expresses it, “in any given
case, emic, culture-specific categories or dimensions are used by particular groups
to classify and order domains and settings, thereby to structure space and hence to
organise it. These orderings and organisations can then be expressed through physical
means, resulting in built environments. In effect, the organisation of space cognitively
precedes its material expression; settings and built environment are thought before
they are built …” 1
This manner of thinking goes back at least to Aristotle, who draws a clear distinction
between noesis (νόησις: cogitation) and poiesis (ποίησις: production). It may be recalled
that, “things are generated artificially whose form is contained in the soul [of their
maker] … In generations [i.e., in the making of things] … part of the process is called
cogitation, and part production – that which proceeds from the starting point and
the form is cogitation, and that which proceeds from the conclusion of the cogitation
is production.” 2
The process of the creation of any artefact, then, according to Aristotle, includes two
stages: conception and design on the one hand, and physical construction on the
other. 3
Cogitation and Production
It is quite clear that Heidegger pointed out some aspects of dwelling that many people
recognised as familiar. However, does this mean that his concept of dwelling, as laid
out in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” is not simply a pure theoretical construct that
has little more to do with hard facts than vesting some obvious truths with philosophical
language? In order to assess the validity of his reasoning, we should ask: How
do people actually dwell? To answer this question, we need to review the empirical
data assembled so far.
The ways in which people organise their living space – that is, modify their environment
to make it more favourable to themselves, or at least in a way that they believe is
more favourable – has been systematically investigated by anthropologists and social
anthropologists. In time, a huge volume of field observations was assembled relating
Integration into the Environment
The antipode of this positivist way of seeing things is the phenomenological anthropological
approach. “The forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the
ground,” notes Tim Ingold, interpreting the conclusions of a large number of field
researchers, “arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational
contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings.” 4 The way, that is, in
which man lives in his environment and assimilates it may be described as integration
into it, not as the relentless imposition of preconceived schemata on it.
Seeking to blur the distinction between the conception and the construction of artefacts
and buildings, phenomenological anthropology has seen in “Building Dwelling
Thinking” a theory that forms the basis for interpretative schemata which better
reflect the empirical data. 5

Six The Making of Things
97 _______
The view of positivist anthropology emphasises the unique capacity of human beings to contrive in their
minds not-yet-existing things and bring them into being on the basis of mental pictures. To what extent,
though, are such pictures elaborated, and to what extent are they just general plans of action? Here, a
street in Bilbao, Spain. People tend to feel comfortable in urban environments formed over time by a
multitude of active agents.
cherished by positivist science since early modern times, on the basis of an approach
that distances itself from positivism.
Heidegger’s mortals seem at first sight closer to Ingold’s than to Rapaport’s people,
since they do not engage in the supposed hubris of imposing themselves, unrestrained,
on their environment. 6 This environment is, in any case, not a set of objects outside
them, but their very world, of which they themselves are part. The contradistinction
between nature and culture, natural object and artefact, man and environment, is a
pattern of thought in the Western world developed by the Enlightenment and Modernity
that bears little relation to the complexity of the constant, mutual process
by which man and the environment are shaped as an organic whole, and has bred
the mentality that led the planet to the brink of disaster: so say the adherents of
the phenomenological school of anthropology, who interpret empirical observations,
“Natural” Building
In the passage quoted above, in which Taut holds that “from an aesthetic point of
view … new houses, new neighbourhoods, even entire new towns … cannot even be
compared with the old houses and the old towns,” beauty is considered as a manifestation
of an alleged “natural” production of built environment: the praise of old
houses in general, and old towns in general, irrespective of their architecture, implies
an admiration for a vaguely defined past when people supposedly built without having
in mind preconceived plans. Such building practice qualifies as “natural.” We
may recall here that building performed “naturally” produces the kind of buildings
that allow dwelling in Heidegger’s sense: the “self sufficiency of the power” which
ordered the Black Forest farmhouse implies a “natural” procedure. Loos notes in
1910, “The farmer marks out the site for his new house in the green meadow and
digs out the trenches for the foundations. Then the mason appears. If there is clay in
the area there will be a brickworks delivering bricks. If not, then he can use the stone
from the shores of the lake. And while the mason is laying brick upon brick, stone
upon stone, the carpenter arrives and sets up his tools. His axe rings out merrily. He
is making the roof. What kind of roof? A beautiful or an ugly one? He has no idea.
It’s just a roof.” 7
Similarly, in 1925 Pikionis says of the peasant, “He doesn’t need a desk, nor a pen, to
pour out the vain lines of his imagination. He hasn’t read any books on architecture.
He doesn’t know of architectural order and character. But he achieves them unconsciously,
following nature.” 8 The “old building” and the “old town” are the offspring
of a “natural” process. The man-made environment produced by a “natural” process
appears as an integral part of the natural environment; it counters man’s distancing
from nature that resulted from nature’s objectification by modern science – a process
Max Weber called the Entzauberung of the world (the stripping of the world of its
magic). 9
The great importance that many modernist architects attached to proportions in architecture
seems, in this context, to have been the result of a quest for something to
compensate for the loss of qualities that come with the “natural” processes of producing
built environments. Designing buildings on the basis of a strict system of numeri-

Seven The Building of Dwelling
117 _______
Adolf Loos says, “The aim of a work of art is to make us feel uncomfortable; a house is there for our comfort.
A work of art is revolutionary, a house conservative…” Here, a shop window in Berlin, Germany. Shop
windows undermine the stability of the image of buildings.
identifies the manipulating force of formal architecture, it fails to recognise that every
act of building imposes patterns of thought on people who perceive its final products;
and while formal architecture usually attempts to give monumental form to selected,
commonly respected principles, random building activity just reflects commonly held
views of the day and personal preferences, which are questionably worth acquiring a
form that can last in time.
Planning and Dwelling
In any event, a pressing need has arisen for a re-examination of the design process. 20
Evidence assembled by field research has begun to play a truly important role in planning.
Many more aspects of the life of a city and its inhabitants are being investigated
and monitored nowadays than in the 1950s and 1960s. On the one hand, trends
that can be detected statistically are interpreted as “inclinations” and as choices on
the part of the public, that is to say, as an expression of opinion that has to be taken
seriously into account. On the other hand, the impact of every measure is more carefully
studied.
Central planning is beginning to give way to more flexible schemata which correspond
better to societies where individuals tend each to have his or her own way of
life, and personal aspirations are accorded the respect that was once reserved for institutions,
such as the nation or the Church.
In this way, the participation of laymen in building their own houses and their own
dwellings is becoming attainable once more, after an interval of two and a half centuries.
In countries where housing is more or less centrally planned and provided for,
this participation now takes the form of a constant supply of information to the housing
and planning authorities. 21 This, of course, presupposes and demands respect for
the citizen, and responsibility from the authorities – that is, democracy in the broadest
sense of the word. In countries where housing is provided for through private investment,
markets are sensitive enough to register any shifts in the needs or wishes of the
public and ready to adapt to any new trends that can be detected – be it the choice to
live alone or with a partner, to live in an extended or a one-parent family, to provide
for either better private or better “communal” areas within the house, or whatever.
In this process, information assumes the role once played by the hand-operated tool
in the formation of man’s environment, and goes some way towards justifying Marshall
McLuhan’s view that the media is now an “extension” of man. 22

Eight The Building of Places
123 _______
Informal mosque in central Athens. The origins of architecture, maintains Vittorio Gregotti, lie not in the
hut – architecture’s sacred cow since Vitruvius – but in putting a stone on the ground to recognise a place
in the midst of an uncharted territory and an unknown universe.
Which Space?
Being-in-the-world is – as Heidegger had already pointed out it in his Sein und Zeit
(Being and Time) in 1927 – a being-in-space. 1 However, this space does not exist independently
of things; things are not contained in a pre-existing space. “Modern physics
was compelled by the facts themselves to represent the spatial medium of cosmic
space as a field-unity determined by body as dynamic centre,” notes Heidegger. “…
Space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience.
It is not that there are men, and over and above them space.” 2 Man is more,
then, than the absolute point of reference. Man and space aren’t two distinct entities.
Human beings are by “persisting through” (durchstehen) space. 3
Even before World War II, several scholars had approached the concept of space
from a subjective standpoint. In 1945 Merleau-Ponty summarised the findings of
the psychology of perception in his seminal work Phénoménologie de la Perception
(Phenomenology of Perception). In it, evidence from various fields of knowledge was
interpreted as indicating that a distinction should be made – as philosophers of the
phenomenological school including Heidegger had already suggested – between “geometric”
space, a theoretical construct of the human intellect dealing with abstract
quantified relations, and a “human,” “existential” space, which Merleau-Ponty called
“anthropological” space, the realm of an experience of relations with the world by a
being situated in it. 4 In this context it is useful to note that, in Mark Wigley’s words,
“Heidegger always insists that the fundamental sense of the word ‘in’ is not spatial in
the sense of the occupation of a ‘spatial container (room, building)’ but in the sense
of the familiar.” 5
What was new in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” though, was the particular emphasis
placed on the fact that man’s relation to space is metaphorically and literally subject to
building; and the notion that places derive from things that make dwelling possible,
and that dwelling is identified with man’s being-in-the-world; the notion, that is to
say, that place is where human beings are-in-the-world.
Vittorio Gregotti, a prominent member of the so-called school of Venice, referred to
this notion of place as the outcome of man’s activity in his Il territorio dell’ architettura
(The Territory of Architecture), published in Italian in 1966. 6 Modern architecture’s
disrespect for the local, the undifferentiated mega-structures of the 1950s and 1960s
obviously had inherent flows. The origins of architecture, maintained Gregotti, lie not
in the hut – architecture’s sacred cow since Vitruvius – but in putting a stone on the

Nine Modern Spaces – Contemporary Places
145 _______
“Cities are the repositories of memories, as well as memory’s texts: their layered surfaces, their coats of
painted stucco, their wraps of concrete register the force of these currents both as wear and tear and as
narrative. That is, city surfaces tell time and stories. Cities are full of stories in time,” says Leonie Sandercock.
Here, twin-towers memorabilia sold at stands in the Ground Zero area, New York.
of architectural trends, not least critical regionalism, which was informed by modernism,
yet inspired by the specific context of the respective region – not of the building’s
immediate surroundings as in the case of contextualism. 3
The objective of the New Urbanism movement, on the other hand, was to resuscitate
the qualities of the town that had been lost with modern architecture and town
planning. 4
Settlements designed by adherents of this movement recalled the image of the “traditional”
town and adopted its symbolic system. The urban environments created
were of high quality – the downside was that these settlements were transformed
into small isolated residential islands for upper-middle class professionals living in
nuclear families. A settlement with the form of a nineteenth century town and the
conveniences of a modern city, with the atmosphere of yesterday and the opportunities
of today can only exist as an island. A town today needs motorways and airports,
large warehouses and petrol stations. Moreover, a town without supermarkets can
no longer offer cheap food for low-income families, and a town consisting mainly of
detached houses cannot house the large number of one-person households that are
common in modern western societies.
Places of Memories
A lack of historical memory was obviously a major, virtually insoluble, problem in cities
built de novo, and also in urban environments that had a large proportion of new
buildings; these included the German towns that emerged after the mass construction
of buildings to heal the wounds that were still evident at the time that the lecture
“Building Dwelling Thinking” was delivered.
The connection between places and memory had been noted in the antiquity, in the
context of memorisation techniques developed by orators. It came to the fore again in
the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century with the view that
the city was a text consisting of signs and symbols that could be deciphered and read
(not necessarily in a single “correct” manner). 5 As Leonie Sandercock puts it, “Cities
are the repositories of memories, as well as memory’s texts: their layered surfaces, their
coats of painted stucco, their wraps of concrete register the force of these currents
both as wear and tear and as narrative. That is, city surfaces tell time and stories. Cities
are full of stories in time.” 6 Memory, including what we call “collective memory,” is
assisted, supplemented, or even manufactured by loci – places. In the case of the built
environment, buildings are such places. Some members of the “resident’s committees”

Nine Modern Spaces – Contemporary Places
149 _______
A typical “non-place” of contemporary cities – in this case, a sidewalk next to a billboard – becomes
“place” for sanitation workers who are taking a short break. The distinction between “places” and “nonplaces”
is rather arbitrary.

Ten Dwelling Disengaged
161 _______
The man-made environment never consisted solely of tangible things. Sculptures like these stimulated
people’s imaginations, creating in their minds worlds that would exist in parallel with the real one. We now
perceive them solely as decorative. Cities are places of memory, as well as places of oblivion, fortunately
so.
The Insufficiency of Buildings
Contemporary cities continually welcome new people, new ideas, new customs, and
provide them with a spot alongside existing ones. This additive manner of welcoming
what is new tends to give life in the city the character of watching a spectacle. 1
Additionally, the influx of images from advertising, from the constant movement of
people and vehicles, from shop windows, from information of all kinds and forms,
that succeed each other at a rapid pace, has rendered space, defined solely by physical
elements and by architecture in the conventional sense of the term, irrelevant. If
to this flood of images we add the virtual reality that has been claiming an increasingly
larger part of our everyday experience, it becomes clear that we have to content
ourselves with a rather superficial perception of some of the city’s features; we do
not thoroughly experience and comprehend it, we rather encounter a series of events
rather than buildings. 2 Cities are now less defined by physical elements – buildings
and streets – than ever before. Aaron Betsky, who was commissioned to curate the 11 th
Venice Biennale for Architecture asks, “How can we be at home at all in a world in
which the continual movement of goods, people, and information continually erodes
all sense of permanence from any place? How can we construct a physical order that
can become a stage on which we can live our lives in concert with others if the constructions
that allow us to live and play our roles are increasingly invisible results of
communications and computer technologies?” 3
Betsky, who seeks to retain as much as possible of Heidegger’s imperatives in the
era of globalisation, claims that as the contribution of edifices to the creation of our
perceptible environment fades, architecture has to assume a new role. “Buildings are
objects and the act of building leads to such objects, but architecture is something
else. It is the way we think and talk about buildings, how we represent them, how we
build them. This is architecture … In this world it is not enough to keep the rain out,
create room for office cubicles, or fit into a context that either changes continually
or becomes artificially frozen. In fact, buildings are not enough. They are the tombs
of architecture, the residue of the desire to make another world, a better world, and
a world open to possibilities beyond the everyday,” 4 he noted. “Architecture must be
the beacon of coherence in the world we inhabit. We live in an environment that is
becoming so difficult to define or even see that we need architecture to make sense of
it, to make us at home in it, to help us find our way through it. We need architecture
to build our humanity in a world of sprawl,” wrote Betsky back in 2000 in his book

Ten Dwelling Disengaged
167 _______
This picture, entitled “Life goes on”, was shot by Red Army photographer Jewgeni Chaldej in summer
1944, in Sebastopol. Will building as a process cease to be necessary for achieving either dwelling or a
rather vague sense of “feeling at home”?
“There have always been non-places in the city, and this has been most often for the
best. Their individual freedom (the flaneur’s freedom) may be fully experienced, sheltered
from the ‘universe of recognition’ effects produced by excessive proximity, the
intrusive sharing and cruelties of neighbours, the least amiable aspects of place.” 10
Moving on the same wavelength, about the same period, Rem Koolhaas produced
a radical manifesto in favour of the real cities of today: he declared that far from
desirable, place-specific character is detrimental, “Is the contemporary city like the
contemporary airport – ‘all the same’? Is it possible to theorise this convergence? And
if so, to what ultimate configuration is it aspiring? Convergence is possible only at the
price of shedding identity. That is usually seen as a loss. But on the scale at which it occurs,
it must mean something. What are the disadvantages of identity, and conversely,
what are the advantages of blankness? What if this seemingly accidental – and usually
regretted – homogenisation were an intentional process, a conscious movement away
from difference toward similarity? What if we are witnessing a global liberation movement:
‘down with character!’ What is left after identity is stripped? The Generic?” 11
The admiration felt by Venturi for “un-heroic” architecture had been transferred to
the contemporary urban environment. The “no frill no thrill” city had found its theoretical
justification. The generic city had been born. By far the larger part of the world
population lives, stays, and dwells, albeit in the mundane sense of the term, in “generic”
cities, throughout the globe: the old parts occupy only a small fraction of the
total area of historic cities (themselves only a fraction of world cities), and house only
a small part of the life that unfolds in them.
Seeking to formulate architecture’s modus operandi in today’s man-made environment,
Koolhaas called upon it to “generate density, exploit proximity, provoke tension,
maximise friction, organise in-betweens, promote filtering, sponsor identity
and stimulate blurring …” 12 Instead of appreciating cities organised on the basis of
elements that are recorded in people’s minds as “paths,” “edges,” “regions,” “nodes,”
and “landmarks,” Koolhaas praised the generic city; in doing so he sought rather to
disengage character from place, than destroy any sense of identity. The drawbacks
of an identity bound to a specific place are indeed a cause of concern, as Neil Leach
demonstrates, “Identity … becomes territorialised and mapped on to a geographic
terrain. The individual becomes one with the land in a process of identification …
It is precisely in the context of an identity rooted to the soil that those groups not
rooted to the soil are excluded …” 13