Heidegger and dwelling

Diana Hand   Meditations on dwelling (2001)

 I have long been fascinated by the experience of dwelling and inhabiting and "being-in" built space, and I have included in this post drawings that I did while exploring this issue.  I am still exploring the issue, and  now have the experience of understanding it a little better. I have just re-read Martin Heidegger's famous essay,   and what follows is a hurried, brief and inadequate synopsis.  This is followed by a few of my current notes and ideas.  This post is fragmentary but I wanted to get a marker down because the ideas and processes are important to me. 

 

Martin Heidegger      Building Thinking Dwelling (1951) 1.

According to Heidegger, there are 4 dimensions of being – earth, sky, divinity and mortality.  Humans are mortals, and are passing through their time on earth.  Dwelling is a reflection of the fourfold, or the four dimensions.  By dwelling we bring together and focus the four dimensions.  By dwelling properly we celebrate our time on earth and recognise our spiritual and earthly context. Positive awareness of our finite time is an essential part of the well lived life. 

Heidegger points out that humans are not the masters of language but rather are shaped by it and its meanings.  By exploring etymology and ancient meanings, he says,  we can discover deeper truths about ourselves and the right way of living.  The old verb “bauen” (German), for example, means “To dwell or to stay in a place”.  The associated verb “wuon” means “to stay in place…. to preserve the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its own nature”.  Therefore mortals by dwelling are present in the fourfold.

How does dwelling relate to physical building?  Heidegger uses the example of a bridge to show how such an intervention in the landscape creates a meaningful “location”.  But the bridge is more than its qualities.  Contrary to received Western philosophy, which regards essence as less knowable than objective properties, Heidgger (I think) considers that the essence of the bridge (for example) as a “thing” is what enables it to gather the fourfold.  The location allows the spaces to exist, and although the bridge and other built constructions may be analysed quantitively “the spaces through which we go daily are provided for by locations; their nature is grounded in things”

Only if we understand the true nature of dwelling, can we build rightly, with an understanding of our relation to things and immediate habitual experiences rather than by abstract and quantitative theory and practice.  “....genuine buildings give form to dwelling in its presencing and house this presence”.  But we have constantly to learn to dwell, to reconstruct anew our relation to the fourfold: “”The real plight of dwelling lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling.  And they must ever learn to dwell”.  Hence thinking and reflection is an essential component of building and dwelling.

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This is a fascinating and profound essay.  Each paragraph, even each sentence, is capable of generating new and original thought,  just as good philosophical writing should do.  Heidegger refers to his phenomenological beliefs when he explains that the essence of a being or a creation or a thing is real and knowable with its own integrity, and this worthy of respect…. “ to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its own nature”.  In this, with regard to the environment, he was prescient.  His architectural theory is also based on respecting our essential nature as inhabitants of the earth. 

 Like Alexander, who wrote his “Notes on the Synthesis of Form” about a decade later, Heidegger believed that the ordinary experience rather than (or at least as well as) abstract theory should be the foundation of design.  His ideas were influential in the 1970s and 1980s, and now again there is a movement towards community involvement in design.  One designer who has described his influence is Christine Kenline in her essay:   “Thinking about dwelling in building”).      More about this thesis in another blog.

Heidegger, like Alexander and many others of that time, was, among other things,  reacting against the impersonal rationalism of international modernism.  But what significance has Heidegger here for us?  We are still in the modernist era.  Our houses are more like machines for living than dwellings.  As such they are status symbols and investments.  "Dwelling" is out of fashion mostly in the modern world, and no wonder when it is women who are the backbone of domesticity in the dwelling culture. Nowadays women want what men have always had – independence and freedom  - “presence in their own nature as individuals” as Heidegger would have described it. 

There is also something reactionary in the search for a "lost birthplace, against the deracinated home of post-industrial society" to quote Anthony Vidler in his book The Architectural Uncanny (p. xi).  Such a search can tip over in to narrow chauvinism or worse.

But do we need to rethink dwelling for our times, as he also said we would need to do.  If so what form would it take?  A nod to properly thought-out communities in new building schemes, a reconstruction of the UK planning legislation to make self-build (and personal investment in houses) more accessible, and  a consideration of the physical spaces we inhabit.

Follow this link for a discussion by the phenonomenological architectural theorist  David Seamon about how the work of architects, including Alexander,realises the ideas of Heidegger in more practical terms. I will outline Seamon's ideas in a future post.


1. Heidegger, Martin  "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" in Poetry, Language, Thought   (1951)