Heidegger: A Critique on the Reductive in Architecture

Hei­deg­ger: A Cri­tique on the Reduc­tive in Archi­tec­ture

Jor­dan Parker Williams

Soci­ety, Nature and Technology

Pro­fes­sor Moore

Posi­tion Paper 1

(What is so mod­ern about mod­ern technology?)

28 Sep­tem­ber 2006

A trend in archi­tec­tural design prac­tice has been mount­ing since the idea of spe­cial­iza­tion and indus­tri­al­iza­tion have dom­i­nated our soci­ety, this trend is reduc­tion­ism in archi­tec­ture. Where we don’t worry about the architect’s “caprice of self-centered indi­vid­u­al­ism but [the per­ceived ‘ratio­nal­ity’] of imper­sonal reg­i­men­ta­tion (Mum­ford). Reduc­tive effi­cien­cies and stark sep­a­ra­tions often define our ways of life, even if we don’t rec­og­nize it as such, because we are deep in the trenches of lib­eral cap­i­tal­is­tic rationality–which relies on log­ics of effi­cien­cies, not in the phys­i­cal and men­tal well-being of humans and the refined sen­si­b­lity of sustainability.

 

His­tory is Bunk.

Through­out time our soci­ety has been chang­ing the world we live in, and now it is hard to say how much we have changed, mutated, destroyed or have cul­ti­vated the world around us and our world, it all depends how you look at it. “From the 1750–1850 the Indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion caused a last­ing shift from an agri­cul­tural and com­mer­cial soci­ety rely­ing on ani­mals and sim­ple tools to an indus­trial soci­ety based on machin­ery and fac­to­ries” (Edwards). The use of elec­tric­ity, the gaso­line engine and factory-based pro­duc­tion meth­ods was rapidly adopted by our cul­tures, cre­at­ing the urban cen­ters that we have today (Edwards). These icons (cities) of tech­nol­ogy have prop­a­gated a divi­sion of city and nature, or tech­nol­ogy and nature. How­ever I think one of Heidegger’s main points was to “avoid exclu­sive focus on ide­al­ized notions of pre­serv­ing the dis­tant wilder­ness” (Shan­nin) and rather “be one with nature.”

 

“In the mid-Thirties, Hei­deg­ger began artic­u­lat­ing a view that empha­sized the ancient Greek sense of a nat­ural emer­gence of mean­ing, in con­trast to the [Mod­ern] view that mean­ing is imposed on the world by human sub­jects (Shee­han). This idea that mod­ern project brought about the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a dichotomy with nature and humans has been preva­lent in our cul­ture. How­ever, new ideas gen­er­ated from the envi­ron­men­tal­ism debate have chal­lenged this way of think­ing, just as Hei­deg­ger chal­lenged it. The recent envi­ron­men­tal rhetoric of Civic Envi­ron­men­tal­ism denounces tech­no­cratic approaches toward envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems which have pro­duced a dichotomy of nature – “wor­thy” wilder­ness vs. “unwor­thy” urban envi­ron­ment, and vice versa. This strong tra­di­tion of a “dichotomy in west­ern intel­lec­tu­al­ism takes its roots in Greek phi­los­o­phy, which affirmed a dual­ism of mor­tal body and eter­nal soul” (Shannin).

 

“Such dual­ism has become quite com­mon­place and it has per­me­ated the world of pol­i­tics, sci­ence and cul­ture. West­ern soci­ety, in gen­eral, became trapped in these notions of polar­ity, which have been used to jus­tify inequal­ity, dom­i­na­tion, neglect and oppres­sion. For many cen­turies humankind has seen its des­tiny shaped by a sys­tem of socially con­structed rela­tion­ships – humans vs. nature” (Shan­nin). Putting tech­nol­ogy and nature in sep­a­rate cat­e­gories allows for a hier­ar­chy (anthro­pocen­tric world­view), where a chal­leng­ing dia­logue can unfold, rather than view­ing nature, tech­nol­ogy, archi­tec­ture, cul­ture, habits as pro­foundly tan­gled if not one and the same (bio­cen­tric worldview).

 

Hei­deg­ger rec­og­nized this dichotomy as a chang­ing of the guard in the way humans live their lives and who they become when they embrace these ideas of human vs. nature—as chal­leng­ing nature. Here Hei­deg­ger attempts to assign a bet­ter way of liv­ing or dwelling, a more con­scious sit­u­ated expe­ri­ence. Hei­deg­ger wanted peo­ple to have a sit­u­ated expe­ri­ence with the land, in a poetic sense. To quote Hei­deg­ger “in con­trast, a tract of land is chal­lenged into the putting out of coal or ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal min­ing dis­trict, the soil as a min­eral deposit. The field that the peas­ant for­merly cul­ti­vated and set in order [bestellte] appears dif­fer­ently that it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to main­tain. The work of the peas­ant does not chal­lenge the soil of the field. In the sow­ing of the grain it places the seed in the keep­ing of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But mean­while even the cul­ti­va­tion of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon [stellt] nature. It sets upon it in the sense of chal­leng­ing it. Agri­cul­ture is now the mech­a­nized food indus­try. Air is now set upon to yield nitro­gen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield ura­nium, for exam­ple; ura­nium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruc­tion or for peace­ful use.” I think Hei­deg­ger is see­ing some dishar­mony issues in things, where nature is not allowed to just “be.” Hei­deg­ger saw it, “the reveal­ing that rules in mod­ern tech­nol­ogy is a chal­leng­ing [Her­aus­fordern], which puts to nature the unrea­son­able demand that it sup­ply energy that can be extracted and stored as such” (Hei­deg­ger). Mod­ern tech­nol­ogy sets-upon nature and challenges-forth its ener­gies, in con­trast to techne which was always a bringing-forth in har­mony with nature.

 

 

A Rev­o­lu­tion with Sustenance.

“Techne … reveals what­ever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, what­ever can look and turn out now one way and now another… Thus what is deci­sive in techne does not lie at all in mak­ing or manip­u­lat­ing nor in the using of means, but rather in the afore­men­tioned reveal­ing. It is as reveal­ing, and not as man­u­fac­tur­ing, that techne is a bringing-forth” (Hei­deg­ger) This har­mony of techne has a sim­i­lar vision to sus­tain­abil­ity, not merely repli­cat­ing itself but repro­duc­ing, i.e. ‘organ­i­cally’ grow­ing out of a place (repro­duc­ing), rather than being implanted or “set-upon” (replicated/manufacturing) in space or a ‘nowhere’ as Ken­neth Fram­ton would say. The dif­fer­enc­ing between repli­cat­ing and repro­duc­ing is an idea that implies evo­lu­tion, often times an evolv­ing method or prin­ci­ple or strat­egy is more respon­sive, adap­tive and less intru­sive. I think that Heidegger’s ideas lend them­selves to this evo­lu­tion prin­ci­ple with the gen­eral notion of this bringing-forth, in a co-responsible manner.

 

Sus­tain­abil­ity is ori­ented toward solu­tions that do not doom future gen­er­a­tions, the earth, liv­ing humans, and devel­op­ing coun­tries to a per­ma­nently sec­ondary place in the world econ­omy under the rubric of “envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion” (Edwards). Sus­tain­abil­ity also has the broader goal of not pit­ting the inter­ests of com­pet­ing inter­ests (con­ser­va­tion­ists and ‘convienience-ist’ for exam­ple) but cre­at­ing a har­mony, cre­at­ing some­thing in the world that stems from all walks of life, made of many parts to make a syn­er­gis­tic whole—finding tol­er­ance through plurism of ideas and ways of doing things, instead of cut throat com­pe­ti­tion and nar­row vision. The sus­tain­abil­ity rev­o­lu­tion has emerged as a main­stream phe­nom­e­non at a global scale to deal with the ever present envi­ron­men­tal changes, social injus­tices, and chang­ing global eco­nomic pat­terns (Edwards). This to me seems to assim­i­late with Heidegger’s poetic think­ing but at a world scale and an evolv­ing liv­ing pat­tern that is gen­er­ated from the earth: a sit­u­ated experience.

 

To quote a goal of civic envi­ron­men­tal­ism: “the uti­liza­tion of local insti­tu­tions over which we (peo­ple) have some con­trol, our homes, schools, churches, farms, and locally con­trolled busi­nesses, as pilot projects of eco­log­i­cal liv­ing”, this expresses great strides in the vision of Heidegger’s dwelling (Shan­nin). I feel there are sev­eral scales to ‘poetic thinking’—one scale that I feel Hei­deg­ger did not engage in, was on a world scale—I see it as a world­wide aware­ness of issues such as cli­mate change, pol­lu­tion, ozone deple­tion and habi­tat destruc­tion that will require an inter­na­tional scope to resolve. Pos­si­bly Hei­deg­ger con­fronted this issue with his “new-age” four fold, like a con­nected meta-physical rhi­zome of humans or a col­lec­tive con­scious­ness of the world all build­ing, dwelling, and thinking.

 

The wrong kind of discipline.

On the scale of the build­ing or how humans dwell, we find the scale archi­tec­ture, where tech­nol­ogy can be most blind­ing. Recently sus­tain­abil­ity employed in archi­tec­tural prac­tice has been a very prac­ti­cal, sin­gu­lar venue via energy effi­ciency: a sci­ence of Btu’s—where design moves are proved only by sta­tis­tics that may have more sta­tis­ti­cal weight than sub­stan­tial effect, mean­ing the more effec­tive thing to do does not always look good to the econ­o­mist. In William McDo­nough and Michael Braungart’s (Cra­dle to Cra­dle authors) dif­fer­enc­ing between eco-effectiveness and eco-efficiency; they describe effi­ciency as being “less bad” and effec­tive­ness as a strat­egy that not just avoids envi­ron­ment harm but increases eco­log­i­cal health. Steven Kellert in his book Build­ing for Life offers this cri­tique, “though admirable, McDo­nough and Braungart’s con­cept of eco­log­i­cal health needs to be extended to include a greater empha­sis on human expe­ri­ence, incor­po­rat­ing the recog­ni­tion of how much people’s phys­i­cal and men­tal well-being depends on their con­tact with nature.” The idea that tech­nol­ogy can solve all our prob­lems (envi­ron­men­tal, social, eco­nomic) with­out a deeper ques­tion­ing of our daily prac­tices, habits and per­cep­tions does not lead us down a path of men­tal and phys­i­cal well-being, for we might end up with a her­met­i­cally sealed bios­phere, ster­ile, per­fect and pre­dictable. For the ideas of eco-effectiveness still have us sit­ting in rush hour traf­fic, only we aren’t pol­lut­ing the air any­more, pro­duc­ing water and oxy­gen in hybrid cars. The impor­tance of a human con­tact with nature is over­looked in McDo­nough and Braungart’s per­spec­tive, and is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of most ‘sus­tain­able design prac­tice’ in north amer­ica today–based on hyper-efficiencies.

 

When you reduce it down to Btu’s you lose the “essence.”

 

The issues of greater eco­log­i­cal health ver­sus her­met­i­cally sealed boxes, seems like a sim­ple choice. How­ever more and more of our built envi­ron­ments are becom­ing her­met­i­cally sealed boxes rather than inte­grat­ing con­nec­tions between peo­ple and the nat­ural envi­ron­ment. Most of these choices are guided by stan­dards to avoid sick build­ing syn­drome and cre­ate boxes that are energy effi­cient. Ken­neth Fram­ton agrees on such reduc­tion­ism on our non-place cities/suburbs, where we make spaces and not places, “out­side the ‘mass’ engi­neered som­nam­bu­lism of the tele­vi­sion, we still indulge in the pro­lif­er­a­tion of road­side kitsch—in the fab­ri­cated mirage of ‘some­where’ made out of bill­board facades and token the­atri­cal para­pher­na­lia the fan­tas­mago­ria of an escape clause from the land­scape of alienation…with ‘newspeak’ over­tones, they tes­tify to a fun­da­men­tal break in our rap­port with nature (includ­ing our own), they speak of a lay­ing waste that can only find its ulti­mate end in ourselves.”

 

As an archi­tec­tural exam­ple of effi­ciency over effec­tive­ness: many sub­ur­ban devel­op­ments today are posi­tioned to carry out pro­duc­tion; their for­mu­las are set up for eco­nomic imper­a­tive for prof­its which negate some more mean­ing­ful processes of con­sen­sus and gen­er­a­tion of place that poten­tially could unfold. Counter-active to the sub­urbs, new urban­ist com­mu­ni­ties offer a mit­i­gated ver­sion of this devel­op­ment process. This mit­i­gated process has more ‘poetic think­ing’ in it than the sub­urbs, and is focused more on peo­ple rather mere hous­ing to fill hous­ing needs: a means to an end.

 

To be one with nature.
In regard to our nat­ural world, which we humans are con­di­tioned to feel sep­a­rated from and yet we humans have innate pro­cliv­ity toward every­thing in the bios­phere. This con­cept of the “instinc­tive bond between humans beings and other liv­ing sys­tems” is called bio­philia (Wil­son). One of the great­est pro­po­nents of con­nec­tion to nature through an experience-based and edu­ca­tional stand­point is David Orr, in an inter­view he describes the value of nature and how reduc­tion­ism lim­its our appre­ci­a­tion for nature.

When we speak of the human rela­tion­ship to our envi­ron­ment, I think we need to draw a dis­tinc­tion between com­plex­ity on one hand and com­pli­cat­ed­ness on the other. A corn­field, for exam­ple, is a com­pli­cated con­trivance tied to futures prices on the Chicago Board of Trade, man­u­fac­tur­ers of chem­i­cals and expen­sive equip­ment, bal­ance of pay­ments, Saudi Ara­bian oil, and seed companies.

A for­est, by con­trast is com­plex beyond our capac­ity to fully com­pre­hend. Nat­ural sys­tems are incred­i­bly com­plex; they have a kind of a lay­ered com­plex­ity. We can’t com­pre­hend how com­plex they are. Com­plex­ity I think is an eco­log­i­cal and per­haps spir­i­tual measure.

In con­trast, com­pli­cat­ed­ness is an indus­trial thing. We under­stand com­pli­cated things some­what because we made them. Cities, for exam­ple, are merely complicated.

The indus­trial mind, which is born of this com­pli­cat­ed­ness, sees the world as some­thing to be manip­u­lated. Essen­tially, this mind­set holds that we can make end runs around the nat­ural world and have it all, and of course we can’t.

What the indus­trial world has done in this tran­si­tion from com­plex to com­pli­cated is to draw down nat­ural wealth, biotic poten­tial, species diver­sity, fos­sil fuels, and fos­sil water. The result is a short-run bonanza. Wes Jack­son points out bet­ter than any­body else I know that the price of this tran­si­tion is the loss of cul­tural infor­ma­tion. So the extrac­tive econ­omy destroys both eco­log­i­cal and human poten­tials (van Gelder).

The con­cept of com­plex­ity verses com­pli­cat­ed­ness brings to mind the things we choose to ignore and devalue in the name of effi­ciency and reductionism.

In Arti­fi­cial Love, Paul Shep­heard defines archi­tec­ture as the rear­rang­ing of the world for human pur­poses. Shepheard’s ver­sion of the his­tory of humans is a tech­no­log­i­cal one, in which machines become sculp­ture and sculp­ture becomes archi­tec­ture. For Shep­heard, our machines do not sep­a­rate us from nature. Rather, our tech­nol­ogy is our nature, and we can­not but be in har­mony with nature. The change that we have wrought in the world, he says, is a won­der­ful and pow­er­ful thing, a cul­ti­va­tion of it. I don’t think Shep­heard knows it but he is in the same camp as the Indus­trial Ecol­o­gist of Nat­ural Cap­i­tal­ism fame, a tech­no­log­i­cal fix, although Shep­heard merely does not address envi­ron­men­tal issues, but he does address our col­lec­tive con­scious­ness through our human cre­ated won­ders on earth. For Shep­heard there is no chal­leng­ing to nature as Hei­deg­ger would view it, yet the mount­ing evi­dence of the envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis begs to dif­fer. The idea that we are all one large socio-technological-nature rings true for me, thus this means all the more rea­son for the amaze­ment of Shep­heard and the tech­no­log­i­cal drive of the Indus­trial Ecol­o­gists to fix our prob­lems and the rev­er­ence of nature via bio­philia of Orr. These things com­bined and applied all together might start to make a frame­work for sus­tain­abil­ity through plurism, rec­og­niz­ing the our cul­ti­va­tion of the world affects the world and that we are affected by the world—valuing not just human made things but the bios­phere and its processes.

 

 

Our build­ings look like casu­al­ties of causality.

If mod­ern tech­nol­ogy is viewed as a mere means to an ends based on a soci­o­log­i­cal framework/boundaries, and not as a process of co-responsibility and co-creating then causal­ity reigns. “The four causes are the ways, all belong­ing at once to each other, of being respon­si­ble for some­thing else” (Hei­deg­ger). I think a process of co-responsibility is imper­a­tive, for we have the abil­ity to design. This abil­ity allows us to make mean­ing­ful instances of “com­ing into pres­ence.” Design is our abil­ity to our poten­tial to affect the world with poetic think­ing and some­times look­ing for restraint as the best option does not rely on effi­ciency and quan­tity. Specif­i­cally in regards to our ten­dency toward “pro­duc­tion con­sid­ered solely as an econ­omy of method…inhibiting rather than facil­i­tat­ing the cre­ation of recep­tive places” (Frampton).

An extreme exam­ple of this co-responsibility and restraint is often found in the Amish cul­ture as told in an inter­view with David Orr:

“David Klein, an old– order Amish man liv­ing in Holmes County, Ohio, has explained to my stu­dents on sev­eral occa­sions why he uses rel­a­tively advanced tech­nol­ogy to bring in hay but not to get in grain. The old order Amish refuse to buy com­bines because thresh­ing par­ties are a com­mu­nity affair. They refuse to let tech­nol­ogy intrude in cer­tain activ­i­ties because to do so would dam­age the com­mu­nity and limit their chances to help their neigh­bors and work together. They make that choice with full knowl­edge that indi­vid­u­ally they could be wealth­ier if they got grain in faster and increased the scale of farm­ing. But they would be wealth­ier at the expense of com­mu­nity” (van Gelder).

Hei­deg­ger was con­cerned with co-responsibility and the bring­ing forth of techne through ques­tion­ing of tech­nol­ogy and habits. The Author of Lul­laby, Chuck Palah­niuk, points out how our medi­ated cul­ture can hide ideas in things and limit ques­tion­ing; “Experts in ancient Greek cul­ture say that peo­ple back then didn’t see their thoughts as belong­ing to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or god­dess giv­ing an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now peo­ple hear a com­mer­cial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being hon­est.” The cul­ture of mak­ing has been hid­den from our eyes, and co-responsibility is lost. So as the sil­ver­smith might have crafted the chal­lis, the con­sumer now selects his prod­ucts, I ask is this the same?

If instead we took a stance and world­view where there is more to life than reduc­tive effi­cien­cies and stark sep­a­ra­tions, that we are part of nature and nature a part of us, we might be more open to holis­tic, long-term, fair solu­tions to envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion issues and con­ser­va­tion, envi­ron­men­tal and social jus­tice, afford­able and fair hous­ing and access to eco­nomic loans and sub­si­dies. Being more delib­er­ate about our phys­i­cal and men­tal well-being is entirely in our con­trol, and we can achieve this delib­er­ate­ness with­out being a techno­phobe or a tech­no­crat. The abil­ity to ques­tion our world is our great­est asset as a species, under­lin­ing a men­tal capa­bil­ity for tol­er­ance and multiplicity—standing outside the fire while being in fry­ing pan—may be our great­est human­ness. This stance requires some restraint on our part as to avoid power grabs over nature, and remem­ber that our con­scious­ness comes first. We can not afford to impov­er­ish our rela­tion­ship with nature any longer. The increased sep­a­ra­tion from the land has cre­ated so much impov­er­ish­ment. We see fewer and fewer options before us.

 

 

Ref­er­ences:

 

Drey­fus, Hubert L. “Hei­deg­ger on Gain­ing a Free Rela­tion to Tech­nol­ogy,” in Tech­nol­ogy and the Pol­i­tics of Knowl­edge,” Andrew Feen­berg and Alas­tair Han­nay, Eds., (Bloom­ing­ton, IN: Indi­ana Uni­ver­sity Press, 1995), pp., 97–107.

 

Edwards, Andres. The Sus­tain­abil­ity Rev­o­lu­tion: por­trait of a par­a­digm shift. Gabri­ola, BC: New Soci­ety Pub­lish­ers, 2005, pp. 3,4,21

 

Framp­ton, Ken­neth. “On Read­ing Hei­deg­ger,” in The­o­riz­ing a New Agenda for Archi­tec­ture: An Anthol­ogy of Archi­tec­tural The­ory, 1965–1995, Kate Nes­bitt, ed., (New York: Prince­ton Archi­tec­tural Press, 1996), pp. 440–446.

 

Hei­deg­ger, Mar­tin. “The Ques­tion Con­cern­ing Tech­nol­ogy” in, The Ques­tion Con­cern­ing Tech­nol­ogy and Other Essays, Harper and Row: New York.1977, pp. 3–35.

 

Kellert, Steven. Build­ing for Life: design­ing and under­stand­ing the human nature con­nec­tion. Washington,DC: Island Press. 2005, p. 96

 

Mum­ford, Lewis. From the Ground Up: Obser­va­tions on con­tem­po­rary archi­tec­ture, hous­ing, high­way build­ing, and civic design. Har­vest Books: New York. 1956, pp 110–111.

 

Shan­nin, Dim­itri A. On Civic Envi­ron­men­tal­ism. 2003. www.drake.edu/artsci/PolSci/ssjrnl/2003/Shanin.pdf

 

Shee­han, Thomas. “A Nor­mal Nazi” New York Review of Books, XL, nos. 1–2 (Jan­u­ary 14, 1993) 30–35. Thomas Shee­han, “A Nor­mal Nazi,” in The New York Review (Jan­u­ary 14,1993), pp. 30:35.

 

Shep­heard, Paul. Arti­fi­cial Love: A story of machines and archi­tec­ture. The MIT Press: Cam­bridge Mass­a­chu­setts. 2003, p79

 

van Gelder, Sarah. “Human Agri­cul­ture: What it will take to fos­ter strong rural com­mu­ni­ties, nutri­tious foods, humane cities, and eco­log­i­cal wis­dom” An inter­view with David Orr in A Good Har­vest (IC#42) Fall 1995, p 14

 

Wil­son, Edward O. and Steven Kellert. The Bio­philia hypoth­e­sis. Wash­ing­ton, DC: Island Press 1993.

 

Define:

Repli­cate to repeat or copy; Ana­lyz­ing the same sam­ple twice; should yield very sim­i­lar results.

Repro­duce make a copy or equiv­a­lent of; “repro­duce the paint­ing”; have off­spring or young; implies evolution.

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