Donatella Mazzoleni » 4.Living

Developments in this lesson

In our lessons so far we have covered the first steps on our learning journey.
We defined architecture as the art of:

• constructing forms of protection for our life on earth,
• making sense of our presence on earth

We then defined the scope and applications of architecture and the specific systems and units of measurement it uses….

In this lesson we will begin our actual exploration both within and outside architecture to put together a series of elements from as broad a knowledge-base as possible, which will help to develop our imaginative potential….

The topic of this lesson is: living.

Conceptual tools

Stages of the agogic journey (touched on in this lesson)

(Preparation) – Nomadic research – Serendipity – Accumulation – (Attempts at design) – Analogies – (Distraction, rest – Epiphanies – Evaluation)

Non-verbal language (used or referred to in this lesson)

Spatio-visual languages
graphics, painting
Spatial/territorial languages
architecture, landscape, cosmologies

References to other subjects (used or quoted in this lesson)

Philosophy

Theoretical tools

” (…) We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is a dwelling (…) These buildings house man (…) but – do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?

(…) To build is in itself already to dwell (…). The Old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell. This signifies: to remain, to stay in a place.

(…) The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling.

(…)Both modes of building – building as cultivating, Latin colere, cultura, and building as the raising up of edifices, aedificare -are comprised within genuine building, that is, dwelling.”…

From Martin Heidegger Building Dwelling Thinking
Conference held 5 August 1951 as part of Second Darmstadt Debate on Man and space; printed in Conference Papers, Darmstadt, 1952.
Italian translation Martin Heidegger Saggi e discorsi by Gianni Vattimo, Mursia , Milano 1976.

Theoretical tools

But if we listen to what language says in the word bauen we hear three things:

• Building is really dwelling.
• Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth.
• Building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings.

But ‘on the earth’ already means ‘under the sky’. (…) Earth is the serving bearer (…)The sky is the vaulting path of the sun (…)The divinities are the beckoning messengers of the godhead. (…)The mortals are the human beings. (…) This simple oneness of the four we call the fourfold (…) dwelling itself is always a staying with things.  (…). Mortals nurse and nurture the things that grow, and specially construct things that do not grow.

the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase of the earth’s population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.

Quotes from Martin Heidegger Building, Dwelling, Thinking

Theoretical tools

“Our dwelling is harassed by the housing shortage. Even if that were not so, our dwelling today is harassed by work, made insecure by the hunt for gain and success, be- witched by the entertainment and recreation industry (…)…Dwelling so understood is always merely the occupying of a lodging.

When Holderlin speaks of dwelling, he has before his eyes the basic character of human existence (…): poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling (…).

“Man does not dwell in that he merely establishes his stay on the earth beneath the sky, by raising growing things and simultaneously raising buildings. Man is capable of such building only if he already builds in the sense of the p~tic taking of measure. Authentic building occurs so far as there are poets, such poets as take the measure for architecture, the structure of dwelling”. (…)(…)

Quotes from Martin Heidegger …Poetically man dwells… a lecture at the Bühlerhöhe on October 6, 1951. Published in Akzente,a poetry review, n.1, p.57, 1951
Italian text:  Martin Heidegger Saggi e discorsi by Gianni Vattimo, Mursia , Milano 1976.

Mother Earth

The great sea of sand, Eastern (Egypt). Photo by Corinna Rossi.

Living is…

“Poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell. (…) Do we dwell poetically? Presumably we dwell altogether unpoetically. (…)That we dwell unpoetically, and in what way, we can in any case learn only if we know the poetic. Whether, and when, we may come to a turning point in our unpoetic dwelling is some- thing we may expect to happen only if we remain heedful of the poetic. How and to what extent our doings can share in this turn we alone can prove, if we take the poetic seriously”.

“The upward glance passes aloft toward the sky, and yet it remains below on the earth. The up- ward glance spans the between of sky and earth. (…) We now call the span thus meted out the dimension. This dimension does not arise from the fact that sky and earth are turned toward one another. Rather, their facing each other itself depends on the dimension (…)Man’s dwelling depends on an upward-looking measure-taking of the dimension (…) The taking of  measure is what is poetic in dwelling. Poetry is a measuring (…)”.

From Martin Heidegger Poetically man dwells (as above)