Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

In their university days, many architects would have commonly run across the essays “Building Dwelling Thinking” and “Poetically, Man Dwells” by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. These essays have united generations of architects around the idea that a work of architecture which does not acknowledge and incorporate notions of place falls short of meeting the highest aims of architecture. The purpose of this paper is to move from Heidegger’s quasi-romantic notions of poetic dwelling to more pointed warnings regarding technological thinking. Though this has been well established in other works by Heidegger and his scholars, this paper relies on works by the philosopher that have remained untranslated until recently and are largely unknown. These works includes the author’s own translations of Heidegger’s poetry, short commentaries, and the 1970 essay “Man’s Dwelling” (Das Wohnen des Menschen). The latter is particularly valuable because it serves as a coda to the two previous essays “Building Dwelling Thinking” and “Poetically, Man Dwells”, and because it lends this paper its three orienting principles – unpoetic dwelling, the adulation of science, and the mechanization of man. As an illustrative historical example, this paper delves into the debates amongst modern architects around two of their most iconic precepts: form follows function, and a house is a machine for living. The author presents this paper to an organization and conference centered upon technological tools and methods as a continuing caution against the uncritical and unfeeling adoption of technological means in the classroom and in professional practice.