Archosophy Session 01 (2014-12-11) Summary

The first Archosophy Vancouver session took place on 11^th December 2014. Landscape Architecture firm PFS Studio generously hosted it. We had two speakers – Nena Stanković, an art and film theorist from UBC, and Sean Ruthen, a writer and architect with VIA Architecture. Both presentations dealt with the relations one forms with the built environment. Or, how the built environment is formed from the relations it is implicated within. From the evening’s discussion, the notion of the “unfinished” became one that connected Heidegger and Derrida, but more importantly connected to a question of how the unfinished could enter professional practice (again)?

Of Heidegger, Mies and Libeskind

The evening started with Nena using concepts from Martin Heidegger’s essay Building Dwelling Thinking to read Mies ven der Rohe’s National Gallery in Berlin and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, also in Berlin.

To read Mies and Libeskind, Nena introduced us to Heidegger’s use of etymology to tease out buried relations between words. She pointed out Heidegger’s examination of the word “building”. The Old High German form for building is “bauen,” which goes beyond functional construction to include “dwelling”. Moreover, buaen is also related to the German word bin, as in “ich bin” or “I am”. Heidegger thus surmised,

• Building is really dwelling;
• Dwelling is the manner in which humans are on the earth;
• Building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings.[1]

There is thus a call, as Nena suggested, for being aware of how one’s existence is produced by one’s relations to the built environment. This awareness constitutes a poetic[2] mode of living.

What relations should we be aware of? Nena suggests Heidegger’s “Fourfolds” – Earth, Sky, God and Mortals– which he derives from the ancient Greeks’ four primal elements – Earth, Air, Fire and Water.[3]

It is with the Fourfolds that Nena proceeded to produce a reading of how Mies and Libeskind’s buildings allow for a poetic mode of existence to emerge. For example, the glass walls of Mies’National Gallery allow its interior space to be connected to the wider cityscape. Vice versa, one can look into the gallery reinforcing a connection between the inside and outside. For Nena, the gallery’s space (and time) is produced by the elements that surround it. Likewise, Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, for Nena, dispenses with symbolism; instead, space itself as produced by light, shade, micro climatic changes, and geometry to produce a sensibility of the museum.

Mies and Libeskind’s buildings allow the changing of the elements to produce its space. There is thus an incompleteness. And it is with this notion of incompleteness that we move to Sean’s presentation.

Of Derrida and Eisenman

Sean’s presentation on Jacques Derrida picked up from Nena’s. Derrida was a student of Heidegger at one point, and Sean’s presentation also dealt with the overall question of what it means to dwell, to relate to the built environment.

Sean’s presentation largely draws from his recent book review of Richard Coyne’s book Derrida for Architects. Sean briefly talked about Derrida’s take on the concept of aporia, which is pertains to keeping things in perplexity and ambiguity rather than to seek resolution. This is then followed by a discussion of Derrida and architect Peter Eisenman’s collaboration, ChoraL Works, which in its early manuscript and then later book-form, serves as an instigation for thinking for Bernard Tschumi’s completion of Parc de la Villette.

Chora L Works has its basis in the concept of Chora, which Derrida draws from Plato’s Timaeus. The Chora as Derrida understood it is a space from which space(s) emerge, but the Chora is itself without defined conceptual or physical form.[4] Hence, one might suggest the book Chora L Works is not itself a Chora; it is the event of engaging with it that opens up the Chora. It is in this event that we engage in the construction of the bridges between concepts we read and might make and future spaces yet-to-come. To quote Heidegger, “the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge.”[5] In this sense, there is something architectonic¸ something concerned with making, in this event reading Chora L Works.

It is here that the evening’s discussion moved from a review of Heidegger and Derrida’s philosophical concepts to a more robust discussion about the “unfinished”.

Sean as well as the evening’s audience agreed that what makes Chora L Works interesting is that they are “unfinished”; unfinished not in the sense of there being a defined outcome that was initially planned but unrealised or unfulfilled. Rather, unfinished in the sense that one might draw ways from those manuscripts, paintings and books to think to about space. In the case of Chora L Works it is critical to be reminded it does not instruct designers on what space must result. It is as such different from today’s more prescriptive approach to design that comes in the form of guidelines and instruction manuals.

Of an unfinished question

A key question, that itself cannot be reduced to a single answer, was asked that evening:

• How will the “unfinished” play a role in the urgency of spatio-economic identity politics and climate change that  occupy much of town planning, landscape architecture and architecture practice and academe?

With this question, the course of the Archosophy Sessions seems to be taking place.

Archosophy Session 01 (11th Dec 2014, PFS Studio) - Photo Credit: Derek Deland (2014)

NOTE: Images of the various buildings and parks mentioned in the presentation are not shown to avoid copyright issues.

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[1] Martin Heidegger (1971) “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought (Trans. A. Hofstadter), NYC: Harper & Row, p.148.

[2] The terms poetic can be traced to the Greek word poeisis, which means “to make.”There is thus a will here to create rather than just exist.

[3] This connecting of dwelling to the primal elements may at first seem reactive. But Nena quickly pointed out to the audience that this is not a call to return to some simpler pastoral world. Again, this awareness is an examination of how these elements changes our relation to the built environment, and how our relation to these elements changes the built environment.

[4] Derrida and Eisenman wrote, “Chora receives everything or gives place to everything, but Plato insists that in fact it has to be a virgin place, and that it has to be totally foreign, totally exterior to anything that it receives. Since it is absolutely blank, everything that is printed on it is automatically effaced. It remains foreign to the imprint it receives; so in a sense, it does not receive anything-it does not receive what it receives nor does it give what it gives. Everything inscribed in it erases itself immediately, while remaining in it. It is thus an impossible surface-it is not even a surface, because it has no depth.” See Jacques Derrida (1997) Choral L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman (Ed. J. Kipnis & T. Leeser), NYC: Monacelli Press, p.

[5] Heidegger (1971), p.154.