Foreword
Christian Norberg-Schulz, the Norwegian theorist and architect, is one of the great defenders of phenomenology in architecture. From his earliest writings in the 1960s to his last — Meaning and Place (1998) — he has, by inquiring into the views of the great contemporary thinker Martin Heidegger, presented a written and illustrated commentary based on the essay "Building Dwelling Thinking". In his book Intentions in Architecture (1962) he draws upon linguistics, perceptual (Gestalt) psychology and phenomenology to construct a comprehensive theory of architecture. The book was published just before Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, one of the most important post-modern writings. A clear, growing tendency toward phenomenology is apparent in Norberg-Schulz's later books.
Norberg-Schulz, in setting forth Heidegger's thoughts in his essay "Heidegger's Thinking on Architecture", undertakes a linguistic analysis of several writings of the philosopher and, following Heidegger's own interest in the etymology of words in their everyday use, tries to give a clear account of the philosopher's thoughts in this regard.
Norberg-Schulz's critique of modern architecture is broadly developed: he claims that this architecture has produced a crisis of meaning by creating a diagrammatic, functional environment that does not allow dwelling. Referring to A Moment of Disturbance and Crisis, he accepts that others too have tried — by using semiotics (the study of architecture as a system of conventional signs) — to approach the question of meaning in architecture. But he rejects this method as inappropriate, and chooses instead an approach deeply indebted to Heidegger's phenomenology.
Heidegger's thinking on architecture
Although Heidegger has left no text on architecture as such, the matter plays an important part in his philosophy. His particular conception of "Being-in-the-world" implies a built environment, and in his discussion of "dwelling poetically" he refers openly to the art of building. Hence an analysis of Heidegger's thinking on architecture must be a part of our reading of his philosophy. Such an analysis can also bring us a better understanding of the complex problems of the environmental conditions of our own time.
In Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art" the chief example is taken from the art of architecture; we use it as a starting point:
"A building, a Greek temple, depicts nothing: it stands simply in the cleft of a rocky valley. This building harbours within itself the manifestation of the god, and in this concealment lets it rise up, through an open portico, into a holy precinct. By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is, in itself, the extension and the delimitation of a precinct as a holy precinct. Yet the temple and its precinct do not lose themselves in the unbounded. It is the architecture of the temple that first gathers around itself, and at the same time around its presence, the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, mishap and blessing, victory and disgrace, course and decline, gain the shape of human destiny that has been ordained. The all-encompassing extension of this connecting ground is the world of this historical people. Only from and within this extension does the people return to itself for the carrying out of its task.
The building, by standing there, rests upon rocky ground. It is this resting of the building that draws the secret of the rock from its formlessness, and at the same time supports it. The building, by standing there, holds its ground against the storm raging above it, and so first lets the storm appear in its violence. The shining and gleam of the stone, though it seems to shine only by the grace of the sun, is what first brings to light the brightness of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple's unshakable rising-up makes the unseen space of the air visible. The firmness of the building stands opposite to the surge of the wave, and its calm reveals the turmoil of the sea. The tree and the grass, the eagle and the bull, the snake and the cricket, first enter into their distinct shapes and so appear as what they are. The Greeks called this coming-forth and rising-from-itself in everything Phusis, which makes clear and lights up the ground upon which, and in which, man founds his dwelling." (The Origin of the Work of Art)
What does this passage tell us? Above all we must attend to the context in which the passage is used. When Heidegger refers to the temple, he does so to show the nature of a work of art. He intentionally chooses a work for description that cannot be classified as "representational". In this sense, the work of art does not represent — it brings into presence, brings something to presence. Heidegger defines this thing as "truth". Furthermore, the example shows that, on Heidegger's account, the building is — or can be — a work of art, and like a work of art, "keeps the truth". So "what" is kept, and "how" is it carried out?
The "what" in our question covers three components. First, the temple makes the god present. Second, it gathers what shapes the destiny of human beings. Finally, the temple makes all the things of earth visible: rock, tree, plants, animals, and even the brightness of day and the darkness of night. Generally, the temple "opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back upon the earth". To do this, it "sets-into-work" the truth.
To grasp the meaning of all this, it is better to attend to the second question — "how?". Heidegger four times repeats that the temple does what it does by "standing there". Both words are important. The temple does not stand just anywhere — but "there", "in the cleft of the rocky valley". The words rocky cleft and valley are surely not put in as ornaments; they show that temples are raised in particular and striking places, and that through this raising the surrounding setting acquires for itself an extension and a bounding, through which a holy precinct for the god takes shape. In other words, the given place has a hidden meaning, which is brought to light by the temple. How the building makes the destiny of the people present is not clear, but it indicates that this is done together with the housing of the god — that is, the people's destiny is to be intimately attached to this place. Finally, the embodying of the earth is brought to attention by the raising of the temple upon it. Thus the temple rests on the ground "and is held up in the air". By doing this, it gives to things their particular look.
Thing, world, and the fourfold
Heidegger's reading of architecture as the "setting-into-work of truth" is fresh, and may even seem disorienting. Today we are accustomed to thinking about art with terms such as expression and representation, and to seeing man or society as its source. Heidegger insists, however, that "it is not the doer (NN. fecit) that should be known, but the simple existential fact (factum est) that has been opened up by the work". This factum is brought to light when a world is opened up so as to give to things their own look. So "world" and "thing" are mutually dependent concepts, to which we must attend if we are to grasp Heidegger's view better.
In Being and Time, Heidegger defines the world ontically as the totality of things, and ontologically as the Being of these things. In particular, the world is the "Where" in which a human being lives. In his later writings, he gives a reading of this "where" as the fourfold of earth, sky, mortals and divinities:
"The earth is the serving one, the bearer that nourishes with its fruits, the keeper of waters and rocks, of plants and animals. The sky is the path of the sun, the course of the moon, the shining of the stars, the seasons of the year, the brightness and the dusk (gloaming) of the day, the darkness and the brightening of the night, the moderation and change of the weather, the movement of the clouds, and the blue depth of the ether. The divinities are the messengers that point to the godhead. Out of the hidden sway of the divinities, the god comes forth as he is, who removes himself from any comparison with the beings that are present. The mortals are the human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means: to be capable of dying, by virtue of the very fact that death is."
"Each of these four is what it is, because it depicts the [other three]. They all belong together in a mirror-play, [the very play] that founds the world." The mirror-play may be taken as an open "between" in which things appear as they are. Heidegger, in an essay on Johann Peter Hebel, in fact speaks of man's remaining "between earth and sky, between birth and death, between joy and pain, between work and word", and calls it the "multifarious between" of the world. We see therefore that Heidegger's world is a concrete totality; instead of being the distant world of conceptions, it has the character of here-and-now.
In any case, the world as a totality of things is not a mere collection of objects. When Heidegger perceives things as the manifestation of the fourfold, he revives the original meaning of "thing" as gathered or gatherer. So he says: "Things meet mortals in a world." Heidegger also gives examples to clarify the nature of "thing". A jug is a thing, just as a bridge is, and each gathers the fourfold in its own way. The jug is part of the equipment that founds man's immediate environmental conditions, while the bridge is a building that determines wider features of the surrounding setting. Hence Heidegger says: "The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the river … It does not just connect two banks that were already there. Rather, only because the bridge passes over the river do the banks appear as banks."
Language and memory
When Heidegger wrote "The Origin of the Work of Art", he had not yet reached the concept of the fourfold; but in the description of the Greek temple all the factors are there: god, the human being, earth, and implicitly sky. The temple, as a thing, relates to all of them and lets them appear as they are. At the same time they are unified in an "onefold". The temple is made by man and is intentionally created to disclose a world. Although natural things too gather the fourfold, and call for an interpretation that brings their thinghood to light, this disclosure happens in poetry and, more generally, in language — which is itself in its first sense poetry. For the first time, language by naming beings brings them, for the first instance, into the word and into the open.
The last quotation shows that to grasp Heidegger's theory of art, we must also attend to his attention to language. Just as he does not take art as representation, neither can he take language as a means of communication based on habit and convention. When things are first named, they are known as they are. Before that they were only passing phenomena, but those names "keep" them and open up a world for them. Hence language is the "original art" (Urkunst), and what Heidegger calls disclosing in it the human being as a being already historically formed. Accordingly, Heidegger defines language as the "House of Being". Man dwells in language; when he listens to it, or answers it, the world that he is opens up, and an authentic existence becomes possible. Heidegger calls this "dwelling poetically". So he says: "But where do we humans get our information about the nature of dwelling and of poetry? … [We get it] from the saying of language, but only when, and so long as, we [respect] the nature of language itself."
Heidegger says that poetry speaks in images, and the nature of the image is to let something be seen. By contrast, copies and imitations are only kinds of "original image" "that let the unseeable be seen". So what is the source of the poetic image? Heidegger answers plainly: "Memory is the source of poetry." The German word for poetry (Gedächtnis) carries this meaning: "that which has been thought of". Although here we must understand "thought" in the sense of Andenken (mindful recollection, thinking with remembrance), which serves as the disclosure of the "thinghood" or the "Being of beings". Heidegger notes that the Greeks already understood the relation between memory and poetry: for them, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses, and Zeus their father. Zeus needed memory in order to bring forth art; Mnemosyne herself was a daughter of earth and sky. This implies that memory, as the bringer-forth of art, is our perception of the relation between earth and sky. Neither earth nor sky alone produces the work of art.
The work of architecture as the making of place
In his later essay "Art and Space", Heidegger discusses in greater detail the dual nature of being-spatial. He first notes that the German word Raum (space) comes from Räumen, meaning "the freeing of places for human dwelling". "Raum, by gathering things — which here belong to one another — provides a region." "We must learn to understand that things themselves are places, and not merely belong to a place." "The thing as a gatherer depicts the fourfold in its own way, but its thinghood is hidden and must be brought to light by a [work of art]." Sculptural embodiment is "the embodiment of the truth of Being in a work that founds its own place".
Heidegger's saying may here be related to his description of the temple as a body that stands, rests and rises into the heights. So the thinghood of a building is determined by its standing between earth and sky as a sculptural form. In general, this is in line with another saying of Heidegger's, that a building re-establishes the world upon the earth. To establish upon the earth means to embody. In other words, the fourfold in the act of building is gathered in a thing in the sense of "the act of bringing-forth" (Poiesis). Thus the earth keeps a world to which it has been opened.
Opening and keeping at the same time may be taken as a kind of conflict, which Heidegger calls the "rift" (Riss). Yet the conflict is not a mere break ready for opening; it is, in a precise sense, an intimacy in which the rivals belong to one another. "The rift does not let the rivals fly apart. It brings the contest of the high and the low into their general order." Thus the world gives measure to things, while the earth, as embodiment, offers a limit. If we apply this to our own context, we may say that a place is defined by its boundaries. Architecture, at the boundary, happens as the embodiment of the world. Hence Heidegger says: "A boundary is not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognised, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing."
A boundary may also be perceived as a "threshold", as the manifestation of a "difference". Heidegger, in his analysis of Trakl's "A Winter Evening", shows how a threshold carries the unity-and-difference of world and thing [earth]. In a building, the threshold simultaneously separates and unites an outside and an inside; it separates the strange from the habitual. It is a gathering in the middle, where a view of the world opens up and is set down upon the earth.
Boundary and threshold found the elements of place. They form part of a figure that brings to light the spatiality (Raumlichkeit) under view. In German the nature of this is beautifully shown by the language itself; the word Riss, in addition to the sense of cleft, also means plan. The cleft in space is fixed by Grund-Riss and Auf-Riss — that is, plan and elevation; and so the dual nature of being-spatial appears together. Plan and elevation together compose a figure or a Gestalt: "The Gestalt is the structure in whose form the rift takes shape and presents itself."
Coda: a way for architecture
Heidegger's thought about the art of building stops here; in one sense it stands outside architecture itself, and so does not cure the problems of architectural Gestalt in this way. Indeed, Heidegger opens his essay "Building Dwelling Thinking" with the saying: "This thinking about building does not by any means seek to discover architectural ideas, let alone to lay down rules for building." This says openly that for Heidegger the arts have their own particular professional questions, on which, as a philosopher, he does not feel qualified to argue. His aim was not to give an explanation, but to help man to return to original dwelling. Yet he did surely lay a foundation for this ground, and offered his Andenken (mindful, recollective thinking), which can take us further along a way for architecture.
To sum up, we should repeat the principal points of Heidegger's thought on architecture. The basic point of departure is the thought that the world appears only as it is when it is said — that is, when it is set in order. The discussion of the Greek temple depicts this idea by saying that the work of art "opens up a world and for the first time gives things their look". Earlier, in Being and Time, Heidegger had stressed that "discourse is existentially equiprimordial with state-of-mind and understanding." In other words, it is impossible to consider the world apart from language — which is understood as the "House of Being". Language names the things that man perceives in the world, and man's reaching to the world goes by way of listening and answering to language.
Yet, in order to give an immediate presence to the world, man must also fix the truth in a work. From this comes the primary aim of architecture: to make the world visible. Architecture does this as a thing, and the world that it brings to presence is composed of what it has gathered. Apparently a work of architecture makes visible not the totality of a world, but only certain aspects of it. These aspects are formed in the concept of being-spatial. Heidegger implicitly distinguishes spatiality (Spatiality) from space (Space) in a mathematical sense. Spatiality is a concrete term that names the region (Gegend) of the things that found a dwelt-in landscape.
When we say that life takes place, this saying implies that, in man's Being-in-the-world, depicts the Between of earth and sky. Man stands, rests and is active in this Between. The natural and made things that found the boundaries of this Between also stand, rest and rise — recalling Heidegger's descriptive sayings about the Greek temple. In this way they embody natures that depict man's state-of-mind (Befindlichkeit), while at the same time bounding the precinct that takes in human activities. So a work of architecture brings to light the spatiality of the fourfold by standing-there. Standing there, in a coherent place of rocks and plants, water and wind, brightness and darkness, animals and human beings, takes in the event of life.
Heidegger's thought on architecture is the greatest tendency of the present time. In a moment of disturbance and crisis it can help us reach an authentic perception of the ground of our work. Between the two wars, the course of architecture rested on the concept of "functionalism", which took its classical definition from the slogan "form follows function". Hence the architectural solution was to be derived directly from the practical patterns used.
In the past few decades it has become clearer and clearer that this approach, taken as wholly necessary, leads to a diagrammatic and soulless environment with poor possibilities for human dwelling. So the problem of meaning in architecture has come up. Up to now, semiotic methods have been mainly current, and architecture has been perceived as a system of conventional signs. Yet semiotic analyses, looking at architectural forms as the representation of something else, have proved the inappropriateness of explaining architectural works in this fashion. Here Heidegger comes to our rescue: his thought of architecture as the embodiment of truth keeps its artistic dimension, and so its human character too — through the concepts of world, thing and work — leads us out of the impasse of scientific abstraction back to what is concrete, that is, to the things themselves.
Although this does not mean that the problems are solved, today we are only at the beginning of the way. In particular architectural examples in which a step is taken on this path, a fresh architectural conception comes to light. Heidegger's thought can help us understand what it implicitly points to, and his Andenken is a method we need in order to reach a deeper understanding of the things themselves. In "Building Dwelling Thinking", Heidegger in fact concludes: "Thinking itself belongs to dwelling in the same sense as building does … Building and thinking, each in its own way, are unavoidable for dwelling." In other words, we are bound to think about the thinghood of things in order to reach a complete view of our own world. By such a poetic Andenken we shall obtain a measure for architecture, the structure of dwelling.
From: Christian Norberg-Schulz, "Heidegger's Thinking on Architecture", Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, 20 (1983): 61-67. Translated by Nayer Tahoori.
