#7 Practical Approach
The Goal in Architecture PART.I Goal — 4.2/3
PART.I Goal — 4 is written in 3 parts. This second part of Practical Approach introduces phenomenology and it orientates on how our culture of technology resists architectural value. The third part that follows this introduces yogic practice and a specific practice that will give form to the stages of our approach and its important points.
Path, Goal, Phenomenology and Architecture
It is likely already obvious that I am not going to use a forensic or historical investigation of architecture. The intent is to proceed out of our present post–WWII Machine Ages Modernist architectural profession through live spiritual practices, and to honour the antecedents and our ancestor in each.
Christian Norberg-Schulz refers to Dagobert Frey who wrote of architecture as ‘archetypal motifs of world experience’. Norberg–Schulz quotes him at length.
The goal already contains the path as its point of reference, directional indicator and ultimate end; and movement may be directed towards the goal, may emanate from it or may encircle it. All architecture is a structuring of space by means of a goal or path. Every house is an architecturally structured “path”: the specific possibilities of movement and the drives towards movement as one proceeds from the entrance through the sequence of spatial entities have be pre–determined by the architectural structuring of that space and one experiences the space accordingly. But at the same time, in its relation to the surrounding space, it is a “goal”, and we either advance toward this goal or depart from it.”
Frey uses the word ‘experience’ (perception), but he implies that architectural space is not a function of this experience, rather it has a structure which ought to be experienced, because it expresses basic properties of human existence.1
Norberg-Schulz accepts Frey’s contribution as part of a “better knowledge of history”. He writes that,
the word ‘experience’ (perception) … implies that architectural space is not a function of this experience, rather it has a structure which ought to be experienced because it expresses the basic properties of human experience.
Referring to Rudolf Schwarz in this context, Norberg–Schulz presents Schwarz’s concept “that the fundamental structure of existence, of ‘being in the world’ … (be) translate(d) … into concrete properties of architectural space”. He quotes Rudolf Schwarz:2
Man cannot plan the world without designing himself.
And
At the time he took his land, he already decided the plan of his life and he measured the earth accordingly and placed the ground–plan of his historical existence within it.3
Norberg-Schulz utilizes these statements to point the way to phenomenology in knowing what is architecture. Although these directly support G¡a , Norberg-Schultz and others still conflate or con—fuse the object with the experience in ways that imply a relationship that then demand objective precision. He engages phenomenology and proposes to advance architecture through its quantitatively measured object of the built environment. It plays to the way that we research and build within contemporary scientific Machine Ages technology. It is as if the physical fact of the space has melted together with architectural intents so that the weight and extent of the object default to being architecture, and that is then taken as the measure of architecture. Architecture hasn’t the materiality to melt. This approach to phenomenology does not succeed in evolving architecture in practice. It has an expository effect, but does not effectively discriminate architecture from building.
Architects provide their work as a materialization of needs, desires and physical demands, society and culture. To present a case for relating architecture to its space in objective terms so that the built form is its measure makes sense because that is what the built environment does. The architect forms the environment so that our dwelling presences as architecture. This approach to phenomenology stays within the logic of current practice as service that does not discriminate technical means from architecture, and transforms what is spatial and non-linear into a linear textual form.
‘Human existence’ can be built. Architecture is not to presence that we exist, but our aspirational value. Building and social spaces are physical facts. Frey’s description of 'path' is not linked to a goal in dwelling, nor to architecture. Schwarz’s statements pertain to technology, not to architecture. Christian Norberg-Schulz does not quibble with this. He does not appear to notice that he stays within building. It is not possible to connect the technology of place or space-making with architecture from within material measure or define it through the five material senses, staying within building. Making the environment so that architecture presences is to behuman existence for the experiencer. We are the connection. It seems necessary to bring human being dwelling directly into defining architecture, and to not do it as the measure of the environment only. This is why understanding the character of architecture and how it comes into our knowledge is important.
The experiencer presences architecture. A building does not ‘do’ anything, it does not dwell, especially if we use killed and embalmed materiality, as we do. We dwell, not the building. ‘Representation’ is done within each of us as we dwell. We will know that the Goal in life comes into play at the heart of practice as the awareness of the experiencer.
The profession's stalemate and concealment of what we are not valuing.
The architectural profession cannot move forward out of its current ‘stalemate’ within a professional technicist proxy that has building as its ends. Professional architectural practice ‘pulls’ materiality as technology over a ‘gap’ as if that gap were then concealed as under a carpet. This is the 'gap' or interval that Frey, Schwarz and Norberg-Schulz do not respond to. What does that gap conceal, and is there actually such a gap? A gap may be assumed if there is a bridge. We bridge a gap, signifying it with the bridge. Frey, Schwarz, Norberg-Schulz and many others as the mainstream of architecture bridge the space between ourselves and architecture with theory as technic.
If we consider that each of us is 10x more energy and matter than most of us feel or experience, and the sub- and superconscious are invisible to most of us, is the 'bridge' our process to deal with this unknown? Is the practicing architect designating the physical built form as architecture creating the image of bridging an interval that is expressly not part of the profession’s technicist competency? This interval conceals the concealment of unknowing.
We are concealing that overwhelming wonder that we are part of, a vast field as yet again untapped, by accepting that the building is architecture. We bridge an interval of unknowing as a bridged gap that looks like intellectual understanding, sometimes verified with scientific results.
The fullness of nature that includes that unknown is part of us in ways that we cannot imagine yet, and yet it is directly in our being, in each of us. There is no gap. We are concealing something that is present and integrated. We are bridging with concealing ideas and things that we make that are vastly inferior to the actual integrity of the capacity that we do have. The known unknown is inverted from opportunity to lack. That value may be revealed through understanding and using the Verknüpfung of spirituality with architecture presencing aspiration, revealing capacity orders of magnitude beyond what most of us live. This is wellbeing that covers all others.
Concealing architecture benefits from the 'placebo effect'. Architecture is necessarily beneficial. If we think it architecture, then we already benefit from it. But a placebo is not the medicine. Architecture is part of us in this way as is spirituality. A symptomatology of our current profession can be a readout as unconcealing our nature, as spiritual practice removes the concealing con–fusion to give access to knowledge. We can build on phenomenology through its antecedent spiritual practice, which is Buddhist practice and Vedic, dissolving both the bridging that we call technology now and the gap or interval of unknowing that spirituality has always dealt with.
D. Frey “Grundlegung zu einer vergelichenden Kunstwissenschaft” 1949. p. 6, in Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space and Architecture. 1971. p. 14
R. Schwarz The Church Incarnate. 1958, and Von der Bebauung der Erde. 1949, in Norberg–Schulz, Existence Space and Architecture. 1971. p. 15.
This accords with Heidegger and expresses history as a form of Bestand. It also represents the ‘already decided’ according to the 'original granting of Being’s destining'. This contextualizes architecture in a way that differentiates it from the physical environment. Both of these quotes can be pointed at architecture through the lens of technology with 'Enframing essence', another term of Heidegger's phenomenological expression of technology.