Arch 577 – Fall 2021

Name: Nithyashree Balachandar Iyer

Section Instructor: Soumya Dasgupta

Section Number: AD1

Reading notes for Week #: 10

Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture
Norberg-Schulz, "The Phenomenon of Place," pp. 412-428
Norberg-Schulz, “Heidegger’s Thinking on Architecture,” pp. 429-439
Introduction (pp.412-413)
• Phenomenology: “Method that’s urges a return to things as opposed to mental constructions
and abstractness.”
o Identified by Schulz as a way to create meaningful architecture through the design of
specific spaces.
o Schulz additionally emphasizes on the importance of basic architectural elements like
wall, floor, and ceiling- experienced as horizon, boundary, and frame respectively.
o It also focusses on site and tectonics.
o It has lately led to renewed interest in sensuous qualities of materials, light, colour
and in the symbolic, tactile significance of the combination of all.
• Phenomenology has proven to be important and a very influential school of thought for
designers like Tadao Ando, Steven Holl, Clark and Menefee, and Peter Waldman.
• Norberg Schulz writes Architecture: The meaning of a place (1988) with a series of textual
and pictorial representations of Martin Heidegger’s essay: Building dwelling thinking. He also
admires Robert Venturi’s work but later discovers that his work was more interested on the
surface rather than “the wall between inside and outside”. (pp.413)
• He defines place as qualitative totalities of a complex nature that cannot be defined by
scientific concepts and a single identity of function.
• He says “similar” functions also take place in different ways (E.g., sleeping and eating.)
• Phenomenology-
o There is an urgent need for phenomenology in architecture- it is defined as a return to
things as opposed to abstractness and mental constructs. (pp.415)
o They have included ontology, psychology, ethics, and aesthetics in the past.
• Language and literature have been used as source in the past- highlights Heidegger’s poem on
nature of language- A Winter Everything
• The poem uses concrete images and distinguishes the inside from the outside. The outside
represents the winter, snow, how the world and environment feel, while the inside talks about
a house, a shelter, and the feeling of being ‘well provided’. There is a connect between the
inside and outside through the window.
• The next 2 stanzas talk about the meaning of the place. Through man’s labour in the outside,
the fruit is the comfort of the inside.
•

The Phenomenology of a place

• World consists of concrete phenomena. (Eg: The trees, buildings, towns, streets, etc.)
• These concrete phenomena are made up of tinier particles- atoms, molecules, etc. which are
called abstractions or tools by Schulz.
• He says these concrete phenomena make up comprehensive or contradictory phenomena.
Comprehensive phenomena would be the environment for other phenomena to occur.
• A common name for environment would be place – “a totality made up of concrete things
having material, substance, shape, texture, colour, - making up environmental character”
(pp.414) He says that each of these qualities cannot be separated to its individual properties.
• The poem illuminates the basic lifeworld (basic) properties of space.
• It distinguishes between the natural and manmade elements. Heidegger calls the place
between earth and sky the world hence the author infers that a place is more than just its
location (which is too abstract) and hence needs to consider the visuals of the place.
• Heidegger calls the houses and settlements within a landscape the foci. (pp.417)
• The author therefore concludes that “the basic property of man-made nature is concentration
and enclosure” (pp.418)
The structure of a place
• The structure of a place described in terms of “landscape” and “settlement”, Analysed
through “space” and “character”.
• Space- three-dimensional organisation of elements making up a place.
• Character- general atmosphere of any place.
• Deems space seen as 3 dimensional and perceptual space unsatisfactory.
• However, concrete human actions take place in a space that is characterised by qualitative
differences. (Eg: up and down, outside and inside”.
• Kevin Lynch’s concept of node, landmark, path, edge and district. Paolo Portoghesi’s
definition of space as a system of places. – definite meaning for concrete space.
• Concrete Space properties:
o A varying degree of enclosure and extension.
o Settlements have figure-ground relationship
o In a larger context, an enclosure located at the centre becomes a “focus”.
o Centralization, direction, rhythm is important.
o Natural elements may be clustered or spread out- defining proximity.
• These are all topological kind of spatial properties from Gestalt theory’s principles of
organisation.
• Boundaries: of a built space is the “floor, wall and ceiling”
• Character: more concrete concept than space. It is linked with any real presence. Any space
is linked with a particular character- “protective” dwelling, “practical office”, and so on. This
is the phenomenology of character.
• Even when we talk about landscapes, it is a particular kind: “Barren” landscape, “Threatening
landscape.
• Character is determined by material:
o Boundary depends on its formal articulation. Formal articulations is dependant on
how its built.
• He praises Venturi- “architecture is the wall between the inside and outside”
• Character depends upon how things are made, (technical realization)
• “Phenomenology of place has to therefore comprise the basic modes of construction and their
relationship to formal articulation” pp.420
• Structure of place: Environment totalities (Places).
• These places designated by use of nouns. And character is designated by the use of an
adjective.
• Places come in a gradual diminishing scale- environmental levels:
i. Top: natural places
ii. Natural places contain the next level: man-made places
iii. Man-made places focus on explaining character of the environment through things-
details.
• Man-made: related to nature in 3 basic ways:
o Visualisation: He wants to visualize his understanding of nature
▪ To express what he has seen, he builds.
o Symbolization: He symbolizes his understand of nature.
▪ Experienced meaning-translated through another medium- symbol.
o Gathering: He gathers these experienced meanings:
▪ To express them as microcosmos (or imago mundo)

Spirit of a Place
• Genius loci- Roman concept. Every independent being has its “guardian spirit” that gives life
to people.
• “The Genius depicts what a thing is or what it wants to be”, Louis Kahn.
 • “In the past, survival depended on a good relationship to a place in the physical and the
psychic sense” pp.422 (E.g., Egypt planning according to flooding behaviour of the Nile and
feeling of security in the city.)
• Lawrence Durrell writes that science and technology made man think it liberated him from
the spirit of a place, but it has only led to pollution and environmental chaos, ultimately
becoming the nemesis and “the problem of place has regained its true importance”. pp.423
• Coming back to “space” and “character”. Man in a place is exposed to 2 psychological
functions:
o Orientation: man must know where he is (orients himself). Kevin Lynch’s “node,
path, edge” produces an “environmental image” which is a system of orientation.
o Identification: Man needs to identify himself with the environment. “The
environmental quality which protects man from the feeling of being lost is called
‘imageability’, which means that the shape, colour or arrangement which facilitates
the making of vividly-identified, powerfully-structured, highly useful mental images of
the environment.”
• Kevin Lynch’s contribution to the theory of place is important as the empirical findings of an
“concrete urban structure” confirm the “general principles of organisation” by gestalt
psychology.
• While orientation and identification are not interdependent, psychological functions need to
be fully developed in creating meaningful and concrete spatial structures.
• Through stories, Schulz notices that people identify concrete environmental properties, and
these are usually developed during their childhood. “Thus, the child gets oriented with the
environment and develops perceptual schemata which determine all future experience.”
• Hence “the identity of a person is defined in terms of the schemata developed because they
determine the world which is developed.” (pp.425) “Human identity presupposes the identity
of place.”
• “Dwelling” belongs to a concrete place

Still a little confused about the meaning of concrete structure/place. And why does Schulz limit
himself to talking about phenomenology in a dwelling? I don’t understand the connect between
the title and it’s connection with the dwelling.

Pallasmaa, "The Geometry of Feeling: A Look at the Phenomenology of Architecture," pp.

447-453
Pallasmaa asserts that meaning in architecture depends on its ability to symbolize human presence.
(pp.447)
• He formulates a theoretical position about an experience’s reliance on memory, imagination
and the unconscious. (pp.447)
• It is however contradicted by his own sensuous abstract “architecture of silence” and his
criticism of postmodern collage as superficial formalism. (pp.447)
• Buildings of today lack meaning and are being revitalized through “a richer idiom and
reviving historical themes” pp.448
Architecture as a play with form: Architecture has become more about building based on its own
value systems compared to building based on intentionally in a background.
• Still believes its technology has allowed it to be free from artistic expression and that that’s a
good thing.
• Instead, it has just detached itself from the background and purpose.

The illusion of Elementarism

• The advance of modern science has been taken over by elementarism and reductionism.
• The elementarism view has been taught by various schools and has been reduced to arts of the
visual sense. (E.g., The Bauhaus)
 • The author argues that art is in fact the opposite of the elementarist idea and that “meaning of
an artistic work are born out of the whole, from a vision that integrates the parts and are not
the sum of the elements”.

The architecture of Imagery

• The analysis of an artwork doesn’t lie in its actual physical being but, in the person,
experiencing it.
• “Its meaning lies not in its forms, but in the images transmitted by the forms and the
emotional force that they carry. Forms only affect our feeling through what it represents”
(pp.449)
• To renew art, its deepest essence has to be discovered. And hence, Pallasmaa says, all art
originates from our body in a way.

The Eidos of architecture

• “Phenomenology hence means examining a phenomenon of the consciousness in its own
dimension of consciousness” (pp.450)
• It is “looking at architecture” from within the consciousness that’s experiencing it through
architectural feeling instead of assessing its physical proportions and properties of building or
using a stylistic form. “Phenomenology seeks the inner language of a building.” (pp.450)

Architecture without architects

• The presentation of architecture, the author says, is a “the pure looking of a child’s way of
experiencing things, for the rules of architectural discipline do not regulate the experience or
the way it is presented.

Primary feelings of architecture

• Architecture is the direct expression of the human presence in the world.
• It is based on the language of the body that neither the use or creator of the experience is fully
aware of.
• Primary feelings produced by architecture would include:
o House as a sign of culture in the landscape
o Approach to the building
o Entrance into the building
o Roof over the building
o Stepping into the house
o Specific purpose for stepping into the house and crossing that boundary between
interior and exterior.
o Being in the room
o Being in the sphere of influence
o Encountering the darkness or light in the space
o Looking out the window
• He again highlights that experiencing art is a private dialogue between viewer and the work.
It excludes all other interaction.
• “The quality of architecture does not lie in the sense of reality that it expresses but in its
capacity for awakening our imagination” (pp.452)

Gage, Killing Simplicity: Object-Oriented Philosophy in Architecture, Log, No. 33

(Winter 2015), pp. 95-106. (CANVAS)

• This book speaks for OOO and its potential to reshape contemporary architecture
 • Speculative realism is an umbrella term under which Object-Oriented Ontology comes under.
OOO stems from the frustration that architecture grows and is justified by its relation rather
than its own autonomy.
• Background of OOO:
o It emerges from a materialist line of thought- from Aristotle to Leibniz
o But jumps to post-enlightenment and post-Kantian philosophy.
o It is not naïve realism- Objects exist only as they are perceived by the human senses.
o OOO is in the philosophical realism: belief that there is a reality outside of the mind.
o OOO is not philosophical idealism: reality exists primarily as a mental construct.
(Was Rene Descartes a philosophical idealist? - “I think therefore I am”)
o This speculative realism workshop at University of London offered a new direction
in philosophy – presented by Harman, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and
Badiou's protégé, Quentin Meillassoux. Harman has been most active in this
discussion.
o Harman’s work is mainly based on phenomenology and the works of Heidegger.
o In Harman’s work, Phenomenology is only the starting point and is it makes the
transition to Speculative realism, phenomenology opposes it in many ways.
o But as the book goes on, there is barely any trace of Heideggerian concepts. Hence,
OOO could be a new form of phenomenology.
o Harman says that objects have hidden qualities that withdraw from our
understanding- because every object has a vast number of knowable and
unknowable. (E.g., we only notice the organs when we have medical problems”
o “So, to represent just one quality out of the lot would be pointless” (p.p96)
o Heidegger’s tool analysis explains that a functional tool is an equipment and that we
don’t pay attention to it (unless it stops functioning the way it usually does).
Invisible form:

• Louis Sullivan’s reductionism axiom: “Form follows Function” continues to influence

contemporary architecture.
• But this idea has taken many forms in the past 119 years. And Heideggerian idea of the tool
being forgotten applies to present day in the sense that “architects in the past century have
unwittingly complicit in making architectural form invisible to the consciousness of its users”
(pp.98)
• OOO uses a broader definition of the word “object”. “In architectural terms an object-
building is understood to mean one that rejects its context, whereas a building conceived as
an object in OOO terms simply means that its reality cannot be understood through its
external relations - including its relation to context.”
• Harman defines these object relations as overmining, undermining and duo-mining.
• Examples of:
o Overmining- object comes real only when observed by an observer.
o Undermining- objects are merely a collection of atoms that constitutes true reality of
the universe.
o Duo-mining- a combination of both at different times?
• Using this, Gage says that architects are constantly either overmining or undermining
buildings. For undermining: (E.g Rem Koolhaas. “Fundamentals” is Venice Biennale, or
Brad Pitt’s affordable housing after hurricane Katrina, Schumacher’s Parametricism).
• Gage says, “Any architectural movement that redirects legitimacy from the discrete entity
toward a grammar of parts undermines architecture.” (pp.100)
• Believes that OOO has the potential to change and reconfigure the theoretical foundation on
which most architectural movements of the 19th C and 20th C were based.
 • Most destruction in architecture is through overmining: (E.g.: The notion that buildings and
architecture connect to a larger world, its connectivity with globalization, urban contexts, and
so on.) (E.g.,2: the rationalization of a building by attaching it to a big idea or central
concept, and diagramming.)
o Gage is critical of arrow diagrams- which are predominantly used today: he says that
they are used extensively because of “its immediately consumable benefits”. (pp.101)
o The ultimate form of overmining a building, Gage says, is “painfully simplistic”
metaphor: diagrams into graphics and metaphors. (E.g., Daniel Libeskind’s Denver
Art Museum, And Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade centre terminal and he calls this
Cringeworthy)
• A building is undermined in the big idea referring to just one aspect of the building and is
overmined that the whole building is legitimized through this one big idea. This he calls duo
mining.
• Buildings should hence have vast number of qualities, properties, and relations and that it
should never be reduced or simplified to have a single meaning or observation. It is hence
against simplification.
Against simplification

• Gage reiterates that objects aren’t fully knowable. Yet, it doesn’t mean that one is not able to
fully experience it.
• Harman refers to the qualities that one can perceive about the object as sensual. (Why?)
• “OOO spans the divide between idealism and phenomenology, linking the perceivable with
the unknowably complex, though not through a direct causality.” (pp.103)
• However, Gage says architecture based on OOO is barely an antidote to the complexity our
world has now. But that through OOO, architecture has the responsibility to emerge from the
careful study of just its own existence and not reducing it to smaller “sound bites”.
• He writes “If architects can imply complex realities through the design of sensual qualities,
as opposed to using singular simplified relations like diagrams or metaphors, then there will
be new forms of cultural engagement to discover.” (pp.104)
• OOO considers both sensual and real object as the same. (I still don’t understand what the
meaning of sensual object is.)
Radical versus weird
Stems from Harman’s term: Weird Realism.

• Radical: Takes something that already exists to an extreme.

• Weird: Something that is outside the realm of what exists.
• Weird Realism stems from a book Harman talks about by H.P Lovecraft. Lovecraft used
language to imply that there exists an architecture that is curious, strange, and that is outside
the architectural norm. - this is an imagination that is outside of reality.
• The uninteresting built environment today, Gage says, is because “it stems from an
architectural profession that does not validate its production on its own terms and invents
unnecessary alibis for its output.”
• He concludes that architecture isn’t a crime and that it doesn’t need an alibi. It needs a
philosophical reset. No new shapes or styles.
• He says OOO might not provide all the answers but it prompts us to ask new questions.
Brown, the nadir of ooo: from graham Harman’s tool-being to timothy Morton’s
realist magic: objects, ontology,
Causality, parrhesia no. 17. 2013 pp 62-71. (canvas)

Talks in support of Heidegger’s tool analysis by Harman- “Tool Being: Heidegger and the
metaphysics of objects” (2002)

• Describes it as original and productive, and that its scholarship was thorough, its writing
vigorous and engaging.
• Harman’s theme generalized Heidegger’s tool analysis as not only a proper phenomenon to
follow but that it applied for any object regardless.
• Harman’s argument: “Relations among objects, Harman argues, are such that they always
involve a selective constitution which differentially specifies individual entities as individual.”
It is through such selective relations that objects are torn out of immersion within the
contexture of the world: drawn into distinction, constituted as individual entities” (E.g.
Boulder doesn’t need to be experiences as a boulder)
o Final chapter of Harman’s book: Brown says, takes a disappointing turn. (Ah, twist
in the story.) Starts off the “Object-Oriented Ontology” movement.
o He argues that “Objects are vacuum sealed” and distinct from one another, “devoid of
all relation”.
o No specific meaning of an object can exhaust its “reality”.
• Brown questions why, in his example of the bridge, it couldn’t exist in current relation with
its surrounding objects and then exist in new surroundings and form new and distinct relations
with the other surroundings.
• He calls the conclusion of Harman’s Tool-Being “an impenetrable fog”- collapse of his
ontology, absurdity, irrelevance, and infinite regress “that philosophical positions wouldn’t be
able to rectify the incoherence of his own argumentation” (Ouch!)
• Despite this, OOO has found its way into a viable academic trend.

Why is this an academic trend and what did they deduce from Harman’s OOO?

• Morton’s book Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013)- assesses the present state
of OOO, and its influence in American Academia.
o Praises Harman’s seductive prose and admires the concept.
o Does not critique even a single position. Within these positions he says “causation is
wholly an aesthetic phenomenon.”
o Morton argues that the book is a series of “riffs” rather than arguments. He says the
humor in the book shows an object playing an object and that if we take such humor
to be conceptually vacuous, then “we’re taking ourselves too seriously”. (pp.64)
o However, he says that his book is to be taken seriously and that OOO is in fact
congruent to physics in the past decade but that it only holds a secondary position
after philosophical position.
o He talks about actions that are “totally uncertain” like the photon whose random path
cannot be guessed no matter what and this is because it is in 2 or 3 orientations.
o But the problem is that these scientific phenomena in quantum physics and
philosophical science are debatable themselves. – Not debated in Morton’s book.
o Science: Takes a turn to talk about Niels Bohr’s standard model, David Bohm’s
interpretation of the model and how it undermines objects which is a “sin” in OOO’s
 world (don’t understand this shift). Morton mocks Bohm, pretentious to tell scientists
“How to think” because he can practice his own interpretive framing.
o In philosophy: he attacks Whitehead’s theory of process as “lava lamp materialism”.
o In mathematics: Portrays his more superior grasp of rational numbers, set theory than
Cantor, Zermelo-Fraenkel and so on.
• Brown says it is hard to say if Morton wants his readers to accept this as valid or if he expects
them just not to care.
• No meaning to the passage on mathematics in relation to OOO and what do they have to do
with Russel’s paradox?
• Brown also says Morton clarifies that he doesn’t understand Russel’s paradox at all.
• Morton’s errors and weaknesses are not constrained to just science and mathematics alone-
Brown highlights the last paragraph- a critique of Marx:
o “Morton lauds Einstein for supposedly theorizing space and time as “emergent
properties of objects” but later he says that theories depend on “a casual miracle”.
(pp.67). Marx is quoted as an example.
o Brown says: “remember we’re not reading the work of an overconfident
undergraduate here”- protesting too much while understanding very little.
• Brown says he named the essay “The Nadir of OOO” because the “absurdities of Realistic
Magic” due to the confused ontology of what it wants to popularize. (pp.68)
• Brown calls this Object-Oriented Ontology a self-parody.
• He says that the readers inability to understand what the book is trying to say is inherent in
the book by itself and not because of the reader’s lack thereof.
• He ends his essay by calling the book and the movement “tasteless”.

Betsky, The Triple O Play. Architect Magazine. Oct. 18, 2017. (CANVAS)
• Talks about the Triple O that is “haunting schools of architecture” – Object Oriented
Ontology.
• Seems like it does not provide a promising foundation to base architecture projects on but is
being used by Yale, SCI-Arch, etc. based on their understanding of the triple O.
• Triple O “is the notion that all of the universe is made up of tools” and Harman says, “all
being is tool-being”.
• This new meaning dethrones human beings from the position of the only subjects that can
give meaning to the world.
• Herman’s poetic power in talking about a bridge and how every object making up the bridge
have a specific power, effect and are “ensconced in some niche reality.”
• He points out that all tools are made of smaller part which in turn is a tool- down to the atoms
and the subatomic level. He hence concludes that there is no tool ad that it is just a “surface”
or “mask”.
• “Everything around us is continually in motion at a scale and speed we cannot detect, and
our interpretation of what he calls a “society” of interacting tools is itself a tool.”
• The tools can be understood as “actors”- the stones to us human beings.
• Harman says that all interaction takes place within an object like a kaleidoscope or volcano
since “objects cannot touch one another” (I don’t understand how objects cannot tough one
another.)
• These objects have “surfaces” which are the only things we have left and is being reduced by
technology (how?)
• Harman says that technology is leading us to a de-fetishized world, a landscape of
imperative simulacra [..]
• This theory has been used by designers who rely on semi-automatic, parametric or algorithm
production through computers to justify their activity. Their design hence tries to use this way
to be a part of the society of tools.
• Other designers use the computer to put together objects that already exist. (E.g.: Mark Foster
Gage- Yale professor)
• In an urban level or larger scale like the national level, interaction between objects as well as
institutions or organisations like governments, NGOs, etc.
• Betsky also wonders if Triple O leads to a completely new form of organic architecture.
• Harman says that OOO is a branch of philosophy that deals with “post human world”.
Harman dismisses space.
• Instead, they use triple O as means to save the planet and to warm against “fetishization” and
the “denigration of the world”.
• Harman says that we should not construct a meaning and form “in and out of such a world”.
(Why?)
• Conclusion: Betsky’s does not approve of Triple OOO and says architecture arising from this
concept is not going to be good?