








































Architecture Philosophy is the journal of  the International Society for the Philosophy 
of  Architecture (ISPA). The society was founded in 2009 by Carolyn Fahey, and 
the journal was first published in 2014 by Tom Spector, Carolyn Fahey, and Stefan 
Koller.

Architecture Philosophy proudly acknowledges the support from the Oklahoma State 
University School of  Architecture and the College of  Engineering Architecture and 
Technology that makes free distribution of  print copies in the U.S. possible. The 
journal also acknowledges the support of  the DFG (German research foundation) 
and Bamberg university that  made the conference “The Human in Architecture and 
Philosophy” possible (Bamberg, Germany, July 19th to 22nd 2016). Furthermore, 
the journal acknowledges the support from the Oklahoma State University Library 
for making the submission management software, the journal’s online presence, and 
its indexing in academic search engines a reality. 

Architecture Philosophy (ISSN 2372-0883) is published semiannually. Two parts form a 
volume. The subscription is free for digital copies, and print copies are available to 
society members at ISPA events. Visit isparchitecture.com for digital access to the 
journal’s content. 

The graphical layout of  the journal and the cover design are by Carolyn Fahey, 
adapted for this issue by Martin Düchs. 

Copying
This journal is copyrighted by Oklahoma State University. For permission requests 
please contact the ISPA at isparchitecture@gmail.com.

© Oklahoma State University

This issue is printed in Germany by Bamberg University.



MANAGING EDITOR
Tom Spector, Ph.D., University of  California - Berkeley

guest EDITORS
Martin Düchs, Dr., Bamberg University
Christian Illies, Prof. Dr., Bamberg University

Assistant EDITORS
Christoph Baumberger, Ph.D., University of  Zurich
Carolyn Fahey, Ph. D., Newcastle University
Stefan Koller, Ph.D., Delft University of  Technology

EDITORIAL BOARD
Philosophy
Rebecca Bensen-Cain, Ph.D., University of  California - Santa Barbara
Rafael de Clercq, Ph.D., Catholic University Leuven 
Noël Carroll, Ph.D., University of  Illinois
Paul Guyer, Ph.D., Harvard University
Christian Illies, Ph.D., University of  Oxford
Jeff  Malpas, Ph.D., Australian National University

Architecture
Andrew Ballantyne, Ph.D., University of  Sheffield
Ufuk Ersoy, Ph.D., University of  Pennsylvania
Helen Mallinson, Ph.D., London Consortium
David Leatherbarrow, Ph.D., University of  Essex 
Graham Owen, M.Des., Harvard University
Nicholas Ray, M.A., University of  Cambridge

CONTACT
Web isparchitecture.com
Email isparchitecture@gmail.com



CONTENTS

Pau Pedragosa 25Presence or Meaning in 
Architecture

1Editorial

9Karsten Harries, Roger 
Scruton & Christian Illies

Karsten Harries and Roger 
Scruton on Architecture and 
Philosophy

49Mari HvattumOn Durability

77Marion RousselToward a Post-human Era? 

61Henry DicksFrom Anthropomimetic to 
Biomimetic Cities

Martin Düchs & 
Christian Illies





isparchitecture.com

We build for humans—for the most part. Temples, 
zoological gardens, and multi-story car-parks seem 
to be exceptions. They are built for gods, animals, 
or cars. But then, even they are indirectly for 
humans. They are meant to be used by humans who 
worship there, gaze at giraffes, or park their cars. So 
in the end, architecture will always have to consider 
human beings as its recipient, observer, and user. 
Architects simply cannot avoid thinking about the 
human being.  After all, it makes a big difference, 
what characteristics and needs, necessary life 
circumstances and life forms, what expectations of  
privacy or ideal social life, and even what emotions, 
hopes, fears, and visions we take as central for human 
beings. Our understanding of  human beings will be 
the focus for entirely different architectural forms 
and ways of  building. But to reflect upon ourselves 
and who we are is, essentially, a philosophical 
question. According to Kant, “What is man?” is 
even the central question of  philosophy. Therefore, 
to think about the human being is an ineliminable 
concern for architecture and philosophy of  
architecture alike. But it is also a concern which 
has not been addressed very often in the last 
decades. That is why it has been the topic of  the 
3rd International Conference of  the International 
Society for the Philosophy of  Architecture. 
From July 19th to 23rd 2016 we invited some 
100 scholars from all over the world to Bamberg 
University, Germany, to think about and discuss 
“The Human in Architecture and Philosophy.”
     Architecture has raised the question about the 
concept and the place of  the human being in its 

in the end, 
architecture 
will always 

have to consider 
human beings

“
”

THE HUMAN IN ARCHITECTURE AND 
PHILOSOPHY: STEPS TOWARDS AN 
“ARCHITECTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY”
Martin Düchs & Christian Illies



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

2

Ed
it

or
ia

l

efforts in many ways. Contemporary architecture is very often based 
upon the explicit claim to have put the human being at the centre of  
designing and building. And this is by no means new as architectural 
history and theory show.  To take just a few examples: Le Corbusier and 
the CIAM wrote within their Athens Charter that, “architecture must 
once again be placed in the service of  man,”1 and even the sharpest critics 
of  CIAM-inspired modern architecture seemed to search for the human 
being in architecture. The Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, 
for example, wrote a manifesto “Give the houses back to the human 
beings.”2 Many houses or even the works of  some architects are marked as 
especially “humane.” Alvar Aalto is praised for being on his way “toward 
a human modernism.”3 The British-Swedish architect Ralph Erskine is 
widely recognized as someone who designed humane buildings and is 
even called “the humane architect.”4 But although a lot of  people would 
agree with this judgement, we can hardly tell exactly why his or Aalto’s
architecture are regarded as more humane than other members of  Team 
X--such as Peter and Alison Smithson. They too tried to make a more 
humane architecture but somehow are widely perceived as having come 
up short.5 Last but not least, one could point to the fierce discussions 
concerning the rightful interpretations of  Rudolph Wittkower’s Architectural 
Principles in the Age of  Humanism.6 The claim that architecture is made for 
human beings seems simultaneously obvious and in need of  justification.
     What is the relevance and what is the content of  architects’ claims 
about building for human beings? For whom do and did we build if  not 
for human beings? In the service of  which concept or idea of  human 
beings should architecture be placed (e.g., for sober rational beings, for 
creatures with emotional needs, for more atomistic or social beings)? 
And rather generally: What does it mean to build for humans? Is judging 
a work of  architecture to be humane expressing anything more than a 
personal preference? There are so many questions and no easy answers.
     It might seem surprising that all these questions have no obvious 
philosophical answer because it has long been central to philosophy 
to answer exactly Kant’s question “What is man?”7 Many subsequent 
philosophers have tried to take up the challenge and to give answers. In 
the mid-twentieth century, even a veritable branch of  philosophy called 
“Philosophical Anthropology” emerged in Germany that has been 
entirely dedicated to the study of  the Kantian question. Philosophers 
such as Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen, and Helmut Plessner (partly also 
Ernst Cassirer and Hans Jonas) wrote their most important works about 
us humans and our characteristics. They tried to combine the results not 
only of  modern evolutionary biology, ethology, and sociology but also 



3

isparchitecture.com

of  history, cultural anthropology, psychology, 
and ethnology with the classical conceptions 
of  humans as free and rational beings.8

     But the heyday of  philosophical anthropology 
seems to have gone. The latter half  of  the twentieth 
century was dominated by philosophical thought that 
dismissed such attempts at elucidating the essence 
of  mankind as hopeless. Such thinking denies the 
existence of  a fixed human identity that we can grasp, 
understand, or even talk about. There is no human 
essence; only history. Instead, we should look at what 
sociology, cultural anthropology, or evolutionary 
biology could tell us about the human condition.9

     This thinking takes several forms. Some anti-
mentalists suspect an outdated essentialism or 
idealism that is based upon an entirely wrong 
metaphysics. Radical naturalists agree, though with 
other arguments—for them there is no independent 
entity, like humans, and natural science has the last 
word (as Quine claimed at some point). Others take 
a dualistic stance according to which the realm of  
nature and of  our cultural (socio-political) sphere 
have nothing in common and are to be looked at 
separately. For them, the only interesting questions 
about humans are attempts to locate them in 
(and explain them from) political or sociological 
conditions. All philosophical anthropology has to 
become sociology, as Habermas famously claimed.10     
     Others, like Wittgenstein, look for linguistic 
questions or forms of  life as the basis for 
philosophical refection on humans. And some, 
following Heidegger, would even argue that it is 
dangerous to ask about “the” human being because 
he or she is essentially open and un-definable. 
Everyone is simply what he or she makes out of  
himself  or herself. Any attempt to encapsulate the 
human being (or human nature) would only serve to 
limit him or her and to miss what we really are.11 The 
radical openness of  humans as self-constructing 
beings does not allow for any characterisation 
of  human beings as such, they claim.12 These are 

  it has long 
been central to 

philosophy to 
answer exactly 

this question: 
What is man?

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

4

Ed
it

or
ia

l

just some philosophical positions of  the twentieth century—but they all 
agree that we cannot ask what we are and expect meaningful answers.
     The absence of  anthropology from most contemporary philosophy 
creates a rather tricky situation. On the one side, contemporary philosophy 
tells us that all attempts to define what is characteristically human will 
fall short. But on the other side, we deal with humans every day and 
should know what that means (and actually do have some idea of  it). 
Furthermore, architects have to create buildings for beings of  some 
description—a task which comes to seem altogether paradoxical if  
humans are, for us, a kind of  black hole or invisible phantom that no one 
can possibly catch. Building for a phantom is an otherworldly challenge.
     Philosophy, it seems, cannot get off  the hook of  the Kantian question. 
It is, after all, the paradigm human practice of  reflecting on fundamental 
questions and challenges and thus of  giving orientation to people. Who else 
should do it? Simply to run away (“Catch me if  you can!”) and to argue that 
humans are no possible object of  reflection cannot suffice. The pertinence 
of  the challenge demands better, even if  we never get a final answer to the big 
question. That is probably also why some philosophers like Noam Chomsky 
in very recent years dare to ask again: “What kind of  creatures are we?”13

    That is why the 3rd International Conference of  the International 
Society for the Philosophy of  Architecture (see the call for papers at 
http://isparchitecture.com/events/3rd-international-conference/) has 
turned to human beings in architecture. It is, as we might say, an approach 
to the big question by the side entrance. Our philosophical focus is not 
human beings as such, or human nature, but humans at home: Human 
beings as those for whom we design and build houses which they use 
and where they stay. At the conference, this side entrance has turned out 
to be a rather successful door. Even if  the conference did not answer 
the big question—unsurprisingly—the papers and discussions showed us 
a wide range of  fascinating facets of  the human being in Architecture 
and Philosophy. On the one side, it helps us to formulate more clearly 
what architecture is meant to do. On the other side, it contributes to an 
important aspect of  philosophical anthropology, namely that humans 
are beings that build houses. We need some kind of  shelter, but houses 
are almost always more than a merely functional hut. They are deep 
expressions of  our being and of  our aspirations, what we belong to and 
how we conceive individual life and the life of  a community. Although it 
has always been generally acknowledged that human beings built dwelling 
places, more careful analysis of  this need is revealing a lot about us.
     Issues 3.1. and 3.2 of  Architecture Philosophy contain a selection of  papers 
developed out of  the conference that did most to reveal its many facets. 



5

isparchitecture.com

We have selected them 
on the basis of  their 
originality and quality, 
but we have also aimed 
at illustrating the variety 
of  methodological 
a p p r o a c h e s . 
“ A r c h i t e c t u r a l 
anthropology,” as 
we might call it, is a 
field very much in the 
making and it seems 
too inappropriate to 
determine one kind of  
approach as the only 
possible one. That is 
also the reason why we 
are grateful to be able to 
include a dialogue at the 
outset between Karsten 
Harries and Sir Roger 
Scruton about this 
fundamental question; 
namely on how to conceive of  a philosophy of  
architecture and architectural anthropology. The 
two founding fathers, or at least great inspirers of  
two different schools of  architectural philosophy (a 
more analytical orientation from Scruton and a more 
phenomenological tradition from Harries) rightly 
deserve to have the first word in this debate. True to 
form, we find that Scruton approaches architecture 
as a demand  on its justification, while Harries  begins 
with questions of  home and of  place. Yet, should 
we be surprised to find that, starting from oblique 
angles to one another they find much convergence? 
     This dialogue leads naturally to a paper that 
takes its starting point from another encounter of  
two great philosophers. Pau Pedragosa scrutinizes 
the discussion between Ernst Cassirer and Martin 
Heidegger about philosophy and the human being 
that took place in Davos (Switzerland) in 1929. 

figure 1: Bamberg University



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

6

Ed
it

or
ia

l

His paper’s title, “Presence or Meaning in Architecture,” encapsulates 
the fundamental oppositions in that debate that can be drawn from 
Heidegger’s and Cassirer’s ideas about the human being. Drawing on the 
two philosophical giants’ different philosophical anthropologies, Pedragosa 
argues for cultivating two different ways of  understanding culture and, 
hence, architecture. Cassirer‘s and Heidegger’s antithetical conceptions 
of  the human being can be described as the human activity for world-
construction against the human receptivity for world-interpretation. 

Finding merit in both conceptions, Pedragosa follows Cassirer to 
propose an understanding of  architecture as a symbolic form that 
constructs new meanings; that buildings are the bearers of  meaning. 
But he also finds much to recommend in Heidegger’s approach; that 
architecture is less concerned with construction and more with the 
origin and the questioning of  building; that the building is an irreducible 
presence of  itself  that opens up the environment. Pedragosa argues that, 
while at the time of  the debate it was widely perceived that Heidegger 
had won, in  the hard-won wisdom of  the ensuing century,  a more 
balanced appraisal is warranted. The exchange between two established 
philosophers and Pedragosa’s  paper examining established philosophic 
controversy surrounding the human in architecture are followed by 
selections that seek to expand the possible approaches to our topic. 
     How important to our sense of  home is the simple expectation that our 
architecture outlive us? Mari Hvattum’s paper “On Durability” looks at how 
time is inscribed in human artefacts. Starting with the sensible observation 
that architecture, in most cases, lasts longer than the people building it 
she makes a case for considering that in an age when the extremes of  
the ephemeral and the eternal are cultivated in equal measure, there may 
be reason to look again at the particular kind of  durability pertaining to 
the human-made. This involves studying, not so much works, as work: 
how human making, as both Gottfried Semper and Hannah Arendt have 
reminded us, transforms ephemeral acts into (relatively) durable worlds, 
and how the past, whether we know it or not, inhabits the present.
She does this by drawing on the specific example of  the destruction 
and reconstruction of  the famous bridge of  Mostar, Bosnia; 
employing it as something of  a case study for discussing how 
architecture provides essential touchstones for temporal beings.
     Even though humans may not have a static nature, our relation to 
nature itself—that is to say, the world that goes on without us—is too 
important a topic to go unaddressed. Henry Dicks, in his paper “From 
Anthropomimetic to Biomimetic Cities: The Place of  Humans in 



7

isparchitecture.com

Cities like Forests,” observes that even though in recent years biomimicry 
has emerged as a powerful response to the problem of  sustainability and 
today exerts an important influence on both architecture and urbanism, 
its implications for the humanities have been largely overlooked. Taking a 
historical approach, the first key argument of  this article is that throughout 
Western history the dominant model for the polis, qua both city and state, 
has been the human being and that it was also this basic model that underlay 
traditional understandings of  the place of  humans in cities and states. With 
the transition to biomimetic cities and states, the key model of  which is the 
forest ecosystem, the question of  the place of  humans arises once again. 
In response to this question, Dicks proposes a speculative philosophical 
anthropology based on a combination of  Heidegger’s thinking of  the 
clearing and recent insights from the study of  human evolution and pre-
history with a view to grounding a new model of  the polis not simply on 
the forest, but rather on the forest and the clearing. His invocation of  the 
Heideggerian forest and clearing in this regard is likely to spark future  debate.
     We then conclude the first volume with Marion Roussel’s “Towards a 
Post-Human Era? Digital Architects and the Future of  Mankind,” which 
looks at possible futures. Roussel believes that in this age of  unprecedented 
technological progress, we can no longer ask “what is man?” without 
examining what we think man will become. In the field of  architecture 
such an examination necessitates considering both what and for whom 
we will be building in the decades to come. Looking at the future world 
visions from the commentary of  digital architects from the 1990s to the 
present day, this paper aims to show how these architects have already 
been imagining the future of  mankind. It attempts to shed light upon our 
present state of  evolution and the expected outcome of  that evolution.
     Taken together, we believe these papers illustrate that addressing 
the question of  what we mean now by the human in architecture  can 
and must run the full gamut  of   humans’ time on the planet; from the 
prehistory of  the clearing in the forest  to the strange possible futures 
made possible by modern technology.   It is a question as relevant ever.

ENDNOTES

[1] Le Corbusier, The Athens Charter (1943), §87. Based on studies undertaken 
at the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in Athens, 
1933. Accessed on Moderist Architecture, https://modernistarchitecture.
wordpress.com/2010/11/03/ciam%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cthe-
athens-charter%E2%80%9D-1933/.



[2] Our translation. For the original, see Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Gebt 
den Menschen die Häuser zurück (München: Pattloch, 2003).
[3] Alvar Aalto, Toward a Human Modernism, ed. Winfried Nerdinger (New 
York: Prestel, 1999).
[4] Mats Egelius, “Ralph Erskine: the humane architect,” Architectural Design 
Profile vol. 9 (London: Architectural Design, 1977).
[5] Team 10 Meetings: 1953-1984, ed. Alison Margaret Smithson (New York: 
Rizzoli, 1991) and Alison Margaret Smithson and Peter Smithson, The Charged 
Void: Architecture (New York: Monacelli Press, 2001).
[6] Rudolf  Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of  Humanism (New 
York: Norton, 1971); Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of  Humanism. A Study in 
the History of  Taste (London: Architectural Press, 1980); and Alina Alexandra 
Payne, “Rudolf  Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of  
Modernism,” Journal of  the Society of  Architectural Historians 53, no. 3 (1994): 
322–342, doi: 10.2307/990940.
[7] Immanuel Kant, “Logik,” Akademieausgabe Band IX (Berlin: 1900ff.), AA 
IX S.25.
[8] For an extensive view on the tradition of  Philosophische Anthropologie 
see Joachim Fischer, Philosophische Anthropologie: Eine Denkrichtung des 20. 
Jahrhunderts (Freiburg im Breisgau: Alber, 2009). Some of  the most important 
books include Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Bonn: Bouvier, 
1991); Arnold Gehlen, Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt 
(Bonn: Athenäum, 1962); Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der 
Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965); 
and Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of  Human 
Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
[9] Michael Tomasello, A Natural History of  Human Thinking (Cambridge: 
Harvard University Press, 2014).
[10] Cf. Jürgen Habermas, “Anthropologie, philosophische,” in Das Fischer 
Lexikon: Philosophie, ed. Alwin Diemer and Ivo Frenzel (Frankfurt am Main: 
Fischer, 1958), 18–35.
[11] Martin Heidegger, Über den Humanismus (Frankfurt am Main: 
Klostermann, 2000).
[12] Ibid.
[13] Noam Chomsky, What Kind of  Creatures Are We? (New York: Columbia 
University Press, 2015).



isparchitecture.com

Building Thinking Asking: what is 
the right way to do Philosophy of           

Architecture?

A panel discussion between Karsten Harries and SIR Roger 
Scruton moderated by Christian Illies

KARSTEN HARRIES: When I was asked to participate 
in this session, I was told our conversation had 
to do with “Building Thinking Asking: what is 
the right way to do Philosophy of  Architecture?” 
What does the title mean to the philosophy of  
architecture? The question of  course presupposes 
that there is the right way—I am not at all sure 
that there is.  

Philosophers have concerned themselves with 
all sorts of  things. They can write about sports, 
about the philosophy of  cooking, just about 
anything is suitable fodder for philosophers of  
different types. Now philosophers have concerned 
themselves especially with the different arts. This 
is what aesthetics stands for. And it has long 

Martin Düchs (L) introduced 
and Christian Illies (R) mod-

erated the panel discussion 
between Karsten Harries 

(CL) and Roger Scruton (CR)



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

10

K
a

r
st

en
 H

a
r

r
ie

s 
&

 R
og

er
 S

cr
ut

on

been recognized that architecture is one of  the arts. But it had also been 
recognized that architecture is the art that poorly fits with the other arts 
in many ways because it is so dependent on the demands that the world 
puts on architects. So it is essentially an impure art. At least if  you measure 
purity by a concern for beauty. So it is the one art that, perhaps more than 
any other, has to be sent into the world. That is to say, architecture has to 
recognize not only the physical neediness of  man that’s obvious, but the 
spiritual neediness of  man. That is more definitive.

So given an understanding of  beauty as ideally a self-sufficient 
presence, the sort of  understanding that we can trace back, for instance, 
to Baumgarten, architecture’s descent into the world must be considered 
as something like an unfortunate concession. The architect has to almost 
contaminate his concern for beauty, so understood. I think architecture 
invites us to question this understanding of  beauty, not just for architecture, 
but to question in general the understanding of  the work of  art as an ideally 
self-sufficient aesthetic object. Architecture’s descent into the world raises 
this question: must the understanding of  beauty not be questioned that 
has played such a powerful role in the evolution of  aesthetics; must it not 
be challenged? Should beauty have a different function? In this connection 
I have argued that beauty should be understood as re-presenting the 
beautiful object—here I appeal to Ernesto Grassi for support—that the 
beautiful object forces us to look again. The object re-presents itself.  It 
refuses to go away. And I think that when we go to Vierzehnheiligen and 
Banz Abbey we will have a chance to experience that effect of  beauty on 
these buildings. Their beauty forces us to look again. They won’t leave 
us alone. So I want to say that the philosophy of  architecture more than 
any other philosophy of  art invites us to rethink the nature of  beauty in 
general, also the essence of  aesthetics. 

I also want to raise some questions about the relationship of  
architecture and philosophy. For a long time architecture and philosophy 
have gotten along quite well without worrying too much about each 
other. And many architects today still do not worry about philosophy at 
all. Does that say something important?  To be sure, there is something 
like a ‘philosophy envy’ among a certain small group of  architects, or a 
theory envy, so that this group is open to philosophy in a way that invites 
questions. That deserves discussion.  But that’s a little bit different from 
my first point, so I think we probably should stop there. 

CHRISTIAN ILLIES: Thank you Karsten. I think, after having raised the issue 
of  beauty, we cannot possibly stop Roger from commenting on that.

ROGER SCRUTON: Everything that Karsten said was really interesting, I 



11

isparchitecture.com

don’t think I disagree with him in any way. But 
perhaps I should say a little bit about how I 
came about my interest in this topic, because it is 
unusual for an analytical philosopher to address 
aesthetics. Karsten is much more used to the phe-
nomenological and art historical way of  approach-
ing things, where the meaning of  architectural 
objects is clearly part of  how we experience them. 
Analytic philosophy, which was my training at 
Cambridge, or at least when I was growing up, 
largely ignored questions of  aesthetics. And cer-
tainly the idea that you should be interested in the 
objects around you was disapproved of. But I’ve 
always been interested in the objects around me. 
When I was sixteen and first became aware of  the 
world, it was architecture that principally impacted 
upon me. I was living in a little town, Marlow, 
on the River Thames near High Wycombe—in 
a scruffy little working class house for the work-
ing poor. And around me was the beautiful old 
English gingerbread town of  Marlow. However, 
the developers were at work pulling it all down 
and putting up their glass and steel facades and 
concrete girders. That awoke me to the idea that 
the world is perhaps not as permanent as I had 
hoped, and that all kinds of  evil 
forces were at work pulling it 
apart. That thought was deep 
in me throughout my career as 
an undergraduate. And when I 
started doing research in phi-
losophy I decided, yes, I will do 
aesthetics because maybe that 
would will help me to under-
stand what I felt when I had seen 
the uglification, as Kundera calls it, of  the world in 
which I was living. Eventually that led to my book 
on architecture. 

But I was hampered by my training, I have 
to say. Karsten was lucky, he wasn’t hampered by 
having a training in analytic philosophy. He looked 

To be 
sure, there is 

something like 
a ‘philosophy 
envy’ among 

a certain 
small group of 

architects

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

12

K
a

r
st

en
 H

a
r

r
ie

s 
&

 R
og

er
 S

cr
ut

on

at the ‘things themselves’ as Heidegger would say, or Husserl at least, and 
extracted from them his philosophical ideas. I had to come down from the 
scaffolding that analytic philosophy erects above everything and bring my 
logical distinctions to earth. I had to apply them to what I read about what 
architects say and what architectural critics say. But I was rescued by one 
particular architectural critic and that is Ruskin. I am sure you’ve all come 
across him—a slightly crazy but incredibly cultivated Victorian writer for 
whom architecture really was an expression of  the moral life. He had 
problems with women. But in architecture he saw the fruit of  what we are 
as human beings. He tried to express it in The Seven Lamps of  Architecture 
and in the wonderful book The Stones of  Venice. Those are books that 
everyone should read. I had the sense that this is what philosophy should 
be like. How could I bring my analytical training to bear on the kinds 
of  questions Ruskin was raising: questions about the spiritual, historical 
meaning, the social significance of  buildings, and the way in which for 
him the holy spirit enhances what we build? For Ruskin, buildings were 
not made of  stone; they were made of  some spiritual substance which 
happened to have borrowed stone temporarily in order to manifest itself  
to us. That’s a Hegelian thought, of  course. I am sorry to hear that Hegel 
fled from Bamberg. But his writings on architecture show that he wasn’t 
that sensitive to this particular art-form. In the end I came around to 
see that Heidegger’s wonderful essay on “Building Dwelling Thinking” 
contains deep truths that we analytic philosophers have to rediscover. It 
is very hard though, and we have a discipline that we have to fight against 
to rediscover those truths. So, I’ve been wrestling downwards from that 
great analytical skeleton to the place where Karsten has been “wallowing” 
successfully for some years.

HARRIES: For me, my interest in architecture is way older than my 
interest in philosophy, and it has continued to be a very intense interest. 
It began very early. It began—I recall the exact moment—it began when 
I was 7 years old—we had left burning Berlin and found a home in Bad 
Königshofen. There’s a church outside Bad Königshofen, the pilgrimage 
church Mariä Geburt in Ipthausen, and that church overwhelmed me. 
We were not religious. It was not a religious experience, and it wasn’t an 
aesthetic experience. It seemed as if  I had stepped into another world. 
As if  something touched me that I had not experienced. Nowhere in 
Berlin had there been anything like that.

Later, when I went to Munich to the Max-Gymnasium and saw 
churches like the abbey church of  Kloster Andechs, these churches 
repeated the experience to some extent. That intense experience of  18th 



13

isparchitecture.com

century churches in southern Germany antedates 
my interest in philosophy. I could imagine myself  
working today in art history—indeed in any number 
of  history studies. My interest in philosophy 
emerged partly because I was also very interested in 
mathematics. I tended towards philosophy because 
I thought it less confining.  After I had come to 
America with my parents, had studied at Yale, and 
begun to teach there, my colleagues in philosophy 
were more interested in painting as the purer art, 
but the architects felt the need for something like 
a philosophical core in our Architecture School’s 
undergraduate program.  So I was approached 
by the Director of  Undergraduate Studies Kent 
Bloomer—I had just published The Meaning of  
Modern Art and grown a little tired of  teaching 
this material. I was asked whether I would teach a 
beginning course in the philosophy of  architecture 
in the architecture school.  So that’s how it all began. 
The Ethical Function of  Architecture was, basically, the 
result of  my course notes. It was written very much 
in connection with the development of  that course. 
But it was not identical with it. Since the book was 
reasonably successful, it led to requests for lectures 
and essays that kept me going. 
In recent years I’ve done a lot 
of  other things, but have always 
drifted back to this topic.

SCRUTON: That’s very inter-
esting because, I suppose, I 
was awakened to the prob-
lems of  architecture by my 
experience of  seeing the town 
demolished. It wasn’t from great works of  art that 
I learned to care about building, but from ordinary 
natural streets. But they nevertheless were home, 
and there was something ‘unheimlich’ about their 
destruction. That really awoke me to the ethical 
significance of  architecture. Obviously Ruskin was 
writing about great works of  architecture, just as 
you write.  I spent some time in Rome after leaving 

   It wasn’t 
from great 

works of art 
that I learned 
to care about 

building, but 
from ordinary 

natural 
streets 

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

14

K
a

r
st

en
 H

a
r

r
ie

s 
&

 R
og

er
 S

cr
ut

on

university, and was overwhelmed by the fabric of  the city, and especially 
the Roman baroque and Borromini as its greatest exponent. But I came 
back with the thought that if  you can’t defend the ordinary, vernacular, 
uninteresting architecture which we all appreciate without noticing it, 
then you haven’t done architecture justice. The Americans see beautiful 
buildings from the past as landmarks and say to themselves, “This has 
got to be preserved.” So you’ll see a rather beautiful courthouse sur-
rounded by horrible towers of  mirror glass which completely destroy its 
character, and I want to say: “That wasn’t the point.” This courthouse 
only made sense because of  all the things that surrounded it. If  we can 
only treat architecture as a collection of  great works of  art then we have 
missed what really matters.

HARRIES: On that we completely agree. I do want to invite us to think 
a little bit more about how works of  architecture relate to the vernacu-
lar. For instance, my wife and I explored the area around Bamberg a bit 
and we noticed how the churches related to the red roofs of  the houses 
around them.  What moved us was the way architecture related to the 
vernacular—the way the roof  of  some church related to these other red 
roofs. There’s this important dialogue going on between the vernacular 
and works of  architecture. But sometimes the latter get in the way of  
more modest buildings.  These get blocked by these works of  architec-
ture, by works which refuse, really, to engage with the vernacular. There 
is a problem when you get a building that just sits in the city, doesn’t 
move, and doesn’t engage its surroundings in an important way. It just 
sits there and wants to be appreciated as a self-sufficient aesthetic object. 
What we are talking about, what I want to talk about, is that architecture 
should answer to, should speak to the vernacular. Buildings should rec-
ognize they are not just sitting alone. 

They should also respond to the weather. This can be seen with the 
strongest architecture in Central Europe—consider, e.g., Fischer von 
Erlach’s Italianate villas. It is interesting to look at the way his southern 
work was appropriated by Viennese architects. They realized that the 
weather made it impossible to create Italian forms in the north. The 
weather just wouldn’t allow certain domes or made their upkeep very 
expensive. The ice would tear them apart.  For the same reason, the fabric 
of  the French Cathedrals is not very suitable to the kind of  climate we 
have here. The baroque architecture in Southern Germany and especially 
the Austrian baroque is a beautiful answer to those who tried to build 
Italian architecture and failed to consider how the weather would tear it 
apart. And the result is the typical or what we think of  as the typical 



15

isparchitecture.com

South German and Austrian baroque. The weather 
comes into the picture, and that is to say, also, the 
vernacular.  This means that the architect should 
be sensitive to the climate, consider the way the 
vernacular relates to the climate.  The weather helps 
give works of  architecture their special voice.

ILLIES: You’ve both approached architecture 
from a very personal experience. But what role 
does philosophy play in this experience? Part of  
what you say could have been said without philos-
ophy. Is was simply about how educated people 
should approach architecture. That seems to raise 
no specific question for philosophy, rather, more 
generally, the problem of  aesthetic education. Or 
is there a specific role for philosophy in it? And 
what would that exactly be?

HARRIES: We can see the issue with our archi-
tecture students. There is the idea of  the work as 
something that we ought to discuss in isolation, as 
a beautiful object. They want to create a beautiful 
object by bounding space in certain ways.  That 
seems to be the task for many of  these students.  
And there is a presupposition here, namely the 
aesthetic understanding of  the successful work 
of  art as ideally a self-sufficient object.  It is here 
upheld, even if  there are concessions to functions 
and so on.  But I would 
challenge this. Here I think 
a philosopher’s task is a little 
bit like yeast.  He should raise 
questions that make archi-
tects more mindful. Some 
of  these questions involve 
philosophical assumptions. 
This is a self-critical function 
of  philosophy.

SCRUTON: I was going to say that there is an 
aspect of  philosophy which is neglected by archi-
tects and which should not be neglected because 
architecture is an application of  practical reason, 

            You’ve 
both 

approached 
architecture 
from a very 

personal 
experience. 

But what role 
does philosophy 

play in this 
experience?

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

16

K
a

r
st

en
 H

a
r

r
ie

s 
&

 R
og

er
 S

cr
ut

on

about which philosophy has something to say. Consider the questions: 
“why do this?” “why add that detail?” “why go on in this way?” Phi-
losophers have had a lot to say about those questions. For example, 
they have distinguished reasons about means from reasons about ends. 
Architecture was invaded by the functionalist heresy at a certain stage, 
which made all practical reasons into reasons about means. Functional-
ism was part of  the utilitarian disease, which had a long gestation period 
in the nineteenth century. Ruskin was battling against that disease. Of  
course there are important means to our ends, but there are also the 
ends themselves. We have to understand them. We have to reason about 
them. When you lay a table, for example, or when you put your clothes 
on in the morning, you are not reasoning about means, you are reason-
ing about ends. You are saying: “How should this be, in itself ?” “How 
should it be and therefore how should it look?” And you are always, as 
Kant says, looking for agreement in judgment. You try to imagine the 
others into the arena with you. Of  course Karsten is right, weather is 
always important. Function is always important. But function is not the 
end of  the architect.

HARRIES: This relates to something we said before. We spoke of  the 
vernacular and how it makes you feel at home.  And you need to feel 
metaphysically at home.  And when you spoke of  laying out a table for a 
nice meal, somehow this makes us also feel more at home in that room. 
That’s an accomplishment. And it is an accomplishment if  we build and 
from the very beginning keep in mind that function; if  we build not just 
to provide shelter, but bound space in such a way that we feel somehow 
more at home. 

SCRUTON: Yes.

HARRIES: It is crucial to bound space in such a way that we feel some-
how more at home, not that we necessarily will feel more spiritually at 
home.  But that remains an important function of  architecture.

ILLIES: You criticized the idea of  the self-sufficient aesthetic object, 
which removes architecture from exactly that function.  But is that not 
also a problem of  all aesthetic decisions? When I say, “The window has 
to be exactly there, because there it is right. It cannot be an inch further 
to the left. This is its place,” am I already moving too much towards the 
self-sufficiency of  the object and away from the homeliness? It must be 
like this because it has exactly the right light, or something like that. Is 
there some sort of  tension between these two forms of  thinking?

SCRUTON: Yes. Now you see, when you are doing philosophy, or phi-
losophy about architecture, you are asking the question: “How do you 



17

isparchitecture.com

reason about the intrinsic rightness of  something? 
What are the constraints? Is it just that you are 
trying to create a home, or is it about something 
else?” To me, that is what aesthetics is about. And 
I think analytical philosophy is probably in need of  
correction here. However, I may be the only one 
who thinks that. [Laughs]  The question you raised 
puzzles me. Inter-
estingly enough, 
Wittgenstein in 
his few remarks 
about aesthet-
ics, fixes on that 
very example. He 
thinks of  a door. 
What guides me 
in designing and 
making a door? 
And he says, you 
don’t ask whether 
it is beautiful or 
not. You ask: “is 
it right? does it 
look right to you?” 
“does it fit in?” 
The functionalists 
think they can set-
tle such questions 
by procedures 
and that’s what’s 
wrong with them. 
When there is 
no procedure for 
answering a question, there may be a real question 
nevertheless.

HARRIES: Here we must recognize how condi-
tioned the question of  what is right or wrong is by 
historic circumstances.Take the example of  Vier-
zehnheiligen.  Balthasar Neumann had planned a 
cruciform basilica with the altar to the Fourteen 
Saints to be placed in the crossing, as one might 

figure 1: Vierzehnheiligen, 
banz, germany



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

18

K
a

r
st

en
 H

a
r

r
ie

s 
&

 R
og

er
 S

cr
ut

on

expect.  But the architect in charge of  executing Neumann’s plans, 
Gottfried Heinrich Krohne, whose own earlier design had been rejected, 
missed the sacred place by quite a few yards by moving the church to 
the east, which caused the sacred spot to fall into the nave.  Apparently, 
this Protestant architect did not take it to be all that important: what 
did a few feet matter.  But they did matter. What was to be done?  The 
executed plan hints at the ingenious solution at which Neumann arrived.  
He made things right.  Here you have an understanding of  what is right 
that is very different from the sense of  right that would be part of  a soci-
ety that doesn’t bring the religious into the story.  Neumann could not 
say, “Oh it doesn’t matter, a few yards to the east or the west”—because 
here the architecture had to respond to precisely this very specific sacred 
place. 

We no longer reckon with place in that way.  Take the example of  a 
house.  The place has significance for any number of  reasons.  And then 
you ask, “What’s right?” There is no simple answer.  It depends on the 
context in which the question gets raised and then different answers will 
be given in a different context. 

SCRUTON: What animated me when I wrote The Aesthetics of  Architecture 
was in part the sense that people give phony answers to the question, 
“What is right?” They invent something like Corbusier’s Modulor, in 
order to justify the nonsensical things that they do. I think we should rec-
ognize that people take refuge in systems, when it is precisely the systems 
that are wrong. Alberti wrote beautifully about this when he said that 
what matters in architecture is the appropriate. He hardly ever uses the 
word “beautiful” or any equivalent of  it. But the appropriate object in 
the appropriate place matters and that should guide architecture. For that 
it is very hard to find rules. Maybe you are saying that the rules have to 
be constructed post facto. We generalize from what has been successful. 
That’s what the rococo style in this room exhibits. No architect, I hope, 
had anything to do with this—a local builder did it.

HARRIES: It’s not rococo.

SCRUTON: Late baroque, then.

ILLIES: The problem I have with “feeling at home” is that some 
people feel at home in buildings I think they shouldn’t feel at home 
in. Especially in the standard architecture of  today—with its appalling 
inappropriateness.

HARRIES: Since you mentioned it, I think this is a good place to pur-
sue this question, a question that Heidegger has discussed in “Building 
Dwelling Thinking”. First of  all, he gives us a very broad definition of  



19

isparchitecture.com

‘building.’ And he points out that philosophy and 
architecture, both in a sense, have built—one in 
a conceptual space, the other one in a real space.  
From the very beginning people have tried to ori-
ent themselves in space by bounding it in various 
ways to make themselves feel at home. And they 
have not just done that by building in the literal 
sense by raising structures, but they have also 
done so conceptually, mainly through language, 
by slowly controlling their environment. They are 
both ways of  grappling with the task of  making 
this world into a home. This need has been a fact 
from the very beginning and it remains a need 
architecture must meet to prove itself.

SCRUTON: I think that the word ‘wohnen,’ which 
is in the title of  Heidegger’s essay, could also be 
translated as “settlement.” I think that’s really 
what he had in mind, and that’s something that 
all human beings need. We are, naturally, settled 
beings. We can be launched into nomadic existence 
in desperate situations. But our natural condition, 
and that is especially true of  European civiliza-
tion, is settling in one place. And maybe the story 
of  Romulus and Remus, of  how the settler took 
advantage over the wanderer, 
tells us something. Settling 
means having boundaries, 
and recognizing within those 
boundaries that we are sharing 
things. We don’t share every-
thing. We don’t share our wives 
and children and the rest of  
our domestic assets. Neverthe-
less of  the things we do share the most important 
is often the temple—which is the mark of  our 
settlement. That is why with Heidegger we can say 
that it’s important to get the sacred place to be in 
the right place.

HARRIES: I am surprised to hear you quoting 
Heidegger!

We are, 
naturally, 

settled beings
“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

20

K
a

r
st

en
 H

a
r

r
ie

s 
&

 R
og

er
 S

cr
ut

on

SCRUTON: I am an educated man! [Laughs]

HARRIES: Today it seems to me that we face, thinking of  architecture, 
two challenges: One is the increasing scarcity of  space. I think that archi-
tects are still profligate in their use of  space because they don’t realize 
that space is becoming a scarce resource. I think that this is something 
that architects can learn from history: to reckon with space as a scarce 
resource. We aren’t just talking about cars and air pollution, but space 
itself. And the other challenge is in a way an opposite challenge. We 
are liberated, as never before, by the digital revolution. It opens up an 
entirely new space. So there is a tension here between, on the one hand, 
the increasing scarcity of  space and, on the other hand, that opening up 
of  space which promises a new freedom. There is the call of  freedom 
that speaks on the one side. And there is the opposite call to be settled 
in one place. I think the successful architecture of  today should not try 
to find a solution in the middle, but has to recognize that that tension 
is part of  a successful life. That we cannot have it one way or the other, 
that that thought shortchanges us. So we have to give space to freedom, 
and also to the need to have a home. We need both. Without that we 
impoverish ourselves.

SCRUTON: I think that one of  the things that troubled me when I first 
started thinking about this is an incident that occurred in 1979, I think, 
when I published The Aesthetics of  Architecture. I was reading Gideon’s 
book Space, Time and Architecture. I thought here was somebody who 
didn’t really understand physics and who is playing around with con-
cepts beyond his grasp. He made it look as if  architecture is simply 
about space and not about that much more important thing, which is 
the boundary that encloses space. Gideon gave the sense of  conquering 
the world, of  opening up and of  making it our own, when in fact all the 
great architecture we know from the past history was putting boundaries 
around space, making it smaller. People had to make it smaller in the 
Middle Ages. Those little hilltop towns in Italy, which everybody loves, 
contained an awful lot of  people—a thousand or two thousand people 
in that tiny little area. They had to be in that area because it was the 
only thing they could defend. But by being crowded in that space, they 
made their piled-up homes beautiful, and I think all were at home there. 
Italians now may go to America and make a fortune, coming back to 
build some absolutely appalling bungalow in the valley underneath. But 
still their heart is in that little village on the top. I think that idea that we 
enclose space, that we make it smaller, so as to adapt it to ourselves, is a 
really important part of  the architectural motive.



21

isparchitecture.com

HARRIES: Yes, I agree with what you said, but 
I think we shouldn’t forget that other metaphor, 
which finds its expression in an understanding 
of  the church in the image of  Jacob’s ladder, a 
ladder that escapes the earth and that opens it up 
[Gestures to the sky]. You will see in the church of  
Vierzehnheiligen how self-consciously the archi-
tect opens up the architecture to the infinite.

ILLIES: That sounds as if  Karsten becomes a 
Hegelian and Roger turns into a Heideggerian. We 
should close the conversation before the trans-
formations get out of  hand, and open it to the 
audience.

AUDIENCE QUESTIONS

QUESTION: What about Heidegger’s “terror of  
time.” Where do you think it belongs? Does it 
belong to architecture or philosophy?

HARRIES: Where does it belong? It belongs to 
both. I think it is part of  the human situation. 

QUESTION: That means it belongs to space as well?

HARRIES: I think the two are related. As a matter 
of  fact, the separation of  time and space is itself  
very problematic. I talk a lot about that. How 
space and time are one. In other words, I am not 
satisfied by separating the arts of  space and the 
arts of  time. I think space enters into music, and 
time enters into architecture. And so the “terror” 
comes to both.

QUESTION: You both mentioned vernacular archi-
tecture. I want to ask, what do you think about the 
role of  tradition and style? It imposes rules: rules 
which allow us to understand and still to create 
homely architecture.

SCRUTON: I think it’s a fundamental question. 
When rules are a priori rules, worked out without 
consulting the object, and preceding the practi-
cal problem, you might justify them perhaps in 
functional terms. But there are also certain rules 



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

22

K
a

r
st

en
 H

a
r

r
ie

s 
&

 R
og

er
 S

cr
ut

on

in architecture that define tradition rather than reasoned solutions. They 
are not a priori maxims, but the collective wisdom over the many years—
people worked them out by trial and error. Architects see (for example) 
that when you make a room like this you should have a molding that 
goes along just below the ceiling, which has got three or four parallel 
lines in it, so as to bring the wall to an end. That’s something discovered 
over many centuries. And until modernism came along it was accepted. 
Those are the sort of  things that are, I would say, legitimate rules in 
architecture. They are not a priori rules, they are the résumés of  experi-
ence—that’s what a tradition is. Why do human beings need traditions, 
and when is it right to depart from them and when is it wrong to follow 
them? These are the big questions of  the twentieth century. 

QUESTION: You spoke of  the spiritual in architecture. Can there be such 
a thing as exclusively secular architecture?

SCRUTON: Jolly good question. [To Harries] Shall I just say something? 

HARRIES: You start.

SCRUTON: I have in recent years been quite intrigued by that ques-
tion because I am very much impressed by what the classical tradition 
achieved. In all its forms. In particular, in vernacular architecture. You 
are familiar with the vernacular Georgian house. It uses details which are 
mimicked in the next house. There’s something similar with the Ger-
man baroque cities. But the origin of  the repeated details is not secular. 
It is holy. The details come from the Greek and Roman temples in the 
neoclassical case or from the baroque churches in the German case. So 
it looks as though the deeper ground of  vernacular architecture does not 
come from the secular world. It comes from something holy—whether 
you say it was handed down by God, or just say it comes from the reli-
gious instinct. Funnily enough, if  you look back at the book of  Exodus, 
at the moment when God hands down the tablets of  the law to Moses, 
he hands down at the same time the design for a temple. He says “I don’t 
just want you to stop committing adultery and am not only speaking of  
the other things you’ve been doing. I want you to build a home for me, 
and here’s how you do it with columns, architraves, and capitals.” It’s very 
much a metaphor, but we do think ultimately that the origin of  archi-
tectural grammar has to be divine. Today we live in a secular society that 
doesn’t believe there is a divine origin of  things. So somebody could say 
that this leaves us in the wilderness

HARRIES: I would give a somewhat different answer with less empha-
sis on the classical tradition. But I would also say that it is a mistake to 
divorce the sacred from the beautiful. And that the vernacular buildings 



23

isparchitecture.com

that Roger speaks of, in some measure, all rec-
ognize the beautiful. In unpacking this, I don’t 
consider myself  particularly religious. I would 
emphasize the re-presentational function of  the 
beautiful; that is where we should begin. When I 
deck out a table for a festive meal, that is what I 
do: I invite people, as it were, to feel good in that 
room at that table. I think that’s what vernacular 
architecture does too. That’s what a good, well-
placed door does.

SCRUTON: A festive meal, though, traditionally, 
allows you to see a state of  grace.

HARRIES: Yes, and I would welcome that. I think 
that we recognize the importance of  the distinc-
tion between the sacred festal and less festal times. 
And the same thing goes for spaces. This is part 
of  a successful life.

ILLIES: Would you say that a similar thing hap-
pens even in modernist architecture, where you 
don’t start with divine points of  reference? But 
architects still need, do they not, some normative 
points of  reference? You look for certain qualities 
to replace the divine points of  orientation, for 
example the ideal of  ‘equality.’ They can give a 
kind of  orientation for an entire building. So you 
still have an orientation in normative ideals—func-
tionless ideals which are then incarnated in the 
entire building.

HARRIES: I would like to then turn to particular 
examples. I would agree with you here, but what 
I would not overlook is the offering of  the site. 
It’s not just the materials, it’s not just the setting, 
it’s the recognition of  the site and its constraints. 
The building then re-presents the landscape; it lets 
us look more happily at it.  A good building is not 
like a scar on the land, it lets you look more hap-
pily at that land—at the same land. I think quite a 
few modern architects succeeded very well at that. 
So I would not restrict it to a certain style. I mean 
I happen to like the eighteenth century, but if  I 



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

24

K
a

r
st

en
 H

a
r

r
ie

s 
&

 R
og

er
 S

cr
ut

on

were to build myself  a house today, it would be modern.

SCRUTON: Well, yes, I would disagree with that bit! [General laughter]

QUESTION: If  we were to look at architecture today, it is on the one hand 
characterized by different approaches with different priorities. On the 
other hand, we have to try to integrate architecture. What shall we do? 
Should we try to correlate the different approaches in a more substantive 
way, or should we remain constant on this different approach?

SCRUTON: Hegel says in the introduction to the “Elements of  the 
Philosophy of  Right,” when philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has 
a form of  life grown old—meaning that philosophy comes after life. It’s 
a reflection upon it, and it is not the premise upon which life begins. I 
think this is also true about the philosophy of  architecture. You don’t 
want architects to begin from a philosophy of  architecture. You want 
them to be architects. Philosophers meditate on what they are doing, and 
perhaps make sense of  it. But there is always a danger in trying to start 
from a philosophy of  something and then arriving at the thing. One of  
my writings consists of  a book on the philosophy of  wine. I’ve never 
thought that someone could start making wine by learning the philos-
ophy of  it. But of  course wine is an incredibly pregnant object for a 
philosopher to think about, and also to drink. So the philosophy comes 
afterward. Of  course you can come to the conclusion, through philoso-
phy, that this architect is doing something really interesting and this one 
is perhaps doing something wrong or whatever, but those are not topics 
that architects themselves need to be very interested in.

HARRIES: I would just want to add that, yes, philosophy should come 
afterwards, but I think it should come afterwards with its questions. That 
is, it should make the architect a little bit less sure of  himself. It should 
invite him to call into question certain assumptions. For example, the 
attitudes towards space of  the students in our architecture schools. I 
think it needs to be challenged. It needs to be questioned. So I see the 
function of  philosophy in architecture schools to be a little like yeast that 
makes the dough rise, as it were.

iILLIES: Thank you very much. We’ve had fascinating conversions 
between Karsten and Sir Roger and Heidegger and Hegel. But it is 
time to come to an end. Let us do what Roger warned us not to do; we 
inverse the order. We’ve had philosophy, and now we turn to wine.

ACknowledgment: The editors would like to thank Tom Spector whose 
transcription made this article possible. 



isparchitecture.com

Presence or Meaning in 
Architecture
Pau Pedragosa

 

1. The Davos Debate

Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger met in 
1929 for a public debate in the town of  Davos in 
the Swiss Alps.1 Over time the debate took on a 
legendary character and has become a key episode 
in the European history of  ideas. Cassirer and 
Heidegger defended two antithetical images of  the 
human being, which are also two antithetical images 
of  culture and hence of  architecture. 

The Davos debate was a great cultural 
antagonism of  the Weimar Republic. On the one 
side Cassirer, heir of  Kant and Goethe, a humanist 
of  the Enlightenment and a cosmopolitan 
Jew. On the other side the anti-humanist and 
provincial Heidegger. Four years later, Heidegger 
embraced the Nazi revolution and Cassirer was 
forced into exile.2 It is tempting to draw political 
conclusions from both philosophies (and we will 
draw some conclusions at the end of  this paper), 
but to contemporaries of  the 1929 debate, the 
confrontation was philosophical, not political.3 
Heidegger’s thinking implied a radical break with 
and destruction of  the past, but this break had not 
yet received the political form he gave it in 1933.4 

In general terms the Davos debate involved the 
clash of  two different conceptions of  philosophy: 
between humanist philosophy and the existentialist, 
non-humanistic philosophy of  the new era. What 
Heidegger criticized during the 1920s were the 



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

26

Pe
dr

a
go

sa

humanist ideas of  progress and freedom. In a direct encounter with 
Cassirer, the most eminent representative of  neo-Kantian “rationalism,” 
Heidegger presented himself  as the author of  a fundamentally new kind 
of  philosophy destined to replace the remaining “rationalist” tendencies 
in Husserlian phenomenology as well.5 

Heidegger in fact “won” the debate against Cassirer and the young 
students at Davos agreed with his revolt against the “rationalism” of  the 
neo-Kantian tradition.6 Heidegger gave voice to the generation struck by 
the violence of  the First World War, which was seen as a huge break with 
tradition.7 This perspective of  a new generation led some toward fascism 
and others toward communism, while others, like Cassirer, stood for the 
democratic parliamentarian politics of  the Weimer Republic. 

Cassirer was not only one of  the most eminent representatives 
of  the classical liberal intellectual tradition in Germany, he was also a 
representative of  modern political republicanism. He owed his academic 
career to the Weimar Republic, because he was offered a professorship at 
the newly founded university in Hamburg in 1919. He defended Weimar 
in the university on the occasion of  the tenth anniversary celebration of  
the Republic in August 1928. Against the popular view that the Weimar 
Republic was “un-German,”8 he argued that the idea of  a republican 
constitution had its origin in the German philosophical tradition.9 

The confrontation in Davos turned on the interpretation of  Kant’s 
philosophy. Yet the debate was more enduring and broader than the 
technical matters of  philosophical interpretation, and touched on the 
central issue of  what it is to be human. Their essential disagreement was 
that, for Cassirer, the human being is essentially a being endowed with a 
capacity for creation. For Heidegger, the essence of  the human being is 
a special kind of  receptivity by virtue of  which the human stands within 
the “openness of  Being.” Where Cassirer puts activity, creativity and 
freedom, Heidegger proposes passivity and receptivity.10 The disagreement 
between them defines two opposing anthropological conceptions: the 
human capacity for world-construction against the human receptivity for 
world-interpretation.

2. Ernst Cassirer

From 1919 until his exile in 1933 (the whole period of  the Weimar 
Republic), Cassirer held a chair in philosophy at the newly founded 
University of  Hamburg, located in one of  the most liberal towns in 
Germany. It was during this period that he brought out the three volumes 



27

isparchitecture.com

of  The Philosophy of  Symbolic Forms: Volume One: 
Language, 1923; Volume Two: Mythical Thought, 1925; 
Volume Three: The Phenomenology of  Knowledge, 1929. 

With this mature work, Cassirer distances 
himself  from the neo-Kantian Marburg school 
to which he belonged. This is not to deny the 
continuities between Cassirer and neo-Kantianism. 
The essential philosophical position of  the entire 
neo-Kantian tradition, also shared by Cassirer, is 
transcendental idealism, which states that we only 
understand of  the world what we put into it through 
our own reason, concretized by Kant as applying 
concepts spontaneously to what is passively received 
by the senses. It requires the dualism of  intuitions 
and concepts. Kant’s Copernican turn means that 
nature is not something we experience passively, 
but something to which we ascribe concepts in 
order to understand it. We understand what we put 
in nature, rather than what nature gives us. Cassirer 
points this out: what is true for us is only what we 
ourselves have created.11 

Both the neo-Kantian Marburg school and 
Cassirer reclaim science as an essential transcendental 
creation of  human reason. But Cassirer distances 
himself  from Kant and neo-Kantianism by relaxing 
the scientism of  the Marburg school in favour of  
a more pluralistic theory of  cultural expression, 
including a historical variation to the fixed Kantian 
a priori. Cassirer takes a new and original step from 
the Critique of  Reason to a critique of  culture.

Cassirer defines the human being by his special 
capacity to create, in complete freedom, worlds 
of  meaning. These worlds become the objective 
culture of  myth, religion, art, language, and science. 
He terms these objective cultural worlds “symbolic 
forms.”12 

For Cassirer, to be human is to be an animal 
symbolicum, an animal distinguished by the 
spontaneous capacity for symbolic expression. This 

the Davos 
debate involved 

the clash of 
two different 

conceptions of 
philosophy

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

28

Pe
dr

a
go

sa

capacity has developed historically: as the human being passes from the 
mythic to the modern-scientific understanding of  the world, it undergoes 
a process of  enlightenment, an emancipatory awakening to its role as 
creator of  its own symbolic reality: the history of  human culture is “the 
process of  man’s progressive self-liberation.”13 Even though Cassirer 
understood the sequence of  symbolic forms as a historical narrative from 
myth to science, during the 1920s and by the time of  the Davos debate he 
defended a pluralistic approach and tended to see mythical thinking and 
rational thinking as co-existing forms of  reflection and of  approaching 
reality. It was only after the Third Reich that he became much more 
critical about mythical approaches (mainly in his last book, The Myth of  the 
State.) He then argued that the mythic symbolization of  reality had to be 
overcome by scientific reason in order to prevent philosophical and, much 
more dangerous, political irrationalism. As we will see at the end of  this 
paper, Cassirer interpreted Heidegger’s philosophy and Nazism as such 
irrationality. Both were made possible the irruption of  myth in modern 
times.

2.1 From Substance to Function

This narrative of  human beings’ historical emancipation was already 
in place in Cassirer’s previous work of  1910, Substance and Function,14 in 
which Cassirer explains two ways of  concept formation: the traditional 
and the modern one.

Cassirer begins by discussing the problem of  concept formation and 
by criticizing, in particular, the “abstractionist” theory on which concepts 
are arrived at by ascending inductively from sensory particulars. This is the 
traditional manner of  concept formation, the Aristotelian logic of  genus 
and species. Any science based on this theory of  concept formation can 
only be descriptive and classificatory, and proceeds by abstraction, forming 
ever-higher generic concepts (ascending from the sensory particulars 
to ever higher species and genera). This theory is also an expression of  
realism, where reality is thought to exist in itself, and the concepts “mirror” 
or “copy” nature as the realm of  things conceived as substances. The 
substance is the fixed and ultimate substratum of  changeable qualities. 
From this results a metaphysical “copy” or mimetic theory of  knowledge, 
according to which the truth of  our sensory representations consists in 
a relation of  pictorial similarity between them and the ultimate things or 
substances lying behind our representations.15

Cassirer is concerned to replace this mimetic theory with the 



29

isparchitecture.com

“constructivist” theory:

In opposition to the logic of  the generic concept, which, 
as we saw, represents the point of  view and influence 
of  the concept of  substance, there now appears 
the logic of  the mathematical concept of  function. 
However, the field of  application of  this form of  logic 
is not confined to mathematics alone. On the contrary, 
it extends over into the field of  the knowledge of  
nature; for the concept of  function constitutes the 
general schema and model according to which the 
modern concept of  nature has been moulded in its 
progressive historical development.16

With the new concept of  function, we achieve 
the truth of  an object, not by picturing a realm of  
metaphysical substances constituting the enduring 
substrate of  the empirical phenomena, but rather 
in virtue of  an embedding of  the empirical 
phenomena into an ideal formal structure of  
mathematical relations.17

This is the modern manner of  concept 
formation, which is not descriptive and mirroring 
but constructive. This type of  concept formation 
constructs concepts and thereby things. What are 
constructed in this method are relations of  things. 
The relations are not in the world, but constructed by 
pure thinking. They are logical relations and nothing 
existing in nature. This concept-formation defines 
the logic of  scientific knowledge in modernity: the 
new symbolic language of  mathematics and physics, 
which is totally formal.18

Metaphysics of  substance implies a mind-
independent reality, which imposes its conditions 
on conceptualization. The theory of  function, on 
the contrary, is totally a conceptual abstraction or 
symbolization to which reality adapts. 

2.2 Symbolic Forms

Cassirer’s theory of  scientific development therefore 



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

30

Pe
dr

a
go

sa

presupposes the gradual desubstantialization of  reality and its replacement 
by a symbolized, purely conceptual theory of  relations. Science gradually 
breaks free from a substantive conception of  reality. Just as the functional 
theory replaces the “copy” theory of  knowledge, so does the more 
general theory of  meaningful representation developed in the philosophy 
of  symbolic forms. We overcome the mimetic theory of  knowledge by 
the insight that science must work up our sensory impressions into freely 
created theoretical structures. Similarly, all symbolic forms must subject 
the mere sensory given to the free creative activities of  the transcendental 
subject.19

In the third volume of  The Philosophy of  Symbolic Forms, The Phenomenology 
of  Knowledge, Cassirer explains the plurality and historically evolving 
symbolic forms according to three main symbolic capacities or functions of  
the transcendental subject: the expressive function20 (Ausdrucksfunktion), 
the representative function21  (Darstellungsfunktion) and the significative 
or meaning function22  (Bedeutungsfunktion.). These functions give rise 
to three main world-presentations: the mythical world, the intuitive world, 
and the theoretical world. The more primitive ones give birth to the 
more sophisticated ones.The most basic and primitive type of  symbolic 
meaning is expressive meaning, which is the product of  the expressive 
function. The experience of  events in the world around us is charged with 
affective and emotional significance, as desirable or hateful, comforting or 
threatening:

[T]he world of  mythical experience is not grounded in either representative 
or significance-giving acts, but in pure experiences of  expression. What is 
here present as ‘reality’ is not a complex of  things provided with determinate 
‘marks’ and ‘characteristics’, on the basis of  which they can be recognized 
and distinguished from one another; rather, it is a manifold and profusion of  
originally ‘physiognomic’ characters.23

The following symbolic meaning, the representative meaning, is the 
product of  the representative function of  thought that takes us out of  
the original mythical world and into the stable and enduring world of  
substances, identifiable and distinguishable as such. It is in natural language 
that this symbolic meaning of  representation is most clearly visible.24 
Through natural language we construct the intuitive world of  ordinary 
sense perception. We distinguish the enduring substance, on the one side, 
from its variable manifestations from a different point of  view and on 
different occasions on the other, and we thereby arrive at the fundamental 
distinction between appearance and reality.25 



31

isparchitecture.com

The third and final meaning of  the symbolic 
forms is the product of  the significative or 
meaning function of  thought and consists in the 
pure relational concepts characteristic of  modern 
mathematics, logic, and mathematical physics 
that are finally freed from the bounds of  sensible 
intuition.26 The language of  mathematical-physical 
theory transcends all expressive and representative 
meaning exhibited in the mythical and intuitive 
worlds, and we thereby finally attain the stage of  
pure signification of  the theoretical world. The 
purely logical relations replacing all “picturing” of  a 
substantial reality finds their most precise and exact 
fulfilment in modern mathematical logic.27

3 Meaning or Presence in Architecture 

3.1 Function or Substance: Hans Blumenberg’s Interpretation of 
the Davos Debate

In order to draw some consequences from 
Cassirer’s as well as Heidegger’s philosophy for 
architecture we will follow the suggestive and, for 
our purposes, very fruitful interpretation of  the 
Davos confrontation given by the great German 
historian of  philosophy Hans Blumenberg. This 
philosopher interprets the debate using Cassirer’s 
categories of  “substance” and “function”: “Against 
the distinction between the concepts of  ‘substance’ 
and ‘function’ which had already been introduced 
by Cassirer in 1910, Heidegger decided, with 
Luther, in favour of  substance as the first and the 
unique category, against the functional propagation 
of  categories into ‘symbolic forms’ – and in favour 
of  […] the conventions of  the realists.”28 

According to Blumenberg, Cassirer sides in 
favour of  “function,” “meaning,” and “idealism” 
whereas Heidegger favours “substance,” “Being,” 
and “realism.” For Cassirer, modern science has 
transformed reality into a symbolic order, which is 
not the reality in itself, but only its signifier. Our 

For Cassirer 
to be human is 

to be an animal 
symbolicum, 

an animal 
distinguished by 

the spontaneous 
capacity 

for symbolic 
expression.

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

32

Pe
dr

a
go

sa

capacity to create symbols consists in creating meanings or signs that point 
to reality but they are not reality itself.  Heidegger, by contrast, understood 
philosophy not as the study of  our capacity to create meaning, but as the 
phenomenological description of  that which “shows itself.” What shows 
itself  is reality,29 not just a symbol or a sign of  it. Cassirer’s preference 
for the “functional propagation of  categories into symbolic forms” 
presupposes the primacy of  human agency, whereas Heidegger’s decision 
“in favour of  substance as the first and the unique category” and his study 
of  what shows itself  presupposes the primacy of  human receptivity. 

Following this thread of  interpretation we can distinguish two types of  
architecture that, together with both images of  the human being, underlie 
either creativity, meaning, function and abstraction or receptivity, reality, 
substance and presence. The first one, in Cassirer’s guise, is internationalist 
and trusts in the human capacity for world-construction. Architecture 
is conceived as a materialization of  new and creative meanings and the 
architect is a free agent for the construction of  new worlds. The second, 
more Heideggerian, conceives architecture as environment-interpretation. 
Architecture is here understood as world disclosing, a world that is 
always already there, and the architect as the interpreter of  that world 
or environment as it shows itself. In the first case architecture proposes 
new ways of  living, buildings are the bearers of  new meanings, and the 
emphasis is in the meaning that buildings convey. In the second case the 
building just shows itself; it is an irreducible presence of  itself  that opens 
up the environment.

 Where Cassirer emphasizes the creation of  new meanings oriented 
toward the future, Heidegger opposes with the priority of  the origin; the 
interpretation of  what is already there. He emphasizes paying attention 
to the presence of  what is there and shows itself  before proposing new 
constructions.

3.2 Architecture as Meaning 

     We now try to draw some consequences of  Cassirer’s philosophy for 
architecture. Our task is to apply Cassirer’s philosophy to architecture, 
beyond what he in fact said about this kind of  art. The reason for this 
application is that Cassirer includes architecture in the symbolic form of  
art:

[W]e can interpret certain spatial forms, certain complexes of  lines and figures, 
in one case as an artistic ornament and in another as a geometrical figure, so 
endowing one and the same material with entirely different meanings. The spatial 
unity, which we build in aesthetic vision and creation, in painting, sculpture 



33

isparchitecture.com

and architecture, belongs to an entirely different 
sphere from the spatial unity, which is represented in 
geometrical theorems and axioms. In the one case we 
have the modality of  the logical-geometric concept, in 
the other the modality of  artistic imagination –in the 
one case, space is conceived as an aggregate of  mutually 
independent relations, as a system of  “causes” and 
“consequences”; in the other, it is conceived as a whole 
whose particular factors are dynamically interlocked, 
a perceptual, emotional unity.30 

But our claim is that, when dealing with modern 
architecture, we have to take into consideration 
technology as well. Modern architecture seems to 
require a convergence of  the symbolic forms of  art 
and technology. As far as we know, Cassirer himself  
did not study this convergence but he prepared the 
theoretical ground for such study. In that sense 
Cassirer’s philosophy has much in common with 
modern architectural theory and, in particular, 
with the Bauhaus, the great school of  design and 
architecture whose history and final fate of  exile 
runs parallel to that of  Cassirer and to the Weimar 
Republic itself. Cassirer’s philosophical orientation 
is best expressed by the neue Sachlichkeit (the 
New Objectivity), a social, cultural, and artistic 
movement committed to internationalism and to 
a more objective and scientific organization of  
architecture and the social life through the project 
of  uniting art and technology.31 This convergence 
of  both symbolic forms, art and technology 
could be termed “functional aesthetics”32 or 
described by the familiar motto “form follows 
function.” That form follows function means that 
forms are not based on imitations or on mimetic 
qualities of  a substantial reality as produced in 
traditional paintings, sculptures, and architectural 
ornamentation, but rather that form is the result 
of  constructing relations, that is, form is the result 
of  function in Cassirer’s sense of  “function,” as 
opposed to “substance”: functional forms are an 

”

The spatial 
unity, which 

we build in 
aesthetic 
vision and 
creation, 

in painting, 
sculpture and  
architecture, 

belongs to 
an entirely 

different 
sphere from 
the spatial 

unity, which is 
represented 

in geometrical 
theorems and 

axioms. 

“



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

34

Pe
dr

a
go

sa

aggregate of  different elements mutually related.  

The works of  the artists, designers, and architects of  the Bauhaus 
are above all a realisation of  the functional aesthetic approach. As an 
example, consider Marcel Breuer’s furniture and Walter Gropius’s lights in 
the Bauhaus’ Dessau building. Both Breuer’s and Gropius’ designs show 
modular pieces of  furniture and lamps as industrially produced series that 
create what we might call a functional space. A functional space is based 
on relations among parts according to repetition and variation. This kind 
of  design allows the construction of  furniture (tables, chairs, lamps) and 
the arrangement of  space by fitting together the pieces in different ways. 
There is not only one way—say one substantial, “real,” way to relate the 
pieces—but rather different users have many equall valid possibilities 
for combining the pieces and creating their own spaces by sliding the 
modular elements. Design is not mimetic of  a “real being” because the 
same elements (tables, chairs, or lamps) related otherwise would create a 
different space.

We can understand this kind of  industrial design (or, more generally,  
functional aesthetics, and the slogans “form follows function,” “art and 
technology: a new unity,” “new objectivity”) as a functionalized symbol or 
as a sign without a real signified. It is a sign in the sense of  Cassirer’s citing 
of  Helmholtz’s theory of  signs to explain scientific theories:

This tendency [explaining objectivity in terms of  “pure formal relations”] 
appears especially pregnantly in Helmholtz’s theory of  signs […]. Our 
sensations and representations are signs, not copies [Abbilder] of  objects. For 
one requires of  pictures [Bilder] some or another kind of  similarity with the 
pictured object […]. The sign, by contrast, requires no substantial [sachlich] 
similarity in the elements, but solely a functional correspondence in the two-sided 
structure. What is established in this structure is not the particular intrinsic 
character of  the designated thing, but rather the objective relations in which it 
stands to other similar [things].33

Philosophically considered we cannot interpret the production of  such 
designed objects within the framework of  the metaphysics of  substance 
or the mimetic or pictorial theory of  knowledge because the object and 
the space are the result of  relations and combinations, and they open up 
the possibility of  freedom to change, improve, and transform the space. 
The space is thus constructed rather than determined by conditions 
already existing. Functional space is the result of  first bringing together 
independent parts. The space designed is therefore not holistic but rather 
mechanic—functional—because the part (the modular piece) is prior to 



35

isparchitecture.com

the whole. 

Before considering the second type of  
architecture, let’s take a brief  look at Heidegger’s 
philosophy.

 4. Martin Heidegger 

     In 1927, two years after Cassirer published the 
second volume of  The Philosophy of  Symbolic Forms, 
dedicated to myth, Heidegger published his first 
important work, Being and Time. For Heidegger, 
to be human is to be gifted with a special sort of  
receptivity or openness to the world that Heidegger 
calls the “disclosedness” or “unveiling” of  Being. 
The phenomenon of  disclosedness is deeper than 
our rationality and practical action. Heidegger 
calls “Dasein” the human being as capable of  this 
opening capacity. 

For Heidegger, human beings are defined by 
finitude, which is to say we discover ourselves in the 
midst of  conditions we have not created and cannot 

Figure 1: Bauhaus, Dessau



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

36

Pe
dr

a
go

sa

hope to control. My having been born in a particular year, in a particular 
land, to particular parents—everything that Heidegger designates as the 
“thrownness” (Geworfenheit)34—is no mere accident that can be overcome. 
The contingencies of  history and the everyday cannot be transcended in such 
a way as to reveal some underlying essence—like the transcendental symbolic 
capacity of  Cassirer’s subject—but rather constitute me from the ground up. 

4.1Pragmatic World and Existential Space 

     Heidegger begins his philosophizing with the analysis of  the everyday 
situations in which the human being is involved.35 In such situations the 
world disclosed to human beings is not the world of  scientific explanation 
(the symbolic form of  modern science, in Cassirer’s terms) but instead the 
“environment” (Umwelt). The environment shows itself  in our practical 
involvement or dealing (Umgang) with the things. In such involvements 
the things of  the environment appear not as objects but rather as things-
in-use, as equipment or tools (Zeug).

Heidegger’s basic thought is that the human relation with worldly 
things is primarily a relation of  practice and concern, and not a theoretical 
one. We understand things not as objects of  theoretical analysis, but rather 
as they first appear within a context of  practice. To reinforce this idea, 
Heidegger introduces the famous distinction between the “ready-to-hand” 
(Zuhanden) statuses of  things as understood in an equipmental fashion 
versus the “present-at-hand” (Vorhanden) manner of  being of  entities 
as they are disclosed for perceptual cognition, theoretical inspection, and 
consideration.36 The ready-to-hand is our everyday understanding, and that 
understanding is the primordial way things appear to us, while the present-
at-hand is a consequence of  theoretical dissociation from the more basic 
relation. The theoretical cognition of  the merely “present-at-hand” is a 
derivative mode of  Dasein, a modification of  the more basic, essentially 
pragmatic mode of  involvement with the “ready-to-hand.” 

Equipment appears always in a context of  interconnections. This 
context is a totality within which each tool has a sense. The totality thereby 
assumes a transcendental status in that the whole is a condition for the 
possibility of  understanding any one of  its parts. The environment is a 
holistic structure of  concern, in which objects are always understood in a 
context, before the explicit knowledge of  any discrete item we may pick 
out for inspection.37 For Heidegger the whole is prior to the part. The 
functional designs of  Breuer and Gropius mentioned earlier run counter 
to this holistic space of  the everyday since the part (the modular furniture) 



37

isparchitecture.com

exists prior to its arrangement.

The holistic character is of  great importance 
for understanding the kind of  space that belongs 
to our everyday, or, as Heidegger puts it, our 
“existential spatiality.”38 This existential spatiality 
is a series of  environmental regions where Dasein 
realizes its concerns, plans, and expectations, and 
it is fundamentally different from and prior to, 
its scientific understanding as functional space. 
Existential spatiality is fundamentally different 
from the Cartesian notion of  extension or its 
more developed scientific-functional version. This 
conception of  space does not apply to a being 
whose primary relation to the world is one of  
involvement because Cartesian space always places 
things at a measurable distance, whereas existential 
spatiality determines distances in terms of  Dasein’s 
context of  significance.39 Existential spatiality is the 
precondition for our understanding of  Cartesian 
space, because the former is an existential condition 
for understanding at all. Whatever formalized 
structures of  measurement we might create, 
such structures were themselves merely a way of  
“thematizing” the spatiality of  Dasein’s everyday 
existence. There can be, therefore, no breakthrough 
from existential spatiality to space, because an 
existential condition is by definition constitutive 
and could not be abandoned. Of  course Heidegger 
does not deny the possibility that one could develop 
a purely mental representation of  formalized space. 
But this representation is not something more real 
than the existential spatiality. Heidegger saw the 
existential structure of  human understanding as 
constitutive rather than, as with Cassirer, evolving 
toward scientific abstraction.

4.2 Authentic and Inauthentic Existence: Existential Time

If  we conceive Dasein not as primarily 
theoretical or cognitive but rather as oriented 

For Heidegger, 
human beings 

are defined by 
finitude

“
”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

38

Pe
dr

a
go

sa

towards pragmatic engagement and projects, then our conception of  time 
(of  “existential time” as well as the conception of  “existential space”) 
is not just the thought of  the line of  time, and temporal finitude is not 
just the thought of  an eventual limit to this line of  time. Finitude is 
rather  Dasein’s concern with its own death, the radical possibility that 
the on-going pragmatic projects will cease to be.40 In facing existentially 
such possibility, the pragmatic subject is removed from the context of  
pragmatic involvement that defines the everyday understanding of  
himself. In “being-towards-death,” Dasein is revealed to him for what he 
is: as thrown into the world.

In the normal course of  events, Dasein takes the context of  its projects 
and practical activities for granted, a framework that is fixed and simply 
given. In “being-towards-death,” Dasein steps out of  this given context, 
which is then recognized as neither fixed nor given. Dasein recognizes that 
its normal or everyday context is simply one possibility among others, one 
that is thereby subject to his own free choice. Facing death thus opens up 
the possibility of  an “authentic” existence in which Dasein’s own choices 
rest on no taken for granted context at all. In “inauthentic” existence, by 
contrast, Dasein operates unquestioningly in its everydayness as a context 
of  projects taken as given. Heidegger describes the inauthenticity of  
everydayness in terms of  the “others” as “they” (das Man):

In utilizing public transportation, in the use of  information services such as the 
newspaper, every other is like the next. This being-with-one-another dissolves 
one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of  being of  “the others” in such 
a way that the others, as distinguishable and explicit, disappear more and 
more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the they unfolds its true 
dictatorship. We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We 
read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also 
withdraw from the “great mass” the way they withdraw, we find “shocking” 
what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite and which all are, 
though not as a sum, prescribes the kind of  being of  everydayness.41

Facing death singles out my existence as my own and makes possible the 
withdrawal from the uniformity of  the “they,” from the “great mass.” It is 
thus on the basis of  “being-towards-death” that the distinction between 
“authentic” and “inauthentic” existence is defined.42 

5 Architecture as Presence 

     We can now distinguish a second type of  architecture, inspired by 



39

isparchitecture.com

Heidegger; this kind of  architecture goes against 
its modern conception as the construction of  
functional spaces or as the fusion of  art and 
technology; it is less concerned with construction 
and more with the origin and the questioning of  
building. Heidegger wrote about architecture in 
the essays “The Origin of  the Work of  Art” and 
“Building Dwelling Thinking.” But our purpose 
is not to follow this or that work but the essential 
core of  his thought that we find relevant for 
architecture, as it is expressed in Being and Time in 
the terms we have just explained. The main points 
relevant for architecture are the difference between 
a holistic and a functional space; and the difference 
between authentic and inauthentic existence, where 
authenticity means questioning the taken-for-
granted assumptions and contexts of  our everyday 
projects. 

If  the kind of  architecture that exemplifies 
Cassirer’s position was the Bauhaus-inspired 
modernist design, then we can propose a more 
recent architectural project, one critical of  
modernity, as an example to illustrate Heidegger’s 
thought: Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal’s 
1996 project for the Place Léon Aucoc in the city 
of  Bordeaux, France. 

The Place Léon Aucoc is a triangular village 
space lined with trees, benches and a place to play. 
The house facades lining the Place were a good 
example of  sober collective housing. Lacaton and 
Vassal said: 

The question was: how is it possible to make an 
embellishment of  the square? And the answer after 
three or four months of  working research was to 
say: there is nothing to do. And our project is to do 
nothing. It’s our project and please, you have to do it 
like we want. And it has been done like that.43   

The architects decided to exclusively carry out 
simple maintenance tasks: changing gravel, cleaning 

Facing 
death singles 

out my 
existence as 

my own

“
”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

40

Pe
dr

a
go

sa

more often, taking care of  the trees, slightly modifying the circulation, 
and so on, with the aim of  improving the way people meet. This kind of  
passivity is not indifference but rather an active non-intervention. Lacaton 
and Vassal say: 

What does the idea of  “embellishment” boil down to? Does it involve replacing 
one groundcover with another? A wooden bench with a more-up-to-date design 
in stone? Or a lamp standard with another, more fashionable, one? Nothing 
calls for too great a set of  changes. Quality, charm, life exist. The square is 
already beautiful.44

The architects’ choice of  non-intervention is existentially “authentic” 
in the sense that this decision rested on not taking for granted the 
architect’s professional context at all. In “inauthentic” existence, the 
architect operates unquestioningly in the everyday professional work in 
which the construction of  “something” is taken for granted. This project 
both shakes and radically subverts architecture’s customary state of  affairs 
by implying a step backwards towards questioning before constructing. We 
can understand this architectural project as a questioning of  what building 
is and of  what architecture is. These radical questions depended on a fresh 
interpretation of  the place: what the place requires rather than what the 
architect’s freedom wants. Of  course, the place and the programme may 
require the construction of  a building but it just as easily may not.

This radical project by Lacaton & Vassal exemplifies a broader attitude 
in architecture, one which consists in opening up to a given environment, 
in listening to place, to its sheer presence, and responding to it. The holistic 
character of  the environment is of  great importance for understanding 
this kind of  architecture. The whole of  the environment is a condition 
for the possibility of  understanding any one of  its parts that the architect 
might build. And these parts open up this whole through different ways 
and architectural strategies. This totality should not be understood just in 
terms of  physical environment but in a much broader sense, which includes 
culture and the existential human situation as such. Architecture “mimics” 
this whole. Whereas for Cassirer architecture as functional space is a new 
construction rather than determined by conditions already existing, for 
Heidegger, on the opposite extreme, architecture is determined by these 
preconditions; that is, it “mimics” or responds to the priority of  the 
whole or of  “reality.” Heidegger expresses this whole and its architectural 
response in these terms:

The sun, whose light and warmth are in everyday use, has its own places – sunrise, 
midday, sunset, midnight; these are discovered in circumspection and treated 



41

isparchitecture.com

distinctively in terms of  changes in the usability of  what 
the sun bestows. […] The house has its sunny side and 
its shady side; the way it is divided up into “rooms” 
is oriented towards these, and so is the “arrangement” 
within them, according to their character as equipment. 
Churches and graves, for instance, are laid out according 
to the rising and the setting of  the sun – the regions of  
life and death, which are determinative for Dasein itself  
with regard to its own most possibilities of  Being in the 
world.45

 

6 Cassirer versus Heidegger on Myth 

     Heidegger’s description of  the holistic character 
of  the environment, of  our everyday space, is 
shockingly similar to Cassirer’s description of  
mythical space:

There is no cosmology, however primitive, in which the 
contrast of  the four main directions does not in some 
way emerge as the cardinal point of  its understanding 
and explanation of  the world. […] The east as the 
origin of  light is also the source of  life – the west as 
the place of  the setting sun is filled with all the terrors 
of  death. And this opposition of  night and day, light 
and darkness, birth and death, is also reflected in 
countless ways in the mythical interpretation of  the 
concrete events of  life.46

Despite their surface similarities,47 the use of  these 
conceptions is radically different. In these radically 
different conceptions of  myth resides the final 
explanation of  the philosophers’ opposing visions 
of  architecture and of  human culture in general. 

Figure 2: Place Léon Aucoc



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

42

Pe
dr

a
go

sa

The description of  myth is very important for Cassirer since it reveals 
not only the primitive stage that was reached many centuries ago but also 
the unmediated experience of  perception. Myth embodies the concreteness 
of  life before the categorization of  theoretical consciousness. Myth is the 
lowest and most primary form of  symbolic existence and it is the ground 
of  any other form of  culture. All other symbolic forms only come into 
existence by working through myth. Cassirer is convinced that in the history 
of  human culture the rise of  conceptual abstraction is a welcome progress. 
He is committed to philosophical modernism and understands modernity, 
and thus modern architecture, as the triumph over, and a displacement of, 
myth. As we said before, Cassirer holds this view during the 1920s but in a 
moderate way, accepting the plurality of  symbolic forms. It was only after 
the Nazi seizure of  power that he became critical of  mythical thought: to 
move from myth to higher forms of  symbolic consciousness is a demand 
placed upon human beings; it is the call to work oneself—as an individual, 
as a civilization—out of  myth and to come to light, to enlightenment, as 
living a life in culture.48 It is a demand to keep the forces of  myth at bay.  

Heidegger’s primordial space, by contrast, cannot be overcome but 
only concealed or forgotten. Such forgetting is symptomatic of  what 
Heidegger calls the “fallenness” of  Dasein. The scientific calculation and 
objectification of  space robs the world of  its “worldhood” and transforms 
the existential space into functional space. Heidegger wishes to return us 
to a purer and more authentic state of  being, one located not in some 
mythic past but under the surface of  everyday life. For Heidegger mythical 
existence is a simplified model of  the human existential structure but 
essentially remains the same.

Whereas for Cassirer the path from myth to science is an inevitable 
and welcome progress of  mind, and the culmination of  the human 
capacity to create worlds, for Heidegger this process is rather more like 
a lapse, a regrettable breakdown in the otherwise constitutive structures 
of  human being. The functionalist symbolization of  reality that Cassirer 
sees as a high achievement is, for Heidegger, a historical impoverishment 
in human understanding. In fact, Heidegger says that such a break from 
existential space to a modern scientific one is not progress but a loss 
and an alienation from both the world and individual existence. What 
Heidegger calls thrownness and passivity is for Cassirer a primitive and 
mythical conception of  humanity that denies both its responsibility and 
emancipation. What Cassirer calls freedom and creativity is for Heidegger 
an old metaphysical misconception that hides the essential human finitude.



43

isparchitecture.com

7 Final Consideration on Politics 

     We have seen the antagonistic understandings 
of  Cassirer and Heidegger on both architecture 
and on culture broadly considered. It is not our 
intention to decide which one is preferable because 
only together do they define the complete image 
of  the human being and how it shapes its place in 
the world. If  we compare metaphorically human 
beings’ life and history as a play in two acts, the 
night from which culture springs and the day that 
overcomes the night, we can say that Cassirer 
draws attention to the second, the day of  culture, 
and Heidegger to the first, the night from which it 
springs. One looks at what has flourished, the other 
at its roots.49 Human culture involves both.

That said we would not like to finish this paper 
without a last commentary on politics. Cassirer’s 
continuous confrontation with Heidegger, in 
the context of  the weak parliamentarian politics 
of  the Weimar Republic, had more than purely 
philosophical motivations; they were at opposite 
ends in social and political terms as well. In his last 
work, The Myth of  the State, written in his American 
exile, Cassirer writes:

In all critical moments of  man’s social life, the rational 
forces that resist the rise of  the old mythical conceptions 
are no longer sure of  themselves. In these moments the 
time for myth has come again. For myth has not been really 
vanquished and subjugated. It is always there, lurking 
in the dark and waiting for its hour and opportunity.50

From his exile Cassirer interpreted the irruption 
of  Nazism as the irruption of  myth in modern times 
and judged Heidegger’s philosophy as encouraging 
myth’s staying power. Cassirer’s philosophy helps us 
to prevent political radicalisms such as xenophobia 
and radical nationalism that today, when Europe is 
again in crisis, threaten our societies. 

I would like to conclude by saying that Cassirer 
was overall a moderate humanist and defender 

In these 
moments the 

time for myth 
has come again.  

For myth has 
not been really 
vanquished and 

subjugated. 
It is always 

there, lurking 
in the dark and 

waiting for 
its hour and 
opportunity

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

44

Pe
dr

a
go

sa

of  the Enlightenment, and even though he thought that science is the 
highest stage in human consciousness, he rejected the reductionist views 
of  scientism on the one side and of  myth’s irrationalism on the other. 
In the early twentieth century, these two reductionisms appeared in the 
guise of  positivism and Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of  life). Cassirer 
condemned both because they elevated a single symbolic form into an 
absolute conception of  the world, presenting a partial truth as though it 
were total. 

This is something we can learn today at the beginning of  the twenty-
first century from the debate that took place early in the twentieth.

Endnotes 

[1] For a thorough understanding of  the Davos debate see the excellent 
book by Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide. Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos 
(Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2010.) See also Michael 
Friedman, The Parting of  the Ways. Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago 
and La Salle: Open Court, 2000), 1. Friedman writes: “Davos, Switzerland; 
March 17–April 6, 1929. An intensive “International University Course,” 
having the express purpose of  effecting a reconciliation between French-
speaking and German-speaking intellectuals, was sponsored by the Swiss, 
French, and German governments. The high point of  the occasion was 
a series of  lectures presented by Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, 
followed by a disputation between the two men.”

[2] Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of  Culture 
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 196.

[3] See Deniz Coskun, “Cassirer in Davos: An Intermezzo on Magic 
Mountain (1929),” Law and Critique 17 (2006): 1-26.

[4] Skidelsky, The Last Philosopher of  Culture, 196-197.

[5] Friedman. The Parting of  the Ways, 3.

[6] Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York and 
London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1968). Gay explains that one of  the 
main tensions during the Weimar Republic was the generational conflict 
between fathers and sons. This conflict was represented in Davos by the 
figures of  the old philosopher Cassirer and the young Heidegger.

[7] Skidelsky, The Last Philosopher of  Culture, 196-197.

[8] Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in 
Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 



45

isparchitecture.com

The author explains how the right-wing intellectuals of  this period, the so 
called “reactionary modernists,” argued that the Enlightenment tradition was 
un-German. The Enlightenment belongs to “civilization,” a term used to 
characterize the tradition of  nations such as France and the United Kingdom 
while German is defined by Kultur, term understood as the opposite of  
Zivilisation.

[9] Friedman, The Parting of  the Ways, 4.

[10] Gordon, Continental Divide, 7.

[11] Sebastian Luft, The Space of  Culture: Towards a Neo-Kantian Philosophy of  
Culture (Cohen, Natorp, and Cassirer) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
2015), 45. See also Friedman, The Parting of  the Ways, 99.

[12] Gordon, Continental Divide, 13. Gordon writes: “The Philosophy of  
Symbolic Forms represents the effort to interpret all of  human creativity 
after the transcendental model. Culture is an ever-expanding and pluralistic 
field of  symbolic expression, which obeys certain laws of  formation, the a 
priori principles of  human spirit.”

[13] Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of  Human 
Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), 228.

[14] Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function & Einstein’s Theory of  Relativity 
(Chicago: Open Court, 1923). For a commentary on this work see Friedman, 
The Parting of  the Ways, 94. See also Luft, The Space of  Culture, 157-161.

[15] Cassirer, Substance and Function. For Cassirer’s treatment of  substance and 
the realist position see Part I, “The Concept of  Thing and the Concept of  
Relation” and Chapter I, “On the Theory of  the Formation of  Concepts,” 
3-9.

[16] Ibid. 21.

[17] Friedman, The Parting of  the Ways, 95. 

[18] Luft, The Space of  Culture, 157-161. For example, the atom, as a concept, 
is not a name for a thing, which one could identify in nature, no matter if  one 
had the most powerful microscope. The atom is a name for an idea, a theory, 
for the relation of  different elements that make up reality. The thing “atom” 
is a construction in the framework of  a theory.

[19] Friedman, The Parting of  the Ways, 103-109.

[20] Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of  Symbolic Forms: Volume Three: The 
Phenomenology of  Knowledge. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). 
See Part I, “The Expressive Function and the World of  Expression.”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

46

Pe
dr

a
go

sa

[21] Ibid. See Part II, “The Problem of  Representation and the Building 
of  the Intuitive World.”

[22] Ibid. See Part III, “The Function of  Signification and the Building Up 
of  Scientific Knowledge.”

[23] Ibid. 68.

[24] Ibid. 119. See also Friedman, The Parting of  the Ways, 104, 105.

[25] Cassirer, The Philosophy of  Symbolic Forms, 142.

[26] Ibid. 284.

[27] Ibid. 46.

[28] Hans Blumenberg. “Afinitäten und Dominanzen” in Ein mögliches 
Selbst-verständnis: Aus dem Nachlass (Stuttgart: Philip Reclam, 1996), 161-
168. See Gordon, Continental Divide, 349:

Blumenberg reprises and old theological controversy that took place 400 years 
earlier between Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli, over the character of  Christ’s 
presence in the Eucharist. The confrontation was between the orthodox view that 
the body of  Christ is really present in the bread and wine, and the unorthodox view 
according to which Christs’s embodiment is merely an illusion, that the bread and 
wine only signify his body and blood though they are not literally so.

[29] For a discussion of  the realism of  Heidegger see the crucial §44 of  
Heidegger, “Dasein, Disclosedness, and Truth,” in Being and Time (New 
York: Harper and Row, 1962). See also the arguments given by Friedman, 
The Parting of  the Ways, 54-58. Friedman says that Heidegger “rejects 
(in §44) the “Copernican Revolution” in favor of  an apparently “direct 
realist” conception of  truth.” From Friedman, The Parting of  the Ways, 
54. Friedman also writes that “Heidegger is a “direct realist” in so far as 
he begins with the idea of  “being-in-the-world.” We do not start with a 
cognitive subject together with its contents of  consciousness, but rather 
with a living practical subject necessarily engaged with its environment.” 
From Friedman, The Parting of  the Ways, 55.

[30] Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of  Symbolic Forms: Volume One: Language 
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 96. See also Ernst Cassirer, 
The Philosophy of  Symbolic Forms: Volume Two: Mythical Thought (New Haven: 
Yale University Press, 1955), 166. Here Cassirer directly links art and 
architecture together.

[31] We can also find a close bond between the modernist architect 
Adolf  Loos and Cassirer. In Ornament and Crime, (Adolf  Loos, Ornament 
and Crime: Selected Essays. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1997). Loos writes: “I 



47

isparchitecture.com

have discovered and given to the world the following notion: The evolution 
of  civilization is synonymous with the elimination of  ornament from the 
utilitarian object.” We find a parallelism between the historical narrative of  
the elimination of  the ornamental with Cassirer’s historical emancipation 
from myth and religion in order to achieve the enlightenment of  reason 
and science. According to this interpretation, architecture should be freed 
form ornamentation in the same way that philosophy should be emancipated 
from myth. See Peter Galison, “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and 
Architectural Modernism,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (1990): 726. The author 
compares in this article the Bauhaus theory of  design and architecture 
with the philosophy of  logical positivism. Even though Cassirer criticised 
the scientism of  the logical positivists, there are some points in common 
between both.

[32] Birgit Leitner, “Ernst Cassirer and (?) the Bauhaus: The Question of  
Functional Aesthetics,” Proceedings of  the European Society for Aesthetics 3 (2011): 
167.

[33] Cassirer, Substance and Function, 304.

[34] Heidegger, Being and Time, §29.

[35] For the following discussion of  the everyday pragmatic situations in 
which Dasein is involved see Heidegger, Being and Time, §15-16.

[36] For the conversion of  the “ready-to-hand” to the “present-at-hand,” see 
Heidegger, Being and Time, §16

[37] Gordon, Continental Divide, 221-224.

[38] Heidegger, Being and Time, §§22-24.

[39] Ibid. §18.

[40] Ibid. §§46-60. For the analysis of  “being-towards-death” and the 
possibilty of  “aunthentc” existence.

[41] Ibid. §27, 119.

[42] Friedman, The Parting of  the Ways, 50-51.

[43] https://www.lacatonvassal.com/index.php?idp=37#

[44] Ibid.

[45] Heidegger. Being and Time, §22.

[46] Cassirer, The Philosophy of  Symbolic Forms: Volume Two: Mythical Thought, 98.

[47] In 1925, while Heidegger was working on the manuscript of  Being and 
Time, the Deutsche Literaturzeitung sent him a copy of  the second volume 



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

48

Pe
dr

a
go

sa

of  The Philosophy of  Symbolic Forms dedicated to myth. It is certainly a 
possibility that Cassirer influenced Heidegger. See Skidelsky, The Last 
Philosopher of  Culture, 205.

[48] Luft, The Space of  Culture, 164.

[49] Rudiger Safranski, Un maestro de Alemania: Martin Heidegger y su tiempo 
(Barcelona: Tusquets, 1997), 226-227.

[50] Cassirer, The Myth of  the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 
1944), 280.



On Durability

Mari Hvattum

“An Attempt to Grasp Eternity” 

On November 9, 1993, the Mostar bridge 
fell. For months it had withstood heavy artillery, 
withstood in the same way that it had endured wars, 
floods, and disasters ever since its erection in 1566.1 
But that afternoon it finally gave in; its collapse was 
broadcasted on television screens all over the world.

Some days after the event, the Croatian 
journalist Slavenka Draculić picked up a newspaper 
with two pictures on the front cover. One showed 
the body of  a woman, killed in the ongoing war; the 
second was a photograph of  the destroyed bridge. 
To her own dismay, Draculić found herself  crying 
as much over the bridge as she did over the dead 
woman. It made her feel slightly guilty, prompting 
her to reflect on her own reaction: “Why do I feel 
more pain looking at the image of  the destroyed 
bridge than the image of  the woman?” she asked 
herself, and continued: “Perhaps it is because I see 
my own mortality in the collapse of  the bridge, 
not in the death of  the woman.” Draculić added: 
“We expect people to die. We count on our own 
lives to end. The destruction of  a monument […] 
is something else. The bridge, in all its beauty and 
grace, was built to outlive us; it was an attempt to 
grasp eternity. […] A dead woman is one of  us – 
but the bridge is all of  us, forever.”2 In a collection 
dedicated to the human in architecture, Draculić’s 
“eternity” offers, I believe, a poignant point of  
departure.

We do indeed expect the built world to persist 

 On 
November 9,                    

1993, the 
Mostar bridge 

fell

“
”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

49

Hv
a

tt
um

longer than we ourselves do. People die, but the things they built tend to 
last a little longer. It is a twofold that says something crucial about the role 
of  architecture. In the next few pages I want to use this particular kind 
of  “eternity” as a point of  departure for thinking about that which lasts 
and that which perishes, and the ways—or at least some of  the ways—in 
which it happens.

Relative Permanence 

     Architecture may last longer than the people building it, but it is not 
eternal. Buildings are subject to all sorts of  changes: weathering, war, 
neglect, changing uses and needs, economic up- and downturns, the force 
of  gravity and the law of  materials. In her book The Human Condition (1958), 
Hannah Arendt writes about the relative permanence that characterizes 
the human-made. “The durability of  the human artifice is not absolute,” 
she points out, yet artifice gives to human life—fragile as it is—a certain 
stability and solidity.3 “The things of  the world,” says Arendt, “have the 
function of  stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact 
that – in contradiction to the Heraclitian saying that man can never enter 
the same stream – men, their ever-changing nature not-withstanding, can 
retrieve their sameness, that is their identity, by being related to the same 
chair and the same table.”4 The durability of  the human-made—the fact 
that the things we make last longer than us and are modelled on things that 
last longer still—is what for Arendt upholds a human world.

At first glance, Arendt’s observation may seem staggeringly out of  
sync with her times. More often than not, twentieth century architects and 
artists took the exact opposite stance, celebrating the ephemeral over the 
durable and looking towards the future rather than the past. “Our houses 
will last less time than we do, and every generation will have to build its 
own city,” proclaimed Antonio Sant’Elia triumphantly in his manifesto for 
futurist architecture from 1914.5 To many modernists, ephemerality was a 
badge of  honour, testifying to the dream of  an architecture that responded 
strictly to the here and now. When the English architect William Holford 
characterized the modern monument as a “momentary crystallization of  
a scientific fact,” he testified to this belief.6 If  the historical monument 
spoke of  eternity, the modern monument, paradoxically, must speak 
strictly of  the now.

The fascination with the transient carries well into the present. A quick 
look at contemporary architectural publications, exhibitions, or student 
projects gives a strong sense that the ephemeral has a great deal more 



50

isparchitecture.com

appeal than the durable. But there is another side 
to the coin. For if  modernity is “the ephemeral, 
the fugitive, the contingent,” as Charles Baudelaire 
famously stated, he also reminded us that its other 
half  is “the eternal and the immutable.”7 And 
modernity has indeed sought eternity: the eternity 
of  scientific facts, for instance, or the eternity of  a 
petrified past, safely stowed away in the museum. 
In architecture, the desire for eternity is perhaps 
encountered most directly in modern preservation, 
with its dream to fixate the historic monument as 
an unchanging entity, available for contemporary 
veneration.

I will try to steer clear of  both poles in this 
dichotomy, addressing neither the ephemeral nor 
the eternal. Or rather, the “eternity” that I will speak 
of—the eternity that Draculić hinted at as well, I 
think—is not the pretend eternity of  the musealized 
monument but rather what Hannah Arendt called 
durability, that is, the relative permanence of  the 
human-made world.

“The things 
of the world”, 

says Arendt, 
“have the 

function of 
stabilizing 

human life”

“

”

Figure 1: Old Bridge in Mostar, 

ca. 1974



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

51

Hv
a

tt
um

The Durability of Making 

     Let me try to be a bit more specific. For what—if  we stick to the 
realm of  architecture—is it that endures? The buildings themselves? Their 
materials and constructions? Matter can certainly endure for a very long 
time, like the stones of  the cave tombs in Barnenez, supposedly the oldest 
building in the world, or the tar-saturated wood of  the nearly 1000 year 
old Norwegian stave churches. Ancient matter has a fascination of  its 
own—Alois Riegl, for one, considered the appreciation of  “age value” as 
a particularly modern sensibility.8 The memory of  matter can endure even 
longer, like Aldo Rossi’s famous example in the Architettura della Citta of  
how traces of  a Roman amphitheatre continue to structure the city, even 
when the original stones and bricks are long gone.9 Rossi drew on a long 
tradition of  seeing type as a harbinger of  durability, a dominant position 
in architectural thinking throughout much of  the modern period.10 This is 
not, however, the only way to think about durability in architecture. Here 
I will focus on a little handful of  thinkers who, each in their own way, 
proposed that what endures in architecture is not just matter, or type, but 
human action: ways of  doing things, ways of  making oneself  at home in 
the world. If  Hannah Arendt wrote of  the reification of  work into a world 
of  things that in turn stabilizes and lends durability to human life, then we 
can perhaps speak of  architecture as a reification of  human action into 
built form.

The three nineteenth century thinkers that I will discuss in the 
following—the German art historian Karl Bötticher; his fellow 
countryman, the architect Gottfried Semper; and the Norwegian 
ethnologist Eilert Sundt—did just that. And although only one of  them 
could be considered an ethnologist by profession, all three drew on the 
new discipline when trying to understand the origin and development of  
architecture. In fact, their thinking on architecture could be seen, if  not as 
fully fledged ethnologies (or anthropologies) of  architecture, then at least 
as attempts to integrate the human into architectural thinking in ways that 
broke sharply with the academic neo-classicism of  the late eighteenth and 
early nineteenth centuries. If  theorists such as Marc-Antoine Laugier or 
Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy had envisioned architecture 
as an imitation of  primordial architectural form—most famously the 
primitive hut—these mid-nineteenth century thinkers saw architecture as 
an imitation, rather, of  human action.



52

isparchitecture.com

Baumkultus der Hellenen 

     Karl Bötticher is most famous for his books 
on Greek tectonics, published in several versions 
from the mid-1840s onwards.11 Here, however, 
I will discuss a much more idiosyncratic work by 
Bötticher, namely Der Baumkultus der Hellenen from 
1856. Despite its small size and seemingly obscure 
topic, this book presented a fierce criticism of  
nineteenth century art history, which had, according 
to Bötticher, ignored the link between ritual action 
and architecture. The obsession with style and 
appearance had led to a neglect of  the purpose for 
which man builds, he argued. In the eyes of  the 
ancients, ritual practice could not be separated from 
the building or artefact accommodating it, and 
understanding ritual action was thus a prerequisite 
for understanding architecture, the Greek temple in 
particular.12 Cultic practice and its physical setting 
formed one indivisible knot of  meaning and should 
be studied accordingly.

That more holistic approach was exactly what 
Bötticher set out to achieve. He traced the decorative 
apparatus of  the temple back to the ephemeral 
adornment of  sacred trees: ribbons, bells, and 
garlands embellishing places for ritual and sacrifice. 
He considered such arrangements architectural 
pre-forms, motives that would later be reified into 
architectural form in the temple. “Bäumen seien 
die ersten Tempel der Gottheiten gewesen” (trees 
were the first temples of  the dieties) he stated.13 By 
suggesting that the adornment of  holy trees was 
the beginning of  architecture, Bötticher invoked 
a notion of  origin that broke sharply with neo-
classical thinking. The origin of  architecture, far 
from being found in architecture itself, resides in 
the ephemeral arrangements of  worship.14

Bötticher’s thinking on the origin of  architecture 
turns our conventional ideas about ephemerality 
and durability upside down. What lasts, here, is not 
matter, construction, or type, but ephemeral human 



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

53

Hv
a

tt
um

acts, metamorphosed into the architecture of  the temple. It is a delicious 
idea: the most durable thing in architecture is a ribbon or a bell, fluttering 
in the wind.

Durable Metamorphoses  

Bötticher did not develop his ideas on ritual into a fully-fledged 
theory of  architecture. As many scholars have pointed out, Der Baumkultus 
remains a somewhat isolated work within his oeuvre.15 For Bötticher’s 
contemporary, Gottfried Semper, however, the ritual origin of  architecture 
would become a central premise. In Semper’s view, architecture is 
essentially about the stuff  people do in order to make themselves at home 
in the world. And the most primordial way of  doing that is to imitate. 
Primitive man imitates the order of  the world around him, writes Semper: 
the rhythmical shifts of  day and night, the cycle of  the moon, the ebbs and 
flows of  the sea. He continues, “[P]rimitive human beings […] delight in 
nature’s creative law as it gleams through the real world in the rhythmical 
sequence of  space and time movements, in wreaths, a string of  pearls, 
scrolls, round dances, the rhythmic tones attending them, the beat of  an 
oar [...] These are the beginnings out of  which music and architecture 
grew.”16

By imitating nature’s rhythms in the things he does and makes—in 
dance, knots, or tattoos on his skin—man makes for himself  a specifically 
human realm. Architecture emerges gradually out of  these ephemeral 
acts, as a metamorphosed reification of  human action. The origin of  
architecture, then, is not found in building, but in man’s attempt at coming 
to terms with the world around him through rhythm and ritual.

Weaving is one of  Semper’s key examples of  how the ritual act is 
translated into physical form.17 Beginning with the rhythmic movement 
imitating the order of  the natural world, the weaver produces an 
enclosure—the wickerwork wall, for instance—which in turn establishes 
a human domain separated from the natural world. Weaving, then, is 
simultaneously a ritual imitation of  cyclical time and the technical origin 
of  the architectural wall.  It runs through the history of  architecture as 
a constant motif, yet is continuously transformed and metamorphosed 
into new guises through the process of  material transformation, or 
Stoffwechsel, as Semper called it. The wickerwork enclosure, then, ossifies 
into Chinese lattice work, Assyrian stone reliefs, Pompeiian frescoes, and 
sixteenth century Portuguese tiles, continuing to echo even in the modern 
wallpaper. Through history, architecture retains its role as enclosure yet 
it is never exactly the same—it goes through a never-ending material 



54

isparchitecture.com

metamorphosis and carries all the memories 
of  its previous stages with it, at any point of  its 
development.18

So what is it that endures, here? Not matter, 
certainly: the material is but a medium in this 
metamorphic process. What endures is human 
work, ossified in a chain of  ever-changing 
materialities. Rather than looking for the origin of  
architecture in architectural form, Semper located it 
in human action, thus overturning key principles of  
neo-classical thinking.19 In one of  his late essays he 
stated this quite explicitly: “In a most general way, 
what is the material and subject matter of  all artistic 
endeavour?” he asked, and answered, “I believe it 
is man in all his relations and connections to the 
world.”20

Patterns of Use 

     The nineteenth-century discipline that most 
vigorously explored ‘man in all his relations and 
connections to the world’ was of  course ethnology, 
or Kulturgeschichte as it would be called in German 
and Scandinavian-speaking countries. Both Semper 
and Bötticher were influenced by contemporary 
ethnology. Scholars have for instance pointed 
out Semper’s reliance on the German ethnologist 
Gustav Klemm, whose Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte 
der Menschheit (1843–1851) elaborated on the ritual 
origins of  art and postulated dance and knots as 
the dual origin of  architecture. Klemm described 
artefacts as “mimetic narratives” and as primary 
vehicles for man’s orientation in the world.21

If  architects read ethnology, ethnologists also 
sometimes read architectural history. At least that 
is the case for the Norwegian ethnologist Eilert 
Sundt (1817–1875), a younger contemporary of  
Semper and Bötticher.22 Neither an architect nor 
a historian, Sundt nevertheless made a significant 
contribution to understanding the relationship 
between architectural form and human action. He 

What 
endures is 

human work, 
ossified in 

a chain of 
ever-changing 

materialities 

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

55

Hv
a

tt
um

also gave quite an original answer to our initial question of  what it is that 
endures in architecture.

Sundt studied theology and earned his living as a Protestant minister. 
His reputation as pioneer of  Norwegian social science, however, he earned 
from his empirically scrupulous studies of  everything from marriage 
habits and mortality statistics to Norway’s gypsy population and the social 
conditions of  the urban poor. Among his many books is one on vernacular 
architecture in the Norwegian countryside published in 1862. It is called 
Om Bygnings-Skikken paa Landet i Norge, a title perhaps best translated as 
“On the manner of  building in the Norwegian countryside.”23 On his 
many travels up and down the country, Sundt tells his readers, he had been 
struck by the underlying regularity of  vernacular buildings. Although each 
hamlet, farm, and building was to some extent different from every other, 
they all adhered to a common pattern. The regularity was noticeable not 
least in the organization of  the domestic interior. Sundt observed how 
building form, furniture, and permanent elements such as fireplaces, 
windows, and entrances followed the exact same template, reflecting the 
social structure of  rural Norwegian society. “I cannot tell how surprised I 
was when I first realized this house custom [hus-skikk]” he wrote:

Once you have gotten to know how things are arranged in one house, you know 
for certain how all houses of  a similar kind are organized. When I now travel 
through the Gudbrandsdalen region and see an old-fashioned house, it is as if  
I can see through the walls and know, that here, by the door, stands the great 
cabinet; there in the corner is the main seat; in the other corner, the master bed, 
etc. It is as if  the houses were made of  glass.24

While in the city, people build “after their own heart,” Sundt writes; in 
the countryside, building is governed by ancient traditions that regulate 
not so much the building itself  as the way of  life that in turn regulates 
building. Sundt called this reciprocal process ‘skikk.’ It is a tricky concept 
to translate, but comes close to tradition, or custom. ‘Skikk’ refers to ways 
of  doing things, ways of  arranging social phenomena into certain patterns 
that can be embodied in buildings and things. It is tempting to adopt 
Arendt’s vocabulary: ‘skikk’ is human work transformed into a built world.

The durable factor in Sundt’s architectural analysis was not wood 
or stone, but ways of  translating life into recognizable—and indeed 
durable—configurations. In an almost proto-structuralist fashion he 
describes how the ‘skikk’ governs life, how life governs architectural 
form, and how architectural form in its turn gives stability to life. It is 
a slow cycle that is not unchangeable but nonetheless relatively stable. 
Interestingly, Sundt sees this mimetic stability between life and artifice 



56

isparchitecture.com

as a waning phenomenon. Modern man does not 
adhere to any ‘skikk,’ he writes. In the modern 
city, houses reflect individual habits and desires, 
and have thus no durability outwith the life of  the 
individual: “It is different in the cities: the houses 
are more singular and the people as well – each 
with their own habits and needs, […] one in this 
way, the other in that way.”25 Modernity, for Sundt, 
represents a break with the durability of  ‘skikk.’ It 
is replaced by individualist transience, but also, we 
may add, by a compensatory search for eternity. For 
Sundt’s farmhouses, that eternity came in the form 
of  the museum, where so many of  the interiors he 
studied would end up.

Mimesis of Praxis

“[B]uildings and paintings and poetic texts, 
as much as rituals, are cables that hold a society 
together through time” write Alexander Nagel 
and Christopher S. Wood in their book Anachronic 
Renaissance.26 Nagel and Wood are particularly 
interested in artworks that—explicitly or 
implicitly—evoke multiple temporalities, like the 
way Roman spolia in early Christian churches acted 
as veritable time machines, connecting and doubling 
time and tying the present to multiple pasts “like a 
homeopathic remedy for discontinuity.”27

In the 
modern city, 

houses reflect 
individual habits 

and desires, 
and have thus 

no durability 
without the life 
of the individual

“

”

Figure 2: Section of 

farmhouse, Norway 

taken from 

Sundts book



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

57

Hv
a

tt
um

Semper’s material metamorphosis, Bötticher’s reified ritual 
arrangements, and Sundt’s long-enduring “skikk” are all examples of  such 
multi-temporal conditions. Their durability has nothing to do with the 
fixed eternity of  the museum or the immobilized past of  the historical 
monument. Instead, all these examples demonstrate architecture’s capacity 
to accommodate and preserve human action, giving shape to our attempts 
at making ourselves at home in the world. Aristotle said that the tragedy 
was “not an imitation of  men but of  actions and of  life.”28 Much the 
same could be said for architecture in the way I have outlined it here, as a 
“mimesis of  praxis,” it is an imitation of  human action.

All of Us

Back to the question: What is it that endures in architecture? A 
brief  glance at Semper’s theory of  Stoffwechsel, Bötticher’s ephemeral 
tree decorations, or Sundt’s “skikk” has taught us that it is neither matter 
nor form. It is rather—very much like Hannah Arendt proposed—the 
fact that work and works tie us to a shared duration, not a singular, 
monolithic past, but a heterogeneous, multi-temporal, contentious past. 
Perhaps that can help us understand Slavenka Draculić’s reaction to the 
destruction of  the Mostar bridge. “Why do I feel more pain looking at 
the image of  the destroyed bridge than the image of  the woman?” she 
asked herself, emphatically stating that while “the dead woman was one 
of  us, the bridge was all of  us, forever.” In what way was the bridge all 
of  us? By means of  its symbolic role as a bridge between East and West, 
Muslim and Christian—a sort of  super-symbol of  a multi-ethnic Balkan? 
Perhaps, but that is not the whole story. As the architectural historians 
Hans-Henrik Egede-Nissen and Emily Macas have both pointed out in 
their respective PhD dissertations, this symbolism is not uncontroversial.29 
Political scientist Heiko Wimmen put it even more strongly: “This popular 
image probably reveals more about the Western need to reduce a complex 
and multi-layered structure to clear-cut oppositions, which can then be, as 
it were, bridged.”30 It seems to me that Draculić’s “all of  us” may point 
to something more than simply the bridge as a symbol of  ethnic conflict 
and its potential reconciliation. Rather than a horizontal “us,” she evoked 
a vertical “us” linked through time as much as through geographical or 
ethnic divides. The bridge was an attempt to grasp eternity, she wrote—a 
complex, contested, and relative eternity in this case, but nevertheless an 
eternity involving “all of  us.” It was perhaps this contentious but significant 
common-ness that made UNESCO forego their usual requirement of  
material authenticity and inscribe the reconstructed Mostar bridge into 



58

isparchitecture.com

the world heritage list.

What lasts in architecture is not stone, but rather 
memories, rituals, dreams, and acts metamorphosed 
into matter and form a thousand times over. 
At a time when we seem to oscillate between a 
fascination for ephemerality and a longing for 
museum-like eternity, it may be good to keep this 
relative permanence in mind, particularly when 
thinking about architecture and its relationship to 
the human.

Endnotes

[1] The Mostar bridge was erected for Sultan 
Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566 by the architect 
Mimar Hajrudin. The bridge was hit several times 
during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, both by the 
Serbian-backed Yugoslav Peoples’ Army (JNA) 
and the Croatian Defense Council (HVO). For 
more information, see “Nomination Dossier: The Old 
City of  Mostar,” UNESCO, January 2005, http://
whc.unesco.org/uploads/nominations/946rev.
pdf. I am indebted to Hans-Henrik Egede-Nissen, 
whose Ph.D. dissertation “Autentisitetens relevans: 
på sporet av et endret fokus for kulturminnevernet,” 
presents a thorough analysis of  the destruction and 
reconstruction of  the Mostar bridge. See Hans-
Henrik Egede-Nissen, “Autentisitetens relevans: på 
sporet av et endret fokus for kulturminnevernet” (Ph.D. 
dissertation, Oslo School of  Architecture and 
Design, 2014), 175-234.

[2] Slavenca Draculić, “Falling Down. A Mostar 
Bridge Elegy,” The New Republic, December 13, 
1993.

[3] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: 
University of  Chicago Press, 1989), 136.

[4] Ibid., 137.

[5] Antonio Sant’Elia, “L’Architettura Futurista: 
Manifesto” (Milan, July 1914). English translation 
in Ulrich Conrads (ed.), Programmes and Manifestoes 

What lasts 
in architecture 

is not stone, 
but rather 

memories, rituals, 
dreams, and acts 

metamorphosed 
into matter and 

form a thousand 
times over 

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

59

Hv
a

tt
um

on 20th-century Architecture (London: Lund Humphries, 1970), 38. On the 
convoluted history of  the manifesto and its reception, see Esther da Costa 
Meyer, The Work of  Antonio Sant’Elia: Retreat into the Future (New Haven: 
Yale University Press, 1995), 141-168.

[6] William Holford, “In Search of  a New Monumentality,” Architectural 
Review vol 104, no 621 (September 1948): 125

[7] Charles Baudelaire, Painters of  Modern Life, trans. J. Mayne (London: 
Phaidon, 1995), 12.

[8] Alois Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus: Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung 
(Wien und Leipzig: Braumüller, 1903), 9 and 16-18.

[9] Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of  the City, trans. D. Ghirardo and J. Ockman 
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1982), 89.

[10] See, for example, Anthony Vidler, “From the Hut to the Temple: 
Quatremère de Quincy and the Idea of  Type,” in The Writing of  the 
Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (New York: Princeton 
Architectural Press, 1987), 147-64; Anthony Vidler, “The Third Typology”, 
Oppositions 7 (1976): 1-4; and Adrian Forty, “Type,” in Words and Buildings: 
A Vocabulary of  Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 
304-11.

[11] Karl Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, vols. 1-2 (Potsdam: Riegel, 
1844-1852). Second, revised edition: Berlin: Ernst & Korn, 1874-1881.

[12] Karl Bötticher, “Einleitung,” in Der Baumkultus der Hellenen nach den 
gottesdienstlichen Gebräuchen und den überlieferten Bildwerken dargestellt (Berlin: 
Weidmann, 1856), 1-6.

[13] Bötticher, “Umriss des hellenischen Baumkultus,” in Der Baumkultus 
der Hellenen nach den gottesdienstlichen Gebräuchen und den überlieferten Bildwerken 
dargestellt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1856), 9.

[14] Ibid., 7-25

[15] See, for example, Hartmut Mayer, Die Tektonik der Hellenen: Kontext 
und Wirkung der Architekturtheorie von Karl Bötticher (Stuttgart and London: 
Menges, 2004), 16.

[16] Gottfried Semper, “Prolegomenon” in Der Stil in den technischen und 
tektonischen Künsten; oder, Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, 
Künstler und Kunstfreunde, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Kunst und 
Wissenschaft, 1860), xxi-xxii. English translation in Gottfried Semper, 
Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. and ed. H. F. 
Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty 2004), 82.

[17] Semper presented his ideas on weaving in several places, see, 



60

isparchitecture.com

for example, Der Stil §54 and §57-61, as well as “The Four Elements of  
Architecture,” in The Four Elements of  Architecture and Other Writings, trans. and 
ed. Harry F. Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1989), 103-104.

[18] A poignant presentation of  Semper’s notion of  Stoffwechsel and 
Bekleidung is found in §66, “Excursus über das Tapetzierwesen der Alten,” 
in Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: 
Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1860), 276-322. 

[19] This point is elaborated in J. Rykwert, “Gottfried Semper and the 
Conception of  Style,” in Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, eds. 
A. M. Vogt, C. Reble, and M. Frölich (Basel: Birkhaüser, 1976), 68-81.

[20] Gottfried Semper, “On Architectural Styles,” in The Four Elements of  
Architecture and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Harry F. Mallgrave and Wolfgang 
Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 269.

[21] Gustav Klemm, Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit, vol. 1 (Leipzig: 
Teubner, 1843), 2-3.

[22] The links between Semper and Sundt have been explored by the Swedish 
art historian Rudolf  Zeitler in the unpublished lecture “Om Eilert Sundt og G. 
Semper” (1979, typewritten manuscript held at the Norwegian Directorate for 
Cultural Heritage Archive in Oslo), though from quite a different vantage 
point  than the present comparison.

[23] Eilert Sundt, Om Bygnings-Skikken paa Landet i Norge (Christiania: Malling, 
1862).

[24] Ibid., §5, 14. In the original text:

Jeg kan ikke sige, hvor jeg blev forundret, da jeg første gang blev opmærksom på og 
opfattede denne hus-skik. [...] Det er så i disse bygder, at når man først har gjort 
sig fortrolig med hver tings plads i et hus, så veed man med det samme, hvordan 
det er i alle de andre huse af  samme bygningsmåde. Når jeg nu kjører igjennem 
Gudbrandsdalen og i forbifarten ser på et hus, at det hører til dette gammeldags slag, 
med stue og kleve, hvilket er tilfælde med de allerfleste, og når jeg fremdeles ser, hvordan 
huset er stillet, eller hvad der er fremsiden og bagsiden - hvilket kan skjønnes på 
dørens eller vinduernes eller skorstenspibens plads, - så kan jeg ligesom se ind igjennem 
væggen og vide, at her ved døren står fremskabet, der ved hjørnet er høisædet, i hjørnet 
hist borte står husbondens seng o.s.v. Det er, som om husene skulde være af  glas.

[25] Ibid., 14-15. In the original text:

Anderledes i byerne: husene mere ulige og menneskene ligeså - med ulige vaner og 
fordringer, mere udviklet forskjellighed i sind og tænkemåde, en så, en anden så. I 
den fjerne landsbygd kan en velstående og en fattig bonde have det så temmelig ens 
i sit hus og sit daglige liv, i hovedstaden derimod kommer forskjellen mellem den 



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

61

Hv
a

tt
um

rige og den fattige, den dannede og den udannede o.s.v. tilsyne på hvert punkt. 
Der er vexel-virkning her: under bylivets bevægede forholde kunne de forskjellige 
anlæg og sindsretninger udvikles frit, og frit sees da enhver at indrette sit hus og 
sit hele husliv, som han bedst veed og kan; men de udvortes forskjelligheder, som 
herved opstå, skabe igjen forskjellige vaner, tilbøieligheder, lidenskaber, og hermed 
påskyndes hin sindets og tænkemådens udvikling, så forskjellen mellem de enkelte 
mennesker bliver altid større og større.

[26] Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance 
(Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010), 15.

[27] Ibid., 183.

[28] Aristotle, Poetics, trans. J. Hutton (New York: Norton, 1982), 1450a.

[29] Egede-Nissen, Autentisitetens relevans, 210. Emily Gunzburg Macas, 
“The Old Bridge,” in Representing Competing Identitites, (Ph.D. dissertation, 
Cornell University, 2007), 198-255.

[30] Heiko Wimmen, “New Nations, Imagined Borders: Engineering Public 
Space in Post-War Mostar, Bosnia-Hercegovina” (paper presented at the Beirut 
Conference for Public Spheres, Beirut, Lebanon, October 22-24, 2004), 
quoted in Macas, Representing Competing Identitites, 217.



From anthropomimetic to biomimetic 
cities - The place of humans in “cities 
like forests”
Henry Dicks

INTRODUCTION

In Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, 
Janine Benyus argued that the key to sustainability 
is to learn from the 3.8 billion years of  “research 
and development” already carried out by nature.1 
Since the publication of  her book, biomimicry 
has been heralded as “the mantra for Silicon 
Valley and other regions of  the techno-sphere”2 
and as a “revolutionary concept” capable of  
underpinning a “Second Industrial Revolution.”3 
In keeping with this, biomimicry is also attracting 
increasing attention from architects and urbanists. 
The famous architecture critic, Charles Jencks, has 
noted that “the basic trend of  the time [is] towards 
biomimesis,”4 and there is a growing tendency 
amongst both architects and urban theorists to see 
natural ecosystems—especially forests—as models 
for the city.5

Perhaps the most significant limitation of  current 
thinking in and around biomimicry is that it focuses 
almost exclusively on technological innovation. 
Turned resolutely towards the future via the concept 
of  sustainability, biomimicry practitioners—usually 
engineers, designers, architects, or urbanists—
typically focus on how basing artificial entities or 
systems on natural models can provide a coherent 
response to the ecological destruction wrought 
by conventional technologies. If  biomimicry is as 
important as its advocates believe, however, then it 
also raises important questions for the humanities, 

throughout 
Western 

history the 
dominant 

model for 
the polis, 
qua both 
city and 

State, has 
been the 

human being

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

62

Di
ck

s

including such disciplines as urban and architectural history, anthropology, 
political theory, sociology, and philosophy. If  buildings and cities are 
henceforth to be based on “natural models,” then how is this different 
from what went on in the past? Did architects and urbanists previously 
design things without reference to models or did they just use different 
models? If  the cities of  the future are to be based on natural ecosystems, 
then what place might humans occupy in these cities and how might the 
emergence of  these cities affect human self-understanding? And, given 
the important but often overlooked relation between the polis qua city 
and the polis qua state, what implications might the rise of  biomimetic 
urbanism have for political theory?

With a view to responding to these questions, this article will be split 
into three parts. In the first two parts, I will argue that the traditional model 
for both the state (Part 1) and the city (Part 2) is the human being. Then, 
in the third part, I will briefly examine the emerging model of  the natural 
ecosystem, and in particular the forest, before going on to consider—via 
an articulation of  Heidegger’s thinking of  the clearing with some recent 
theoretical insights into human evolution—how this new model calls for a 
radical shift in human self-understanding.

1 Anthropomimicry in Political and Social Philosophy

The polis of  the ancient Greeks was both city and state. This is not 
to say, however, that there was not a certain distinction between the two. 
For thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, the community of  citizens that made 
up the state was far more important than the buildings and streets that 
made up the city; politics was far more important than urbanism. This 
split between politics and urbanism has been exacerbated in more recent 
times as the geographical coincidence between city and state eroded 
and the nation-state became the primary political unity. The result is the 
almost complete divorce between political philosophy, on the one hand, 
and architecture and urbanism, on the other. This is not to say, however, 
that political philosophy and urbanism have followed totally different 
paths. Indeed, ever since the ancient Greeks, thinking about the state and 
thinking about the city have evolved in parallel, conceiving their object in 
very similar terms: both the state and the city have been conceived via the 
same foundational model—the human being.

The first major manifestation of  “anthropomimetic” political 
philosophy occurs in Plato’s Republic.6 Seeking a response to the question of  
the nature of  justice, Plato argues that the ideal state would be composed 
of  three classes—philosophers, auxiliaries, and businessmen—each 



63

isparchitecture.com

of  which corresponds to a “part” of  the human 
soul—reason, courage, and moderation. Justice, he 
goes on to argue, results from each class “minding 
its own affairs,” for doing so gives rise to that state 
of  harmony and balance between the different 
parts of  the state that Plato sees as the essence of  
justice. Harmony and balance between the different 
parts of  the human soul thus constitute a model 
for the organization of  the state and therewith also 
an answer to the question of  the nature of  justice.

A similarly “anthropomimetic” approach to 
political philosophy was also common in the Middle 
Ages, a famous example being John of  Salisbury’s 
Policraticus, which drew an extensive analogy 
between the organs of  the body and the organs 
of  the state.7 Modern political philosophy was 
also strongly marked by this approach. Hobbes’s 
Leviathan famously opens with the description of  
the state as an “artificial man,”8 and Rousseau’s 
1755 article in the Encyclopédie on political economy 
likewise contains an extended analogy between the 
organs of  the state and the organs of  the human 
body.9 Moreover, it is also important to note the 
role played by speculative anthropology in modern 
political philosophy. The state was conceived in 
analogous terms to the human individual in the 
state of  nature. As individuals entered the social 
contract, thus leaving the state of  nature behind, 
the state of  nature did not completely disappear but 
was instead elevated to the international level; the 
war of  all against all would henceforth take place 
between nations, not individuals.

In the wake of  the French Revolution, as 
representative democracy fitfully emerged as the 
dominant form of  politics in the West, an important 
shift occurred in political philosophy away from 
the nature and role of  government towards what 
Hegel and Marx called “civil society.” Indeed, for 
Marx, all traditional history had focused on the 
“super-structural” issues of  religion, politics, and 

Harmony 
and balance 
between the 

different parts 
of the human soul 

thus constitute 
a model for the 
organization of 

the State

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

64

Di
ck

s

ideology, thus overlooking the relations and forces of  production that 
make up the economic “base.” The separation of  civil society from the 
state, and therewith also the shift from the “political question” to the 
“social question,”10 in turn made possible the emergence of  sociology. 
From its very inception, sociology supposed a specific model for society: 
the physiological one of  the organism. Grappling with the newfound 
separation between state and society, Saint-Simon developed a theoretical 
understanding of  the latter via the concept of  “social physiology” (la 
physiologie sociale).11 In order to understand society scientifically, he 
thought, it was necessary to use concepts drawn from physiology, an 
approach which led him to inquire into the various “organs” of  the “social 
body,” while at the same time seeing political economy, law, and public 
morality as the basic “rules of  hygiene” of  this same social body. Strongly 
influenced by Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte may have abandoned the 
expression “social physiology” in favour of  the neologism “sociology,” 
thus founding the latter as a stand-alone discipline, but he did not abandon 
the organismic model.12 For Comte, the very possibility of  sociology 
as a positive science depended on seeing society as an “organism,” an 
approach that led him to import a wide number of  key operational 
concepts—organs, illnesses, etc.—from physiology. Likewise, in De la 
Division du Travail Social, Durkheim also took up this physiological view 
of  society, arguing that the division of  labour in the “social organism” 
corresponds to the functional division of  the “biological organism” into 
different members and organs.13

For our purposes, there are three key points to underline regarding 
anthropomimetic political and social philosophy. The first is that 
specifically in political philosophy, one finds a strong tendency to focus 
on the soul or mind of  the human individual and its mimetic counterpart 
at the level of  the state. Plato, for example, focuses on what he sees as 
the three different parts of  the soul and their mimetic counterparts in 
the state. Likewise, while Rousseau’s article on political economy draws 
an extensive analogy between the parts of  the human body and the parts 
of  the state, his political philosophy—as developed most notably in Du 
Contrat Social—focuses rather on analogies between the mental faculties of  
human individuals and their corresponding attributes in the state, the most 
notable example being his invocation of  the individual will as a model 
for the “general will.” The second is that the emergence of  sociology 
in the nineteenth century did not amount to a change of  model—away 
from the “anthropological” one favoured by political philosophers from 
Plato to Rousseau and towards a new and different “physiological” or 
“biological” one—but rather a shift in focus within the same basic model, 



65

isparchitecture.com

such that the traditional emphasis on the mind, 
and therewith also on the activities of  government 
and science, was replaced by a focus on the body, 
and therewith also on socio-economic activity, 
particularly the work. The third key point is that all 
the political and social philosophy discussed above 
sees the political or social community as composed 
solely of  human beings. Plato’s state is composed 
of  people, not things. The parts of  Hobbes’s state 
that correspond to the different parts or attributes 
of  the human individual (the soul, memory, joints, 
nerves, strength, etc.) are all people (the sovereign, 
counsellors, magistrates, etc.),14 hence the famous 
depiction of  the state on the frontispiece of  
Leviathan as a composite of  human individuals. 
Similarly, in Comte and Durkheim’s work, the parts 
of  the social organism that they think correspond 
to the parts of  the biological organism are all 
different categories of  people. In short, human 
beings provide not just the form but also the matter 
of  the traditional view of  the state.

 

2. Anthropomimicry in Urban Theory 

     The first key manifestation of  anthropomimicry 
in architecture and urban theory occurred in early 
Renaissance Italy in the work of  such important and 
influential figures as Leon Battista Alberti, Filarete, 
and Francesco di Giorgio Martini.15 According to 
the French urban historian Françoise Choay, the 
fundamental explanation for this phenomenon lies 
in what she calls the “scandal of  homo artifex.”16 
Unlike other species, whose constructions follow 
paths determined by their nature, humans are free to 
build things however they choose. So, whereas the 
laws that govern the construction of  beehives or ant 
nests are determined by the nature of  the species, 
humans, as uniquely autonomous agents, must give 
themselves their own laws of  construction. This in 
turn raises the question of  what laws and guidelines 
they should give themselves. The response, Choay 



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

66

Di
ck

s

explains, was that the construction of  artefacts should follow the form 
of  the human body, for the human body was considered the most perfect 
form in all of  nature, primarily on the grounds that it combined the 
fundamental attributes of  all the various different spheres of  creation, 
from the growth of  plants and the sentience of  animals to the rationality 
and spirituality of  bodiless angels.17 The result was an approach to the 
planning and design of  cities that would dominate Western architecture 
for hundreds of  years: the form of  the city should follow the form of  the 
human body.

There was, however, a complication with this “anthropomimetic” 
approach to urban planning and design. Unlike Vitruvius, who saw 
the human body as a purely formal or aesthetic architectural model, 
the architects and urban theorists of  the early Italian Renaissance also 
looked for functional equivalents to the different parts of  the human 
body.18 The complication was that it was not easy to find meaningful 
points of  comparison between internal organs of  the human body and 
corresponding functional parts of  the city. There was, as Choay notes, a 
“blank” in the city where the internal organs should be.19

Four hundred years later, this blank was eventually filled in. The 
moment of  transition is most clearly visible in the contest between Antoni 
Rovira i Tras and Ildefonso Cerda for the renovation of  Barcelona in the 
mid-nineteenth century. Rovira’s project accepted the basic methodology 
of  the early Italian Renaissance: the renovation of  Barcelona was to follow 
the ideal aesthetic form of  the human body. As Antonio Lopez de Aberasturi 
explains: “[f]rom the head – the forum  to the peripheral members, the 
proportions of  its [the proposed city’s] elements are modelled on the 
proportions of  the human body, in conformity with the teachings of  the 
great treatises of  classical architecture.”20 (my translation) Cerda, on the 
other hand, introduced a functionalist approach. The city should not have 
the aesthetic form of  the human body, but rather the functional efficacy 
of  the biological organism. The urbanist, in this new framework, takes 
on the role of  both “anatomist” and “doctor” of  the “urban organism.” 
His role is first to dissect the city, to analyse its biological functions—its 
systems of  consumption, digestion, circulation, evacuation of  waste, and 
so on—and then, in the case of  pathology, to intervene in such a way 
that the city may be cured of  any “illness.” So, just as Auguste Comte’s 
founding of  sociology as a positive science required society to be seen as 
an organism, so the emergence of  urbanism as a positive science—which 
Choay traces back to Cerda’s Teoría General de l’Urbanización—likewise 
required the city to be seen in this same physiological way.21



67

isparchitecture.com

But the city, as theorized by the nascent science 
of  urbanism, was not just any old organism. Indeed, 
as the development of  urban infrastructures over the 
course of  the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has 
testified, the principal technological developments 
in the thinking and practice of  urban planning and 
design typically evoked the model of  the specifically 
human or animal organism. For example, the 
mid-nineteenth century British hygienists, and 
Frederick Ward in particular, proposed new forms 
of  centralized urban water systems whose pipes 
were based on the model of  “arteries,” “veins,” and 
“capillaries,” whose steam-powered pumps used to 
transport water uphill were based on the “heart,” 
and whose impermeable paving, which was thought 
to protect the city from disease, was modelled on 
the “skin.”22 Perhaps the greatest example of  this 
way of  thinking, however, is to be found in Le 
Corbusier’s Urbanisme, which describes the city as a 
“human organism,” its buildings as “cells,” its roads 
as “arteries,” its parks as “lungs,” and the urbanist 
as its “doctor” or “surgeon,” depending on the 
severity of  the treatment required. In the book’s 
appendix, Le Corbusier even provides various 
diagrams of  the internal organs of  the human body, 
explicitly referencing them as models on which his 
practice as an urbanist is grounded.23

In view of  the above analyses, it is clear that 
the evolution of  Western thinking about both 
states and cities has followed a similar path. Indeed, 
while some moments in history have given rise to 
particularly intense moments of  activity for the 
former (e.g., the Enlightenment) and others for 
the latter (e.g., the Renaissance), it is also true that 
there have been periods of  strong convergence, 
most notably the mid-nineteenth century, which 
saw the simultaneous emergence of  both sociology 
and urbanism, viewed as positive sciences, thanks in 
large part to a shared grounding in the physiological 
model of  the organism. This is not to say, however, 
that history does not also reveal significant 

 Unlike 
other species, 

whose 
constructions 
follow paths 
determined by 

their nature, 
humans are 

free to build 
things however 

they choose

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

68

Di
ck

s

theoretical differences between the polis qua city and the polis qua state. 
We have already seen that the mid-nineteenth century marked a change 
in focus from the Enlightenment vision of  the human soul or mind as 
model for the workings of  government to the sociological vision of  the 
functional differentiation of  the biological body or organism as model 
for the social division of  labour. In the case of  urban theory, by contrast, 
the shift is not from mind to body, but rather from the outward, aesthetic 
form of  the human body to its internal, functional organization. A second 
major difference concerns the composition of  the anthropomimetic state 
in contrast to that of  the anthropomimetic city. Whereas the former 
is composed solely of  human beings, the latter is composed rather of  
houses, temples, fortresses, city walls, market places, and other artificial 
constructions, though later also infrastructure, most of  which was 
inanimate, as in the case of  transport, water, and energy networks, though 
some of  which was composed of  living beings, as in the case of  the new 
urban parks, whose creation was justified throughout the Western world 
on the grounds that they constituted the “lungs of  the city.”24

3 The Biomimetic Polis and the Question of the Human

It is not hard to see that modelling cities and states on human 
individuals is ecologically problematic. Viewed ecologically, humans are 
“consumers.” To base cities and states on the model of  human individuals 
is thus to create urban and socio-political systems whose continued 
existence depends on the extraction and consumption of  vast quantities 
of  energy and materials from their environment and which also generate 
huge quantities of  waste and pollution. Conversely, to base cities and 
states on natural ecosystems would be to create urban and socio-political 
systems which generate their own usable energies and materials while also 
recycling their wastes in processes analogous to natural nutrient cycling.

To get a brief  idea of  the power of  this new model, let us briefly 
consider the potential implications of  Braungart and McDonough’s motto, 
“[i]magine a building like a tree, a city like a forest,”25 for sustainable energy 
systems. According to this model, every building would capture all or 
almost all of  the energy it requires using solar panels, whether photovoltaic 
or, in the future, using techniques closer to natural photosynthesis. As 
for distribution, just as in the forest the rhizosphere connects the trees 
together such that excess sugars may be passed on to mycelium in the 
soil and thereby also on to other trees, so “energy positive” buildings 
would pass on their excess energy to buildings that do not meet their 
own energy requirements via a distributed underground grid. And finally, 



69

isparchitecture.com

just as in the forest the mobile 
organisms—the insects and 
animals—obtain their energy 
in the first instance from 
the plants, so in a city like a 
forest, the mobile elements—
cars, trams, drones, etc.—
could also obtain their energy 
directly from the buildings.

While it would in theory 
be possible to develop all 
sorts of  other examples of  
how forest ecosystems could help us re-think the 
technological foundations of  our cities and states, 
the key question that the remainder of  this article will 
seek to address is rather the anthropological one of  
the “place” humans might occupy in the biomimetic 
polis, and therewith also the issue of  how basing the 
polis on forest ecosystems calls on us to re-think our 
self-understanding. Before developing a response 
to these questions, it is important to recall two 
key features of  the basic anthropology supposed 
by modern political philosophers: first, the key 
opposition that structures this anthropology is that 
of  a body shared with the rest of  nature and a mind 
unique to humans; second, human individuals—
qua syntheses of  bodies and minds—provide both 
the form on which the state is modelled and the 
matter of  which it is composed. In this manner, the 
state provides a place where these dual aspects of  
the human may find fulfilment: bodily fulfilment 
may be attained via the activity of  consumption 
we share with animals and mental fulfilment by 
the intellectual activities—politics, science, art, 
etc.—that humans alone possess. In view of  this, 
it could perhaps be thought that the biomimetic 
polis runs the risk of  going to the opposite extreme 
of  the anthropomimetic polis (i.e., of  excluding 
the human altogether). If  the basic models for 
the different elements of  the state are provided by 
nature—plants, animals, fungi, etc.—and not by the 

Figure 1: the construc-

tion of the city of 

Savannah, Georgia in 

an area of cleared 

forest



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

70

Di
ck

s

human, then what place might the biomimetic polis accord to humans? In 
response to this question, the key argument sketched out in the remainder 
of  the article is that it is possible to think the place of  the human in 
“cities like forests” via the development of  a speculative philosophical 
anthropology that combines Heidegger’s ontological thinking of  the 
“clearing” with various anthropological insights that have emerged from 
the study of  human evolution and pre-history.

4 The Clearing in Anthropology and Philosophy

In “The End of  Philosophy and the Task of  Thinking,” Heidegger 
describes the clearing as “the open region for everything that becomes 
present and absent.”26 This becoming present, he thinks, depends on 
humans’ unique ability to understand Being (i.e., the “as”), for it is “as” 
things—as tools, as other humans, as animals, as Gods, etc.—that beings 
show up in the clearing. It is widely assumed in the secondary literature on 
the subject that the clearing in the forest is ultimately just a “metaphor” 
for this uniquely human ability to understand the “as.”27 On this reading, 
the clearing in the forest is simply a figurative representation of  being-
in-the-world, and in particular of  its spatiality. In what follows, we will 
see that it is possible to draw on contemporary interpretations of  human 
evolution and pre-history in order to interpret the clearing not as mere 
metaphor, but rather as a literal and insightful description of  the “there,” 
understood as the space where the “as” reveals itself.

For the first four or five million years since our hominid predecessors 
separated from the common ancestor they shared with chimpanzees, the 
driving force behind human evolution was the thinning out of  the tropical 
forests of  Africa and therewith also the transition from an arboreal lifestyle 
to one which increasingly took place in open environments.28 According 
to the French paleo-anthropologist Pascal Picq, it was precisely the 
completion of  this transition to open environments—and not an increase 
in brain size, the generalization of  tool-use, bipedalism, language, or any 
other single factor—that defines the genre homo,29 and therewith also 
what are widely referred to as “early humans.” The emergence of  “modern 
humans,” approximately 1.5 million years later, again marked a significant 
shift in our ancestors’ relation to the environment. If  “anatomically 
modern humans” emerged approximately 200,000 years ago, it was not 
until approximately 50,000 years ago—during the depths of  the last Ice 
Age—that so-called “modern behaviour” emerged. Then, as soon as the 
glaciers receded some 12,000 years ago, a dramatic increase in the human 
population came about thanks largely to the widespread practice of  



71

isparchitecture.com

deforestation, whether to create space in which to 
dwell, hunt, and gather or to adopt the agriculture 
and architectural techniques characteristic of  the 
Neolithic Revolution.30 The clearing, on this view, is 
not a metaphor for the space where humans dwell, 
for the genre homo is not only biologically adapted 
to living in the clearings or open environments 
opened up several million years ago by climate 
change, but also, and largely because of  this 
adaptation, has in its most recent incarnation—
behaviourally modern humans—constantly sought 
to clear forests, a practice that has now spread so far 
and wide that human habitation of  clearings goes 
largely unnoticed.31

But the clearing is not just a physical habitat, 
an open environment to which members of  the 
species homo sapiens are biologically and culturally 
adapted, for it must also be seen in Heideggerian 
terms as the space where Being “reveals itself,” 
thus “opening itself ” to understanding. In what 
follows we will not seek to understand the complex 
philosophical issue of  the “self-disclosure” of  
Being in its entirety, but rather to analyse one 
important feature of  this process that is particularly 
important for the present inquiry: concomitant 
with the self-disclosure of  the “as” there emerges 
the possibility of  seeing one being “as” or “like” 
another being. This feature of  the self-disclosure 
of  Being resonates with the argument put forward 
by the cognitive anthropologist Steven Mithen that 
what ultimately distinguishes modern humans from 
early humans is “cognitive fluidity.” By cognitive 
fluidity, Mithen means the ability to combine the 
various different categories of  thought and forms 
of  intelligence so as to produce original syntheses.32 
So, whereas Mithen thinks that the Neanderthals 
had what he calls a “natural history intelligence,” a 
“technical intelligence,” and a “social intelligence,” 
each of  which was more or less as fully developed 
as that of  modern humans, he also thinks they were 
unable to combine these various different forms 

what 
place might 

the biomimetic 
polis accord 

to humans?

“
”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

72

Di
ck

s

of  intelligence and the categories of  thought on which they depend to 
produce novel syntheses.

It is not hard to see that it is this openness of  the “as,” this cognitive 
fluidity, which gives humans the unique ability to blend together their 
understandings of  nature, of  technology, and of  humanity, that constitutes 
the ontological ground for the creation of  both the anthropomimetic 
and the biomimetic polis. It is what makes it possible to conceive cities 
and states based on the model of  the human individual, understood as 
a composite of  an animal body and a human mind, just as it is also the 
ontological ground that allows humans to conceive cities and states based 
on the model of  the forest, understood not just as a natural ecosystem, 
but also as containing clearings and therewith also the open relationship 
to the “as” that is unique to humans. With this in mind, it would seem 
that the transition from an anthropomimietic to a biomimetic model of  
the polis makes possible a new way of  thinking about what distinguishes 
humans from nature: in contrast to the traditional distinction between the 
mind and the body, the new distinction would be based instead on the 
opposition between the forest and the clearing. After the “mind/body” 
dualism of  modernity, which identifies the human with the mental and 
the natural with the bodily, there may thus emerge what I propose to 
call an “enlightened naturalism” (naturalisme éclairé), which, as the word 
“naturalism” suggests, seeks to explain the emergence of  the human in 
naturalistic terms via the study of  human evolution, while at the same 
time also making it possible to think about what is ontologically distinctive 
about the human—the open relation to Being—via the concept of  the 
“clearing” (clairière).

Conclusion

Whereas the traditional model for the polis was the “anthropomimetic” 
one of  the human being, the emergence of  biomimicry has led to the 
possibility not only of  taking the forest as a model for the polis, but also 
of  understanding the genesis of  this model from out of  the clearing, 
understood not only as an open environment, but also as the space where 
the “as” discloses itself, thereby making it possible to see one thing “as” 
or “like” another thing. This in turn calls for a radical shift in human 
self-understanding: rather than seeing ourselves as composites of  an 
animal body and a human mind, we may henceforth see ourselves as 
former forest-dwellers who have come to dwell in open environments 
and who, in doing so, have ultimately acquired an open relation to Being, 
hence the possibility of  conceiving states as “artificial men,” societies as 



73

isparchitecture.com

“organisms,” cities like “forests,” and so on and so 
forth. From this perspective, rather than trying to 
overcome the much-maligned mind-body dualism 
of  modernity in the name of  either reductionist 
monism (e.g., scientific naturalism) or postmodern 
pluralism, the task we face is rather to theorize 
an “enlightened naturalism” (naturalisme éclairé), 
which articulates naturalistic explanations of  
human evolution with ontological thinking about 
the “clearing” (clairière). Moreover, as far as the 
relation between architecture and philosophy is 
concerned, although Heidegger’s significance for 
architecture has been much discussed,33 the idea 
that building takes place in clearings and that there 
may be an important link between clearings in 
the naturalistic and ontological senses has, to my 
knowledge, yet to be explored. From Vitruvius34 
to Le Corbusier,35 it has commonly been assumed 
that the first ever buildings were constructed in 
forest clearings, but this has not been linked to 
the ontological sense of  the clearing, and thereby 
also to the question of  the being of  buildings, and 
in particular to their openness to being seen “as” 
imitations of  the perfect human form, “as” cells in 
an urban organism, or “as” habitable imitations of  
the trees that made way for them in the first place. 
Lastly, it is of  course also important to consider 
how the model of  the forest may allow us to rethink 
not just architecture and urbanism, but also the 
polis in the political sense. Could the model of  the 
forest biome help provide a model for the political 
economy of  entire nation states and in particular 
for their agricultural and industrial production? 
And, if  the forest is the model for the polis, could 
the clearing perhaps provide a model for the agora, 
understood as the economic and political space of  
markets, parliaments, tribunals, and so on, where 
the essential discussions and decisions of  its human 
inhabitants take place?

 

the 
emergence 

of biomimicry 
has led to the 
possibility not 
only of taking 

the forest as a 
model for the 

polis, but also 
of according 

humans a place 
within this 

model

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

74

Di
ck

s

Endnotes

[1] Janine Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: 
Harper Perennial, 1997).

[2] Dickson Despommier, The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st 
Century (New York: Picador, 2011), 34.

[3] Freya Mathews, “Towards a Deeper Philosophy of  Biomimicry,” 
Organization & Environment 24, no. 4 (2011): 364-387.

[4] Charles Jencks, The Story of  Postmodernism (Chichester: John Wiley, 
2011), 225.

[5] See Michael Braungart and William McDonough, Cradle to Cradle: 
Re-Making the Way We Make Things (London: Vintage, 2009); Luc Schuiten 
and Pierre Loze, Vers une Cité Végétale (Wavre: Madraga, 2010); Vincent 
Callebaut, Paris 2050: Les Cités Fertiles Faces Aux Enjeux du XX siècle (Paris: 
Michel Lafon, 2015); and Maibritt Pedersen Zari, “Ecosystem Services 
Analysis: Mimicking Ecosystem Services for Regenerative Urban Design,” 
International Journal of  Sustainable Built Environment 4, no. 1 (2015): 145–157.

[6] Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin Classics, 
1974).

[7] John of  Salisbury, Policraticus: of  the Frivolties of  Courtiers and the Footprints 
of  Philosophers, trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 1990).

[8] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Form & Power of  a Commonwealth 
Ecclesiastical and Civill (London: Andrew Cooke, 1651).

[9] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discours sur l’Economie Politique,” in Du 
Contrat Social, ed. Robert Derathé (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 66. 

[10] Serge Moscovici, Essai sur l’Histoire Humaine de la Nature (Paris: 
Flammarion, 1977).

[11] Claude Henri Saint-Simon, De la Physiologie Sociale: Œuvres Choisies 
(extraits 1803-1825), ed. Georges Gurvitch (Paris: Presses Universitaires 
de France, 1965).

[12] Auguste Comte, Leçons de Sociologie: Cours de Philosophie Positive (Paris: 
Flammarion, 1995), 47-51.

[13] Emile Durkheim, De la Division du Travail Social, (Paris: Editions 
Norph-Nop, 2011).

[14] The only significant exceptions to this are money and goods, which 
Hobbes depicts as the “blood” of  the “artificial man.”

[15] Jütte has documented how in late medieval Europe houses were often 



75

isparchitecture.com

conceived by analogy with human beings, but he 
also notes that it was only with the Renaissance that 
the “boom” in anthropomorphic architecture truly 
began. See Daniel Jütte, “Living Stones: The House 
as Actor in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of  Urban 
History, 42, no. 4 (2015): 659-687.

[16] Françoise Choay, “La ville et le domaine 
bâti comme corps dans les textes des architectes-
théoriciens de la première renaissance italienne,” 
Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse  9 (1974): 239-251.

[17] Ibid., 247.

[18] Ibid., 244.

[19] Ibid., 246.

[20] Antonio Lopez de Aberasturi, “Introduction,” 
in La Théorie Générale de L’Urbanisation d’Ildefonso 
Cerdà, trans. Antonio Lopez de Aberasturi (Paris: 
Editions du Seuil, 1979), 22.

[21] Françoise Choay, La Règle et le Modèle: Sur 
la Théorie de l’Architecture et de l’Urbanisme (Paris: 
Editions du Seuil, 1996).

[22] Frederick Ward, Discours Prononcé à la Séance 
d’Ouverture du Congrès International de Bienfaisance, 
(Bruxelles: Librairie Européenne, C. Muquardt, 
1856), 9-31.

[23] Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris: Flammarion, 
1994).

[24] Catherine Ward Thompson, “Linking 
Landscape and Health: The Recurring Theme,” 
Landscape and Urban Planning 99 (2011): 191.

[25] Michael Braungart and William McDonough, 
Cradle to Cradle, 139.

[26] Martin Heidegger, “The End of  Philosophy 
and the Task of  Thinking,” in Basic Writings, ed. 
David F. Krell (Oxford: Routledge, 1993), 442.

[27] See Richard Capobianco, Engaging Heidegger 
(Toronto: University of  Toronto Press, 2010), 89; 
Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of  Heidegger: A 
Paradigm Shift (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

76

Di
ck

s

2015), 20-21.

[28] Jean-Jacques Hublin, Quand d’Uutres Hommes Peuplaient la Terre (Paris: 
Flammarion, 2008).

[29] Pascal Picq, Au Commencement était l’Homme (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2009), 
99-100.

[30] Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis 
(Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 2002).

[31] Robert Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of  Civilization (Chicago: University 
of  Chicago Press, 1992), 245.

[32] Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of  the Mind: A Search for the Origins of  Art, 
Religion and Science (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 203.

[33] See Miguel De Beistegui, Thinking with Heidegger (Indianapolis: Indiana 
University Press, 2003); Adam Sharr, Heidegger for Architects (Oxford: 
Routledge, 2007).

[34] Choay, “La ville et le domaine,” 239-251.

[35] Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture (Paris: Flammarion, 1995).



Towards a post-human era? - 
DIGITAL ARCHITECTS AND THE Future 
OF MANkind

Marion Roussel

In this age of  unprecedented technological 
progress, we can no longer ask “what is man?” 
without examining what we think man will become. 
In the field of  architecture such an examination 
necessitates considering both what and for whom 
we will be building in the decades to come. Since 
the expansion of  information and communication 
technologies in the beginning of  the 1990s, the 
most forward-thinking architects have been 
asking these very questions. More specifically, 
digital architects have been among the first in the 
field, if  not the first, to become interested in the 
effects of  technological advancements not only on 
architectural design and the built environment of  
the future, but also on society as a whole and on 
our physical, psychological, and cultural evolution. 
Thus they have constructed future world visions 
often impregnated with post-humanist and trans-
humanist currents of  thought.

These future world visions are valuable 
resources in our quest to grasp and understand 
the contemporary conception of  mankind and 
of  mankind’s possible futures. Through such 
commentary this paper aims to show how digital 
architects have been imagining mankind’s future 
from the 1990s to the present. It will attempt to 
shed light upon our current state of  evolution 
and its expected outcomes, regarding especially 
how we relate to the natural and to the artificial. 

we can 
no longer 

ask ‘what 
is man?’ 

without 
examining 

what 
we think 
man will 

become

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

78

R
ou

ss
el

These relationships have already been profoundly transformed by new 
technologies and they will be transformed more and more. From the 
possibility of  new modes of  being made possible by cyberspace, which 
architects dreamed of  during the 1990s, to the fantasy of  a world populated 
by a new bio-mechanic species of  life and truly living buildings, the 
statement made by the artist Roy Ascott that “[w]e are only interested in 
what can be made of  ourselves, not what made us” takes its full meaning.1

Cyberspace: The Possibility of New Modes of Being

The digital turn in architecture occurred at the beginning of  the 
1990s as a result of  the democratization of  personal computers.2 It was 
contemporaneous with the development of  the Internet and virtual reality 
technologies, leading, during the course of  that decade, to the theorization 
of  cyberspace.

The cyberpunk author William Gibson, who popularized the term 
“cyberspace,” described it as “[a] consensual hallucination experienced 
daily by billions of  legitimate operators, in every nation” and “[a] graphic 
representation of  data abstracted from the banks of  every computer in 
the human system.”3 Born around the beginning of  the 1980s in science 
fiction literature, it was depicted as a new level of  reality, an entirely new 
space of  living, but an immaterial one which existed in addition to our 
physical one and was produced by the global interconnection of  computers 
from all over the world. In fact, during all the 1990s, cyberspace provided 
a basis for reflection on the topic of  the transformation of  space under 
pressure of  the ICT (Information and communications technology) and 
of  the hybridization of  virtual and physical spaces. Moreover, it nourished 
a new imagination related to a likely transformation of  mankind itself  as a 
result of  these virtualization processes.

In the fields of  architectural and urban theory, a number of  research 
papers and publications emerged in this decade. Cyberspace: First Steps by 
Michael Benedikt (1991),4 Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte (1995),5 
and City of  Bits by William Mitchell (1996)6 demonstrated the involvement 
and interest of  architects in this emerging digital society and its implications. 
The publication of  the issues of  the Architectural Design review “Architects 
in Cyberspace,” in 19957 and “Architects in Cyberspace II” in 1998,8 
bringing together the contributions of  the so-called “cyber-architects” 
(Marcos Novak, Neil Spiller, John Frazer, Karl Chu, etc.), celebrated the 
“digital turn” in architecture as well as the community of  thought that 
gathered around the topic of  architecture, ICT, and digital architecture.

These works were mostly focused on the issue of  dwelling, seeking 



79

isparchitecture.com

to redefine what it means to inhabit at a time when 
the virtualization of  space was seen as capable 
of  creating a transformation in man. Immersion 
in virtual spaces and, therefore, the mind-body 
problem, were examined with a view to the future 
of  man (individual, subject, or species) and his 
technological hybridization. It is not surprising, 
then, that the Architectural Design issue “Architects in 
Cyberspace” ended with a paper by Stelarc entitled 
“Towards the post-human: From Psycho-body to 
Cyber-system,” in which the artist announced the 
obsolescence of  
the biological body 
and the entry of  the 
human into a post-
evolutionary era.9

C r e a t i n g 
visions of  the world 
to come, reflecting 
on the evolution 
of  mankind and 
society, the “cyber-
architects” flirted 
with trans-humanist 
currents of  thought 
and definitions of  
the post-human. 
D i f f e r e n t i a t i n g 
itself  from 
philosophical-cultural post-humanism and from 
technological post-humanism, trans-humanism 
promotes the enhancement of  human intellectual, 
physical, and psychological capacities through 
techniques such as stem-cell therapy, genetic 
engineering, psycho-pharmacology,  anti-aging 
therapies,  neural interfaces, machines, and other 
mechanical enhancements.10 By taking control of  
the evolutionary process and thus liberating the 
human species from its biological limitations, trans-
humanists aim to attain a post-human existence 
whose visions range from the post-human as a 

figure 1: trans-vitruvian man



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

80

R
ou

ss
el

cybernetic organism; a digital, disembodied entity; to even a new biological 
species.11 In the process, the definition of  the human would evolve, 
perhaps in unpredictable ways.

Most of  the digital architects believed that the emergence of  cyberspace 
would truly transcend everything we know.12 “What would architecture be 
in this sphere of  virtuality?” asked Karl Chu in 1995, before answering: 
“No one knows for sure, however one thing is certain, traditional 
conceptions of  territory, of  dwelling, of  identity, of  the phenomenology 
of  existence and being will no longer be the same.”13 Thought as a true 
phenomenological, perceptual, and phenomenal environment, cyberspace 
opened the possibility of  new modes of  being, and even of, in Michael 
Benedikt’s words, “another venue for consciousness itself.”14 

Marcos Novak, pioneer of  virtual reality and algorithmic architectural 
conception, exemplified this idea with a virtual environment called 
“Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Worlds in Progress” (1991-1994) in 
which performers were compared to mystic Sufis in trance, immersed 
in a vision, an inner journey, exploring the meanderings of  the human 
mind. Generated from musical algorithms and L-Systems (a formal 
and generative grammar used to model and simulate growth in plants), 
this environment was made up of  an increasing number of  chambers 
interconnected on the rhizome model, without any narrative hierarchy or  
determined development, and without beginning or end, thus leading to 
ways of  being in space totally different from what we experience daily.15

For the British artist Roy Ascott, in the same spirit, cyberspace-
induced transformations in the concept of  inhabiting were considered so 
important that architecture needed to be fully rethought and urban strategy 
to be re-conceptualized.16 In fact, according to Ascott, new perceptual and 
cognitive abilities should have emerged from our relation to information 
and communication technologies, expanding our sensory apparatus and 
connecting our individual bodies. The ability to be both here and there 
at the same time, which cyberspace should have permitted, should have 
enabled new ways of  thinking and perceiving. The “post-biological faculty 
of  cyberception,” as called by Ascott, should have constituted a true 
“qualitative change in our being.” He claims, moreover, that: 

[n]ot only are we changing radically, body and mind, but we are becoming actively 
involved in our own transformation. […] Our consciousness allows us the fuzzy 
edge on identity, hovering between the inside and the outside of  every possible 
definition of  what it is to be a human being. We are all interface. We are comput-
er-mediated and computer-enhanced.17

By the late 1990s, it was conceded that what cyberspace architects 



81

isparchitecture.com

had dreamed of  was nothing but a fantasy. The 
inspiring word “cyberspace” became a synonym 
for the more prosaic Internet, making it clear 
that there was no distinct virtual space separated 
from our physical one. It was also conceded that 
what happened in the electronic space of  data and 
information networks in fact happened in our daily 
space, now hybridized by virtual technologies. Even 
William Gibson recognized that “[c]yberspace, not 
so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited 
periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical 
world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself  
inside out. Colonized the physical.”18

The installation “Trans-ports” presented at the 
Venice Architecture Biennial 2000 by the Dutch 
artists Kas Oosterhuis and Ilona Lénárd, founders 
of  the ONL Agency, is a striking example of  this 
merging. Trans-ports was an experiment in data-
driven architecture: its structure was thought 
as reconfigurable in real-time in actual space as 
Internet users manipulated its online 3D model. 
Concomitantly, data collected in the physical space 
would also modify the structure, this modification 
being reverberated online, changing the 3D model. 
Then the connectedness and interdependence 
between physical and virtual spaces would be made 
obvious. Moreover, the “Trans-ports” inner skin 
was designed as a giant and continuous screen 
projecting information from websites or webcams, 
completely immersing visitors in data. This inner 
skin is conceptually very close to the hyper-
surface architecture theory developed by Stephen 
Perrella during the 1990s, where architecture was 
conceptualized as a media surface melting the 
virtual and the built environment into a single 
hybrid space.

Even if  the fantasy of  cyberspace had vanished, 
the insights developed by Roy Ascott remained 
deeply relevant. Beyond the traditional natural-
artificial debate thenceforth thought as obsolete, 

William 
Gibson 

recognized 
that 

Cyberspace 
has everted. 

Turned itself 
inside out. 

Colonized the 
physical

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

82

R
ou

ss
el

what persisted was the idea of  an intentionally and technologically 
directed self-transformation of  humankind; and this some years before 
the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk wrote two essays on that very 
same proposition respectively entitled Rules for The Human Zoo19 and The 
Domestication of  Being.20 According to Sloterdijk, anthropogenesis is the result 
of  anthropotechnics: human beings produce their own identity by means 
of  technics (technological techniques). Neither technics nor technology 
would be “against” man: we would not be dealing with dehumanization by 
technology. On the contrary, such self-transformation would fully be part 
of  a greater, and genuine, effort to strive for a better humanity.

The architect Rachel Armstrong expressed a very similar idea in 1998. 
She stated that “all mechanised individuals, regardless of  their degree 
of  integration with technology, remain fundamentally human.[...] This 
transformation of  the body is not an artificial process; on the contrary, it 
is a natural extension of  our humanness. Our species has elevated itself  
on the Earth by its capacity to use machines, not by its innate genetic 
programming.”21 Yet, due to, for example, the emergence of  new species 
of  life, be they digital, mechanical, or bio-mechanical, the place of  man on 
the earth could well change faster than we expect, and in such a radical way 
that it could lead to the extinction of  humankind itself.

Toward New Species of Life: Toward the Death of Mankind?  
In 2002 Kas Oosterhuis declared that, “[d]igital life may well assimilate 

us completely in the end, so that we no longer need to pretend that we 
are the be-all and end-all of  evolution.”22 This architect, clearly, shared 
a theory of  personality like that of  Vernor Vinge or Ray Kurzweil, who 
popularized the hypothesis of  ‘singularity.’ Singularity is the idea that we 
are at the dawn of  a ‘technological leap’ determined by the exponential 
growth of  computer power that will result in the emergence of  artificial 
super-intelligences. Proponents of  singularity believe that, at some point, 
progress will be the accomplishment of  these artificial intelligences only, 
with humanity becoming obsolete. In the same way, we would no longer 
be in charge of  our own future: the super-intelligences would decide for 
us; choosing to annihilate us, absorb us, or let us live as they saw fit.

This technological post-humanist concept of  the post-human is quite 
different from that of  trans-humanism or from that of  philosophical-
cultural post-humanism. In fact, whereas trans-humanism embraced 
the project of  creating radically enhanced humanity, and whereas in 
philosophical-cultural post-humanism the concept of  the post-human 
serves as a basis for a new narrative that would not engage “the literal 



83

isparchitecture.com

end of  man but the end of  a particular image of  
us,”23 technological post-humanism envisions 
the very disappearance of  the human species. Its 
project, therefore, is not concerned with the human 
but with the production of  an artificial alterity that 
would not only be no longer human but would in 
fact supersede us, leading to a completely post-
anthropocentric, non-human world.

Karl Chu does not explicitly embrace that 
singularity idea, but his future world vision seems 
close to that of  technological post-humanism. Since 
the late 1990s he has been announcing the advent 
of  a post-human era which he has termed the 
‘hyperzoïc era’. This hyperzoïc era, a “Brave New 
World more fantastic and hyperbolic than anything 
we have seen in the history of  human civilization,”24 
would be not unlike the Cambrian era—an 
explosion of  diversification and complexity. It 
would be characterized by “the profusion of  a new 
type of  life; the Artificial Life of  abstract machines 
and architecture, which will be reflected in a new 
type of  bionic economy of  the mecanosphere, 
coinciding with the biosphere.”25

He reiterated the same ideas in 2004:

Finally, with the convergence of  computation and 
biogenetics, the world is now moving into the so-called 
Post-Human Era, which will bring forth a new kind 
of  bio-machinic mutation of  organic and inorganic 
substances. […] It is only a matter of  time before the 
world will witness biomachinic mutation of  species 
proliferating into every facet of  what so far has been 
the cultural landscape of  humanity. Architects take 
note: this is the beginning of  the demise, if  not the 
displacement, of  the reign of  anthropology, which has 
always subsumed architecture. […] The potential 
emancipation of  architecture from anthropology is 
already affording us to think for the first time of  a 
new kind of  xenoarchitecture with its own autonomy 
and will to being.26

The emphasis put on the possibility of  creating 

the world 
is now 

moving 
into the 

so-called 
Post-Human 

Era

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

84

R
ou

ss
el

new species of  architectural life (that is, living buildings) from scratch, 
through the use of  genetic engineering and synthetic biology, is very 
interesting. Even more interesting is the idea that, in the same way, 
architecture, which, according to Chu, “has always been a subset 
of  anthropology,” “especially from the standpoint of  its mythical 
inception,”27 would no longer be subsumed by anthropology. This idea 
is not, however, developed further and nothing is said about what could 
become of  human beings in this new environment, except that it “may 
lead to conditions that are so precarious and treacherous as to even 
threaten the future viability of  the species, Homo sapiens, on Earth.”28

While also largely adhering to a post-anthropocentric trans-humanist 
view, Marcos Novak’s reflection on these issues is more intriguing. 
According to Novak, we would become alien. In 1998, referencing 
Nietzsche, he wrote that if  the project of  modernity might be characterized 
by the desire to build the super-man, our (post-modern) time would in 
turn be characterized by the desire to build what he calls “the alien.”29  In 
2002 he stated, again referencing Nietzsche and the end of  theo-centrism, 
that the production of  the alien, encompassing all aspects and areas of  our 
reality, would lead to the death of  mankind. “Allocentrism” would then 
replace anthropocentrism, undermining the traditional definition of  the 
human.30 “The death of  mankind” is not intended, however, to suggest 
some sort of  “literal, alarmist, and paranoid apocalyptic fear.” It implies, 
rather, that mankind is an ongoing project,31 and that this ongoing project, 
according to the architect, would tend toward the alien.

This idea can be linked, first, to what the French philosopher Michel 
Foucault claimed in The Order of  Things: that is to say that “man is an 
invention of  recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.”32 “Man is 
[…] a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, 
and […] he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered 
a new form.”33 Thus, to say that mankind is an ongoing project tending 
toward the alien is to say that our understanding of  what is mankind, our 
conception of  man, is shifting. Secondly, in order to understand what it 
means to become alien, the whole conceptual landscape of  Marcos Novak 
needs to be examined, beginning with its central notion of  ‘transmodernity.’

Developed in the middle of  the 1990s, ‘transmodernity’ refers to 
the idea that our era is characterized by all that the prefix ‘trans-’ entails: 
‘beyond,’ ‘across,’ ‘through,’ ‘so as to change.’ Under the pressure of  
new technologies and hybridization of  virtual and actual spaces, all the 
traditional taxonomies (dead/alive, natural/artificial, human/non-human, 
etc.) would be erased, giving birth to new conditions, new situations, 



85

isparchitecture.com

new events, new bodies, and new identities. Thus, 
the main effect of  transmodernity would be the 
“production of  the alien.” To sum up, our world 
would become stranger and stranger, and so would 
we: “[t]his is no surprise: transmodernity is about 
becoming: becoming alien.”34

In “Speciation, Transvergence, Allogenesis: 
Notes on the Production of  the Alien,” Novak 
stated that if  in the past our interest has been 
focused on evolution as a continuous process 
of  adaptation (relying on such concepts as 
fitness), today it is diversity and the discontinuous 
mechanisms of  speciation which might retain our 
attention. Drawing an analogy with biological 
processes (an analogy which requires, however, 
further explanation), Novak claims that: 

[t]o say that we are a transmodern culture is thus to say 
that we have placed ourselves into a period of  rapid and 
intentional cladogenesis. To say that transmodernity is 
characterised by the production of  the alien is to say 
that our cladogenesis is directed towards what I term 
allogenesis.35

Big Bang 2.0: Building a Brave New World? 

‘Cladogenesis’ refers to a mode of  evolution by 
branching, in which a parent species splits into two 
distinct species, the new species then being fed by 
the same genetic material as the one from which 
it originated. The neologism ‘allogenesis’ refers to 
the emergence of  new species from every available 
material—genetic, epigenetic, or even non-genetic. 
Allogenetic processes are more discontinuous 
than cladogenetic and can lead to the emergence 
of  “alien” species. This does not, however, mean 
that we would be dealing with a radical rupture but 
rather that the continuous movement of  becoming, 
now incorporating new technologies, would direct 
mankind towards exceptionally rapid changes.

Although intentionally and technologically 



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

86

R
ou

ss
el

initiated by human design, allogenesis might result in beings which would 
be impossible to predict. It would moreover concern not only mankind 
but also the production of  other species. As Novak announced in 2008:

Established species were once mutant. There is a deep relationship between how 
the new is conceived, produced, introduced, and established in nature and how 
the new emerges in culture […] we have finally developed tools powerful enough 
not only to represent or describe the processes of  development and speciation by 
which the new enters the world, but to simulate them, and then, beyond that, 
to actually embody them. We will not stop at simulating the evolution and 
mechanisms of  life; we aim to manufacture new species of  life itself.36

Novak’s discourse is very similar to that of  Karl Chu. Novak and Chu 
in fact worked on similar projects that involved the growing of  truly 
living buildings. One example of  this ‘alloarchitecture’ (Novak’s term) 
is the project “AlloBio” (2001-2004), which is defined as an anticipation 
of  the convergence of  the virtual and the actual, the psychological and 
the cybernetical, the architectural and the biological. It may be one of  
the first examples of  what Neil Spiller calls ‘post-digital architecture’: not 
architecture without any digital component, but a synthesis between the 
virtual, the actual, the biological, the cyborgian, the augmented, and the 
mixed.37 “AlloBio” was described as the first specimen of  a hybrid singular 
species, an ‘allo-living’ creature at the intersection of  architecture and 
biotechnology. “AlloBio” might pave the way for buildings which would 
no longer be manufactured but would grow as plants or animals grow 
and would couple the virtual and the actual within reflexive and evolving 
spaces, fed both by data from computer networks and from events taking 
place in physical space. 
AlloBio might be said to have an awareness, a consciousness, and an 
intentionality of  its own. As truly intelligent architecture, 

[it] would have evolving personalit[y] that wouldn’t just behave differently in re-
sponse to our behavior, but would also change and strive to change us. We would 
not command [it]; rather we would be in dialogue with [it]. Sometimes we would 
persuade [it] to do as we wish; sometimes [it] would persuade us. 

This statement is indicative of  the desire to establish more respectful re-
lationships with our environment, beginning with our buildings. Beyond 
the ecological imperative which guides architects such as Dennis Dol-
lens, Michael Hensel, Rachel Armstrong, and Alberto T. Estévez,38 there 
appears to be a desire to create a new world, which is not only our own 
making but also a product of  an ongoing dialogue with these kinds of  

alien architectures.



87

isparchitecture.com

The idea that it might be possible to create a 
new world, or that a new world might be about to 
emerge thanks to biotechnology, nanotechnology, 
cognitive science, and informatics, is not unique to 
Chu and Novak. It is also shared by Roy Ascott. 
According to Ascott a new Big ‘B.A.N.G.’ would 
result from the convergence of  bits, atoms, neurons, 
and genes, hybridizing the dry silicon digital domain 
of  computers and the wet biological world of  living 
systems. The birth of  this new world might be so 
transformative that human identity itself  might be 
pushed to a much more complex level. For Ascott 
the questions “[w]hat is to be human?” and “how 
do we deal with the responsibility of  redefining 
nature and life itself ?”39 emerge as key questions 
for our era. Both are of  equal importance and 
are deserving of  being treated urgently both in 
scientific and in artistic fields.

As Ascott wrote: “The artificial is now part of  
our nature, and nature is in large part artificial.”40 
Moreover: “In as much as we are a part of  nature, 
we wish now to be consciously involved in its 
co-evolution, which is to say in our own self-
definition and reconstruction.”41 The fact that 
the questions “what is it to be human?” “what 
will man become?” and “what do we want nature 
to become?” were addressed jointly merits some 
attention. Now, more than ten years after the 
publication of  Ascott’s paper, it is possible to create 
new species of  life almost from scratch with the help 
of  what are called ‘living technologies’ (synthetic 
biology, genetic engineering, etc.).42 Through these 
technologies nature is in fact compelled to adapt to 
mankind: “technology, often depicted as the enemy 
of  nature, will bring us closer to it, but it will be a 
nature entirely re-described, and re-aligned to our 
post-biological sensibilities.”43 Even in the context 
of  ecological crisis, nature is seen as something to 
enhance so that it can continue to meet our needs.

Between 2003 and 2014 the Genetic 

The 
artificial is 

now part of 
our nature, 

and nature is 
in large part 

artificial 

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

88

R
ou

ss
el

Architectures Research Group (which includes Alberto T. Estévez, 
Dennis Dollens, and Karl Chu) developed bioluminescent lemon trees 
which could be used for street lighting by implanting in their cells genes 
extracted from jellyfish which produce a fluorescent protein (GFP). 
Between 2007 and 2010 the same Genetic Architectures Research Group 
led experiments to develop living tissue and cell masses as a building 
material, allowing living walls to be constructed autonomously, or rather 
to grow on their own. This latter project is quite similar to that of  the New 
York architecture firm Terreform One named “In Vitro Meat Habitat” 
(2008), which is a prototype of  organic architectural skin made of  pig cells 
via 3D printing. In 2015 the American-Israeli architect and designer Neri 
Oxman presented “Mushtari”, a life-support system made for intergalactic 
travelers and consisting of  a prosthetic organ filled with synthetically 
modified micro-organisms. Pointing out that the two bacteria at work in 
this project never meet in the wild, she said: “Think of  it as evolution not 
by natural selection, but evolution by design.”44

This statement is representative of  the way living species are 
instrumentalized. No matter how important the ethical and philosophical 
questions raised by the possibility of  engineering life may be, architects 
such as Amstrong, Estévez, Oxman, and Michael Hensel do not seem 
to be eager to develop critical reflection on their practices. Similarly, 
however ‘alive’ buildings might become, they would not become free from 
subservience to human beings. Significantly, in her book Living Architecture: 
How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities and Reshape Our Lives, Rachel 
Armstrong asked: “Perhaps our homes could care for us, come to our 
rescue, or even love us?”45 In other words the end of  anthropocentrism 
which Karl Chu announced has not yet come. As, as it would seem, our 
human mindset is not changing, there would seem to be little possibility 
that we could in fact build a better world.

Conclusion

During the last thirty years avant-garde architects have been working 
on what and for whom they will build in future decades. During the 
1990s architects dreamed of  a totally artificial and immaterial world. Thus 
freed from terrestrial anchorage, enabled to become pure information, 
mankind would have become post-human, as post-biological beings in a 
computer simulation run by machines (undeniably like the fantasy world 
of  The Matrix).46 During the 2000s it was realized that this would not be 
so. The exponential growth of  technologies, new and old, was making 
everything we know—the artificial, the natural, or the hybridized—more 



89

isparchitecture.com

and more complex. Our gaze therefore turned to 
the biological realm as the place where we might 
create new forms of  biomachinic life, questioning 
and subverting our relationships to the world, to 
nature, and to ourselves. During the 2000s, however, 
we were not able to produce these new forms of  
life, and Marcos Novak’s “AlloBio” building, for 
example, remained but an imaginary architecture.

As, however, science and technology improve, 
it may yet be possible to re-engineer the biology of  
the whole of  nature and to build a ‘Nature 2.0.’ It 
would, then, be time to ask important questions—
those very same questions which architects have 
always pondered. What kind of  world do we want to 
live in? What kind of  relationship with nature do we 
want to have? What pathway do we want to follow 
concerning our own evolution? A new paradigm 
is needed, as Chu suggested, for our role as active 
agents in the transformation of  our environments 
and, indeed, of  our universe at large.47 Such as 
new paradigm is necessary for at least two reasons: 
firstly, because those who are currently shaping 
the new world often fail to take stock of  their 
responsibilities, and, secondly (and perhaps more 
importantly), as pointed out by Roy Ascott, because 
what we will do to our environments is part of  the 
definition of  what we will ourselves become. While 
much seems unclear, one thing at least is certain: 
the way we will transform nature will influence our 
own evolution. 

Endnotes

[1] Roy Ascott, “The Architecture of  
Cyberperception,” Architectural Design 65, no.11/12 
(1995): 38.

[2] It must be acknowledged that if  the 
democratization of  the personal computer was the 
condition for the possibility of  the digital turn—
this democratization permitting every architect and 

While much 
seems unclear, 

one thing at 
least is certain: 

the way we 
will transform 

nature will           
influence our   

own evolution 

“

”



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

90

R
ou

ss
el

every architecture firm to have a computer—the digital turn would of  
course never have happened without the development of  3D modeling 
software that allowed architects and firms to design forms on screen 
that would be impossible to hand draw, even making it possible to add 
a temporal dimension to the design. See Antoine Picon, Digital Culture in 
Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Professions (Basel: Birkhauser, 2010); 
and Mario Carpo, ed., The Digital Turn in Architecture 1992-2012 (London: 
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2013).

[3] William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1986), 51. 

[4] Michael Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge: The MIT 
Press, 1992).

[5] Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

[6] William Mitchell, City of  Bits (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996).

[7] Architectural Design 65, no.11/12 (1995).

[8] Architectural Design 68, no.11/12 (1998).

[9] Stelarc, “Towards the Post-Human. From Psycho-body to Cyber-
system,” Architectural Design 65, no.11/12 (1995): 90-96.

[10] Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Transhumanism as a Secularist Faith,” 
Zygon 47, no.4 (2012): 716-717.

[11] Robert Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, “Introducing Post- and 
Transhumanism,” in Post- and Transhumanism: An Introduction, eds. Robert 
Ranisch and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 7-8.

[12] According to John Frazer, however, cyberspace was not the cause but 
the symptom of  this profound transformation: “The parallel world of  
cyberspace […] is just one manifestation of  deep cultural and technical 
changes which are reshaping our understanding of  our world,” he wrote 
in 1995, stressing that this paradigm shift is characterized by “the shift of  
perception from an universe of  objects to one of  relationships.” See John 
Frazer, “The Architectural Relevance of  Cyberspace,” Architectural Design 
65, no.11/12, (1995): 76.

[13] Karl Chu, “Modal space: The Virtual Anatomy of  Hyperstructures,” 
Architectural Design 65, no.11/12, (1995): 69.

[14] Michael Benedikt, “Cyberspace: Some Proposals,” in Cyberspace: First 
Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 124.

[15] Marcos Novak, “Dancing with the Virtual Dervish: Worlds in 
Progress,” in Immersed in technology, art and virtual environments, eds. Marie 
Anne Moser and Douglas MacLeod (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 
303-308.



91

isparchitecture.com

[16] Ascott, “The Architecture of  Cyberperception,” 40.

[17] Ibid. 38.

[18] William Gibson, “Google’s Earth,” New York Times (New York, 
NY), August 31, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/
opinion/01gibson/html?scp=1&sq=william+gibson&st=nyt. 

[19] Peter Sloterdijk, “Rules for The Human Zoo: A Response to the 
Letter on Humanism,” trans. Mary Varney Rorty, Society and Space 27 
(2009): 12-28.

[20] Peter Sloterdijk, Die Domestikation des Seins. Für eine Verdeutlichung der 
Lichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000).

[21] Rachel Armstrong, “Body Machine,” AD Architectural Design 68, 
no.11/12 (1998): 92.

[22] Kas Oosterhuis, “Yes, We Build Spaceships,” in Architecture Goes Wild 
(Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002), 30-37.

[23] Ihab Hassan, “Prometheus as Performer: Towards a Posthumanist 
Culture?,” The Georgia Review 31, no.4 (1977): 845.

[24]Karl Chu, “The Turing Dimension,” Archilab, published 2000, accessed 
October 20, 2016, http://www.archilab.org/public/2000/catalog/
xkavya/xkavyaen.htm.

[25] Karl Chu, “X Phylum,” Domus 822 (2000): 42-45.

[26] Karl Chu, “Metaphysics of  Genetic Architecture and Computation,” 
Perspecta 35 (2004): 78.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid. 76.

[29] Marcos Novak, “Alien Space: The Shock of  The View,” CIRCA Art 
+ Technology Supplement 90 (1998): 12-13.

[30] See Marcos Novak, “Speciation, Transvergence, Allogenesis: Notes 
on the Production of  the Alien,” AD Architectural Design 72, no.3 (2002): 
66. Novak writes:

Renaissance humanism, the anthropocentric production of  the philosophical 
notion of  Man, followed an era preoccupied with the theocentric production of  the 
philosophical notion of  God. The birth of  Man eventually led to the collapse of  
theocentrism, which Nietzsche characterised as the ‘Death of  God’, thus, I suggest, 
beginning a series: the production of  God (PoG) is followed by the production 
of  Man (PoM); the production of  Man leads to the death of  God (DoG); the 
production of  Man is followed by the production of  the Alien (PoA), which, in 
turn leads to the death of  Man (DoM). […]



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

92

R
ou

ss
el

In other words, centrifugal allocentrism is now displacing anthropocentrism, just 
as anthropocentrism displaced theocentrism, with the alien taking the place of  the 
Nietzschean overman, and extending itself  past all human limits to encompass all 
aspects of  our constructed reality.

[31] Ibid. 67.

[32] Michel Foucault, The Order of  Things: An Archaeology of  the Human 
Sciences (New York: Routledge, 2002), 422.

[33] Ibid. xxv.

[34] Marcos Novak, “Transarchitectures and Hypersurfaces, Operations 
of  Transmodernity,” Architectural Design 68, no.5/6 (1998): 85.

[35] Novak, “Speciation, Transvergence, Allogenesis,” 67.

[36] Marcos Novak, “Alien Beauty: Immanent Design. AlloAtomic 
Transarchitectures for Automutant (Allo)Selves,” in Manufacturing – Share 
Festival 2008, ed. Bruce Sterling (Turino: Share Festival, 2008), 143.

[37] Neil Spiller, “Plectic Architecture: Towards a Theory of  the Post-
Digital in Architecture,” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of  Speculative Research 7, 
no. 2 (2009): 95-104.

[38] Marcos Novak, interview by Alessandro Ludovico, Neural, published 
April 2001, accessed October 20, 2016, http://www.neural.it/english/
marcosnovak.htm.

[39] For all of  them, the artificial life of  architecture may be one of  
the answers to the ecological crisis. On that matter, see Denis Dollens, 
“Architecture as Nature: A Biodigital Hypothesis,” Leonardo 42, no.5 
(2009): 412–420; Alberto T. Estévez, “Genetic Architecture: New 
Ecologic-Environmental Architectural Design & New Cybernetic-Digital 
Architectural Design,” in Genetic architectures, ed. Alberto T. Estévez (Santa 
Fe: Lumen Books; Barcelona: SITES Books/Escola Tecnica Superior 
d’Arquitectura, 2003), 4-19; Rachel Armstrong, Living Architecture: How 
Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities and Reshape Our Lives (New York: 
TED Books, 2012); Michael Hensel, “(Synthetic) Life Architectures: 
Ramifications and Potentials of  a Literal Biological Paradigm for 
Architectural Design,” Architectural Design 76 no.2 (2006): 18–25.

[40] Roy Ascott, “Moistmedia, Technoetics and the Three VRs,” 
ISEA2000, published 2000, accessed October 27, 2016, http://www.
isea2000.com/actes_doc/01_ascott.rtf.

[41] Ibid.

[42] See Mark A. Bedau, John S. McCaskill, Norman H. Packard, and 
Steen Rasmussen, “Living Technology: Exploiting Life’s Principles in 



93

isparchitecture.com

Technology,” Artificial Life 16, no.1 (2010): 89-97.

[43] Ascott, “Moistmedia, Technoetics and the Three VRs.”

[44] Neri Oxman, “Design at the Intersection of  Technology and Biology” 
(presentation, TED2015, Vancouver, Canada, March 2015), accessed 
March 09, 2016, https://www.ted.com/talks/neri_oxman_design_at_
the_intersection_of_technology_and_biology?language=en.

[45] Armstrong, Living Architecture.

[46] The Matrix, directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski (Burbank, CA : 
Warner Bros, 1999), DVD.

[47] Chu, “The Turing Dimension.”



isparchitecture.com

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
SIR Roger Scruton is a writer and philosopher and a fellow at the Ethics and Public 
Policy Center in Washington

Karsten Harries is Professor of  Philosophy at Yale University and has been chair of  
the Department of  Philosophy.

Pau Pedragosa is Philosopher and Architect and Professor of  Theory and History 
of  Architecture at the School of  Architecture at the Polytechnique University of  
Catalonia

Mari Hvattum is Professor of  Architectural History and Theory at the Oslo School 
of  Architecture and Design

Henry Dicks is Teaching Fellow in Philosophy at University Jean Moulin Lyon 3

Marion Roussel is an Architect and a Research Associate in the lab Body Technics 
and Body Issues at the Paris Descartes University.

IMAGE CREDITS
Cover: drawing is taken from Jacques-Francois Blondel, Cours d´Architecture (1771)

“Building Thinking Asking”
Images of panel discussion: Bamberg University 

“Presence or Meaning in Architecture” 
Figure 1: Bauhaus image courtesy shutterstock.com 
Figure 2: Place Léon Aucoc image courtesy A. Lacaton and J-Ph. Vassal

“On Durability” 
Figure 1: The picture of old Mostar bridge was published under: https://com-
mons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mostar_bridge_approximately_1970-1980.jpg
Figure 2: section of norwegian farmhouse was taken from Eilert Sundt, Om 
Bygnings-Skikken paa Landet i Norge (Christiania: Malling, 1862).

“From anthropomimetic to Biomimetic Cities”
Figure 1: The picture is in the public domain and was published under: https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_view_of_Savannah_as_it_stood_
the_29th_of_March_1734.jpg

“Towards a Post-Human Era?”
Figure 1: Image of Vitruvian man, Janeb 13 / Pixabay

All other images by Tom Spector



AP . vol 3 . No 1 . 2017

Architecture Philosophy conducts double-blind reviews of  all papers submitted. Each 
paper is reviewed by one philosophy expert and one architecture expert. Reviewers 
are members of  the editorial board and are asked to evaluate submissions according 
to the following criteria:

Appropriateness to the field of architecture philosophy
Does the paper acknowledge and/or build on existing scholarship in both 
architecture and philosophy?
Does the paper acknowledge existing scholarship in philosophy and architecture 
respectively?

Philosophical analysis
Is philosophy engaged directly?
Is there an argument?
Is there analysis of  the claims made?
Is the logic of  the argument presented explicitly?
Are the paper’s arguments valid and sound?

Architectural analysis
Is architecture engaged directly?
Is architecture’s relevant history/contemporary situation acknowledged?
Is architecture’s history/contemporary situation dealt with accurately?

Originality
Is this paper a contribution to knowledge?
Does the paper present new ways of  solving philosophical problems 
in architecture (philosophy) or does it engage architecture to illustrate 
philosophical problems?
Does the paper present new ways of  engaging architecture and the built 
environment?

Presentation
Is the paper written in English to general academic writing standards for the 
humanities?
Does the paper follow the journal’s submission guidelines?

review criteria



isparchitecture.com

Please direct all submissions and general inquiries to isparchitecture@gmail.com. 
There are no deadlines for submissions, unless otherwise announced (e.g. special 
issue, conference proceedings, etc.).

submission Types
Authors are invited to submit full papers, response pieces, and book reviews. Full 
papers should be between 4,000 and 5,000 words with a 200-300 word abstract, 
response pieces should be between 500 and 1,500 words, and book reviews between 
1,000 to 2,000 words.

General Formatting
All submissions should be presented in accordance with the University of  Chicago 
Style. Papers should be RTF documents, 12 point font, Times New Roman, double-
spaced, and with no additional or otherwise unique formatting. References should 
be manually placed in brackets (e.g. [1], [2], and so on) with full citation information 
placed in the references section at the end of  the document.

Photo Guidelines and Image Permissions
Images should be at least 300 dpi and read well in greyscale prints. The images should 
be submitted as individual files (TIFF or JPEG), in combination with proof  of  
copyright permission. Authors are responsible for obtaining image permissions, and 
are asked to have done so prior to submitting their papers for review. The Oklahoma 
State University image archive is also available for use. Please send inquiries about the 
OSU image holdings to Prof. Tom Spector at tom.spector@okstate.edu.

The papers published by Architecture Philosophy are protected by copyright. The 
content must not have been previously published and cannot be republished without 
the permission of  the journal’s copyright holder. The copyright holder is Oklahoma 
State University.

Authors are responsible for obtaining copyright permission for the use of  images 
in their papers. Original images created by the author are acceptable, and copyright 
access to the Oklahoma State University image archive is available to the journal and 
its authors. In most cases, authors will be seeking image permissions and are asked 
secure image permissions on their own before submitting their paper for review.

submission guidelines


	0-Front Matter
	1-Editorial
	2-Harries and Scruton
	3-Pedragosa
	4-Hvattum
	5-Dicks
	6- Roussel 
	7-Back Matter

