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Ut Architectura Philosophia?
Questioning the Relationship of 
Architecture and Philosophy
 

Karsten  Harries

1 

This conference has been organized by the 
International Society for the Philosophy of  Architecture. 
Our topic is “The Human in Architecture and 
Philosophy.” It raises the question: just what is the 
relationship between philosophy and architecture? 
What do they have to contribute to each other? What 
does architecture have to contribute to philosophy? 
And what does philosophy have to contribute to 
architecture? I shall return to both questions. That 
both are concerned with the human, with the ways 
human beings relate or should relate to each other 
and to the world that environs them seems obvious 
enough. In that sense both would seem to have an 
ethical significance. And both would seem to engage 
in work of  construction, work that presupposes 
some sort of  space, the space of  everyday life in 
the case of  architecture, a spiritual or logical space 
in the case of  philosophy. Philosophers have thus 
frequently invoked architectural metaphors, have 
liked to speak of  laying foundations, of  raising 
conceptual edifices, of  the architectonics of  some 
philosophical system. Think of  Descartes, who 
likened himself  to an architect, his philosophy 
to a chapel raised on firm foundations. But what 
work do such metaphors really do? Are they not at 
bottom dispensable? 

Yet especially in recent years it has once again 
become fashionable to think the philosopher in the 
image of  the architect, if  now often in a critical 

just 
what is the 

relationship 
between 

philosophy and 
architecture?

“

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key, to think of  him as a would-be builder, someone who seeks to edify. 
The very word “edify” should make us think: once it meant simply to 
raise a dwelling or structure, later it came to mean “to improve morally or 
spiritually” — Kierkegaard thus wrote edifying discourses — but today it 
tends to carry a negative connotation: philosophers should not attempt to 
be edifying. 

That shift in meaning invites attention. The word “edify” thus invites 
us to think about recent attacks on both traditional architecture and system-
building philosophy: What, for example are we to make of  invocations 
of  Georges Bataille’s stance against architecture, where architecture, 
both material and spiritual, stands for an order that by assigning us our 
place threatens to imprison us and should be destroyed, even if  such 
destruction threatens chaos? The kind of  thinking that here makes the 
prison the paradigmatic work of  architecture, a kind of  lens through 
which to look at all architecture, is of  the sort that lets Dostoevsky’s Man 
from the Underground call twice-two-makes-four a piece of  impudence 
and celebrate twice-two-makes-five as the ultimate refuge of  a freedom 
that, resisting placement, dreams of  labyrinth and chaos. Was Nietzsche 
perhaps right to claim that “If  we willed and dared an architecture 
according to the kind of  souls we possess (for that we are too cowardly!) 
the labyrinth would have to be our model”?1 Consider, for example, the 
influential exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture, curated by Mark Wigley 
und Philip Johnson in 1988. The catalogue spoke of  the emergence of  
a new sensibility, fascinated by possibilities of  contaminating, disrupting, 
violating, subverting architecture. That sensibility led to an architecture 
that self-consciously calls traditional architecture into question, that is to 
say, an anti-architecture, which in today’s architecture world, both in theory 
and practice, has played a significant role in the work of  Frank Gehry, 
Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Kohlhaas, and Coop 
Himmelb(l)au, the architects celebrated by that exhibition. Although 
perhaps claiming something like an ethical significance, such attacks on 
architecture as traditionally understood are also attacks on ethics in its 
usual sense, which does seek to edify, i.e. to raise a spiritual architecture 
that would help human beings find their proper place. Freedom resists 
such placement. But should every spiritual architecture that would thus 
place us be challenged? 

What, for example, are we to make of  the vogue enjoyed by the word 
“deconstruction” and all it stands for, the word itself  an architectural 
metaphor of  sorts, embraced not just by philosophers and literary critics, 
but also the name of  an architectural practice that challenged what one had 



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come to expect from architecture, a practice that in 
extreme cases has led to attempts to blur what would 
seem to separate so obviously the philosopher 
from the architect: I am thinking especially, but 
not only, of  Derrida’s collaboration with Bernard 
Tschumi and Peter Eisenman, a collaboration that 
threatened to make of  deconstructive discourse a 
strangely cerebral kind of  architectural ornament. 

But does architecture, taken in its usual sense, 
really belong with ethics in that it, too, has by its 
very nature an ethical function, seeking to help 
orient individuals by providing more than just 
physical shelter, by interpreting their place in the 
world, especially in the community, the polis? Or is 
just this understanding of  architecture as having as 
a central task the representation of  a community’s 
shared values or divinities something that we 
moderns, who in so many ways have left behind the 
ancient polis, should resist as incompatible with the 
world we live in, with the values that inform it, first 
of  all with the value placed on the individual and on 
freedom? That was the charge Mark Lilla directed 
against my The Ethical Function of  Architecture: “It 
never seems to occur to Harries that modern 
society is not re-presented in modern architecture 
for the simple reason that it is un-representable. 
That, indeed, was the point, or at least the result of  
the revolution in modern politics.”2 This criticism 
claims that the ethical function of  architecture, 
as I presented it in that book, lies behind those 
who are truly of  this modern age. And if  such an 
ethical, and this means inevitably also a political 
function, was indeed, as Hegel thought, once part 
of  the very essence of  architecture in what he took 
to be its highest sense, must we who are truly of  
today not resist all such architecture, which, when 
attempts are made to realize it in this modern 
age, invites disaster: think of  the architecture of  
totalitarian governments, say of  the architecture of  
Ludwig Troost, who had been charged by Hitler to 



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transform Munich’s Königsplatz into a worthy setting of  a new national 
cult. The buildings that provided this cult with a stage were then widely 
celebrated as an enormous success, applauded by the party ideologue 
Alfred Rosenberg as “the first attempt to realize the ancient Greek 
ideal” and praised by the architectural critic Wilhelm Lotz for showing 
for the first time in the modern age that “a deeper meaning can dwell in 
a city-square” as long as it has its origin in a spiritual principle and not 
in a desire for aesthetic variety in the built-environment or in a merely 
decorative intention. We should note the rejection of  an architecture that 
would be no more than an aesthetic dressing up of  functional buildings. 
The transformation of  the Königsplatz was supposed to have shown 
that it was still possible to create an architecture that emerges from inner 
principles of  dedication and value instead of  being derived from external 
contingencies of  use.3 Did architecture here not achieve that repetition of  
the Greek in the modern of  which Nietzsche and also Heidegger in The 
Origin of  the World of  Art dreamed? It is more than an historical accident 
that Heidegger first gave this lecture on November 13, 1935, just four days 
before Hitler was to give in Munich a powerful demonstration of  what 
such a repetition of  the Greek in the modern might mean in the 20th 
century.4 This unhappy conjunction needs to be confronted by anyone 
who, drawing on Heidegger, wants to claim, as I do, an ethical function 
for architecture. Has Walter Benjamin not taught us to associate such an 
aestheticized politics with fascism—and with kitsch and bad faith, with 
The Myth of  the Twentieth Century? 

Countering Mark Lilla’s claim that modern society is not re-presented 
in modern architecture because it is un-representable, I want to insist 
that buildings cannot but re-present the ethos presiding over their 
construction. But that ethos all too often invites critique. Despite a stream 
of  mostly positive, but sometimes also critical responses, I have not seen 
a need to change my position in any fundamental way. But circumstances 
have changed; the world has changed, demanding a reconsideration of  
aspects of  some of  the central issues that I neglected. More especially, the 
way we today relate to space has changed and continues to change. Two 
developments here seem to me to be particularly significant. 

One is the way an ever developing technology, and today especially 
the digital revolution, have opened up our everyday existence in ways that 
will continue to change our lives in ways we cannot quite foresee. We are 
open today to the world, to the universe, and to imaginary, virtual spaces 
as never before. This revolution has transformed the way architects do 
their work, but, and even more importantly, it has changed our sense of  



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distance, place, and space, and inseparable from it, 
our way of  life, our sense of  freedom, and that is 
to say also our way of  dwelling, which should have 
consequences for our way of  building. 

The other, in a sense opposite, but perhaps 
even more important way in which our world is 
changing has to do with the way the inevitably 
limited resources provided by this small planet have 
to collide with a still increasing humanity and its ever 
increasing demands for a higher standard of  living. 
Not just air and water, even space is becoming an 
ever scarcer, and all too often contested resource. 
Much that gets built today wastes space in ways that 
I find irresponsible. 

These developments call for a reconsideration 
of  what I had worked out in The Ethical Function of  
Architecture. 

2

Let me return to the suggestion that the 
philosopher and the architect are both builders, 
to be sure, using very different media. Just how is 
the bond between architecture and philosophy to 
be understood? Hence the title of  my lecture with 
its question mark: Ut architectura philosophia? The 
Latin obviously makes reference to the Horatian 
Ut pictura poesis, “as is painting so is poetry.” Poetry 
here is said to be like painting in that it, too, 
represents reality. Painting, to be sure, addresses 
itself  to the eye, relying on visible figures, poetry 
to the ear, relying on words. The Horatian dictum 
was thus famously called into question by Lessing 
in his Laocoon. Lessing insisted on the gulf  that 
separates eye and ear, percept and concept, arts 
of  space and arts of  time. And should the kind 
of  considerations advanced by Lessing not call 
into question even more decisively any attempt to 
obscure what so obviously would seem to separate 

buildings 
cannot but 

re-present the 
ethos presiding 

over their 
construction. 

“

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the architect who deals with matter from the philosopher who works with 
concepts, a distinction self-consciously blurred by some recent writing on 
architecture? Should they not call into question, to give just one example, 
a work such as Mark Wigley’s The Architecture of  Deconstruction: Derrida’s 
Haunt? 5 To be sure, philosophers like Kant or Descartes have liked to 
invoke architectural metaphors, have liked to speak of  laying foundations, 
of  raising conceptual edifices, of  the architectonics of  some philosophical 
system. But, to repeat the question, are such metaphors not at bottom 
dispensable? Or is there indeed a deeper bond between the two that awaits 
adequate exploration?

The organizers of  this symposium, we are told, were inspired, by two 
observations and two questions:

1) Many architects, contemporary and historical, claim to focus on the 
needs of  human beings. The resulting architecture, however, often 
does not meet the needs and desires of  the people who live there. For 
whom should architecture actually build?

2) Architecture, traditionally, has played a negligible role in our 
philosophical understanding of  human beings (as also for our 
sociological, psychological, and other anthropological analyses). 
Although it has always been generally acknowledged that human 
beings need built dwelling places, more careful analysis of  this need 
is surely necessary. What does it say about human beings that they 
depend upon the buildings they construct for their own habitation?

The first observation points out that architecture often fails to meet 
the needs of  those whom it supposedly serves. It is impossible to disagree 
with that observation. But it raises the obvious question: just what are 
these needs and why should architecture so often have failed to meet 
them? A first, albeit all too reductive answer, is implied by an observation 
made by Adolf  Loos, who, many years ago standing before an Alpine lake-
side villa, thought that an architect who designs such a building ought to 
feel ashamed. Confronted by today’s macmansions, I share his sentiment:

Everything breathes beauty and peace. What’s this then? A false note disturbs 
this peace. Like an unnecessary screech: among the peasants’ houses, which were 
not made by them but by god, there is a villa. The work of  a good architect, or 
a bad one? I don’t know. I only know that peace, rest, and beauty have fled.

Before god there are neither good nor bad architects. In towns, in the realms of  
Beelzebub, there may be fine distinctions, as there are even in kinds of  crime. 
And I therefore ask: why is it that every architect, whether he is good or bad, 
harms the lake-side? 6



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Hyperbolically, invoking God and the devil, the 
atheist Loos here suggests that it is architecture itself  
that is the problem. His idealized peasant builder 
is thought as so in tune with his environment that 
his buildings have somewhat the same necessity as 
the shelters animals construct to protect themselves 
from an often hostile environment. This allows 
Loos to claim that his peasant houses were made, 
not by his peasants, but by God. They answer to 
and belong to their environment. Such houses 
do not strike us as the work of  some particular 
builder. Satisfying the needs they were meant to 
serve as best they could, they do not mean to be 
works of  art. Precisely that gives them their look 
of  inevitability. With the work of  the architect the 
city is said to invade the countryside, to destroy the 
harmony visible in the peasant houses, a harmony 
today equally visible, Loos thought, in the work 
of  the engineer, who, understanding his task, the 
available means, and the forces of  nature, is not 
concerned to create an aesthetic object.

Loos’ remark suggests that we should draw a 
distinction between the kind of  building that raised 
houses such as those built by his peasants and the 
work of  the engineer, on the one hand, and the 
work of  an architect, on the other. It is of  course 
possible to use the word architecture, as I have 
done so far in this lecture, in so broad a sense that it 
names simply the craft of  building, where building 
would cover a vast range of  different structures 
and approaches. The title of  this conference would 
seem to do so. But the distinction between mere 
building and architecture does seem to have an 
obvious sense. However we finally may want to 
draw it, we have no difficulty making sense of  the 
distinction Loos makes in the quoted passage. His 
peasants, like his engineers, are attuned to the order 
of  nature and thus in harmony with something 
that transcends them. Their buildings reflect this. 
With the work of  the architect, be he good or 



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bad, other concerns enter. The city is said by Loos to invade nature, to 
violate it, where the city would seem to be understood by him here as a 
place of  artificial, unnecessary needs. At issue is the way human beings 
relate to their environment. Architecture, Loos suggests hyperbolically, 
answers to unnatural needs. We are reminded of  the way the Book of  
Genesis opposes the shepherd Abel to the city building Cain. A suspicion 
of  architecture has indeed attended reflections about architecture from 
the very beginning, inevitably tied to thoughts of  a mode of  dwelling 
that had gone astray. Think of  the Tower of  Babel. Behind and buried 
in Loos’s distinction between architecture and building lies the collision 
of  a theocentric and an anthropocentric conception of  proper human 
dwelling, which understood metaphorically, survives the death of  God. 

Related would seem to be the distinction that in that Darmstädter 
Gespräch in which Heidegger delivered his lecture “Building Dwelling 
Thinking” found expression in the collision of  Heidegger’s remarks, 
which bade the assembled architects learn from a Black Forest farmhouse 
of  the 18th century what kind of  building once allowed for an authentic 
dwelling, with those made by Ortega y Gasset. Were those who built 
Heidegger’s farmhouse really at home in their world, content with 
themselves and their world? Was this what Heidegger wanted to say? 
Ortega, at any rate, speaking at the same symposium, did not want to hear 
of  such contentment; and so he called our discontent “the highest thing 
the human being possesses, precisely because it is a discontent, because 
man wants to possess things that he never had.”7 And does this always 
wanting more, this striving for what is higher, not determine our essence? 
Is it not bound up with our reason, which has to assign to everything 
real a place in the logical space of  the possible and thus lets us ever again 
compare what happens to be our life-world with other possible worlds, 
whose temptations and promises seem to render the world to which we 
have become accustomed sadly deficient? Again and again human beings 
have demanded more. Our technology has its origin in such discontent. 
Such discontent bids us create a new world “because, as it is, our world 
does not fit us, because it has made us sick. This new world of  technology 
is like a gigantic orthopedic apparatus, that you [and here Ortega was 
addressing his audience, the architects present] want to create, and all this 
technology has this wonderful, but—as is the case with everything human 
— dramatic movement and quality, to be a fabulous, great orthopedic 
device”8 Is this then how architecture should be understood, as a gigantic 
orthopedic device?

I called the distinction between building and architecture helpful and 



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obvious. But how architecture is to be understood 
here remains in question. Just what is the need 
that architecture, as opposed to mere building, 
addresses? Consider the way Nikolaus Pevsner 
begins his An Outline of  European Architecture with this 
seemingly unproblematic observation: “A bicycle 
shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of  
architecture.” Pevsner interprets this distinction 
for us when he suggests that works of  architecture 
differ from functional buildings in that they are 
“designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.” Most 
works of  architecture are of  course also functional 
buildings. Accepting Pevsner’s distinction we can 
say: Work of  architecture = functional building + 
aesthetic component. On this view it would seem 
to be an aesthetic concern that raises the architect 
above the mere builder, that makes him an artist. 
Works of  architecture, so understood, are buildings 
built to be not just useful, but to have an aesthetic 
appeal. 

Loos suggests that it is precisely this aesthetic 
concern that gets in the way of  good building. 
And since philosophers have tended to discuss 
architecture as one of  the arts and the philosophy 
of  art has evolved as aesthetics, philosophy would 
seem to have contributed to bad building. Consider 
the way the novelist and philosopher William Gass 
praises Peter Eisenman’s House VI because it 
presents itself  to us as a convincing aesthetic object 
that pays no heed to practicality: “Thank God, I 
thought. This house has no concern for me and 
mine, over which it has no rights, but displays in 
every aspect and angle and fall of  light the concern 
for the nature and beauty of  building that is the 
architect’s trust and obligation.”9 Presupposed is 
that the architect’s primary task is that of  creating 
a beautiful object, as opposed to the mere builder 
who is concerned with more practical matters. 

But this opposition of  architecture to building 
raises a host of  questions: what needs does building, 

Loos 
suggests that 

it is precisely 
the aesthetic 
concern that 

gets in the 
way of good 

building. 

“

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so understood, address? There are some obvious answers such as the need 
to provide protection from an often hostile development or a suitable 
frame for certain activities. But do these needs exclude the beauty of  a 
building? What need does beauty address? And just how is beauty, and 
more especially the beauty of  a building to be understood? In opposition 
to the requirements of  everyday dwelling? The distinction between 
building and architecture begins to blur.

This returns us to the first question posed by the organizers of  this 
symposium: for whom does the architect build? What need does or should 
he address?

3

Even a brief  look at some familiar accounts of  the origin of  building, 
such as those of  Vitruvius, Hegel or Corbusier, is sufficient to make us 
question those who would claim that the needs that our building serves are 
so obvious that there is as little need for philosophical reflection as there 
is in the case of  the need for clothing. 

One aspect of  the Vitruvian account of  the origin of  architecture 
especially deserves our attention: when Vitruvius likens his first builders 
in their need for shelter to wild beasts, he also insists on what makes them 
different and he mentions first their “not being obliged to walk with faces 
to the ground, but upright and gazing upon the splendor of  the starry 
firmament.”10 How are we to understand this remark, which links human 
verticality to the firmament? What does the sight of  a splendor that the 
ancients thought essentially inaccessible, a permanent order open only 
to eye and spirit, beyond human reach, what does this vision of  cosmic 
permanence have to do with the origin of  building? 

I want to underscore Vitruvius’ emphasis on the verticality of  human 
being. To be sure, in sleep or death we return to earth-bound horizontality. 
But unlike the other animals, he points out, we are not obliged by our 
bodies “to walk with faces to the ground.” But if  the human animal is 
thus free to look up to the firmament, such freedom is more than a gift 
of  the upright body: “Nature had not only endowed the human race with 
senses like the rest of  the animals, but had also equipped their minds with 
the powers of  thought and understanding, thus putting all other animals 
under their sway.”11 The human body’s verticality signifies spirit. And such 
verticality possesses a spatial and a temporal significance: Their upward 



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gaze lets human beings raise themselves beyond the 
here and now, allows them to look up out of  their 
horizontal temporal condition, that circumscribes 
the lives of  the other animals, to the seemingly 
ageless order of  the firmament. 

Did the sublime spectacle of  the starry sky, 
which the ancients thought to be a perfect sphere, 
awaken the spirit sleeping in Vitruvius’s proto-
humans, somewhat as the snake’s promise, “you 
will be like God,” opened the eyes of  Adam and 
Eve? Did it awaken them at the same time to 
their own subjection to time, to their mortality, 
even as it allowed them to glimpse in the heaven’s 
unchanging order possibilities of  a more perfect, 
more spiritual dwelling? Is the task of  human 
building to carry something of  this promise into 
this death-shadowed world? Or did Vitruvius also 
associate “the splendor of  the starry firmament” 
with the light- and life-granting sun, the hearth 
of  the cosmos, being represented by the warmth-
giving hearth of  his primitive home? This much 
at any rate seems clear: by linking the origin of  
the first house to the awe-inspiring sight of  the 
inaccessible unchanging order of  the sky, Vitruvius 
places human building between animal shelter 
and the divinely ordered cosmos. The human 
being looks up to and measures himself  here by a 
timeless logos, figured by the firmament. Building, 
too, should be informed by this logos; and so we 
find Vitruvius insisting on symmetry and harmony, 
prefigured both by the divinely ordered cosmos 
and the similarly ordered body of  the well shaped 
human being.

Hegel’s understanding of  the origin of  
architecture points in what is essentially the same 
direction: 

It is architecture that pioneers the way for the adequate 
realization of  the God, and in this its service bestows 
hard toil upon existing nature, in order to disentangle 
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chance. By this means it levels a space for the God, gives form to his external 
surroundings, and builds him his temple as a fit place for concentration of  spirit, 
and for its direction to the mind’s absolute objects. It raises an enclosure round 
the assembly of  those gathered together, as a defense against the threatening of  
the storm, against rain, the hurricane, and wild beasts, and reveals the will to 
assemble, although externally, yet in conformance with the principles of  art.12

Hegel’ builders, too, impose a spiritual, and that means for Hegel a truly 
human order on a recalcitrant material; human beings assert and celebrate 
their humanity in the face of  an initially indifferent environment, when 
they level the ground, break the stone, raise walls and columns. They 
defend themselves against nature, not only or even primarily against 
physical threats, but against its contingency. In this struggle they rely on 
and exhibit the power of  the universal. That is why architecture for Hegel 
is in its very essence not the work of  isolated individuals, but of  the spirit, 
and that means of  the community: the spirit breaks down the walls that 
separate individuals. Genuine architecture establishes community.

And not so very different is Corbusier’s account of  the origin of  
architecture:

Primitive man has brought his chariot to a stop: he decides that here shall be 
his native soil. He chooses a glade, he cuts down the trees which are too close; he 
levels the earth around; he opens up the road which will carry him to the river 
or to those of  his tribe whom he has just left. [...] The road is as straight as he 
can manage with his implements, his arms and his time. The pegs of  his tent 
describe a square, hexagon, or octagon. The palisade forms a rectangle whose 
four angles are equal. The door of  this hut is on the axis of  the enclosure—and 
the gate of  the enclosure faces exactly the door of  the hut. [...] You may see, in 
some archeological work, the representation of  this hut, the representation of  
this sanctuary: it is the plan of  a house, or the plan of  a temple. It is the same 
spirit one finds again in the Pompeian house. It is the spirit indeed of  the Temple 
of  Luxor.

There is no such thing as primitive man; there are primitive resources. The idea 
is constant, in full sway from the beginning.13 

A look at the history of  architecture supports that impression. From 
the very beginning the requirements of  human dwelling resist their 
reduction to the need for physical shelter or functional frames for certain 
activities. Not only the body, the spirit, too, needs shelter, shelter especially 
from the terror of  time. 



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4

But let me turn to the second observation 
made by the organizers of  this symposium and to 
the question it raises. Architecture, it asserts, has 
played no very significant part in our philosophical 
understanding of  human beings. We can grant that. 
And yet the prevalence of  architectural metaphors 
in philosophical discourse invites reflection: What 
is the bond that ties philosophy and architecture 
together and allows such metaphors to make 
some sense? An answer is suggested by Martin 
Heidegger’s already mentioned essay “Building 
Dwelling Thinking”, which calls our attention to 
the obvious fact that building serves dwelling, but 
then in characteristic fashion turns to etymology 
to unearth beneath the familiar everyday sense of  
“dwelling” a deeper meaning that is said to have 
been lost to us: 

The real meaning of  the verb, namely to dwell, has 
been lost to us. But a covert trace of  it has been 
preserved in the German word Nachbar, neighbor. 
The neighbor is in Old English the neahgebur, 
neah near, and gebur, dweller. The Nachbar is the 
Nachgeebur, the Nachgebauer, the near-dweller, he 
who dwells nearby. The verbs, buri, büren, beuren, 
beuron, all signify dwelling, the abode, the place of  
dwelling.14

In its origin, Heidegger claims, building means 
dwelling. To really dwell is to be at home in 
the world. Such dwelling presupposes that we 
experience the world not, as science would have us 
do, as the totality of  mute facts that just happen to 
be as they are, but as a meaningful order. But is the 
transformation of  mute alien material into a home 
not the essence of  building? And is it perhaps also 
the essence of  thinking? 

To show how dwelling is to be thought in its 
original sense Heidegger adds: 

Where the word bauen still speaks in its original 

To really 
dwell is to be 
at home in the 

world. 

“
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sense, it also says how far the nature of  dwelling reaches. That is, bauen, buan, 
bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the 
imperative form bis, be. What then does ich bin mean? The word bauen, to which 
it belongs answers: ich bin, du bist mean: I dwell, you dwell.15 

Heidegger sums up his discussion with three propositions:

1. Building is really dwelling.

2. Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth. 

3. Building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing 
things [German Ackerbau] and the building that erects building. 

If  we accept Heidegger’s claim that “Dwelling is the manner in which 
mortals are on the earth” this suggests that we can add as a fourth 
proposition: 

 4. Building as dwelling unfolds also into the architectures that thought 
erects, more especially the thought of  philosophers. 

This then would yield a first answer to the question: What is the bond 
that ties philosophy and architecture together and allows such metaphors 
to make some sense? Both can be said unfold in their distinctive ways the 
essence of  building. That brings to mind Kant’s famous statement that our 
reason is by its very nature architectonic, seeking to assign to everything 
its proper place in some conceptual edifice.16 Heidegger would seem to 
think this in more encompassing fashion, extending it to our being-in-the-
world, which always already has assigned to all we encounter its place in a 
linguistic edifice. Heidegger thus calls language the house of  Being. 

These remarks hint at a deep connection between architecture and 
language. The French prehistorian André-Leroi Gourhan speaks to this 
connection:

the earliest surviving buildings are contemporary with the appearance of  the first 
rhythmic marks. […] [although] the foundation of  moral and physical comfort in 
man is the altogether animal perception of  the perimeter of  security, the enclosed 
refuge, or of  the socialization of  rhythms: [so] that there is no point in seeking 
for a scission between animal and human to explain our attachment to social 
rhythms and inhabited space […] [yet] the little that is known [of  pre-Homo 
sapiens habitations] is enough to show that a profound change occurred about 
the time which corresponds to the development of  the control sections of  the brain 
in strains relating to Homo sapiens. […] Such archeological evidence [as there 
is] would seem to justify the assumption, that from the higher paleolithic period 
onwards there was an attempt to control the whole spatio-temporal phenomenon 



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by symbolic means, of  which language was the chief. 
They imply a real ‘taking charge’ of  space and time 
through the mediation of  symbols: a domestication 
of  them in a strict sense, since it involves, within the 
house and about the house, a controllable space and 
time.17

This suggests that we might want to define building 
in its most fundamental sense as “a taking charge of  
space and time through the mediation of  symbols.” 
So understood building would include both, the 
raising of  structures that provide both physical and 
psychological shelter and the use of  language to 
control and feel at home in the world around us. 
That language and architecture are linked in their 
origin is hinted at by the story of  the Tower of  
Babel.

  

5

Let me return to Heidegger’s claim that human 
being is essentially a dwelling. If  for us humans to 
be is to dwell, it would seem that to build anything 
we must already dwell in some fashion. But does all 
dwelling not presuppose in turn something like a 
building? We seem to be moving in a circle. 

Something analogous would seem to hold 
of  the creation of  language—think of  the story 
of  Adam’s naming of  the animals. Paradise must 
have presented itself  to Adam already as rather 
like a divinely created garden in which everything 
had its proper place. Dwelling, understood in this 
fundamental sense, would thus seem to imply 
something like an experience of  the world as an 
order that assigns us as mortals our place on earth, 
beneath the sky, presided over, Heidegger suggests 
in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” by what there he 
calls the divinities, where we must wonder whether 
our modern world still allows us to make sense of  
Heidegger’s divinities. 



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 Consider once more the meaning of  “building.” To build is to bound 
space. How is this space to be thought? Genesis begins by having God 
create the heavens and the earth by bounding the formless. Plato’s Timaeus 
offers a similar account. To build is to wrest place from space. That seems 
uncontroversial. And to think such building is inevitably also to think 
space as in some sense pre-given and formless. But how are we to think 
that pre-given and formless space? When we attempt to do so, do we 
not inevitably give it some structure? Think of  Euclidean space and its 
three dimensions. Is all such thinking not an attempt to domesticate what 
resists domestication? The meaning of  space remains elusive. I want to 
claim that every human attempt to master space leads us into an antinomy, 
places us between some finite structure and the infinite. That antinomy, 
I want to suggest, also haunts our dwelling as it haunts our building and 
our thinking as the tension between a desire for freedom and a desire to 
be firmly placed.

My introduction of  the term “antinomy” calls for comment. When 
a philosopher thinks of  antinomies he is likely to think first of  all of  the 
four antinomies Kant stated and discussed in his Critique of  Pure Reason. 
And I, too, am thinking here of  Kant’s antinomies, especially of  the first, 
which concerns the difficulty we face when we attempt to represent our 
universe as a cosmos, as a well-constructed, bounded whole, as a building 
in that sense. Kant shows that we are unable to understand this cosmos as 
finite and as having a beginning, as our astronomers and physicists would 
once again have us do, only to get entangled once more in some version 
of  Kant’s antinomy. But Kant also showed that we cannot understand it 
as infinite. The infinite transcends our comprehension. And yet we are in 
some fashion in touch with the infinite whenever we are open to some 
thing in its finally incomprehensible materiality. Not only infinite space, 
but every particular thing in its ineffable particularity, transcends whatever 
our reason is able to construct. As mystics such as Meister Eckhart or 
Angelus Silesius knew, an infinity is buried in every thing. I want to 
confront Heidegger’s metaphor of  language as the house of  Being with 
a question: is Being really at home in that house? Architecture raises an 
analogous question: are buildings without windows and doors that allow 
access to a reality beyond not prisons? This suggests: openings such as 
windows and doors provide a key to successful architecture.

 In using the word “antinomy” I was also thinking of  Kant’s third 
antinomy, which concerns freedom. Like nature, freedom, too, familiar 
as it is to all of  us, eludes comprehension: we are thus unable to think 
what we seem to be so familiar with and call “freedom” as either free 



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from or as governed by the laws of  nature. In the 
attempt to think freedom our reason once again 
suffers shipwreck on the reef  of  the infinite. No 
more than space and time will freedom be mastered 
conceptually. Once again reason is forced to 
recognize its limits. But are these limits not also 
limits that building must respect if  it is not to do 
violence to the demands of  freedom and thus of  
human dwelling?

Kant’s four antinomies were supposed to prove 
the necessity of  understanding every thing in two 
very different senses: as an appearance dependent 
on our human understanding and the architecture 
it imposes and as a thing in itself, transcending that 
architecture. The antinomies thus tear open a depth 
dimension passed over in our everyday dealings with 
things, open windows and doors in the architecture 
raised by our architectonic understanding. But why 
is the opening of  such windows and doors, if  it can 
even be understood as such, of  existential import? 

6

With this let me turn to the question: What 
does architecture have to contribute to philosophy? 
At first blush the answer would seem to have to 
be, despite philosophy’s reliance on architectural 
metaphors: very little, at least given common ideas 
of  what philosophy is. Most philosophers don’t feel 
a need to concern themselves with architecture. 

 I do feel such a need. So let me approach the 
question “what does architecture have to contribute 
to philosophy?” in a more personal way by speaking 
briefly of  the way art and architecture has been 
important to my work in philosophy. 

My interest in both art and architecture is far 
older than my interest in philosophy. As a child I 
liked to draw, paint, and build. A self-conscious 



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interest in architecture goes back to my first encounter with a rather modest 
rococo church: when I was seven my mother moved with us children from 
Berlin, which the constant air raids had made rather unpleasant, to the 
Franconian Königshofen, some 25 kilometers northeast of  Bamberg. On 
the outskirts is a little known, but quite lovely pilgrimage church in the 
village of  Ipthausen, consecrated to the Birth of  Mary (1746-54). The 
landscape, the town, but especially this church spoke to me of  a way of  
life very different from what I had been used to. Today I would say that 
mine was not so much an aesthetic response, but an ethical response, 
ethical in that broad sense in which Heidegger attributes to the Greek 
temple an ethical function when he claims that presenting the world, it 
establishes the earth, with that difference that I knew even then that the 
world opened up by this church was one from which I was excluded, that 
much as I loved it, this was not my world. But it seemed to beckon me to 
a better world. Four years later a teacher in Munich’s Maxgymnasium took 
me to the Benedictine monastery church of  Andechs. The visit to that 
church, too, had a crucial importance. I pay tribute to that teacher in the 
preface to my book The Bavarian Rococo Church (1983) and placed an image 
of  that church on its back cover.

The very fact that I felt a need to write such a book, which has now 
also appeared in a German version,18 suggests a certain impatience with 
academic philosophy. I personally do not see a break between this book 
and my more obviously philosophical work, much of  which has centered 
on Heidegger. It touches on many, perhaps all the themes that matter to me 
as a philosopher, but it does so in a way that pleases me more, that seems 
to me much more concrete, more likely to get readers to really understand 
what concerns me, to touch them, than my more purely philosophical 
essays. Let me mention just a few of  these themes:

1. As opposed to those who, like the art historian Michael Fried, 
oppose authenticity to theatricality, I wanted to exhibit what I experienced 
as the profundity of  an architecture that ever since the Enlightenment 
has often been dismissed as theatrical and superficial, as not really 
authentic. The artistic culture of  the Rococo taught me to question the 
presupposed notion of  authenticity and with it the Enlightenment faith in 
reason and to appreciate the profundity of  superficiality, of  interest in the 
visible, sensible world, for which Nietzsche praised the Greeks: “to stop 
courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to 
believe in forms, tones, words, the whole Olympus of  appearance. Those 
Greeks were superficial — out of  profundity.” 19

My book on the Bavarian Rococo Church is also a reflection on 



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the threshold that joins and separates the Rococo 
from the Enlightenment, and that is to say from 
modernity. There is thus a sense in which this book 
is also a reflection on our own spiritual culture, on 
its legitimacy and its limits, a topic that continues to 
concern me. 

2. A reviewer called that book a preamble after 
the fact of  my The Meaning of  Modern Art (1968). In 
a sense he was right. That earlier book called for a 
step beyond modern art, and not just modern art, 
but beyond what that modern art presupposed. 
I spoke there of  the need for a new realism. In 
philosophy, too, there seems to me a need for such 
a realism. That drew me to phenomenology. 

3. With this call for a new realism I meant to 
challenge the hold of  the aesthetic approach to art 
and architecture that has presided over both theory 
and practice. As I show in The Ethical Function of  
Architecture, that approach invites an understanding 
of  works of  architecture as decorated sheds in the 
broadest sense, as functional buildings to which 
an aesthetic component has been added. But as I 
have suggested in this lecture: What distinguishes 
architecture from building is not adequately 
understood as the addition of  an aesthetic 
component. That calls for further reflection on 
the requirements of  dwelling, and more especially, 

FIGURE 1: Pilgrimage church 

Mariä Geburt, Ipthausen



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on what these requirements are in today’s world, marked by the digital 
revolution and the threatening environmental crisis. 

4. But inadequate as it is to the requirements of  dwelling, the decorated 
shed nevertheless presents itself  as a potent figure for the spiritual situation 
of  this age, which tends to cover up the spiritual poverty that is the price 
of  our objectification of  reality, with an often borrowed aesthetic veneer. 
In that sense, to call ours the age of  the decorated shed is to offer more 
than just an illuminating caricature. 

5. As Heidegger points out, building serves dwelling, as it is born 
of  dwelling. To understand the essence of  architecture we have to enter 
that circle. But we cannot enter it successfully as long as we remain on 
the level of  abstract speculation and mere words. Our words must have 
their ground in concrete experiences. We have to return to the things 
themselves, and that means here first of  all to buildings. But the point 
should be generalized. 

      
7

Let me conclude with the question: What does philosophy have to 
contribute to architecture? It is not the philosopher’s task to tell architects 
what to do. But perhaps philosophy can help make architecture more 
responsible by questioning certain assumptions that stand in the way of  
such responsibility. 

Wittgenstein claimed that philosophical problems have the form, 

“I do not know my way about.”20 Of  course, not all problems having 
this form are therefore already philosophical. To lose one’s way in a 
strange city is not sufficient to make one a philosopher. Nor is failure to 
understand a new piece of  equipment. Say my computer misbehaves and 
I don’t know what to do; I don’t know my way about. Such a loss of  way 
does not present us with a philosophical problem. But why not? I would 
suggest that it fails to do so because in such cases our disorientation is only 
superficial. Thus in the first case I might study a map; in the second I might 
ask an expert for help. The problem here poses itself  against a background 
of  established and accepted ways of  doing things to which we can turn 
to help us decide what is to be done. Genuinely philosophical problems 
have no such background. They are born of  a more profound uncertainty. 
Philosophical reflection flourishes thus where traditions disintegrate and 
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nature, society, and history, and searching for firmer 
ground demand that this place be more securely 
established. In that sense all genuine philosophy is 
at bottom ethical reflection. That also holds for the 
philosophical reflection on architecture.

If  this is accepted, philosophy comes to an end 
either when it believes to have gained firm ground 
and to have laid a secure foundation or when it 
despairs of  responsibly addressing the questions 
that haunt it. There is thus a sense in which science 
and skepticism may be said to bound philosophy. 
Today science presents philosophy with a challenge 
that resembles the challenge that in the 19th 
century photography presented to representational 
painting. 

But science itself  presents itself  today to us 
as anything but unquestionable. There is a sense 
in which everyone of  us, I suspect, stands in an 
ambiguous relationship to science and its offspring, 
technology. On one hand we have to affirm science. 
Technological advances have shaped our life-world 
in ways that we have to affirm. On the other hand, 
science cannot know anything of  persons or values. 
This is why the social sciences stand inevitably 
uneasily between science and what we can call 
folk wisdom or perhaps philosophy. A compelling 
account of  both the legitimacy and the limits of  
scientific understanding and that means also of  
technological thinking seems to me one of  the main 
requirements facing philosophy today. Architectural 
theory and practice, too, seem to me to be in need 
of  such an account. 

But such an account must be guided by some 
understanding of  where we should be going, where 
today such an account must be informed by the 
digital revolution which cannot but shape our 
understanding of  space and even more importantly 
it must be informed by the growing environmental 
crisis. Does philosophy offer much help here? I 
continue to be surprised, given all we know, that 



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not more is being done and I am afraid reason has not proven itself  very 
effective in bringing about needed changes. Needed is a change of  heart. 
But how do hearts change? Traditionally such change has been brought 
about not so much by philosophers, as by prophets and poets, artists, 
and also by architects. In his discussion of  the Greek temple Heidegger 
recognizes thus something of  the mythopoeic function of  architecture. 

Plato’s Republic gives expression to the claim of  the philosopher to 
be in a privileged position to tell human beings what their place should 
be. The ethical function that art and religion once possessed, comes to 
be claimed by reason. Unfortunately reason has proved unequal to the 
assumed task. We live today in the ruins of  the inherited value system. To 
support this claim I could point to the history of  the past two centuries. 
I could also show that, notwithstanding the efforts of  philosophers from 
Plato to Kant and indeed right down to the present, unprejudiced pure 
reason has shown itself  inadequate to this task. Such change requires the 
aid of  those able to touch us more immediately. The need for architecture’s 
ethical function remains. What kind of  architecture? Temple and cathedral 
lie behind us. Not only has the kind of  communal dwelling their building 
presupposed and reaffirmed been lost, but few of  us would wish it to 
return, for it is incompatible with one of  our own ruling myths: the myth 
of  the value of  personal freedom. That myth has freed art, too, from 
its former servitude to religion and state. But if  art has thus gained a 
new freedom, the price of  this privatization of  art has been its peripheral 
placement in a world ruled increasingly by economic imperatives. Art and 
architecture have lost much of  their former ethical significance.

What then is the role of  philosophy? A healthy society needs places 
where it tests what has come to be established and taken for granted. There 
has to be an openness to the future. One task of  philosophy is to open 
windows in the edifice raised by the ruling common sense. I also have a 
contrary sympathy. The conservatives, too, are needed in a healthy society, 
those who insist on the preservation of  the inherited. There is inevitable 
tension between voices pointing in different directions, one forward 
— challenging, testing — the other backward — wanting to preserve. 
Neither should be so immediately associated with political power that it 
can translate its views into political reality without being mediated by an 
ongoing conversation. In this conversation, and more especially in the 
architectural conversation, the philosopher’s words should be like yeast. 
Perhaps in this way they can contribute in some way towards bringing 
about that change of  heart that just today is so desperately needed. 



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Endnotes

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröthe, 169; Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. 
Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich, Berlin, and New York: 
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and de Gruyter, 1980), vol. 3, 152. 

[2] Mark Lilla, “Pseuds’ Skyscraper,” London Review of  Books, 5 June 1997, 33.

[3] Robert Jan van Pelt, “Apocalyptic Abjection,” in Robert Jan van Pelt and 
Carroll Willliam Westfall, Architectural Principles in the Age of  Historicism (New 
Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 328-329.

[4] See Karsten Harries, “Review: Robert Jan van Pelt and Carroll William 
Westfall, Architectural Principles in the Age of  Historicism,” American 
Historical Review, December 1992, 1490.

[5] Mark Wigley, The Architecture of  Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, 
Mass. and London: MIT Press,1993).

[6] Adolf  Loos, “Architecture,” cited in Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in 
Paradise. The Idea of  the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (New York: The 
Museum of  Modern Art, 1972 ), 27.

[7] José Ortega y Gasset, “Der Mythus des Menschen hinter der Technik” in 
Otto Bartning, ed.: Mensch und Raum. 2. Darmstädter Gespräch 1951 (Darmstadt: 
Neue Darmstädter Verlags-Anstalt. 1952) 117. Translation by K. Harries.

[8] Ibid., 117.

[9] William Gass, “House VI,” Progressive Architecture, 58, June 1977, p. 64.

[10] Vitruvius, The Ten Books of  Architecture, trans. Morris Hickey Morgan 
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926), 38. 

[11] Ibid., 40.

[12] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. 
Bernard Bosanquet, ed. and intro. Michael Inwood (Harmondsworth: 
Penguin, 1993), 90-91.

 [13] Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New 
York: Praeger, 1960), 65-66.

[14] Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Poetry, Language, 
Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 
146-147. See also the original version: Martin Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen 
Denken” in Otto Bartning (ed.): Mensch und Raum. 2. Darmstädter Gespräch 
1951. (Darmstadt: Neue Darmstädter Verlags-Anstalt 1952) 72–84.

[15] Ibid., 147.



[16] With his antinomies, to be sure, Kant showed that this striving 
can never be satisfied. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 474/B 502. See Paula 
Manchester, “Kant’s Conception of  Architectonic in Its Philosophical 
Context,” Kant Studien. Volume 99, Issue 2, June, 2008 133–151.

[17] André Leroi -Gourhan, Le geste et la parole (Paris 1964), vol. 2., 139-
140, as quoted in Joseph Rykwert, On Adams’s House in Paradise (New York: 
The Museum of  Modern Art, 1972), 21

[18] Karsten Harries, Die Bayerische Rokokokirche. Das Irrationale und das 
Sakrale (Dorfen: Hawel Verlag, 2009),

[19] Nietzsche, The Gay Science. With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an 
Appendix of  Songs. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 2001).

[20] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe 
(New York: Macmillan, 1959) par. 123.


