PDF Ebook Towards a Nomadic Theory of Architecture
This paper is about home and homelessness. Of the many ways I could approach these terms I find the philosophical and the architectural to be the most rewarding. Home raises questions of existence and being along with problems of physical comfort and social belonging; the built environment, a stable but always changing part of the human condition, is particularly suited to drawing out discussions along these lines. Homelessness, which is usually taken to mean being without a house, suggests anxiety and dread – cornerstones of de-centered modern life. Similarly, home means having a center to one's world as well as a roof over one's head.
The most pervasive current architectural discourses involving home and homelessness imply either a rationality that suggests facile economic solutions (which never seem to materialize) or an individual Dasein (human Being) that serves as a convenient common point of reference but always obscures how any particular Dasein comes to be. These two ubiquitous discussions – the discourse of shelter and the discourse of dwelling – stem, respectively, from early twentieth century Modernism and the culture- and tradition- based understanding of the practice of building. The problems posed by these discourses – problems of home – cannot be fully articulated without an understanding of the genesis of the individual or society that occurs along with these discourses. This paper will draw out the assumptions and implied conclusions of the discourses of shelter and dwelling in order to point to a discourse that is able to discuss how worlds and homes are generated from an aggregation of social forces. Following the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, I will call this the nomadic theory of architecture.
The process of putting this theory together led me to an “architecture” outside the dictates of planning and the questions of dwelling. I will discuss Seattle's Tent Cities as an example of this approach to the architecture of home. The Tent City movement, with its glaring problems and contradictions, exemplifies the architecture of the nomad. By slipping outside of the authoritarian State apparatus, the Tent City movement dissolves the stable categories of shelter and dwelling. This is a trait that Deleuze and Guattari associate with the nomad. Nomadic architecture turns out to be an affective alternative to an untenable architecture of stability and permanence, either in the form of an individual Dasein (as in the case of dwelling) or of a rational system (as in the case of shelter). It uses the pre-given world as its foundation but also as an ever-changing playground.
The rationale for discussing the discourses of shelter, dwelling, and the nomad separately emerges from the different set of assumptions and approaches to architecture that each of these terms conjure up. The historical significance of the debate evoked by the separation of “shelter” and “dwelling,” in particular, has had a lasting impact on architectural theory. Another factor has been the early histories of the Modern movement, such as those of Sigfried Giedion and Nikolaus Pevsner, which constructed a unified Modern movement centered on transparent rationalism; these must be paired with the subsequent critiques, such as those of Giorgio Ciucci and Sarah Goldhagen, which have dismantled the previously unitary view. Together these present an acute awareness of how history is constructed, problems are identified, and solutions are found. The construction and destruction of the unified discourse of the Modern movement parallels the development of the discourse of shelter.
A similar rise and fall has occurred in the discourse of dwelling. The term, in its current architectural usage, derives mainly from Heidegger's “Building Dwelling Thinking,” first delivered as a lecture in 1951. Heidegger's philosophical sympathy with fascism – which is contained deep within the concept of dwelling – means that the term can hardly be used without conjuring images of piched-roofed houses in the Heimat style. Heinrich Tessenow faced no such problems writing in 1916; the cultural climate in Germany seems to have been very receptive to the discourse of dwelling.
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