6. Architecture is a role in humanity’s original claim to revealing.
| We
may therefore be able to expose what architecture has become as it
evolved in that shell of technic, being fuzzy. There is no way to do
that in terms of the Ge-stell [Enframing]. It is essential to develop a
vision that is other to this stellen, and to the Bestand. Architecture arises from the original existance of humanity in the world. Architecture is being that, rather than knowledge of it. Architecture is not of the changing material world, it is reflected being-human in the world. It is a very specific principle. It is that which is unchanging and infinite in humanity in its unconcealing. As soon as we intend to put up a blanket — to build — the issue is of how we do it. And that ‘how’ is not ever merely practical, nor overtly decorative. The pragmatic physical and the decorative are never absent, nor are they definitive. The impossibility of ever settling this is due to the question being superseded. The issue is of how thought of human made knowledge serves humanity’s goal. The useful and the decorative, and their apparent subjectivity, will be properly located if we find a super-ordinate architectural programme. The decoration vs. structural remains an issue as long as people are free to use willpower and to choose, but do not do so. It is the nature of choosing itself which is pressing. The development of willpower, which I choose to call choice, is the remarkable characteristic of Mind. The locating of duty and love remain to fill out this picture. These are not for knowing architecture, for an architect knows architecture, but to evolve a world with human intentional environments which subvert and eventually abandon technicism for cooperation in Nature. This means architecture’s presencing takes a different form than that of ‘discovery’ and ‘invention’. This will take a while to become the general condition, but any one of us can begin at any time. So I’ve chosen to begin. |