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TABLE OF CONTENTS
William Behun, To the Center of the Sky:Heidegger, Polar Symbolism, and Christian Sacred Architecture
Heidegger’s sense of the
holy is an important aspect of his thought, especially in the form that it
takes in his later work. By juxtaposing Heidegger’s thinking on the
sacred with traditional metaphysician René Guénon’s examination of the
symbolism of the sacred pole, we can bring both elements into clearer
focus. This paper undertakes to draw together these two radically disparate
thinkers not to undermine either’s project, but rather to demonstrate one way
in which the sacred can be more thoroughly understood, especially in light of
our increasing disregard for the experience of the divine in the modern
world. The Heideggerian event of the sacred is played out in a way that
is uniquely informed by polar symbols in the architecture of the great gothic
cathedrals, and these prove to be a site for the opening up of the holy within
space. When these elements are drawn together, they serve to reciprocally
inform one another, deepening our understanding of the performative and spatial
dimensions of our experience of the divine and opening the possibility of a
relationship with God that is not bound by onto-theological constructions of
Godhead.
Emiliano Trizio, Built-Spaces for World-Making
The aim of this article is
to contribute to the understanding of the relations existing between, on the
one hand, some specific types of built-spaces and, on the other, the manner in
which man belonging to a given culture defines a particular way of conceiving
and inhabiting the world. The interdependence between the forms of the
construction of the human environment and the intellectual and practical articulation
of social life has been the object of numerous researches. The focus of this
analysis will be, more specifically, on built-spaces that play a decisive role
in the shaping of both the forms or orientation of collective life and the
underlying worldviews, built-spaces that, in virtue of this two-fold function,
deserve to be called world-making.
The approach will be diachronical and comparative. I will first reconstruct, on
the basis of phenomenology-inspired reading of Mircea Eliade’s works, the representative
as well as orientative function of sacred built-space within certain religious
traditions and its relations with a specific conception of the world in general
and of the earth-sky relation in particular. Subsequently, I will show that the
overthrow of these cosmological and metaphysical beliefs during the scientific
revolution, has deprived sacred space of its original meaning, while rendering
at once possible and necessary a completely new type of built-space, the
laboratory, which exerts, in an utterly different way, a world-making function.
In this way, this article develops yet another comparison between the religious
conception of the relation between man and the world, and the conception issued
by the modern scientific and technological development.
Mark H. Dixon, The Architecture of Solitude
As a spiritual or meditative
practice solitude implies more than mere silence or being alone. While these
are perhaps indispensable components, it is possible to be alone or to live in
silence and nevertheless be unable to reconfigure these into genuine solitude. Solitude
is also more than being in some remote or inaccessible place. Even though
geographical isolation might be conducive to solitude, with rare exceptions
human beings have seldom sought solitude in complete seclusion in the
wilderness. The places where human beings have sought solitude have in the end
been human places, human-built places. It should come as no surprise then that
through architecture humans beings have sought to build solitude, to construct,
through stone and glass and wooden structures, places that are conducive to and
encourage solitude. Such structures include individual hermitages, monasteries,
temples and even cathedrals. In each case the purpose is to translate or
reconfigure a natural geographical place into a space, a human space, where
solitude as a spiritual or meditative practice becomes possible. What the
individual sojourner brings to the experience is an inner openness to the
architecture, to the natural environment and to the spiritual realm which
interweave to create solitude. This
paper examines (1) the spiritual need to experience solitude, (2) what it is
that solitude requires and (3) the endeavor to create solitude through
architecture and the challenges it poses to both architecture and spiritual
practice. In particular the paper explores and compares solitude's
architectural expression in three Medieval Christian monastic orders – the
Camaldolesce Order, the Carthusian Order and the Cistercian Order. Despite
their common heritage these orders realize solitude, as an essential spiritual
value, through unique architectural expressions.
Michael Wenisch, Peak Oil, Energy Limits,and Resulting Alterations in the Built Space of the United States
Over and above the probable
peaking of worldwide oil production as a current reality, the arrival of hard
limits on all energy resources is very much nearer in the future than many
people realize. The public discourse on
Peak Oil and the associated arrival of hard limits on energy availability has
attracted more than its share of brilliant and creative minds. In addition to scientific and technical
analysts, this group includes a fair number of generalists who have engaged in
broader forms of reflection upon the likely economic, social, political, and
cultural effects of Peak Oil and other hard energy limits on the structure of
current world civilization. In this
paper, I select for examination three such generalists who are both especially
talented and widely read by those having an interest in this topic: James
Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer, and Dmitri Orlov. My intention is to survey their central ideas
in turn, with a view to forming a reasonably well-developed and concrete notion
as to how the impending arrival of hard limits on energy consumption will
affect the structure of built space in coming decades. I focus both on the macro-infrastructural
level and on what one might term the micro-infrastructural level of the built
space within which the denizens of contemporary industrial civilization live
their daily lives. The principal focus
of the discussion will be on the situation in the United States, though many of
the lines of argument presented may be applied much more broadly if suitably
adjusted in light of locally prevailing conditions elsewhere.
Kascha Semon, The Habit of Inhabitation:Rethinking Digital Design via Merleau-Ponty and Proust
Drawing
on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, this paper describes the role of habit
in the cycle of preconfiguration and reconfigurion of place in architectural
practice, especially in the design of homes – les habitations – in which habit and inhabitation intertwine. In
this paper, Proust’s novel provides the primary examples of the intertwining of
habit and inhabitation. Proust shows us
that an artist (or architect) acquires a relation to a prefigured place into
which she or he is already thrown and can only reshape that world from the
inside out, not the top down. The paper provides an overview of the influence
of place in Proust’s novel, then relate these examples to Merleau-Ponty’s
reflections on place, along the way considering Merleau-Ponty’s brief mentions
of architecture and whether we can justifiably apply his painting-based
aesthetics to architecture. Finally, the
paper suggests what this might mean for architectural design practice,
especially for new digital tools that use gesture to better reflect an embodied
relation to place. The program of the paper is to trace the origin of “program”
– in its architectural sense of the use-structure
of a building and its mediation by habits and inhabitation in the design
process. The design process – right down to whether or not architects use
pens and pencils or digital tools —must come up for revision if
phenomenological evidence (both literary and philosophical) is truly to
transform the practice.
Randy Laist, “The Style of What is to Come”:Representations of the World Trade Center in the Novels of Don DeLillo
Since the very week of September 11,
2001, commentators have remarked on the apparent clairvoyance evidenced in the
novels of the American writer Don DeLillo. DeLillo’s novels have always
represented the Twin Towers as gargantuan symbols of latent catastrophe. The
towers have been significant to DeLillo as a particularly gargantuan representation
of the manner in which modern mass-consciousness expresses itself in the form
of material technologies. Throughout his career, DeLillo has described the
World Trade Center not only as a physical structure, but as a kind of schematic
of the future of the culture that created it. In the lines and angles of the
towers, DeLillo seems to discern the “lines of intentionality” inherent in the
culture of advanced technology itself, and traces them out to the conclusions
toward which they seem to lead. In this paper, I will examine the manner in
which DeLillo has “read” the World Trade Center as an architectural confession
of a distinctly American wish to negate the human scale, to make the world over
as an artificial environment, and to look forward to the surpassing of bodily
and social existence. In four novels written before 9/11, DeLillo crafts an
image of the World Trade Center as a sculptural representation of America’s own
will to self-destruction and in his most recent novel, Falling Man,
DeLillo illustrates the kind of existence that lies on the other side of this
self-destruction.
Roger Paden, Historical Paradigms for Ecotourism
Ecotourism
has been defined in a number of possibly incompatible ways, such as travel to
especially wonderful natural sites, as a form of educational travel, and as
sustainable tourism. These various understandings of ecotourism can be used to
ground a number of different kinds of natural area policies. In particular they
can ground a number of policies concerning the management of the many National
Parks in the United States. In this paper, in order to assess these policies, I
distinguish several different understandings of “ecotourism” and discuss the
kinds of park management programs that might be based on them. In the course of
this discussion, I examine the history of tourism in Europe in order to develop
other notions of ecotourism, including two based on the idea of pilgrimage. To
clarify this last idea of ecotourism, I examine religious pilgrimage and
several ideas of nature taken from the Romantic Movement in Europe and the
Transcendentalist movement in the United States, as seen in the work of
Emerson, Thoreau, Muir, and Ansel Adams.
Glen A. Mazis, Touring as Authentically Embodying Placeand a New World at a Glance
The
critique of tourism as being only a distanced, detached, and consumerist
passing through of foreign landscapes and cultures is disputed in this essay.
The idea that tourism necessarily fits the paradigm of inauthenticity as the
tranquilized and alienated hopping from spot to spot in prepackaged,
superficial presentations is contrasted with another sense of tourism as
drawing upon the potential power of the glance to disrupt the everyday, to
focus on the particular, to be surprised by the new, and to bodily join up with
the rhythms of place being as shifting. Authenticity is seen in both Heidegger
and Merleau-Ponty to be primarily about a greater bodily awareness of surround
and transformation of the self as an ongoing process of “selving” that yields a
more singular sense of who one is in relationship to places and their
interconnectedness. To gain a better sense of oneself in one own being or
uniqueness is to gain more meaning through emplacement within the surround. The
glance at a new world can open up an “interplace” which expands and deepens the
sense of who we are in the interconnection and reverberations among places.
Shane J. Ralston, The Ebb and Flow of Primary and Secondary Experience: Kayak Touring and John Dewey’s Metaphysics of Experience
John Dewey’s metaphysics of
experience has been criticized by a number of philosophers—most notably, George
Santayana and Richard Rorty. While mainstream Dewey scholars agree that these
critical treatments fail to treat the American Pragmatist’s theory of what
exists on its own terms, there has still been some difficulty reaching
consensus on what the casual reader should take away from the pages of Experience and Nature, Dewey’s seminal
work on naturalistic metaphysics. So, how do we unearth the significance of
Dewey’s misunderstood metaphysics? One way is for philosophers to look to
spatial and social-cultural geographers for help. To fully grasp the movement
of experience, these geographers recommend that we start with an experiential
activity, such as touring. The activity of sea kayak touring, I contend,
discloses the general movement of experience in Dewey’s metaphysics between its
primary and secondary phases. With this illustration and a closely connected
metaphor, I demonstrate that Dewey’s naturalized metaphysics can not only
withstand the objections of the likes of Santayana and Rorty, it can also
assist us in gaining a deeper appreciation of the qualitative richness of our
own day-to-day practices.
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