Phenomenologies of the City

Studies in the History and Philosophy of Architecture

Henriette Steiner, Maximilian Sternberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317081333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Phenomenologies of the City: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Architecture brings architecture and urbanism into dialogue with phenomenology. Phenomenology has informed debate about the city from social sciences to cultural studies. Within architecture, however, phenomenological inquiry has been neglecting the question of the city. Addressing this lacuna, this book suggests that the city presents not only the richest, but also the politically most urgent horizon of reference for philosophical reflection on the cultural and ethical dimensions of architecture. The contributors to this volume are architects and scholars of urbanism. Some have backgrounds in literature, history, religious studies, and art history. The book features 16 chapters by younger scholars as well as established thinkers including Peter Carl, David Leatherbarrow, Alberto Pérez-Gomez, Wendy Pullan and Dalibor Vesely. Rather than developing a single theoretical statement, the book addresses architecture's relationship with the city in a wide range of historical and contemporary contexts. The chapters trace hidden genealogies, and explore the ruptures as much as the persistence of recurrent cultural motifs. Together, these interconnected phenomenologies of the city raise simple but fundamental questions: What is the city for, how is it ordered, and how can it be understood? The book does not advocate a return to a naive sense of 'unity' or 'order'. Rather, it investigates how architecture can generate meaning and forge as well as contest social and cultural representations.

PART I
Urban Order and the Lived City

1

Convivimus Ergo Sumus¹

Peter Carl

There appear to have been three periods when the city was significant to Western philosophy. Proper sense of the works of Plato and Aristotle cannot be made without understanding the polis, although neither buildings nor urban topography² play a prominent role in their writings.³ Conversely, Vitruvius is quite reticent about civic life, preferring to concentrate meaning in architectural physiognomy, through decorum, proportion, and the Orders. Augustine’s De civitate dei is the last (theological) consideration of reality for which the city is important until the reflections on the republican city that begin to appear contemporary with Lorenzetti’s frescoes in the Sala dei Nove, Siena (Salutati, Bruni to Machiavelli). Once past Descartes’ advocacy of tabula rasa⁴ and Rousseau’s tree, around which huts gathered, instituting the passage from the benign state of nature to the malign state of society,⁵ the third period where the city re-enters philosophical or quasi-philosophical writing includes Constant, Kierkegaard, Engels, Weber, Simmel, and Benjamin. Between Constant and Benjamin, the European city becomes a metropolis, and writing about it transforms from the essay to the compilation of fragments that are Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and One-Way Street. This is also the period during which Heidegger records the recovery of Aristotle, foundational for phenomenological hermeneutics.⁶ Despite Heidegger’s evident commitment to concreteness, to particular situations as the basis for involvement in ‘world’, cities seem less relevant to his philosophy than does the conception of Greco-German inhabitation of the Danube developed in his lectures on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘The Ister’.⁷

We are concerned here less with the history of philosophy (the ego cogitans would not seem to require a city), and not at all with a utopian arrangement of people in space such that they might behave well (moral aims achieved through technical means). We are concerned to better understand the capacity for contemporary cities to sustain conditions fruitful for philosophical or ethical reflection; that is, the architectural conditions for a fruitful communicative, or civic, order. The Humanist culture of the northern Italian towns appeared only after the preceding three centuries of civil strife had become institutionalised in assemblies and corporations, for the proper conduct of which learning became necessary; and it was only a century later, as most towns fell under the rule of princes, that the new painting, sculpture, and architecture appeared.⁸ A similar trajectory accompanied the development of the polis, and the turn of the polis to perspectivity shortly after Aristotle was repeated in the north Italian case. If the polis established the cosmic conditions of individual freedom/commitment, from dialogue to dialectic,⁹ late medieval and Renaissance Humanism drew upon these resources to formulate a ‘curriculum’ that endured in Europe until the advent of ‘modernism’, roughly corresponding to Nietzsche’s attack on ‘values’. The principal exponents of modernism – Le Corbusier, Stravinsky, Joyce, etc. – took the city (metropolis), not the academy, as their horizon of reference, attempting to create a new culture by drawing opportunistically upon fragments of the tradition.

This condition of speculating through fragments remains true for our great cities, given over to monothematic zones of housing, office-work, commerce-strips, leisure, industry, warehousing and infrastructure, with small compact central areas remaining from earlier periods largely hollowed out to preserve ‘historic’ facades. The two extremes of these cities – the shiny transaction centres (Song Do, Pudong, etc.) and the extensive slums (Dharavi, Kibera, etc.) – reflect a contest between a minority but dominant techno-corporatism, and a majority but reactive primitivism (the so-called ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ cities).

Since Biblical times, cities have been faulted for their largeness, and have accommodated ethical symbolism between Babylon and Heavenly Jerusalem. The conflict between republican and imperial cities appears at the time of Caesar, but the present conflict moves between individual psychology and a collective order represented as systems,¹⁰ which is therefore only a hyperbolic extension of the protocols of marketing and social science. The ‘subject’ or ‘agent’ is granted a freedom that reduces the collective order to opportunistic groupings or ‘exchanges’ which make up networks, market categories, or even just statistical trends.¹¹ The collective order is accordingly attributed to ‘emergence’ or to anonymous ‘systems’, as if the work of algorithms or of a great bureaucracy (as in ‘the political system’, ‘the educational system’, customs and language as ‘codes’). Similarly, technology tends to be regarded as a neutral framework for the fulfilment of individual desire. This approach conforms to a conception of culture that is opportunistic and open-ended, where, for example, religion becomes behaviours shorn of divinity, the opposite of Voegelin’s insistence upon the sensus communis and acknowledgement of the transcendent conditions of existence. This milieu of behaviours and choices is characteristically presented as if there were no need to take account of the embodying conditions, let alone architecture or a city,¹² and for adherents of this position, such generalisations as ‘space’, ‘grid’ or ‘network’ suffice. The resulting economic metaphor promotes the view that the city, particularly in its post-World War II development, might be regarded as an inhabited histogram of land-capitalisation. This may conform to an actual state of affairs, but a civic concern encompasses the basic problem of reconciling available resources with a fair distribution of social and political participation.

Buildings retain a civic decorum until the 1930s, as seen in such diverse examples as Charles Holden’s London underground stations, industrial buildings which still distinguished between a utilitarian back and a more decorous front, and in the urban architecture of Italian Fascism (much of which still serves its cities, shorn of the iconography). The revival of interest in this theme in the 1970s mostly demonstrated that the appearance of buildings alone was insufficient, that the concerns raised by, inter alia, Jacobs, Rowe, and Rossi, required a deeper understanding of civic life. Although a major topic in schools of architecture, the responsibility for civic concern in London is entirely delegated to planning officers; the word ‘city’ does not appear in the RIBA Code of Practice. The publications of CABE, intending to raise the quality of submissions to planning officers, evoke no more profound conception of city than ‘density’, profitability, and the peaceful, everything-works-under-blue-skies enjoyment of ‘amenities’.¹³

The constraints upon a dominantly economic vision of city are presently limited to practicalities and aesthetics. Both invoke the sphere of meaning (implying, therefore, some sort of reference to shared values); but this is also the realm dominated by the concept of ‘space’. Heidegger’s appeal to ‘art’ at the end of ‘The Question Concerning Technology’¹⁴ shares this ambiguity; but his earlier remark in Being and Time that ‘the city gives a definite direction to nature’¹⁵ is both more promising – since it asserts a continuum rooted in nature, suppressing the culture/nature contest – and more enigmatic, since it remained an undeveloped insight in his writings. However, the phrase suggests a fruitful way of formulating the ‘civic’ – the city is a framework for the ethical interpretation of the natural conditions.

Of course if the Athenian polis had been a harmonious, peaceful town devoted to wisdom, Plato and Aristotle would not have felt obliged to argue for it. We may let the famous passage from Plato’s Gorgias 508a stand for what is at issue:

Heavens, earth, gods and men are bound together by fellowship and friendship, and order (kosmioteta) and temperance and justice, and for this reason they call the sum of things the ordered universe (kosmon), not the world of disorder (akosmian) or riot … the great power of geometric equality among men and gods.

Heidegger borrowed the beginning of this statement for his four-fold, but left the rest – which seems to require the sorts of conditions found in a city – to more implicit development. This is not the language of contemporary policy, theory, or even philosophy. ‘Cosmos’ no longer carries a relation to human affairs and language according to a justice-structure of analogia.

Aristotle’s phylia is less a matter of friendship than of commitment to the polis;¹⁶ but it is the basis of the philosophical concern for ethics or justice. In a constant weaving of practical and symbolic meanings, justice and measure had enjoyed a fruitful reciprocity since the ancient Near Eastern cultures, and one can see polis, cosmos, and justice becoming clustered with geometrical thinking from the time of Anaximander.¹⁷ However, Plato’s insight that there is an ontological order – expressed as the potential participation of the human soul in the world-soul – that is stratified harmonically (according to dike, justice) between ‘the bottomless pit of unlikeness’ (affiliated with darkness and earth) and ‘the Highest Good’ (affiliated with light and heavens) persisted in various forms in Europe for millennia after the polis.¹⁸ Aristotle preserves the stratification, as kinds of knowledge, in the Nichomachean Ethics Ζ, and, by decanting dialectic into the official discourse of the polis, Rhetoric, he points to the conditions for the highest level of understanding – the bios theoretikos, rooted in virtue – which was for him the purpose of a polis.¹⁹ In the civic life of the polis, these conditions reside in the pro and contra of debate, whose typicalities – recurring situations – comprise the Topics, the medium of exchange between politics or law, and the logical discourse of the Organon (whose syllogism preserves such proportionalities as A:B:B:C).²⁰ Both philosophers – in their different ways, to be sure – affiliate rightness or justice with analogia, which, however, cannot be expressed as a linguistic code, after the fashion of contemporary logic and computational theory, but rather in terms of the topics of situations. This is a milieu rooted in the disagreement/dialogue of agonic discourse, and resonates extensively and intensively, reconciling fields of relevance in history with primordial typicalities. The concrete conditions – the architectural settings – for debate/agon comprise the principal institutions of the polis for making and judging laws (bouleterion, heliaia), for tragedy and comedy (theatre), for ceremonial games (stadium and agora), for symposia (house), and for sacrifice (shrines and temples). The civic culture created around institutionalised conflict is the most significant commonality between the polis and the northern Italian republican city, and is the most profound insight into the nature of a democratic city.

The Oresteia of Aeschylus provides a succinct genealogy of settings by which justice comes to the polis (Figure 1.1, left). The trilogy is devoted to the final phase of what could be called a mythic history, exposing four strata of continuity behind the institution of civic justice. The first stratum resides with the gods Prometheus and Tantalos, both punished by Zeus for revealing secrets to humans (or, in the case of Tantalos, for serving up his son, Pelops, in a stew for the gods). The revived Pelops initiates the second stratum, set in Mycenaean/Homeric temple-palaces, where his twin sons, Thyestes and Atreus, contest the throne of what is now called Mycenae. Through a series of twinned marriages, seductions, and murders involving Mycenae and Sparta, fathers and sons, brothers and their wives,²¹ we traverse three generations of the House of Atreus to arrive at the events of the trilogy. Two of the tragedies are devoted to the murders of Agamemnon and then of Aigisthos and Clytemnestra. The third tragedy, the Eumenides, is the most relevant for our purposes. The drama opens in the third stratum of this genealogy, at Delphi, in the oracular temple acknowledged by all Greeks. Apollo intervenes in a story driven to this point by Zeus, and orders Orestes, still pursued by the Furies, to the court of Athena in Athens. There, Athena casts the deciding vote for acquittal; but more significantly, the retributive justice...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Urban Order and the Lived City
• Part II Culture and the Natural World
• Part III From Fragment to City
• Part IV Urban Discontinuities
• Index