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VISÃO,
POSSIBILIDADE,
VIRTUALIDADE
VISION,
POSSIBILITY,
VIRTUALITY
COORD./EDITED BY
Constantino Pereira Martins
Vítor Alves
2
TÍTULO / TITLE:
Visão, Possibilidade, Virtualidade
Vision, Possiblity, Virtuality
EDIÇÃO / PUBLISHER:
Ordem dos Arquitectos
Secção Regional Norte
COORDENAÇÃO / EDITOR:
Constantino Pereira Martins
Vítor Alves
PORTO, 2022
ISBN: 978-989-54638-8-6
O ponto de partida para a construção deste
livro foi o simpósio FILARCH realizado no
Porto em Novembro de 2021 na Fundação
Instituto Marques da Silva. As imagens e
textos são da inteira responsabilidade dos
autores, respeitando a ortografia adoptada.
© dos autores dos textos.
The starting point for the construction
of this book was the FILARCH symposium
held in Porto in November 2021 at the
Marques da Silva Institute Foundation.
The images and texts are the exclusive
responsibility of the authors, respecting
the adoped spelling.
© of the authors of the texts.
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69
ENVISIONING THE POSSIBILITY
OF PLACE. MARTIN HEIDEGGER,
CHRISTIAN NORBERG-SCHULZ
AND KENNETH FRAMPTON
CONSTANTINOS V. PROIMOS
Martin Heidegger’s 1951 lecture “Building,
Dwelling, Thinking” which was published in 1954 had an enor-
an inspiration for their work and on philosophers as the several
translations and reprints in many languages reveal (Heidegger,
1971). Heidegger’s method of attempting to retrieve the etymolo-
gy and the ancient meanings of the verbs building and dwelling,
aims to remind to his readers that the appropriate etymological
and philosophical research in language may furnish solutions
to the problems that humans encounter (Heidegger, 1971, pp.
146, 147). For example, the answer to the housing problem that
preoccupied postwar Germany, i.e. the lack of houses for the peo-
ple, has deeper roots than usually thought and its solution does
not simply consist of building more housing units but needs to
be directed at thinking what dwelling and building actually and
originally mean (Heidegger, 1971, p. 161).
The entire second part of Heidegger’s lecture
“Building, Dwelling, Thinking” is devoted to exploring what a
bridge as a built thing. The bridge according to Heidegger “does
not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge
as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream.” (Heidegger,
1971, p. 152) The bridge brings “stream and bank and land into
each other’s neighborhood.” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 152) The bridge
“guides and attends the stream,” “lets the stream run its course,”
“grants their way to mortals,” “leads from the precincts of the
castle to the cathedral square,” “gives to the harvest wagon its
its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.” (Heidegger,
1971, p. 153)
Heidegger employs a number of active verbs in
order to signal the several functions of the bridge as a built thing.
He ends up by claiming:
VISÃO / VISION
Adjunct Faculty at
the Hellenic Open
University and at
the postgraduate
program of the School
of Architectural En-
gineering, Metsovion
Technical University
of Athens
70
To be sure, the bridge is a thing of its own kind; for
it gathers the fourfold in such a way that it allows a
site for it. But only something that is itself a location
can make space for a site. The location is not already
there before the bridge is. Before the bridge stands,
there are of course many spots along the stream that
can be occupied by something. One of them proves
to be a location and does so because of the bridge.
stand in it; rather a location comes into existence
only by virtue of the bridge. The bridge is a thing; it
gathers the fourfold, but in such a way that it allows
a site for the fourfold. By this site are determined the
localities and ways by which a space is provided for.
(Heidegger, 1971, p. 154)
Thus it is not the environment and the place
that determine the bridge but it is actually the other way round: it
is the bridge that generates the place and forms the environment.
One may indeed wonder whether all bridges no matter how they
are built, perform all the functions that Heidegger ascribes to
them. Does the 2008 Pavillion Bridge in Saragosa, Spain by Zaha
Hadid Architects (Fig. 1) gather the fourfold in the same way as
the 17th century Arta Bridge in Greece (Fig. 2) which has for a
long time invaded the collective imaginary with the stories and
the legends around it? For Heidegger does not qualify the bridge
as a built thing apart from saying that: “But the bridge, if it is a
true bridge
a symbol.” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 153)1 It is true that Heidegger
does not give a hint as to what he thinks a true bridge is. His
constructivism does not seem to be shared by any of the Heideg-
gerian philosophers of architecture.
1. The emphasis is
mine.
Figures 1 and 2.
VISÃO / VISION
71
THE PLACE IS GIVEN AND THE
BUILDING COMPLIES TO IT
Christian Norberg-Schulz is a philosopher and
architectural theorist who espoused phenomenology and Martin
Heidegger’s views in particular, throughout his career. In his
“The Phenomenon of Place” published in 1976, Norberg-Schulz
ventures to examine the notion of place,
as a totality made up of concrete things having ma-
terial substance, shape, texture and color. Together
these things determine an “environmental charac-
ter” which is the essence of place. A place is there-
fore a qualitative “total” phenomenon, which we
cannot reduce to any of its properties, such as spatial
relationships, without losing its concrete nature out
of sight. (Norberg-Schulz, 1996, p. 414)
If the place is a qualitative total phenome-
non it cannot be reduced to one of the built things it contains,
like the bridge, without losing its concrete nature out of sight.
Norberg-Sculz seems here to go against Heidegger’s primacy
accorded to the bridge and to all built things thereby, when he
proclaims that the environment has a character determining the
place and all built things should comply to this character.
Norberg-Schulz agrees with Heidegger that
science cannot represent the qualitative aspects of place when
it visualizes only homogeneous and isotropic space in the form
of three-dimensional geometry. (Norberg-Schulz, 1996, p. 418)
Poetry can concretize these qualitative aspects of a place, the
feelings of shelter, security and belonging that the place pro-
vides (Norberg-Schulz, 1996, pp. 415, 416) and this is the reason
why architecture is understood by Norberg-Schulz as a kind of
poetry whose purpose is “to help man to dwell” and make human
existence meaningful by understanding the vocation of place.
(Norberg-Schulz, 1996, p. 426) For dwelling means an identi-
environment in which we live is meaningful. (Norberg-Schulz,
1996, p. 424) What Heidegger claims with his famous example
of the bridge is true, says Norberg-Schulz: the landscape which
designates all natural places (Norberg-Schulz, 1996, p. 417) does
indeed get its value through the bridge only however because
the meaning of the landscape before was hidden and the bridge
“brings it out in the open.” (Norberg-Schulz, 1996, p. 422) Al-
ways according to Norberg-Schulz, “The existential purpose of a
VISÃO / VISION
72
building (architecture) is therefore to make a site become a place,
that is, to uncover the meanings potentially present in the given
environment.” (Norberg-Schulz, 1996, p. 422)
It becomes therefore clear that Norberg-Schulz
has a very interesting interpretation of Heidegger’s example of
the bridge when he claims that the meaning is potentially there in
the environment and it is up to the architect to make it explicit,
uncover it or reveal it. However it seems to me that this is not
what Heidegger actually says when he employs the example of
the bridge. I would like to discuss this however later. In anoth-
er essay of Norberg-Schulz, from 1983, entitled “Heidegger’s
thinking on architecture” he returns to the example of the bridge,
claiming that what Heidegger wishes to reveal, by the example
of the bridge, is the “thingness of the thing.” (Norberg-Schulz,
1996, p. 433) Whenever something is a thing, it gathers a world
and all things, properly speaking, entail a gathering of a world
but this gathering must be revealed not by phenomenology any
longer but by a particular kind of thinking, Andenken, that allows
such disclosures. (Norberg-Schulz, 1996, p. 433) Such gathering
however does not mean that a thing generates a place as Heide-
gger argues for the bridge in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” The
kind of thinking that Heidegger calls forth is extremely necessary
for architectural practice today, Norberg-Schulz argues, which for
a long period of twentieth century was trapped “in the impasse of
-
ism that prevailed in modernism, causing “a schematic and char-
dwelling.” (Norberg-Schulz, 1996, p. 438)
ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING
IN FRONT OF THE TASK OF PLACE
CREATION
If Norberg-Schulz interprets Heidegger in
order to assert the primacy of landscape, environment and place
over the material things that places contain and envelop, Ken-
neth Frampton’s essay “On Reading Heidegger” which appeared
in 1974 is openly critical to all those approaches that fail to
distinguish between architecture and building (Frampton, 1996,
p. 442). This distinction that Heidegger himself does not make,
is important for Frampton because he argues that nowadays we
experience an incapacity to create places and ubiquitously we live
in “non places.” (Frampton, 1996, p. 443) (Augé, 1995)
-
VISÃO / VISION
73
ate and rich sociocultural experiences (Frampton, 1996, p. 444)
but in order to properly conceptualize it, we need to examine a
number of factors like “the manifest exhaustion of non-renewable
resources,” the famine that threatens a large part of the world,
the suburban sprawl proliferating and the industrialization of
building to name just a few. (Frampton, 1996, pp. 444, 445) The
nexus among nature, production and place needs to be careful-
ly scrutinized for it sets the standard for all built environment
and furthermore for the historical circumstances in which we
live. Any approach to the built environment which does not take
under consideration these parameters, i.e. nature, production
historical reality.
Although not explicitly stated, Frampton’s
remarks may apply to Heidegger’s view of built environment in
“Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” Frampton’s concern and motiva-
tion is precisely to qualify Heidegger’s remarks in a sociopolitical
way that he fears that is missing. It therefore depends on the
built thing whether it is on the side of building, particularly the
industrialized and rationalized one, submitted under “the utili-
tarian tyranny of technique,” or architecture that seeks quality,
culture and rich experience, both in public and private sphere.
(Frampton, 1996, pp. 444, 446) The built thing, the bridge which
is the example that Heidegger employs, does not therefore, ac-
cording to Frampton, simply create a place but needs a number
of additional parameters in order to do so.
HEIDEGGER’S ANDENKEN AND THE
NOTION OF THE EVENT
It is interesting to ask what is it that prompts
Heidegger to examine the erection of the bridge as some sort of
an event generating the place of the bridge in a way that is radi-
cally ungrounded, i.e. in no way predicted or anticipated, allow-
ing us only to attune ourselves to it. Things may be thought of as
events (Ereignis
that reveal their fourfold constitution between earth, sky, mortals
Contributions
to Philosophy (Of the Event) (Heidegger, 2012) (Bahoh, 2021)
(Grollo, 2021, pp. 89-104) (Nelson, 2007, pp. 97-115) introducing
his Kehre, his turn away from the philosophical preoccupations
of his youth and a new way in which Being is disclosed to Dasein
by means of a radical rupture. (Sahn, 2016) In the 1936 impor-
VISÃO / VISION
74
tant essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger describes
how truth occurs and discloses itself as rupture in the form of
event, when a political state is founded, when thinking takes
He is careful to exclude science as an original happening of truth
but in all those cases when truth happens, it takes place as an
rapturous event, radically ungrounded. (Heidegger, 1975, p. 62)
During the nineteen thirties, it occurred to
Heidegger that his early work still contained vestiges of meta-
physics in so far as it aimed, in some Kantian transcendental
sense, to reveal the necessary conditions of possibility for how
the world discloses itself to us (Sahn, 2016). This anthropocen-
trism conceded too much to traditional metaphysical thinking
according to Heidegger and thus he ventured to eliminate the
idea that Being is dependent on Dasein and may be grasped
from its analytic. The structure that transcends the early Heide-
ggerian anthropocentrism is the notion of Ereignis, the event of
appropriation that shifts the emphasis to the way modes of Being
have been disclosed to Dasein in history. The event is a rupture
which generates the disclosure of a new mode of Being taking
place through the process of concealment and unconcealment
and being revealed directly as truth. (Sahn 2016) It is however
still an open question whether with this new approach Heidegger
manages to escape transcendentalism, i.e. writing in terms of ab-
stract, a-priori principles and not with regard to the actual world.
(Dahlstrom, 2005, pp. 29-54) (Nelson, 2016, pp. 159-179)2
today, according to Heidegger, is called modern technicity. In
this condition permeated by modern technology, all things are
and bureaucratic production. The machine like logic of technol-
ogy, standardization and industrialization prevails everywhere,
destroying meaningful communities, resulting in nihilism for
modern thinking and promoting functionalist, pragmatic and
unlivable buildings.
CLOSING REMARKS
The bridge is therefore thought of as such an
event of appropriation and this is the reason why no conditions
or terms determine its course or its impact as place generator in
Heidegger’s late writings. Of course not all bridges are the same
in the same way as not all built things merit equal consideration.
However Heidegger’s task is not to establish standards or criteria
of architectural evaluation. He writes on a transcendental level
2. Daniel Dahlstrom,
“Heidegger’s Trans-
cendentalism” in Re-
search in Phenome-
nology, 35, Koninklije
Brill, NV, Leiden, The
Netherlands, 2005,
pp. 29-54, https://
www.bu.edu/philo/
files/2019/09/d-hei-
degger-transcenden-
talism.pdf, accessed
30/1/2022 and Eric S.
Nelson, “Heidegger’s
Failure to Overcome
Transcendental Phi-
losophy” Transcen-
dental Inquiry, eds. H.
Kim and S. Hoeltzel,
2016, pp. 159-179,
https://philarchive.
org/archive/NELHFT,
accessed 30/1/2022.
VISÃO / VISION
75
inquiring about the conditions of possibility of place creation.
Although Norberg-Schulz’s and Frampton’s
-
ist views of how built things determine places are important and
necessary, they give the impression that they miss the transcen-
dental level of discussion that Heidegger ventures in, interested
as he was in the principles and processes of thought, the study
of which led to his considerations of built things as place gener-
ators. Norberg-Schulz and Frampton are right to remind Heide-
gger of the environment, the landscape, nature, society, produc-
tion, politics and history for these are important factors indeed to
take into account when discussing how places become generated.
On the other hand, both Norberg-Schulz and Frampton miss
Heidegger’s consideration of all built things as events which is in
the center of his late thinking.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augé, M. (1995). Non-places.
Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity. Transl. John Howe,
London: Verso.
Bahoh, J. (2021). Heidegger’s Onto-
logy of Events. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Dahlstrom, D. (2005). “Heidegger’s
Transcendentalism” in Research in
Phenomenology, 35, Koninklije Brill,
NV, Leiden, The Netherlands, https://
www.bu.edu/philo/files/2019/09/d-
-heidegger-transcendentalism.pdf,
accessed 30/1/2022.
Frampton, K. (1996). “On Reading
Heidegger” in Theorizing a New
Agenda for Architecture. An Antholo-
gy of Architectural Theory, 1965-
1995, ed. Kate Nesbitt, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton Architectural Press.
Grollo, S. G. (2021). “Thinking the
Event in Heidegger’s ‘Black Note-
books’” Philosophy Today, vol. 65,
Issue 1.
Heidegger, M. (1971). “Building,
Dwelling, Thinking” in Poetry, Lan-
guage, Thought. Transl. Albert Hofsta-
dter. New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (2012). Contributions
to Philosophy (of the Event). Transl.
Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela
Vallega-Neu, Bloomington, Indiana:
Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1975). “The Origin of
the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language,
Thought. Transl. Albert Hofstadter,
New York: Harper & Row.
Nelson, S. E. (2016). “Heidegger’s
Failure to Overcome Transcendental
Philosophy” Transcendental Inquiry,
eds. H. Kim and S. Hoeltzel, https://
philarchive.org/archive/NELHFT,
accessed 30/1/2022
Nelson, S. E. (2007). “History as
Decision and Event in Heidegger”
Arche, vol. 4.
Norberg-Schulz, C. (1996). “The
Phenomenon of Place” in Theorizing
a New Agenda for Architecture. An
Anthology of Architectural Theory,
1965-1995, ed. Kate Nesbitt, Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.
Raoul, F. (2020). Thinking the Event.
Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana Uni-
versity Press.
Sahn, A. (2016). “Heidegger’s Political
Philosophy and the Concept of the
Event” in theoxfordphilosopher.
com/2016/08/03/heidegger’s-po-
litical-theory-and-the-concept-of-
-the-event, accessed 1/11/2021.
VISÃO / VISION
ANETA KOHOUTOVÁ
ANNAMARIA GIACOMELLI BORRAZ
ANTON HEINRICH RENNESLAND
CONSTANTINO PEREIRA MARTINS
CONSTANTINOS V. PROIMOS
DIOGO FERRER
DIOGO MONDINI PEREIRA
LAURA LEGARREA
LUZ ASCARATE
MICHELLE SOUZA BENEDET
NATÁLIA GRANDO
NATALIA KOVALCHUK
NATÁLIA SÁ
PEDRO BORGES DE ARAÚJO
QUENTIN GAILHAC
URIEL DAVI ECCHER
VÍTOR ALVES
