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The Conceptual Bearings of the Intercultural Role of Architecture∗

Nader El-Bizri

‘Ο ‘αγιος Συμεών ‘ο Στυλίτης1

مار سمعان العامودي

[Slide 1: Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nu descendant l'escalier’, 1963]

Prolegomenon: ‘In-der-Welt-sein’

This aim behind this paper is to investigate the principal ‘philosophical

presuppositions’ that underlie some of the fundamental theoretical reflections on the

‘intercultural roles’ of architecture. This line of inquiry focuses on some of the salient

interconnections that this question may have with ontology, epistemology, and

theories of value. We proceed in this context with prudence, since we are perhaps

still unprepared for the interpretation of this question, given that the realm from which

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it addresses us has not been hitherto sufficiently thought in terms of its metaphysical

constitution and unity.

Based on metaphysical perspectives, architecture appears as being intimately

connected with the existential dimensions that underpin the worldly nature of the

‘human condition’, in the sense that ‘being-in-the-world’ (‘In-der-Welt-sein’; ‘être-

dans-le-monde’)2 is essentially a mode of being-in-architecture. Even in its most

rudimentary forms, the ‘architectural’ is ‘ontological’ in terms of how it relates to the

question of being, ‘its meaning, truth and place’.

In sheltering and emplacing the modes of ‘dwelling’, with the extensional

envelopment of ‘the kinaesthetic spatiality of the human body’ and its ocular-motor

sensory inherence in phenomenal and perceptual fields, architecture demarcates the

conditions of possibility for enclosing the everyday existence of human beings, from

birth till death; while retaining also the material traces of past mortals, the physical

layering of history or the tangible signs of its erasure.

Embodiment is the vital mode by which I inhabit the ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt)

as a ‘body-subject’ (corps propre).3 Even the constitutive spatiality of childhood is

inscribed in our corporeality, in recollecting traces of past sensory experiences, of

localities of pleasure and pain, safety and trauma, and of memories in-between. By

surrounding the body, architecture envelops it in multidirectional sequences of

displacements that reveal the ambient surroundings as being perceptual phenomena,

in the continuum of their manifold appearances, instead of letting them simply appear

as ‘objects’.

After all, not a thing is seen in its entirety at once, nor is it given to immediate

intuition in its multiple visible aspects. Rather, things manifest their visible properties

through a spatial-temporal continuum in the manifoldness of their appearing; hence,

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unveiled ‘authentic appearances’ conceal hidden potential appearances that are

imagined. Vision is modulated by judgement, memory, discernment, comparative

measure, and is principally saturated with imagining; in the sense that ‘genuine

immediate appearing’ is supplemented by ‘imagined potential appearances’ through

perceptual un-concealment. This phenomenon of vision, which is confirmed in

phenomenology of perception, and through the principles of optics (and in dioptrics

and catoptrics), is manifest in experiencing architecture, its external surfaces and

interiorised spaces... Architecture cultivates our perceptive potencies in the interplay

between concealment and un-concealment, veiling and un-veiling, visibility and

invisibility. Furthermore, its architectonics connect with our attuned detection of

subtle proportions in physical reality, and facilitate their reflection a fortiori through

nuanced proportional adjustments in terms of the production of spatial harmonics,

scales, orders and ratios, through the formal modelling agency of geometry.

[Slide 2: The West-Bank Wall, cutting the Occupied Territories, 21st century]

Praxis

The architectural is intertwined with the worldliness of humans at existential

depths that ground the sequence of civilisation and the unfolding of its multifarious

material cultures. Architecture is ultimately paradoxical in terms of its

accommodating nature and the manner it produces space and apportions its regions

and localities. Architectural settings can allow for the improvement and betterment of

the conditions of the built and natural environment in which they are emplaced; and,

contrastingly, they could also hinder the emancipating possibilities of the milieu that

interactively receives them. Architecture dialectically facilitates constructive societal

evolutions, transformations, and edifications; or, in extreme opposite forms, it enables

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the politico-economic practices of oppression.4 In making and use, architecture

serves instrumental functions that operatively reflect, perhaps, almost the entirety of

the spectrum of human comportment, in its handsome and unhandsome expressions.

Architecture serves opposites, anomalies and antinomies, it measures

‘objectivism’ against ‘relativism’, with minimal adjustments in its spatial-material-

formal qualities; and yet, it requires in praxis far more dramatic dialectical

displacements of its signifiers, or a radical re-orientation of its shifting symbols. The

phenomenon of the dividing-spacing ‘apartheid-wall’ is a latent potency that pre-

exists its actualised physical appearance; its construction is the objectified sign of the

intensified hardening of the petrifying realities of tyranny, hate and conflict.

[Slide 3: Diego Rivera’s ‘Detroit Industry’, northern fresco; 1932-1933]

Tekhnē

The making of architecture, in its materiality, and in its spatial and formal

qualities, is essentially channelled through the developmental workings of economics

and the ever-evolving specifications of technology, with their differential and

variegated manifestations in material culture. The question concerning ‘the essence

of technology’, and its institutional-industrial entanglement with Capital, is also

connected with reflections on being. Hence, from the technological standpoint,

interrogations about architecture relate again to ontology, and also to the epistemic

conditioning of knowledge, via the powerful machinations of techno-science, of

information processing technologies, and their impress on determining the measure of

thought and organising labour. Investigating the cultural role of architecture is

consequently connected with epistemology, and with the (approximating) reflections

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on ‘truth’ and the conditions of its un-concealment through tekhnē, scientific-artistic

invention, or sapiential contemplation.5

The dominion of ‘technical’ thinking about thought itself transforms the

notion of ‘contemplation’ into an instrumental tool of problem-solving, of utilitarian

functionality. This power of technical ratiocination contrasts the picturing of thinking

as ‘useless’ or ‘workless’; not simply as what is malfunctioning and unworkable, but,

more essentially, as what is lifted from the spheres of use and the commerce of work,

amidst the loud cacophony, speed, and disarray in everydayness; especially in the flux

of hasty acculturations within rapid inter-societal transitional epochs. This state of

affairs does not point to tranquil absorptions in contemplation with solitary repose,

which are not determined through productivity or the ‘metaphysics of making’, or that

are overseen by technocrats, and organised under the superintendence of committees

of bureaucracy and the directives of financiers.

The picturing of objects in the world as ‘ready and present at hand entities’, as

potencies of use, focuses on ‘systems of handiness’, of ‘tools’, instead of being

primarily open to the lived worldliness of nourishment, of edible beings

(nourritures).6 The cultivation of ‘growing beings’, of harvest, wherein the arrival of

care endures, contrasts with the production of tools, the manufacturing of equipment,

the erection of edifices in the arts of making and the precincts of procurement.

[Slide 4: Jacopo de’Barbari’s? ‘Fra Luca Pacioli’, ca. 1495]

Paideia ... Epistēmē

The emphasis on ‘quantificational technicalities’, and their translation into ‘the

functional statistics of economic impact’ (resonating with the Capitalist consumerist

‘culture’), all are increasingly marginalising the ‘traditional’ cultural roles of

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architecture’, and the conscious critical engagement of the architectural thinker with

the humanities, arts and letters. The prevailing exemplars of education and

professionalism are articulated around reductive, fragmentary, and abstractive

constructs, which are disconnected from the historical integrative-interpretations of

the exact sciences and the visualisations of geometry, with their epistemic directives

in the enactment of architecture. Furthermore, the educational investigation of

architecture and its connections with the profession, within mainstream university

curricula, is not cultivated in the context of the unfolding of architectural thought in

its outlooks on the cosmos, on beauty, goodness, truth, justice, law and governance.

Yet, judging the intercultural role of architecture is contingent upon reflections that

are external to the explicit preoccupations of architectural thinking. The

developments within 20th century philosophy, and its ‘linguistic turn’, facilitated the

systemic replacement of Euclidean geometry with logic and algorithm as primary

epistemic models; mainly evoking also the emergence of non-Euclidean geometries in

the nineteenth century, and their integration in physics. Arithmetic and algebraic

notations became more dominant than geometric visualisation in modelling reality.

This state of affairs unfurled in parallel with the focus on the play of language in

‘Continental philosophical thought’, which shifted away from the exact sciences and

the logical investigations of the ‘Analytic school in philosophy’. Textual

hermeneutics, literary analyses of narratives, the modulation of methodologies in

decoding signifiers (semantics, semiotics, psychoanalysis), became emphasised in

orientations that are detached from scientific ‘visualisation’ as a mode of grasping

‘reality’. Historically, the textual served as a source of inspiration to the visual and

plastic arts; particularly in its scriptural manuscripts and codices. This association

with the letters was not separated from the classical epistemic role assigned to the

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study of reality and nature via the agency of geometrical visualisations, or the belief

in their veridical qualities in terms of securing a firm ground for the construction of

rational knowledge.

It might be argued indeed that linguistics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis

constitute ‘scientific disciplines’ that study signs and symbols, and can thus offer

methodological directives in terms of investigating the structure of meaning in

relation to architecture and its communicative cultural role. However, it is still

unclear how a transition takes place from the focus on natural language, its

grammatical structures, its interrelated systems of signs, and its modes of generating

meaning, into the spheres of their applicability within architectural analytics. Even if

such ‘scientific disciplines’ can guide certain domains of research in architecture and

its ‘play of signifiers’, their role cannot replace the need of architectural thought to be

more directly engaged with the exact and mathematical sciences; and especially with

fields focused on optics, mechanics, and geometry. This calls for thinking about the

epistemic and conceptual dimensions that underpin the positivistic directions in the

empirical and quantificational frameworks that guide architectural research,

particularly in terms of exploring the techniques of construction, the systems of

information technology, the sources of renewable energy, and the policies associated

with urban planning.

The theoretical text in our era is becoming the prime intellectual guide in

understanding design drawings and maquettes (architectural models) and the manner

they potentially translate into constructed-built forms and authorial agents of finesse

and culture. The role once played by architectural thought and inquiry, in terms of

contributing to the construction of knowledge and the understanding of natural

phenomena (and even rethinking the problems of philosophy itself), through the

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agencies of geometry, optics, mechanics, the visual and plastic modelling of space

and objects, is replaced in contemporary architectural humanities with an overreliance

on textual analysis, without sustaining the ancient gravity of ‘the Word’ due to the

apparent ‘flight of divinities’ from modern secularised languages. These

circumstances reinforce the dominance of quasi-philosophical narratives on

architectural theory. Architectural thinkers become seduced by the mimetic

emulation, in fragmentary forms, of the propositions of ‘poststructuralists’,

‘postmodernists’, and ‘deconstructionists’. This channels architectural theoretical

research on pathways that leave behind the historic role of being actively involved in

scientific investigation, in geometric demonstration, in experimentations with

technology, along with the refraction of these domains within the practicing of art and

its expressive meditations on religion, its signifiers and symbols. The architect is

increasingly unable to assume the role of being a genuine ‘functionary of society’, or

an honest rational and poetising interpreter of its ‘cultures’, away from facile or

dilettante intellectual appropriations from the humanities. ‘Architecture’ as a

disciplinary profession of design and building, is haunted by current cultural

insecurities in the search for epistemic and practical legitimacies. Confronted with

this picture, we proceed by way of indecision; and yet, we abide by the matter to be

thought; while also cautioning that a call for certainty in this regard constitutes an

arrogation of our voice that invites scepticism!

[Slide 5: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Vedute di Roma, etching; ca. 1740s]

Exodus … Phronēsis

Richness brims in inherited visual and scientific sources, literary texts,

historical narratives, handed down over awe-inspiring monuments, vestiges,

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vernacular settings; all revealing the complexities of the architectural manifestation of

the decline, demise and fall of a people, as well as their collective renewal,

rejuvenation and rise from the ruins. The names of cities become synonymous with

the destinies of nations and civilisations, since the earliest dawns of history and its

epochal appropriative determination of the horizons of our understanding of being.

And yet, this outlook on the ‘civitates orbis terrarum’ invites reflections on the

relationship of the ‘architectural’ with the ‘natural’, in terms of topology, or climatic

and geographical determinants. On symbolic levels, the ‘natural’ feeds also into the

idea of the ‘garden’, ‘the orchard’, as a paradisiacal realm, which invokes also the

image of nature as a temple; as a sacral sphere of romantic, poetic, mystical signifiers.

Picturing the symbolism of sites of ‘Revelation’, of the Desert (Sinai...), the

Island (Patmos...), the Mount (Jabal al-nūr...), and the Cave (Ghār Hira’...); along

with the natural shrines of Gnostics and hermits; grottoes of apparitions; blessed-

blessing trees; ponds of purification; vast landscapes of atonement and redemption,

spiritual meadows... All let architecture appear from afar in different lights (and at

times with the impress of disquietude and sorrowful regret) as delicate pointers to the

place where ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ may be named!

[Slide 6: ‘St. Simeon Stylites’; Wellcome Library] To the ‘placeless’ what are

east or west, north or south? To the ‘homeless’ what cities or gardens do architects

display? Sour-faced; does the alienated and deprived eye look with resentfulness or

coveting? Lodging in the hidden, dwelling the unseen, being a temple of divinities;

this is the journey of the self out of self; the cogito recoiling on itself in

circumambulation; brought into the circling sphere; thinking with anguish about

being-towards-death in the age of the abandonment of divinities, the advent of

nihilism. Through territories of deranging desolation, the signs of remembrance, of

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penitence and resurrection are sought in patient waiting, in fasting. A liminal

clearing, a leeway, takes place in-between ecstasy and despair, weeping and laughing.

The gaze is oriented towards an invisible salvific telos, as promised by antique

soteriology and eschatology.

At the summit of the Lebanon, overlooking the Mediterranean

Sea, a Levantine hermit carved his abode at the heart of a

millennial Cedar tree!

This image attracts meditations on hagiography, on ‘the Holy’; on Gnosis and

mysticism drifting away in the drunkenness of ‘Love’ from the logos of theology, the

laws of the polis. In evoking the longing adoration of ‘what presences in its absence’

more than all appearing actuality, we recollect the memory of the steadfast Syrian

ascetic, St. Simeon Stylite (Mār Sim‘ān al-‘Āmūdī; d. 459 CE), surviving for three

decades on a small platform, ever abiding at the top of a pillar; there, in the vicinities

of Aleppo, not too far from Antioch:

‘For that the evil ones come here, and say,

"Fall down, O Simeon: thou hast suffered long

For ages and for ages!"’7

The migrant pilgrim is summoned to return to quotidian life, to establish

‘cities of words’ in toil and pain, with stone, mortar, masonry; elevating edifices that

gather ‘mortals, earth, heavens, divinities’.8 Like the Prophets, Zarathustra descended

from the mountain,9 and the dwellers on the summits of Olympus were called upon to

edify a Republic, a ‘Virtuous City’ (Madīna fāđila)!

[Slide 7: Pieter Bruegel’s ‘The Tower of Babel’; ca. 1563] Enshrined in language,

the tongue stutters in encountering the ineffable (l’indicible); for all may have been

exhaustively said, and what remains un-thought is so ever shrinking; and with it, is

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reduced the capacity of testimony, of veridical testament. In an epoch when the

pursuit of ‘transcendence’ is forsaken without the signs of ‘immanence’, thought may

be in descent rather than ascent. No measure is sufficient or reliable in ‘Babel’! Lo to

the tribes raising the Ziggurat in ‘glory of man’!

The oldest of old, which follows behind us in thinking, cometh to

meet us in the future! What we contemplated with mindfulness

turned away from us. Thankfully, it mysteriously draws us along

in the draft of its withdrawal.10

NOTES

∗ This present paper offers a dense account of complementary investigations that I conducted

elsewhere as noted in the list of selected publications below.

1 Ho hagios Sumeōn ho Stulítēs. ‘Saint Simeon Stylites’; Wellcome Library (V00 17502;

Library reference: ICV No 17848, Iconographic collection: 44955i); Tempera on wood,

45.5×33cm; undated.

2 Appealing to Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit.

3 Heeding the ‘phenomenological analysis’ of Edmund Husserl (Ideen I; Ding und Raum), of

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phénoménologie de la perception; Le visible et l’invisible), and

Gaston Bachelard (La poétique de l’espace).

4 Considering the analytics of Michel Foucault (Les mots et les choses; Histoire de la folie).

5 Paying homage to Jacques Derrida’s reflections in La vérité en peinture.

6 Reflecting on Emmanuel Levinas’ Le temps et l’autre.

7 Evoking Lord Alfred Tennyson’s verses (St Simeon Stylite).

8 Invoking Martin Heidegger’s ‘parlance’.

9 Pointing to Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘tale’.

10 Recollecting the ‘Mnemosyne’ verse of Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin.

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Selected Publications Nader El-Bizri, 'Qui-êtes vous Khôra?: Receiving Plato's Timaeus', Existentia Meletai-Sophias 11 (2001), 473-490 ___________, 'A Phenomenological Account of the Ontological Problem of Space', Existentia Meletai-Sophias 12 (2002), 345-364 ___________, 'Religion and Measure', Phenomenological Inquiry 27 (2003), 128-155 ___________, 'Ontopoièsis and the Interpretation of Plato's Khôra', Analecta Husserliana 83 (2004), 25-45 ___________, 'On kai khôra: Situating Heidegger between the Sophist and the Timaeus', Studia Phaenomenologica 4 (2004), 73-98 ___________, 'La perception de la profondeur: Alhazen, Berkeley et Merleau-Ponty', Oriens-Occidens: Cahiers du centre d'histoire des sciences et des philosophies arabes et médiévales, C.N.R.S. 5 (2004), 171-184 ___________, 'A Philosophical Perspective on Alhazen's Optics', Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 15 (2005), 189-218 ___________, 'Uneasy Meditations following Levinas', Studia Phaenomenologica 6 (2006), 293-315 ___________, 'In Defence of the Sovereignty of Philosophy: al-Baghdadi's Critique of Ibn al-Haytham's Geometrisation of Place', Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 17 (2007), 57-80 ___________, 'Imagination and Architectural Representations', in From Models to Drawings: Imagination and Representation in Architecture, eds. Marco Frascari, Jonathan Hale, Bradley Starkey (London: Routledge, 2007), 34-42 ___________, 'Le problème de l'espace: approches optique, géométrique et phénoménologique', in Oggetto e spazio. Fenomenologia dell'oggetto, forma e cosa dai secoli XIII-XIV ai post-cartesiani, eds. Graziella Federici Vescovini and Orsola Rignani. Micrologus Library 24 (Firenze: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008), 59-70 ___________, 'Epistolary Prolegomena: On Arithmetic and Geometry', in Epistles of the Brethren of Purity. The Ikhwan al-Safa' and their Rasa'il: An Introduction, ed. Nader El-Bizri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) ___________, 'Creative inspirations or intellectual impasses? Reflections on relationships between architecture and the humanities', in The Humanities in Architectural Design: A Contemporary and Historical Perspective, eds. Soumyen Bandyopadhyay, Jane Lomholt, Nicholas Temple and Renée Tobe (London: Routledge, 2010), 123-135