Jung and His Tower

image of Jung at Bollingen, from http://jung.sneznik.cz/bollingen.htm

Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist, spent his entire life examining in intimate detail the complexities of the human condition. Although spurred by pressing issues of pathology and neurosis, his interest was ultimately in the intense questioning of what it means to be human. His lifelong study and wide-ranging research into the broad range of human experience makes him a compelling person for architects to study. What knowledge and insight, I wonder, can be distilled from the house that he built for himself?

Jung’s first important encounter with architecture as it relates to our psychology was in his interpretation of a dream that he had in 1909. In the dream he was in a house. Somehow instinctively knew that this was his house. He was on the upper storey at the beginning of the dream but became quickly curious about the levels below, and began to descend. As he descended, the house became progressively older and more primitive until eventually when he reached the basement he found himself in a dark, low cave. “Thick dust lay on the floor, and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture,” he records in his auto biography. This dream was instrumental in the formulation of Jung’s model of the self. The house, he realized, was him. As he descended he moved through his various layers, from his conscious self to the unconscious, until eventually he reached the primitive remnants of his ancestors, that common inheritance which we all carry with us that he termed the ‘collective unconscious’.[1]

image of Bollingen from water from http://mysticbourgeoisie.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_archive.html

Years after this dream, about the time of his mother’s death in 1923, Jung decided to build himself a summer house . This home was to be, in his own words, “a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts” and the work that he had been developing over his career. Words on paper were no longer enough for him; he felt a desire to build, to “make a confession of faith in stone”.[2] He developed this stone ‘confession’ over the next 12 years of his life.

His initial intention had been to build a small circular one-storey dwelling with “a hearth at the centre and bunks along the walls.” And it had to be near water. It was to be a simple structure, intended to frame a very simple life, a structure and a life both stripped down to their basic principles, the way that he had also stripped down the model of the psyche to its very basic form. He wished to have no electricity and no running water, chopping his own firewood for heat and cooking. “These simple acts make man more simple,” he wrote, “and how difficult it is to be simple!”

Indeed it seems like he did find it hard to be simple. Before even building the initial structure, Jung had to alter the initial plan to make it less ‘primitive’, and he then expanded it every 4 years for the next 12. First he built what he describes as a ‘tower-like annex’. Then, prompted by what he described as “a feeling of incompleteness”, he extended the annex in order to create a room for personal withdrawal. This was followed by the addition of a courtyard and ‘logia’ facing the lake, which was in turn followed, after the death of his wife, by an additional storey added to the original round structure at the centre of it all. If, as he saw it, that original round dwelling was him, raising it a second storey was and act of self-articulation, something he had felt afraid of doing while his wife was still alive.[3]

Jung intentionally aimed to bring into physical manifestation his idea of himself. Studying the tower he eventually built and the process that to him there gives us some insight into how this can be accomplished: how architecture can literally represent us. It is interesting that Jung chose to make this place for himself immediately following his mother’s death. It is as if he was prompted by the void that she left to fully assert himself in the form of a building. And this relationship between building and death goes further. When excavating in order to place the foundations, Jung uncovered a skeleton. A photograph of this skeleton is preserved in the tower. In addition, in the courtyard, Jung placed 3 stone tablets on which he chiselled the names of his paternal grandparents. All of these are sorts of momente mori, but also symbols of the past. Thus the past and future are both gathered in the present: the tower was built for the future, as most houses are, but it sprung out of his mother’s death and is filled with reminders of what has come before. And, in a way, the simplicity of the life inscribed by the tower is also an evocation of the past. As Jung writes in his autobiography, “in the tower at Bollingen it is as if one lived in many centuries simultaneously. The place will outlive me, and in its location and style it points backwards to things of long ago.”[4] Jung’s tower is thus a ‘locus’ of times: bringing together the past, present, and the future.

Detailed image of Bollingen courtyard, from http://rchrd.com/photo/archives/2006/01/cg_jungs_house.html

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[1] Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 159.

[2] Ibid, 223.

[3] Ibid, 223-226.

[4] Ibid, 237.

Heidegger and his Hut

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger thought long and deeply about the inter-relationship between a person and his environment. He saw a person’s being, their dwelling, and their thought, as intimately connected with their environment. In his late essay, Building Dwelling Thinking he said that

space is never something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an internal experience … I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather I am there, that is, I already pervade the space of the room, and only thus can I go through it.[1]

Our being is thus not isolated to a simple point in space and time but incorporates what is around us. As through verbal communication we make meaning between us, there is a similar sort of rapport that we engage in with the things around us.

Heidegger himself chose purposefully a place in which to conduct his writing, a small cabin set into the slope of a valley in the Black Forest. He chose the site and built the cabin as a place both for his family to retreat to and for him to work. Heidegger felt a close connection to the mountains that surrounded his chosen place of dwelling, as if he drew from their strength. As Adam Sharr has written, Heidegger

located himself as a susceptible scribe, suggesting that philosophy suspended the landscape in words through him almost without agency. The philosopher claimed a poignant sustenance in the changing climate of the locality, the building’s sense of interiority, the distant view of the Alps, and the spring alongside. He attributed a ‘hidden law’ to the philosophy of the mountains.[2]

The mountains, the valley, the cabin, were seen by Heidegger as dialogue partners as he confronted the important questions of Being that his work centred around. As Sharr later suggests in his book, “the mountains’ tangible presence and seasonal movements prompted explorations of existence … For him, the very ‘nearness’ of the mountain situation preceded interpretation. The material he needed to philosophize was already then laid out before him.”[3]

In order to conduct his philosophical work, this is where he chose to situate himself, and he chose to situate himself in a particular way, the cabin removed from the town below, literally set into the earth. Within, the dwelling of the house is clearly articulated as a series of compartments: a sleeping room, a kitchen, a living and dining room, and a study. Given the importance of Heidegger’s work in his life, the study is of particular interest. The writing desk sits before a window, facing east. Since he preferred to work in the morning his writing space would have been flooded with light at the time when he was at the desk. Out over the desk, through the window, the view extends along the valley towards the mountains in the distance. To the right of the desk was a table for laying things out, to the left a shelf where he would store his manuscripts. There was no bookshelf there, as he seemed to prefer to leave his books at home in the city.[4]

Heidegger felt that architecture should grow out of dwelling as a natural extension, that only in this way would it frame true dwelling in an appropriate way. But architecture is built purposefully and it is generally built quickly, not, as one is sometimes temped to think Heidegger imagines, as a snowball builds, small abberations in the internal kernal becoming exaggerated as the snow accumulates. Heidegger built the cabin in the Black Forest as the appropriate frame for his dwelling and for his encounter with the world. For this reason his cabin is of great interest to those of us interested in the relationship between building and dwelling and the meaning it bears.

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[1] Heidegger, Basic Writings, 358-9.

[2] Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut, 17.

[3] Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut, 76.

[4] Sharr, Heidegger’s Hut, 34.

In order the photos are taken from:
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/%7Ejanzb/place/philosophy.htm
http://flickr.com/photos/26612130@N04/2495120356/
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heideggerrundweg0013.JPG

The 'Poetics of Architecture' (& the architecture of poets)

Architecture is particularly fascinating amongst the forms of cultural production, in that while we may have occasion to read a poem, or choose to listen to music, or look at a painting, architecture is inescapable. It surrounds us almost every waking hour of our lives. We may wander through the woods, or across a moor or desert, but eventually we must take shelter from the sun, or from the wind, or from the rain, heat or cold. Architecture surrounds us and gives form to our lives, and in its particular relation to us, its corporeal engagement with our being in the world, there is meaning. We must, through point of necessity, give a physical form to our dwelling, a form which, once constructed, we continue to confront on a daily basis, a form which we work in and with, which we push up against and alter as our needs change, and which plays an important role in who and how we are. This is what I would like to call the ‘poetics of architecture’, the meaning that emerges from these relationships.

As an architect I aspire to think in terms of these poetics. In building a home my aim is to give physical form to someone’s life, hopefully creating a manifestation of who and how somebody wants to be.

It is for this reason that I have been interested recently in the houses of writers. The three writers that I have been examining – Martin Heidegger, Carl Jung, and Al Purdy – have all thought extensively about what it means to dwell as humans in the world. More than this, they have committed much of this thought to words on paper, and of particular interest to me, these three writers all also built their own houses thus framing their dwelling in a particular way. In studying the houses of writers I hope to reveal lessons on the poetics of architecture that may be of use to designers.

Examining each of these writers gives us a slightly different window into architecture’s engagement with our existential situation: their longing for authenticity is satisfied in different ways; their relationships with perceived ‘nature’ and with ‘world’ are different as are their relationships with the past and the future; their depictions of self differ and are sometimes implicit and sometimes quite explicit. All of this is useful for architects wishing to engage intelligently with the poetics of architecture.

Found: images of climate-change fighting technologies at massive scales

So there is an idea afoot that substantially whitening low lying clouds may be a feasible way of cooling the atmosphere (to hold off climate change). Apparently it is possible to make really white mist by using very small water droplets. By mixing this mist with clouds you can make the clouds whiter! Here is an image, linked from Nature Magazine of how the whitening could take place:

Another very science-fictiony infrastructure that scientists are apparently really considering are huge carbon-sucking machines like seen below:

This image is also taken from Nature.

Toolbox!

What with neologisms, repurposings, redescriptions, etc, it is very hard to keep a standard operating vocabulary to aid us in clear communication. I for one fully believe in the value of vocabulary in opening up, and alternately closing down our capacity for thinking. New words are extremely valuable for thinking about new things. The following is a list of words that I find very useful for thinking, I call it my toolbox. The definitions I offer (the purposes of the tools) are of course controversial and may be unfamiliar to you. For instance, Rorty's use of the words Liberal and Irony are unusual (and especially with Liberal, politically suspect), but because I find them very valuable for thinking I have included his definitions here. If you have dispute with one of my definitions, please voice your alterations and elaborations!

Apollonian View - encompassing, summarative perspective, as if seen from above

Canalization - physical manipulation of human activity by architecture

CPA - continuous partial attention, distracted, pluralized state of awareness

Cybermancy - treating computers and other electronic devices as magic

Cyborg - a cybernetic organism

Demystification - the clearing of an imaginary dimension from the understanding of the world

Digital Derive - surfing link to link on the Internet

To Dwell - to live in awareness in such as way as resembles making

Ecosystem - a complex, responsive system of base material factors, biological factors, and abstract (social, mental, aesthetic, systemic, ethical) characteristics that has flexible boundaries and a structural metabolism

Epistemology - examination of how we know

Geolocative - making use of one’s precise spatial location

Hegemony - power – or more specifically embedded power, and usually representing the dominant ideology

Idea - an abstract construction in the mind that either represents something in the world or attempts to give an explanation of it

Image - a metaphoric representation

Individuation - separation of the individual from the world as an isolatable thing

Informational Shadow - digital representation or counterpart of a physical reality

Interpenetration - the phenomenon of the tight interconnectedness of all things, both materially and causally

Intersubjectivity - collaborative creation of self, other, and world through discourse and agreement

Irony - acceptance of the contingency of one’s versions of truth, that truth is a way of speaking (from Rorty)

Liberal - a person who thinks that causing pain to others is the worst thing that we do (from Rorty)

Logos - understood through logic of language

Mythos - understood through intuition and enactment of ritual

Myth - a loading of experience of world with an imaginary / psychological dimension that seriously changes our perspective of it

Narrative - a sequential, rhythmic way of structuring our understanding of things usually depending upon causal relationships and familiar plot devices

Phenomenology - the rigourous philosophical interrogation of our confrontation with the world / a systematic approach to describing things-in-themselves

Plurality - acceptance of different customs and worldviews, within limits set by humanistic principles

Poesis - bringing forth, poetically

Mixed Reality - the zone between virtuality and physicality, in which they are blended in various proportions

Virtual Reality - the realm of engagement and interaction in which phenomena are simulated

Readiness-to-hand - close relationship with those aspects of world for which we have instrumental use

Absolute Space - that space which is directly measurable and useful for technology

Relative Space - that space which is directly tied to time

Relational Space - that space which contains value; social and mental space

Mind/Body Split - tendency to think of the mind as somehow separate from the other bodily functions

Subject / Object Split - tendency to separate the thinking self from the world as a way of viewing it

Table operations - moving narratives, ideas, myths, images around as if seen from above on a table

Trace - residue of something that has come before

Technis - bringing forth, instrumentally

Webgaze - perspective from 'within the Internet'

Heidegger's Dwelling

In Heidegger’s Building Dwelling Thinking (1951), he sets up a tension between dwelling and technology. Simply, he says, in dwelling we save the earth rather than mastering it. Mastering the earth, on the other hand, as he outlined elsewhere in The Question Concerning Technology (1953), is the domain of technology and the science that serves it.

Heidegger says that to dwell is to safeguard the essential unfolding of the fourfold, or quadrature. This fourfold he describes as consisting of the earth, the sky, the mortals, and the divinities. This is frankly obscure. I think it would not be doing too much violence to the Master’s thinking if I was to substitute ‘that which we know as heavy’ for the earth, ‘that which we know as light’ for the sky, ‘that which we know as being of the human finite condition (both physically and temporally specific)’ for the mortals, and ‘that which we know as unknowable’ for the divinities. To dwell is thus to safeguard the unfolding of these things: to aid this unfolding by thoughtfully living through them. If I was to rephrase Heidegger’s notion of dwelling in terms that are more accessible, I would say that it was equivalent to “living in awareness” – in awareness of the quadrature as I have described it.

Now, Heidegger’s description of dwelling is a lot more confusing than this. He both seems to straight up equate dwelling with the Being of humans, what elsewhere he refers to as Dasein, and also describe dwelling as something to be learned, to be developed or cultivated. Further, while dwelling as an activity can be cultivated, it is also a sort of cultivation itself, a ‘caring’ for the world, and thus a making of the world. Dwelling is thus also that sort of being which is similar to making. I would then like to extend my rephrasing of dwelling to “that sort of living in awareness such as resembles a making of the world.” And there I'll leave it.

More on Google Books

About a month back Google announced a major settlement with publishers and the Authors Guild, in which the representatives of the publishing industry agreed that it was alright for Google to be trying to 'scan' every book ever produced, as long as they offered the copyright holders a percentage of the profits made off of the work, as well as payed them a one-time scanning fee. This is a hackneyed version of the actual 134 page agreement, but not inaccurate I don't think.
Now it appears that not everyone is happy about this. A group of interested persons, including the American Library Association, The Institute for Information Law and Policy at The New York Law School, and a consortium of lawyers are now planning on raising their objections to Google's plan. Just to give you an idea of what their knickers are all twisted about, the key words in the debate appear to be things like monopoly and anti-trust.
In my mind the problem doesn't just involve the books thing, it involves Google's position as the sometime owner of content but more often distributor and 'organizer' of content from maps to news to blogs to images to videos etcetera and etcetera. This blog, for instance, although the content belongs to me, is saved on memory that belongs to Google. My email also is all saved on a server owned by Google and is accessed through a program designed and managed by Google. Stepping back a few decades it is as if my filing cabinet belonged to someone else, and also my bookshelf, and also my photoalbum and my vhs collection!
My own very simple formulation of the problem is like this:

Google's mission statement is 'to organize the world's information'.
Organization is a form of control.
Knowledge is power.
Absolute power corrupts, absolutely.

We can trust Google, right? They're basically a philanthropic organization, right? Well, maybe, and no. I think I would not be amiss if I said that history teaches us that it is abject foolishness to trust anyone that has immense amounts of power. Perhaps the founders and executives of Google are in possession of ideals that I share - this is not reason enough to blindly trust them. First of all I cannot be sure beyond a doubt that my ideals are less likely to cause pain and more likely to cause universal prosperity and suffrage than others' ideals. And second of all, Google neither has these goals as its mandate nor is it a democracy (such as the common goals of the group may be upheld) - it is a frankly profit-driven corporation.
So, I think its great that we have a system in place (or at least the Americans do) that allows us to challenge things like this and also that we have people willing and interested enough to challenge them. I only wish that there was greater concern about it circulating. These are very serious issues that need to be attended to with great thoughtfulness and dexterity. The system of information is becoming dangerously unbalanced - kudos to the librarians and to the lawyers for keeping an eye on it for us.