BDT

On "Building, Dwelling, Thinking"

Martin Heidegger. We certainly love to drop his name. The German philosopher seems to hold a mythical authority in our industry, in part due to his essay, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”. Maybe it’s the fact that the sheer philosophical density of Heidegger’s writing lends some authority to the designers who quote it. But I think that there’s a more sincere, unpretentious reason for his popularity as well: Heidegger’s writing does what every young architect struggles to do - define architecture. In fact, because his definition of architecture is so deeply concerned with the je-ne-sais-quoi quality that separates a built house from a lived home, Heidegger effectively restores some kind of unique craft to architecture. In writing this, I hope not only to provide you some transparency about Heidegger, but also to lay the groundwork for using his phenomenological theory as a future tool for evaluating the effectiveness of buildings, not merely as containment units, but as something to dwell in.

With that said, the following is an interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s 1954 essay, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, translated to English by Albert Hofstadter.

There is already a lot to consider in the title, originally “Bauen, wohnen, denken”. Here already, Heidegger frames his writing around verbs - building, dwelling, thinking. One can see in this that phenomenology is a kind of functional programming, meaning that, in the phenomenological attempt to define existence, one does not try to define static atomic things, but rather, dynamic holistic actions. This is because phenomenology is fundamentally concerned with understanding existence subjectively. As such, phenomenology is built upon multiple modes of being, verbs, really. One important takeaway is that Heidegger is not interested in a verb as a thing a subject does. He doesn’t want to separate the subject from the verb, as in “she builds” or “Sie baut”. This is because when you frame the idea as subject-verb, you are observing from outside the action. Only within the verb can we know its meaning. Only within the action of architecture can we define architecture.

Going into architecture, of course, is essentially to “dwell”. And it is around dwelling that Heidegger constructs his essay, which is composed of two overarching parts, a definition of dwelling, and an answer to the question, “how does building belong to dwelling?’

The first part begins with a somewhat casual etymological analysis of the (German) terms “building” and “dwelling” and a series of related terms like “neighbour”, arriving at the conclusion that their shared linguistic root is about living. Thus, the original and fundamental nature of living as a human being is the same as building and dwelling, or at least it hypothetically was at one stage of human development. However, over time, humans have learned to separate the meanings of building and dwelling from living, thus it can be said that there is now two degrees of alienation, from living to dwelling, and from dwelling to building. In order to reconcile these two differences, Heidegger claims that underlying these gaps is the following set of facts:

But if we listen to what language says in the word bauen we hear three things:
1. Building is really dwelling.
2. Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth.
3. Building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings.

We will start by looking at the first gap between living and dwelling. Interestingly, this difference of meaning is actually something that anglophones can also understand by contrasting the meanings of contemporary English words “house” and “home”. Heidegger, for his part, identifies the unique quality of dwelling in another linguistic root: in “being at peace,” “being free”, or “being spared”. In this sense, what makes a house a home is that being in a home is being spared. This leaves us with two questions: 1. What is being spared? 2. From what is it being spared?

Referring to fact 2 above, if dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth, then it may at first seem inevitable that we humans are always dwelling. But Heidegger in fact is subtly referring to the fact that we are not always “on the earth”. Or, to put in phenomenologically, one can be not on the earth, but Being-in-the-world is always on the earth. In fact, Being-in-the-world, for Heidegger, is always tied to the Fourfold of earth and sky, mortals and divinities.

At this time, I am not going to explain the Fourfold, as even Heidegger, in uncharacteristically imprecise fashion, only describes the Fourfold in this text via rather poetic descriptions like “vaulting path of the sun” or “beckoning messengers of the godhead”. As a proxy for the Fourfold, I invite you to think of them as fundamental elements that comprise existence. This is up to you, be it earth-wind-water-fire, water-light-wind, the wuxing, etc. What I want to draw attention to, however, is two further facts:
Fact 4. Even though the Fourfold can be described separately, for Being-in-the-world, they are always one. If there is earth, there is sky, and so on.
Fact 5. Heidegger takes care not to identify the Fourfold with Nature

So to answer the two questions above, what is being spared is the Fourfold, as if we look at fact 2 and fact 4, if dwelling is being on earth, then dwelling must also be being under the sky, and so on. But if all of these elements comprise existence, how can there be anything for them to be spared from? This is where fact 5 comes into play; the Fourfold is spared from objective Nature. So what is the relationship between the Fourfold and Nature? One might read this relationship as Heidegger’s comparison of building and growing. In proper Being-in-the-world, growing and building are not competing concepts. The Earth grows what it needs, and humans, being part of the Earth, build what they need, but this is part of the total growth of the Earth. But just because the Fourfold might be seen as “contained” within Nature does not mean it cannot be “spared” from Nature. It is spared in the sense that, even though there is objective Nature, humans cannot know objective Nature; we only know the Fourfold through direct experience. This is a long way of saying, to spare in Heidegger’s sense is to spare from objectivity, to bring into one’s subjectivity. Alternatively, it means, to inject something with meaning, which we’ll discuss in a second.

I admit, at this point, this conclusion may sound rather unsatisfying, as it has not yet brought us any closer to understanding the practical difference between house and home. There is, of course, one untied thread, and this untied thread is where we actually get advice on turning a house into a home. This untied thread is the difference between being and Being-in-the-world.

As discussed in the short analysis of the title, Heidegger’s philosophy posits multiple modes of being that are not exactly equal. Objective being (she builds a house) is distinct from Being-in-the-world (dwelling in a home). To paraphrase the opening of Being and Time (translated by Macquarrie and Robinson), Being-in-the-world follows being if one looks at their relationship causally or chronologically. This is like saying, the oak happens after the acorn. Conversely, in terms of meaning, being follows Being-in-the-world. This is like saying, the acorn has some kind of “intention” to be an oak, else it would remain an acorn. It is tempting, at this time, to respond that, this “intention” is mechanically coded, hence the acorn is just being an acorn when it becomes an oak. And Heidegger would not strictly disagree with this. He would simply say that, all modes of being are injected with meaning, intention, or purpose. The only reason we describe the acorn’s intention to become an oak as mechanical and not like human “meaning” is because we don’t really know what it’s like to be an acorn.

To return (again) to architecture, we don’t know what it’s like to be a house, hence it is futile to describe a house mechanically to make it a home. But we do know what it is like to live in a home. Being-in-the-world is to being as dwelling is to a house as an object. So to pose the question again, what does the relationship of Being-in-the-world and being actually tell us about how to build a home?

It should be somewhat clear now that the answer to this above question lies not in answering “how does a house become a home?”, but rather to answer, “how does building belong to dwelling?” This brings us to Part 2.

As discussed, dwelling is in the mode of Being-in-the-world. In II.12.54 of Being and Time, Heidegger defines Being-in-the-world not as spatial containment by the world, but rather, as being one with the world, hence the obsessive hyphenation. Being one with the world, for Heidegger, is defined as a certain comfort and deep acquaintance with how it works, and the willingness to act on it.

The example Heidegger gives in Part 2 of “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” is that of a bridge spanning two banks of a river. Note that the bridge is not a Being-in-the-world, but our relationship to the bridge is. Basically, the bridge, for Heidegger, is a being that “gathers” the Fourfold and the elements around itself. It “gathers” the banks of the river with the river, not because it physically brings them closer, but because it establishes the intention behind their relationship. The intention the bridge establishes for the river and banks is that they were separated and uncrossable by humans. The bridge also establishes other intentions like, the river is a thing to be admired by humans while standing above it. There is not necessarily one final intention that the bridge gives, but without the bridge, there is a lack in our subjective relationship to the river and banks. Heidegger terms the bridge a “location,” which is not yet “space,” but it is almost there. To use another analogy, being in a location is to being in a space as being in the world is to Being-in-the-world. In a location, all the elements are there next to each other, but they are not experienced as one.

By contrast, space is those elements experienced as one. What this means is:
Fact 6. Space is to be understood outside of time or causality.
Fact 7. Space is the negation of distance between the elements. There is no distance in a space. Note: “negation of distance” is not Heidegger’s exact terminology
Fact 8. Our relationship to space is one and the same as dwelling.

To understand fact 6, Heidegger gives an interesting statement, namely, that before I walk through the door, I am already in the room on the other side. Obviously there is a temporal separation between the two states, but, to walk through the door, I need the intention of being on the other side. And it is this intention, unifying the two states of being on opposite ends of the door, that is what defines space. By contrast, location is simply one’s being on one side of the door, the door, and the other room, but they are considered separately. It can be said that space is location that is unified by intention. For fact 7, when one considers the intention of entering the room, both states of being on either side of the door are existing in superimposition. To illustrate this, Heidegger makes reference to a bridge in Heidelberg, claiming that, even if one is not at that location, one is in that space so long as one thinks about the bridge. This is because thinking of that bridge is a relationship that negates the distance between the thinker and the bridge. Space is the negation of distance. Fact 7 is perhaps the most difficult to grasp in terms of architecture, unless we admit paper architecture as being spatial. Lastly, with fact 8, because space is the negation of distance, then space with the Fourfold is the unification of the Fourfold. Hence, our relationship to space - our being in the Fourfold - is dwelling.

Finally, to define building, to say that building is the creation of space is to say that building is the process of negating the distance between elements. Typically, we think of building as being incomplete, that a completed building happens after building. Instead, Heidegger argues that the very act of building already contains the intention of the completed building, just as perceiving the door already contains the intention of being in the room on the other side. Heidegger then reiterates this with another etymological analysis:

The erecting of buildings would not be suitably defined even if we were to think of it in the sense of the original Greek techne as solely a letting appear, which brings something made, as something present, among the things that are already present… Building accomplishes its nature in the raising of locations by the joining of their spaces.

Essentially, Heidegger argues that, the things that are already present (the elements, the oak and the acorn, the being on one side of the door and the being on the other side of the door) are brought together as one in the process of building. Thus building belongs to dwelling in the sense that, if dwelling is the way in which we live and exist on the earth, the building is what allows us to envision the possible forms of dwelling. To use the example of the bridge from before,
A. My being on one side of the river is Being-in-the-world, as is my being on the other side, my being in the river, or my standing above the river. These are not quite dwelling because I’m not subjectively comfortable in any of these states
B. The bridge is a location
C. My perception of the bridge and the resulting intention to cross the bridge and conceiving of being on either side is space
D. The construction of the bridge with the intention of making the river crossable is building
E. My comfortably crossing the river via the bridge is Being-in-the-world, and, if comfortable enough, it is dwelling

Although D (building) temporally precedes E (dwelling), for D to be possible, it has to be preceded by E in intention. And because E already exists in intention, then the (still imaginary) crossable bridge exists as space. Hence D exists within E, that is, building belongs to dwelling. Though the practical implications of this statement on architecture merit a much deeper analysis, one can take the above as a sort of philosophical proof of the need for design to proceed first through an understanding of dwelling and being at peace with the Fourfold (elements, if you prefer).

Heidegger then closes his essay with a rather a powerful claim:

The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase of the earth’s population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.

In one sense, this is terrifying because it confronts the both the material fact of homelessness as well as the metaphysical fact that we don’t really know how to live on the earth. But there is also the hint of positivity in this statement in that it calls for the discovery of new forms of dwelling. It is easy to forget in the above examples, like of the bridge, that without the bridge, we don’t easily conceive of crossing the river, just as, before plumbing, we didn’t really see it as a fundamental need in choosing an apartment. But we do now; our imagination, our modes of dwelling have expanded. In this way, Heidegger reaffirms the role of building in the conception of modes of living. Maybe that’s why we architects love him.

Teshima

Why Visit Teshima Art Museum

Because it demonstrates quite clearly what it means for architecture to become a “sermon in stone”. Teshima Art Museum is an architectural manifesto in the purest sense. Though every building can claim to be a manifesto for someone’s way of life, Teshima Art Museum reads as a manifesto for architecture itself while demonstrating what the medium of “space” really looks like.

In fact, reading some of the Google reviews of the site, it seems pretty clear that most visitors feel what the Teshima Art Museum is saying, even if they can’t quite verbalise what they’re supposed to take away from it. I’m going to try to verbalise here what the museum is trying to say by dissecting the spatial language in which it declares, calmly but confidently, the nature of dwelling.

To understand this, I have to start by recounting my own experience a bit.

The museum experience begins with the ticketing office, a concrete box sticking out of a soft, green hill. Though one need not spend much time here, the box does to establish concrete as the primary material intervention. Furthermore, that the box appears open-faced on one side reveals the 25cm thickness of its walls and ceiling, a consistent thickness that reappears throughout the museum wherever concrete is “cut”. In essence, concrete through the museum experience reads as a thin surface or fabric, rather than as a solid object. This aspect becomes quite important later as we enter the museum.

After this initial check-in, the typical museum experience has us take a indirect path to the main museum building that curves around a hill. Classic intro move. The pivot of castle walls, the hedge labyrinth. I’m not mocking it, though. In genius fashion, this introductory path serves two critical functions. First, it erases our view of the entrance and the automobile route into the building, serving us a kind of palate cleanser in preparation for the new space. About a third of the way along the path, the hill blocks any sound from the visitor area. The second, and more important, function of this path is to expose us to uncured elements, particularly water, light, and wind, who will soon feature heavily in the main museum. One knows this especially at the midpoint of the path, where there is an ocean-facing bench, shaded by unshaved trees. Quick note: everyone’s experience here will be a bit different. For me, there was some light rain, an soft, overcast lighting that nonetheless was somewhat cut through the trees, and just the slightest wind felt through the leaves, but not enough to cool me off from the summer heat.

Having established both a material language and our main players in the story, we now turn to the museum. Rounding the hill, we see a kind of submerged dome with two large holes carved in it. I was particularly lucky in my visit, as it was precisely at this moment that the rain cleared, shifting from overcast lighting to higher-contrast, sunny ambience that highlighted the near-white concrete eggshell against the green hills and trees. It appeared, at this moment, not as concrete, but as something delicate, or at least fine. This fineness was again emphasized at the door, which revealed the same consistent 25cm thickness of the concrete as seen at the ticketing office. However, in contrast to before, the door, and the whole museum, was round, making it read even more strongly as fabric. Again, this becomes quite important in a second. Oh, last thing about the door-that the door extends slightly out of the curve of the museum lets one spend just a moment longer in the compressed entrance, charging up a bit of tension to be released as one’s attention explodes into the main chamber.

It is in this main chamber that the fabric-like nature of concrete acquires meaning. To start, instead of forming standing walls, the concrete folds onto the earth, as if the space were formed by raising a pocket of fabric off a table. Because the space is round, this wall-less-ness obliterates any immediate sense of scale or orientation. At the same time, because the concrete has thus far been so consistently presented as thin, one knows that it is a wall, that we are not in a cave carved in the concrete, but that the concrete is certainly a membrane, shielding us from something else. In other words, one feels that one is ‘inside’, even if one does not know how big this ‘inside’ is. It is quite important to emphasize how unique of an experience this is. It is like being in a womb (in that one is in some kind of scale-less, potentially infinite interiority) while simultaneously being aware of there being an outside. The museum offers a mythological return to the womb that does not demand as a price our own adult consciousness.

Ok. I’ve gone too far in that description. But really, what I mean to say is, the space gives us a pure expression of interiority, hence setting up the first part of the thesis - this is a statement about dwelling, or at least about being inside. What is interesting is that the space’s refusal of any obvious orientation makes it less about specifically human dwelling. Consider any other building, any other potential spatial manifesto - the Pantheon, for example. It is formed to human shape but scaled larger than human size; it makes humans look small. Oh, but what about the door of Teshima Art Museum? Is that not giving some human scale? Remember that the door, unlike the two ceiling apertures, is not carved into the concrete, it extends - folds outward from the inside. The effect is that, looking at the door from the inside, unless someone is standing right in the door, one sees only the folding of the concrete fabric, not a deliberate hole. We can also thank the museum staff who prevent people from lingering in front of the door.

So at this point, we know Teshima Art Museum is about dwelling, but counterintuitively, it is not really about human life. So what is ‘dwelling’ in the museum? This is where our main protagonists, water, light, and wind come into play. We already got to know them (in our own unique way) as part of Nature on our walk here.

Quick aside: the choice of these three particular elements is a topic for another post, but, as with the Fourfold, I encourage you to substitute in any set of elements you prefer. For example, should you subscribe to an elemental system based on derivations of time, it is not hard to see the parallels between Teshima Art Museum and Steven Holl’s Chapel of Saint Ignatius in Seattle. The proof is left to the reader on that one though.

Water is the most prominent. A few drops leftover from the morning rain kept entering through the two “windows” in the ceiling. The uneven, hydrophobic floor pushed them into mercurial puddles that slowly vanished into tiny, 3ish mm diameter holes scattered across the floor. Sometimes they drained quietly, other times with a slight gurgle. The rainwater, on its journey across the floor, was joined by other streams of water sneaking out of other 3mm holes. The water would mutate quickly, joining into puddles or breaking into beads, not unlike water watched on a window. Yet I was surprised how the water never seemed to take the same path. I watched, seeing in these puddles something of the flow of… everything, of ideas being born, joining tribes. But it is also unfair to say they meant anything. It was water, doing as water does on hydrophobic surfaces. Because the floor was hydrophobic, and thanks in part to the cleanliness of the floor, the water appeared pure, clear, and acting only according to its own desire to go downhill, but almost expressing creative will by the way the streams changed direction. In other words, it was water expressing its pure nature, water abstracted.

Wind appears next. Breezes flow through the building, often changing direction. The gurgling water gives sound to air. Wind is seen too. Hanging from the ceiling are near-invisible threads, attached sometimes only on one end and other times at both ends. In the single-attached threads, one sees the wind, its strength, and, with some rotation, its direction. In the double-attached threads, the wind shows fully its direction in relation to the thread’s orientation. Once more we see the actions of an element, but so too do we see the wind’s unique will in the changing of direction.

Light appears a bit more slowly. It shows itself most fully over the course of the morning, as the discs of light coming through the ceiling glide across the floor, lighting up some of the water droplets, giving them visible outlines. The disks heat the concrete floor, where they appear as disks with defined edges. On the walls, which appear like concrete or plaster molded by hand, the disks instead disperse into softer circles. Two hours pass. The light changes color. The greenish light of the morning, filtered through trees, has become white. Light follows a pattern in its movement, but it changes all that it touches.

Yes, brilliant, very idealistic though. What does one take away from this? Based on the reviews, most people simply take away some quiet, subconscious appreciation for the elements, a small antacid for urban life’s typical alienation from nature. And insha’Allah, this appreciation might even become some kind of daily experienced connection to the Earth. Maybe we leave it there. Maybe Susan Sontag is right - art doesn’t always need to justify itself. It is an art museum, after all.

You know I’m not going to leave it at that. The building is a manifesto on the process of rendering the elements abstract and bringing them into an interior. No, perhaps the Teshima Art Museum is not ready to house people (without some serious compromise on the occupants’ part), but it shows us how to dwell with the elements. It shows us how the elements can enter a house on their own. It gives the elements space to express their own will. That people feel, for a moment, comfortable alongside these willful elements in the museum is itself a testament to its saying something about the nature of comfort and dwelling itself. This is no small feat, by the way. Just imagine how comfortable you’d feel at spending 2 hours at any other art museum or temple with an uneven, after having to take a humid, hilly bike ride to get there before 9h.

Most importantly, Teshima Art Museum houses the elements without containing or conquering them. From the exterior, its soft form mimics the surrounding hills. Only the ticketing office comes close to any sort of violence on the landscape, as it cuts into a hill. But even then, its positioning towards the ocean and away from the street suggests its own self-awareness about orientation towards nature. In the interior, one finds these three prime elements free to come and go as they please. Teshima Art Museum teaches us how to love the elements and how to give them freedom.

TA Transition

Tadao Ando's Transitional Spaces

I like to see how far architecture can pursue function and then, after the pursuit has been made, to see how far architecture can be removed from function. The significance of architecture is found in the distance between it and function.

There’s this argument that I absolutely hate, posed by some architects seeking to justify the inefficiencies of their transitional spaces. The argument goes that such spaces are places to meet people. No, my friend, your staircase doubling back 3 times while rising up a floor does not make it the grand escalier of the Palais Garnier. Yet in the depths of my soul, I know what they are trying to do, which is to prove to occupants that their time is not always best spent inside their individual apartment units, inside their offices or classrooms, etc. This much I agree with. There’s a right way to handle transitional spaces, and in this essay, I’m going to try to dissect it. Specifically, I’m going to address how transitional spaces play a crucial role in Tadao Ando’s architectural language, how they serve his thesis on dwelling, and what principle we can learn from these spaces, even if we do not adopt Ando’s concrete lexicon.

Let’s start by defining transitional spaces. In short, they are spaces that allow passage between other, hypothetically more important, spaces. They suggest to us not to linger in them, not because they are unwelcoming, but because they admit a lessened status compared to the adjoining spaces. A compressed hallway in an apartment complex is a good example of a transitional space. It points to the individual apartment units as being more important, more dwellable. Dwellable here means allowing us a greater set of potential relations to the world around us.

What is interesting is that Tadao Ando often flips this hierarchy in that it is often his transitional spaces that become the more important spaces in his buildings. While the spaces remain functionally transitional, in that we still aren’t meant to occupy the spaces more than we would the living room or bedroom, these transitional spaces are more important because they reveal a unique set of potential relationships to the world around us.

More specifically, to use the language established in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Tadao Ando’s transitional spaces are material locations that connect other locations. But as spaces, these transitional spaces facilitate our relationship to the world. And as in the Teshima Art Museum, Tadao Ando’s transitional spaces defines these relationships towards the world as relationships towards the abstracted forms of the elements.

To show how transitional spaces serve this aim, I’ll start by identifying 3 common transitional locations used in Tadao Ando’s works:

Courtyard
Bridge
Staircase

All three can be notably found within Ando’s original spatial manifesto, Azuma House. The house is essentially organised as three buildings, a positive building in front, a negative courtyard, and another positive living quarter in the back. Functionally, the courtyard admits light into the house, which fills the entirety of a long plot. But it departs from pure functionality in that the passage through this courtyard is always exposed to the elements. In fact, the only set of stairs to the upper level is in this open air courtyard, and one of the living spaces is only accessible by crossing another fully exposed bridge. Certainly there is enough space to bring these elements inside, or to minimize the size of the courtyard if it is merely to serve as a lightwell. By avoiding these tactics of closure, however, the courtyard transforms from a transitional location to a transitional space. Again as Heidegger put, the space allows the elements in. It would not be fair to attribute this courtyard structure to Ando himself, as there is certainly a tradition from Japanese (and, to some degree, pre-revolutionary Chinese) construction and philosophy that introduces a courtyard with deliberate permeability to the elements as a functional center of the house. But the fact that this tradition exists only reinforces the notion that the aim of such building is to allow in the elements, rather than to conquer them or sever oneself from them.

The criticism thus comes up, why not make the transitional spaces more comfortable? Why not allow the elements more subtly into the non-transitional spaces?

As a concession, Ando does tone it down a bit in his later works, especially the public ones. But this was Ando’s early spatial manifesto, and he knew that while designing it. The real defense to this critique, however, is that transitional spaces create transitional moods, and this transitional mood is more desirable to inspire occupants’ better relationships towards the world.

To understand this second point, I have to borrow an argument from Yann Nussaume’s Regard sur l’architecture de Tadao Ando. In analysing Ando’s writings in The Japan Architect in the 80’s, Nussaume sketches out a formation of Ando’s idea of bâsho (place) containing chikara (force). When read as emotional spaces, transitional spaces share a transitional force. The act of crossing a bridge is in itself transitional in feeling. This is clearly illustrated in theatre, where scenography often includes stairs that lead to nowhere, bridges over flat ground. Both as audience and as actor, we feel the ourselves transitioning through these spaces.

Meanwhile, as this transitional mood is established, Ando’s transitional spaces also perform the task of introducing and abstracting the elements. In Azuma House, this is done with fairly little abstraction, by sheer exposure to the changing will of nature. This can be said of all of Ando’s works. To give two much later examples of different scale, one sees this also in Galleria Akka in Osaka and the Awaji Yumebutai complex on Awajishima. At Galleria Akka, which is another long, narrow plot in an urban setting, the building is organized alongside a narrow courtyard that cuts almost to the back on one side of the plot. In this courtyard space, a long staircase spanning the gallery’s three stories crawls up along the inner wall. Although this courtyard is covered with a glass ceiling, it should be noted that the only reason for such a long courtyard in a narrow space is actually to allow for the display of variations of light as the sun crosses the space each day. Similarly, rain can be experienced pattering on the ceiling, while wind, is manifest in the slight echo of the tall courtyard Furthermore, that the courtyard has, on one side, a sheer concrete wall rising 3 stories (rather than relying on the neighboring building’s wall, for example), emphasizes that this courtyard is not a courtyard of transition with the urban environment, but rather, with nature.

At Awaji Yumebutai (dream stage), the complex is essentially a labyrinth of transitional spaces. Most famous among them is the diamond garden, where square garden plots form a stepped grid up a hill. It should be noted that this is the main green space of the middle of the complex and thus forms a meta-courtyard when placed among other buildings. The diamond garden is experienced either from a tower overlooking the space, or by walking through the garden, which involves climbing several sets of stairs. After hitting the last step up, one is confronted with… a concrete wall. The space, which already includes an abstract form of nature in the tended flower gardens, now serves exactly the mood of the theatrical staircase to nowhere. And it is in this mood that one knows the elements. Water, when not felt as rain, can be heard in the slight trickle of a nearby artificial stream. Wind appears as literal wind, as the echo off the concrete bounding wall, and as the sense of lightness one feels from a high elevation. Light appears in both the sun and the brightness of the flowers.

So it is clear that we can say that Ando’s buildings are formed around transitional spaces and that they achieve his aim of unifying humans with abstract nature. But this does not yet answer the question, why connect with nature when in a transitional mood?

The answer to this question is far from trivial. To answer it requires one more round of clarification of what a transitional mood is.

The transitional mood, also known as liminality, is today popular among western architects, who see in liminality the poststructuralist idea of freedom from old structures, as being a state of destabilisation in itself. Otherwise stated, a revolution can exist without immediately pointing towards a specific alternative to the current state of affairs. Western architects (and I count myself among them) are concerned, primarily, with breaking from the old state, not creating a new one. In the past, this meant breaking with nature to make a safe environment. Now, it means breaking with urban life to reconnect with nature. Oh, but there’s the problem. We seem so unable to break from urban life without sacrificing what makes life today. In truth, natural life is urban life. It is living in nature that has become unnatural. Hence our only option today seems to be for cities to concede the need for parks and tree-lined streets. This is like trying to save the earth purely through recycling. We are living alongside Nature, not in it. In most architecture today (I hate this type of generalisation too), the use of these urban concessions to nature is seen as a liminal space. But it belies the fact that it is a static space in that, fundamentally, what is missing is the expression of Nature’s free will. When walking through a park, do you ever truly forget you are in a city? Well, it’s better than no park at all, but that seems to be all we can say. The park remains a containment of nature.

Where Tadao Ando succeeds is that his spaces allow nature to express its own will in an abstract form.

This brings me back to the opening of this essay. Architects do seem very much concerned with the importance of liminal spaces, and they understand that life cannot be lived in containment. Liminal spaces are what gives architecture an active role in humans’ discovery of how to live. It should be clear, to these architects’ credit, that creating a liminal space is an incredibly slippery task.

Now that we know what a transitional mood (liminality) is, the last task is to understand why it best serves a relationship to Nature wherein we are in-Nature, rather than alongside it.

For this, I rely on Jane Rendell’s description of psychological liminality, as described in her book The Architecture of Psychoanalysis. In it, she describes the feeling of transition, of liminality, originating from a child’s separation from their mother. Rendell expands on this idea with the theory of the transitional object, given by the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. When separated from mothers, children seek out an object, often a soft toy, that replaces the mother’s breast. The child’s relationship to the toy is a displacement of their relationship to their mother. Later on, the child seeks out relationships with the world around them that develop out of a chain of displacements from the womb, from the breast, from the toy. Such continues into adult life, but the manifestation of these relationships carries some version of the relationship with the mother figure-in therapy, for example, if one reinterprets this relationship to the mother. Liminality is not, as some poststructuralists so enthusiastically describe it, a neutral state. It carries with it a maternal relationship.

Tadao Ando, therefore, establishes a sort of maternal relationship between ningen (humans) and shizen (nature), and seeks, in these transitional spaces to make them healthy, via the process of abstraction. After all, our “mother”, Mother Nature, is a fucking bitch. But she’s also our best friend, and unlike with our literal mothers, we must learn to live with this mother. If architecture is some kind of therapy for us, then we ought to learn how to live with her, to develop a kinder relationship with her, one that respects our will and hers.