Abstract
As a graduate student at Duquesne University in the 1970s, I had the good fortune to study phenomenology and Continental philosophy of science with Lester Embree. In seminars that covered both the human and natural sciences I was exposed to philosophical issues and problems – primarily in the works of Alfred Schutz – that continue to shape and influence my research and teaching. When I asked Embree to direct my doctoral dissertation, he suggested I consider writing on a related field of studies that was then emerging in philosophy and other disciplines as arguably equal in importance to philosophy of science. After immersing myself in the works of Hans Jonas, Don Ihde, and Edward Ballard, I became convinced that the burgeoning philosophy of technology was in fact the logical outcome of my philosophical concerns, which had revolved around the occlusion of the lifeworld in the wake of the undeniable successes of the natural sciences since Galileo.
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Notes
- 1.
See Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (London: Oxford University Press, 1981); Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
- 2.
See Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1963).
- 3.
Mumford was for many years the architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine. His essays for that publication can be found in From the Ground Up: Observations on Contemporary Architecture, Housing, Highway Building, and Civic Design (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1956).
- 4.
See Alberto Perez-Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1983).
- 5.
Kenneth Frampton writes that the parting of the ways between engineering and architecture “is sometimes dated to the foundation in Paris of the Ecole des Pontset Chaussees, the first engineering school, in 1747.” Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), p. 8.
- 6.
Hannes Meyer describes the divorce between art and technology in no uncertain terms: “All things in this world are the product of the formula (function x economy), all these things are therefore not works of art. All art is composition and therefore useless. All life is function and therefore unartistic.” Quoted by Christian Norberg-Schulz, Principles of Modern Architecture (London: Andreas Papadakis Publisher, 2000), p. 15.
- 7.
See Theodor Adorno, “Functionalism Today,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Neil Leach, ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 6–19.
- 8.
Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.), p. 72.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 79.
- 10.
Frampton, p. 9.
- 11.
Antonio Sant’Elia and Filippo Tomasio Marinetti, “Futurist Architecture,” in Programs and manifestoes on 20th-century architecture, Ulrich Conrads, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1971), pp. 34–38.
- 12.
Antonio Sant’Elia, Messaggio, quoted in Frampton, p. 87.
- 13.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “Technology and Culture,” in Conrads, p. 154.
- 14.
Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1986).
- 15.
Norberg-Schulz’s Principles of Modern Architecture argues for the continuing relevance of specific modernist ideas and principles, e.g., the free plan and its erasure of traditional boundaries between inner and outer spaces.
- 16.
Martin Filler, Makers of Modern Architecture: From Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry (New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), pp. 86–87.
- 17.
Le Corbusier, p. 26.
- 18.
Ibid., p.136.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Ibid., p. 137.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 22.
Ibid., pp. 162–163.
- 23.
Adolph Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” in Conrads, ed., pp. 19–24.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 220.
- 25.
Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 58.
- 26.
Corbusier states his ethos in a simple but arresting manner: “Absence of verbosity, good arrangement, a single idea, daring and unity in construction, the use of elementary shapes. A sane morality.” Towards A New Architecture, pp. 158–159.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 241.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 237.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Paolo Portoghesi, After Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1982), p. 79.
- 31.
Corbusier, p. 19.
- 32.
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. xlviii–xlix.
- 33.
The Republic, 507a–509b.
- 34.
Le Corbusier, pp. 217–218.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 218.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 7.
- 38.
The newest fad – reportedly coming soon to Los Angeles and New York – is the attachment of monstrous electronic billboards to glass skyscrapers.
- 39.
See Nathan Glazer, From a Cause to a Style (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007).
- 40.
Hans-Georg Gadamer calls this divorce “aesthetic differentiation,” and argues against it in light of the problems it causes for architecture in particular. See his Truth and Method, Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, trans. (London and New York: Continuum Publishing Group, 2004), pp. 149–152.
- 41.
See Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998).
- 42.
Among those architects who explicitly reference Heidegger in a positive way are Kenneth Frampton, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Adam Sharr, Peter Zumthor, Alberto-Perez Gomez, and Colin St. John Wilson, to name a few.
- 43.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962).
- 44.
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell, ed. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 311–341.
- 45.
The importance of the self-concealing character of equipment for architecture cannot be overstated. To be effective a work of architecture must withdraw into the background if the purpose of the structure is to be fulfilled. Even ornament must eventually recede from notice, since its role is to enhance the function of the building by echoing it artistically and then by making room for the function to proceed in a more meaningful way.
- 46.
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 215–216.
- 47.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 98.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 100.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Gadamer, p. 150.
- 51.
Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Basic Writings, Krell, ed., pp. 143–212.
- 52.
Heidegger actually goes farther than this, locating form (Gestalt) in a prior ontological strife between a primordial concealing and revealing that images itself forth as earth and world.
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Casey, T.K. (2010). Modern Technology and the Flight from Architecture. In: Nenon, T., Blosser, P. (eds) Advancing Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9286-1_22
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