DESIGN WITHOUT CAUSALITY: HEIDEGGER’S IMPOSSIBLE CHALLENGE FOR ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE
- Publication Type:
- Article
- Issue Date:
- 2007-10-04T23:45:17Z
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Deploying Martin Heidegger’s thinking on technology, this paper attempts to show an internal
contradiction inherent in our technologically oriented approach to sustainable design.
Heidegger’s thinking on technology, which has had an influence both on the ecological
movement and on architecture, situates the problematic shift toward modern technology at the
beginning of the enlightenment with the emergence of new understandings of both the subject
and the object. Each of these revolutionary understandings contribute to the reframing of
nature as knowable and (therefore) controllable. Nature thus moves from a position of mystery
and wonder to that of a disenchanted, predictable system, allowing the appearance of a
technological orientation in which nature is framed in advance as something simply manipulable
for our benefit.
Unlike the Classical Realist account of nature that emerged from the enlightenment separation
of subject and object, Heidegger’s formulation of the real, of nature, does not allow the same
confidence in causality and control. However, design, as the engine of technological innovation
in modernity, appears inseparable from the modern technological understanding of causality
and control and the framing of nature as a mere resource. This problematises the possibility that
design, as it is currently conceived, can contribute to achieving an ecological sustainable
relation to nature.
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