Heidegger's Thinking Of Architecture And Its Significance

Heidegger's thinking has broadly impacted on many areas, not only the pure philosophy, but also the sociology, the aesthetics, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of technology, the theology, the architecture, etc. In architecture area, Heidegger's thinking has been bringing about a Copernican revolution in the history of Western architecture thinking. It is transcending the classical architecture thinking, changing the modernism ones completely, and helps us determine the relationship between building and human existence.The importance of Heidegger's architecture thinking has been seen by Chinese architecture scholars for a long time. But they could not grasp Heidegger's thinking appropriately because of its obscurity. Recently, Chinese philosophers have gradually recognized the significance of Heidegger's architecture thinking, leading the relational discussions deeper and deeper.This article investigates Heidegger's thinking of architecture from the whole history of western architecture thinking and the whole human existence. It begins with the investigation of the beginning of the western architecture thinking, and analyses the characteristics of the Greek buildings, and induces the basic characteristics of the whole classical architecture thinking. Then it discusses the modernism thinking of architecture, views it as the thinking rebelling against the classical one and adapting to the modern industrial society and the modern science and technology. It runs back over the generation and development of modernism architecture thinking, analyses its fundamental viewpoints, implications, and inclinations, and points out its problems and errors. And then the paper discusses the thinking of architecture phenomenology. This thinking is often viewed as belonging to the postmodernism thinking, but they are not the same. Postmodernism architecture thinking is a confusional and worldly thinking, and the architecture phenomenology is a systematic and holy one. The discussion about the architecture phenomenology concentrates on the theories proposed by Aldo Rossi, Steven Holl, and C. Norberg Schulz. The relationships between them and Husserl and Heidegger are also discussed in this part.The fourth chapter of this article is the most important one, which discusses Heidegger's architecture thinking. Heidegger's thinking of architecture mainly embodies in his "Building Dwelling Thinking", "The Thing", and "???Poetically Man Dwells…", especially in his "Building Dwelling Thinking". In addition, some relational elucidations also appear in Being and Time and other works. Heidegger's discussion about the question of architecture is not about the particular questions such as the design, the theory, the technique, and the history of architecture, but about the essential question of architecture, i.e., about its relation to the human existence. The manner of his discussion is not the one of positive science, but the one of phenomenology. His horizon is existential and ontological. He understands building from dwelling, and understands the dwelling from human existence. Therefore, for Heidegger, building and dwelling are not external each other as two present-at-hand things. They are unified together in principle for human life. Furthermore, building belongs to dwelling, and obtains its essence from the dwelling and human existence. Consequently, this part of the article mainly discusses how Heidegger analyses the essences of the building and the dwelling, how he views the thing as the place of dwelling, how he indicates the essence of building as protecting things, and how he let building belong to dwelling and let dwelling be the authentic origin of building.The last chapter of this paper discusses the significance of Heidegger's thinking of architecture. This existential-ontological thinking of architecture destructs the means-purpose relationship between building and dwelling, endues building with an essential meaning, and so discloses a new broad room for architecture. Through displaying the poetical nature of dwelling, it promotes the pure architecture aesthetics to the height of the authentic existence. Furthermore, it can help us overcome the technological essence of modernism architecture, construct the perfect human dwelling, and develop the individuality, locality, and nationality of buildings.