Abstract

What is the role of buildings in people's lives? What are the specific limitations and restrictions of the contemporary building-practices? What can be done to overcome these limitations? These are the questions this dissertation attempts to answer. It is based on phenomenological hermeneutics which has raised similar questions at the level of human existence at large. Martin Heidegger's work is used here as a conceptual foundation complemented by selected works from Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jan Huizinga and Clifford Geertz. This dissertation is an attempt to describe the phenomenon of building at a fundamental level as an integral part of a people's world. PART I starts with an interpretation of a building on the University of California Berkeley campus, Wurster Hall. Buildings are described as manifestations of a world including the aspects of nature, people, and artifacts. They are defined as dynamic wholes that include building-structures and their construction and use. In contemporary civilization, the dominant understanding of buildings that is embedded in their construction and use can be described as instrumental. Buildings are understood instrumentally in terms of the purposes they serve. These purposes are extraneous to the immediate interaction of buildings with people and nature, but stand in the foreground of the builders' and users' awareness. This aspect constitutes the main limitation of buildings in contemporary civilization. The concept of play, on the other hand, allows to introduce a different, non-instrumental mode of building and "using" buildings. In play the building itself is in the foreground of its people's awareness. Play is proposed as a way of overcoming the limitations of an instrumental, technological understanding of buildings. PART II presents the philosophical arguments that underly this dissertation. It discusses especially the ethical implications of the concept of play in phenomenological hermeneutics. PART III returns to the problems of a hermeneutics of building. With the help of the previously developed concepts a hermeneutic understanding of the design of buildings, the study of buildings and the education of building-designers is developed.