Situatedness in Architecture

In order to speak of situatedness in the context of architecture, and particularly within a historical context, it is first necessary to establish the horizons within which such discussion can be meaningfully understood.  The perspective in which history is viewed must itself be seen as part of the hermeneutic circle (as explored in the work of M. Heidegger, M. Merleau-Ponty and H-G. Gadamer), which is to say that our understanding of the historic inevitably includes our own historicity.  The intervening time and events become a part of our vision, so that the historic can never be simply understood as it would have been to contemporaries.  However this is not to say that we cannot develop an appreciation of what it would have meant, but rather that as modern participants in the historical continuum we cannot ignore all that has been acquired in the intervening period.  History becomes a multi-layered reality, and if it is to understood meaningfully we should seek to both understand it simultaneously in both its original context and as a meaningful expression to the present, which meaning can only be properly understood as original meaning combined with the layers of subsequent events.

The situating of such an historical view, taking into account both its originality and its contemporaneity, completes the hermeneutic circle, and is what Gadamer calls effective historical consciousness (ref. Gadamer, H-G. Truth and Method. London : Sheed and Ward, 1996, pp. 330-307).  It is effective it terms of its value to our own situation; history thus becomes situated both as an historical event and as meaningful to our own situation and experience.  This gives history value rather than mere interest, and through understanding the historical consciousness we will also more effectively understand our own situation.

Therefore we can seek to understand  a work of architecture in two ways :

i)   as an historical event situated in the context of its original time and place, and including its own situatedness, but bearing in mind that such historical analysis will always be interpretive;

ii)  as part of our own historicity, through which we can develop an understanding of our own situatedness, and considering that our contemporary situation both comes from and incorporates the historical.

Through this attempt to complete the hermeneutic circle and access the work’s ontological meaning, with the possibility that we could once again experience the full meaning of the place.  However it must be remembered that this full experience is in no sense a recreation of how its would have been experienced by its contemporaries, although of course there may be much similarity between the two.  However our present understanding would be in the context of our own historicity, including all that has intervened between the work’s creation and the present moment, and is understood here as being both the eternal moment of divine revelation and the temporal moment of situated experience which is the essential condition of human embodiment and experience); however access to that full depth of meaning can only be gained through this combination of informed historical consciousness and effective contemporary situatedness (ontological world view is here understood as essentially vertical, as for example in Plato and the NeoPlatonic tradition; this can be represented as a vertically ordered hierarchy, for discussion of which see Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 73-74).  From such an effective historical consciousness, including awareness of history’s own situatedness, we better understand not only the original work but also our own situation and condition.  This is the lesson of history, whose value is primarily to the present time, and to the present moment an understanding of the historical is invaluable not least because it is itself part of our current situation.

A similar context also needs to be applied to the use of language, for in seeking to discuss historical situations we do so using modern language, through which we seek to convey meaning of both historical and contemporary significances, past and present.  However given that the historical is embodied within our present language, it should be possible through this dialectic to clarify both original and contemporary meanings, and maintain an integrity of both historical consciousness and ontological significance.