Material Studies as the Possible Channel to Re-connect Dwelling and Building

Abstract

Discussing Emily Dickinson’s sense of dwelling, one cannot help but being intrigued to relate it to Heidegger’s proposition of dwelling. Whereas Dickinson’s poem emphasize the vastness possibility of whatever way of life the poet chose had in offering (hence the decision to let her state of mind dwell in such way), this symposia essentially proposes dwelling in a Heideggerian sense of the word. The relation of both senses of the word plays important role to achieve in the realm of material dwelling what the level of possibilities offered in the sublime realm of the mind. Heidegger proposed that dwelling itself is the evidence of human existence in the mortal world, and that “building is really dwelling” (Heidegger, 1951). It is mankind’s very act of being, through cultivating things and constructing buildings. Furthermore, dwelling’s fundamental character is to spare and to preserve [the primal fourfold: the oneness of mortals & divinities, earth & sky]. One argues that ‘dwelling in [im]possibilities’ truly asks a fundamental question of building as both an object and an act, constructed and done in the present time. It asks whether the current practice of building, and now the consumption of it, is truly dwelling or something else. It asks whether it is [im]possible that the act of building and the object building still retain the character and role of sparing, of preserving the primal fourfold of mankind’s existence as mortals on earth? This paper proposes a channel of possibilities to answers the questions through material studies, especially ones which provides insights and knowledge to the realm of [building] construction, since it is through materials that building as verb and noun is made possible to come into being, into existence, as [physical] things that signifies mankind. As mankind exists in things that he cultivates and builds, he cannot escape the material reality of the earth. Material studies argue to provide the possibilities of delivering the conceptual dwelling, now separated from building, into communion with the physical realities of modern man, thus once again remarrying it to building. For through the work of one’s narrow hands, one gathers the fourfold into material things, a mortal paradise on earth.