Presence or meaning in architecture

Abstract

Drawing on the different philosophical anthropologies of Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, I would like to put forward two different ways of understanding culture and, hence, architecture. Both philosophical positions and their respective anthropological, cultural, and architectural consequences are explained in this paper. Cassirer and Heidegger defended two antithetical conceptions of the human being: the human activity for world-construction as against the human receptivity for world-interpretation. Following Cassirer, I propose an understanding of architecture as a symbolic form that constructs new meanings; buildings are the bearers of meaning. It follows from Heidegger that architecture is less concerned with construction and more with the origin and the questioning of building; the building is an irreducible presence of itself that opens up the environment.