THURSDAY NIGHT LECTURE
PROFESSOR ADRIAN SNODGRASS
TRANSCRIPT OF INTRODUCTION: GLEN HILL
I must say it is a pleasure to be asked to introduce Adrian.
I’ll start by doing a little bit of scene-setting.
I joined the faculty as a PhD student in the early 90’s intending to do
a PhD on ecologically sustainable architecture. And, for reasons that
are still unclear to me, I was given Adrian as a supervisor. His first
piece of advice was that I should go immediately and begin reading
Martin Heidegger. And although I was too embarrassed to say it, I
do remember thinking ‘who on earth is Martin Heidegger’?
But the advice proved very fruitful, not just because Heidegger’s
work grounded the deep ecology movement that I was interested in
at the time, but because it opened a rich vein of thought that could be
mined (and as you’ll see I’m still mining it) to reveal many new
understandings of architecture.
As an observer of the drama that was playing out within the Faculty
at that time, I can only say that it seemed to me that Adrian, and his
collaborator Richard Coyne, were on a sort of evangelical mission to
rid the world, beginning with the faculty, of all outbreaks of
positivist, metaphysical thinking. Adrian and Richard refer to it
rather understatedly in their book as ‘countering regressive
scientism’.
Looking back now, I am in a way thankful that these pockets of
positivism did exist, and that they did provoke in response such an
eruption of intellectual energy that it resulted the production of a
remarkable series of texts in such a short space of time. These texts
have of course become a central part of the book that is being
launched tonight.
The task I see Adrian engaged in is not one of small consequence,
and it cannot easily be summarised. At issue is whether metaphysics
will ultimately triumph in every domain, including in the way we
think about design, or whether another path can be allowed to
emerge. The central question is one of truth, but not truth in any
empirical or factual sense.
In a newly released book called ‘The New Heidegger’, the claim is
made that for Heidegger, (and I quote) ‘there is a certain
undecidability at the heart of truth itself.’ And that ‘this
undecidability is the domain of the utmost decision, the domain in
which history as such is being decided.’ (endquote)
This is a big claim. The author goes on to clarify this claim by
posing the question of whether two possible trajectories for history
now confront us.
Whether, on our current path (and I quote) ‘truth will recede more
and more into the open and the disclosed only, whether there will
ultimately be only beings — whether metaphysics will ultimately
triumph across the board.’ (endquote)
Or whether another path is possible where (and I quote again) ‘a
counter movement will be initiated in which the self-concealing
itself will be brought to bear on thought, on culture in general.’
(endquote)
It may sound paradoxical to claim that truth might recede into the
open. We might instead expect that truth comes closer, is clearer,
when it is brought into the open.
The point is, however, that our endeavours to gather more and more
facts, more knowledge, clearer descriptions of everything in our
world, is causing something more significant to be concealed.
Modernity has long been on a path of attempting to articulate greater
and greater knowledge about our world. The pace at which we are
disclosing knowledge about our world has become more and more
frenetic (and is perhaps most frenetic in the very type of institution
we are now gathered). Our attitude has become one of: if we don’t
know it, we will come to know it. In other words, everything is
conceived as an object that is potentially knowable.
However, by frantically filling our world with these facts, these
objects of knowledge, these truths, we become less and less able to
see beyond them, and to recognise that they are themselves grounded
in something else.
Heidegger wants to make it clear that this something else that
grounds our knowledge cannot itself be disclosed as an object of
knowledge. This ground is not like some extra set of facts that has
yet to be revealed, some new object of knowledge that awaits
discovery. For Heidegger it is a groundless ground, an abyss.
So what is the nature of this groundless ground, this abyss, which is
being covered over by all the knowledge we continue to accrue? To
give you some hint of my sense of this abyss, I want to tell you
about a class I used to teach.
Until recently I taught a subject that was aimed at helping students
think about the design process. Inevitably during the course the
question would arise: ‘will computers ever be able to design?’
At this point I would give my safe answer: ‘Not the way we do.’
But persistent students would then ask, ‘but what about when
computers are able to be programmed with every bit of data about a
design situation, what then?’
At this point I would tell them a short, rehearsed, anecdote.
I would ask them to imagine a book about some subject or other
(hold up book). And to imagine that we had the task of
programming all knowledge about the book into the computer. So
we put in the author, the publication details, every fact contained on
every page of the book and so on, until we had captured all aspects
of the book.
At this point I ask them to imagine that we are sitting at our
computer and we notice that the table on which the computer is
resting is wobbly. (Some of you will be ahead of me here). We look
under the table and see that one leg of the table is shorter than the
rest. We are faced with a design problem. Without thinking we
reach for the book that is handy (hold up) and I shove it under the
short leg — a design solution. And this, I try to persuade my
students, is not a solution that the computer could have generated.
Tenacious students might then object and question why the exact
thickness of the book, its mass, density, impact resistance and so on
were not programmed into the computer.
My response would be that, firstly, doing so would amount to
thinking up possible solutions in anticipation of possible design
problems and then entering these as data. At this point I would
claim we are doing the designing rather than the computer.
But even more significantly, experience (in this case our previous
experience of books, table legs etc) which grounds any design move,
is not anything like an object with properties or articulations that are
somehow already present and ready for cataloguing (as data for
example). Even as they occur, we are not thematically aware of all
the dimensions of our own experience, a condition that we use
inadequate words like ‘tacit’ or ‘embodied’ to describe.
And, if we consider the way in which we remember our experiences,
their remembering varies according to the context in which the
remembering occurs. The word re-member carries that very
implication, as the members, the parts of experience, are
reassembled, re-membered into a new whole with each
remembering.
Experience thus appears to exist only as a potential or virtual
reservoir, capable of grounding limitless future articulations in
limitless future contexts. In my story, it is my experience of books
that enables me to reinterpret a book as a wedge.
My contention is that experience has something of the quality of the
groundless ground, the abyss to which Heidegger points. And,
parallel to Heidegger’s warning regarding truth, our capacity to
generate representations of experience (as memories, as descriptions,
as possible design solutions, and so on) might lead us to believe that
the articulations, the representations, of the experience are the truth
of the experience, thus concealing the unrepresentable potentiality of
the experience itself.
Importantly the claim here is not that the articulations, the
representations, the ontic facts gathered from experience are wrong.
They are in the proper sense correct. It is rather that by giving these
representations the status of final ground, as our Western
metaphysical tradition has done, their own unrepresentable ground,
their abyssal ground, has been concealed.
And here is where I situate Adrian’s mission in the book. The
remonstrations contained in this book against the various
manifestations of positivism, representational and metaphysical
thinking in design, architecture and architectural education, are not
about claiming that these representational formulations are factually
incorrect. The issue is instead that such representational Western
thinking is reductive and limiting, and conceals, as Heidegger states,
a more significant truth.
The alternatives pursued in the book are attempts to remove the
certain grounds of Western rationalism, thus exposing a groundless
ground, an abyss. And this of course is where the anti-foundational
thinking in the book, which arrives from contemporary continental
philosophy, resonates with Adrian’s scholarship on traditional
Eastern thinking, where notions such as the abyss are more familiar.
So as I said at the beginning, Adrian is engaged in no small task. I
see his work as part of a struggle to keep open the now tiny window
of opportunity that may allow another history to emerge, a history
that might counter our current reductivist path.
Now for those of you who are perhaps getting a little twitchy with all
this talk of the abyss and ontological uncertainty, here is the ontic
version of my introduction: a set of facts about Adrian.
At the age of twenty-five Adrian ‘escaped’ from the parochial
Australia of the 1950’s and went to Sri-Lanka and India, where he
worked and studied aspects of Indian thought, art, architecture and
religion for more than six years, acquiring a knowledge of Tamil and
Sanskrit.
He then spent seven years in Japan where he studied forms of Far
Eastern Buddhism, and learned Japanese and Chinese. This was
followed by a number of years in Hong Kong and Indonesia.
In 1976 he returned to the University of Sydney where he taught in
both the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of
Architecture.
His Masters thesis, The Symbolism of the Stupa: was completed in
1981. The Symbolism of the Stupa was published in 1985 and is now
widely recognised as a classic.
In 1981 Adrian accepted a joint appointment as Japan Foundation
Lecturer in Religious Studies and Architecture, and began work on
his doctoral dissertation, which he completed in 1985. The
dissertation, Stellar and Temporal Symbolism in Traditional
Architecture, used Chinese, Indic, pre-Columbian, African, Christian
and Islamic materials to analyse the ways in which temporal
concepts and cycles of time are incorporated in buildings. This work
was later published as Architecture, Time and Eternity.
In 1988 Adrian published a third major work on Asian architecture,
The Matrix and Diamond World Mandalas in Shingon Buddhism.
Adrian then extended his scholarship into the field of contemporary
western philosophy with numerous ground breaking papers which
drew together contemporary hermeneutic philosophy, architecture
and design. Some of which are contained in the book being launched
tonight.
After retiring from his full-time position at the University of Sydney
in 1998 Adrian continues to pursue and develop his research
interests.
He is currently an Honorary Research Associate with our own
Faculty of Architecture, editor of the journal Architecture Theory
Review, and Adjunct Professor in the Centre for Cultural Research
at the University of Western Sydney.
Will you please join me in welcoming Adrian Snodgrass.