2020

Lohtaja, Aleksi

Martin Heidegger’s ”Building Dwelling Thinking” argues that socially engaged architecture fails to understand that the crisis of housing is related to more profound crisis of being. To fully grasp this, architecture needs to be detached from direct social and political questions. Instead architecture needs to examine and elaborate, how dwelling and being are related. Situated however to the actual reconstruction period after the wwii, the statement has its own ideological purpose. By looking this from the point of view of the political unconscious of architecture, the article proposes that Heidegger’s philosophical reflections are deliberately targeted against the political project of modernist architecture and its conceptualization of architecture for emancipated masses. The article concludes that this political unconscious is also implied in later phenomenological approaches to architecture influenced by Heidegger.