Environment, Space, Place

Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2011

Malgorzata A. Dereniowska
Pages 9-46

The Cycle of Lived-Space
From Knowing-Making Toward Designing-Building

The article examines the reduction of architecture to the dimension of utility which results in placelessness. The modern redefinition of science as “knowing-making” is essential to this reduction, although it has fundamental and forgotten importance. Drawing upon Martin Heidegger’s and George Grant’s critique of technology, and the ideas of Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Charles-Francois Viel, the significance of the complex relations between theory and practice in architecture will be explored in the context of Kimberly Dovey’s notion of the cycle of lived-space. A re-definition of modern “knowing-making” reveals a semiotic level which contains new possibilities for meaningful and environmentally attuned architecture within the technological framework. I suggest “designing-building” as an alternative, understood as a process of poetic recreation of meaningful spaces.