Creating Cities

Harry Drummond builds a case.

What is the meaning of life? Does God exist? How ought I treat another person? What are the con-ditions of knowledge acquisition? Engaging, fun-damental, and worthy – these sorts of questions are the typical buildings blocks of conversation when a philosopher is asked ‘What do you do?’. What is the nature of building? How can a building influence my life? In what style should we build? These are not the sort of questions it is worth placing money on hearing in the same situation.

Yet the philosophy of architecture has attracted some high profile philosophers. Martin Heidegger, for example, delivered a lecture entitled ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, which proposed the ability of buildings to disclose new worlds to a person (or to Dasein, to use his term). Likewise, the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, who was appointed Chair of the UK’s ‘Building Better, Building Beautiful’ commission striving against architectural ugliness and failure, devoted an entire tome to the Aesthetics of Architecture (1979). Other prolific architecturallyinclined philosophers include Professor Andy Hamilton at Durham University, Gordon Graham of Princeton, and the late Norwegian architect Christian Norberg-Schulz. Given all this intellectual fire-power, why then is it that the philosophy of architecture does not appear alongside epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics in the centre of our philosophical discourse?