Dwelling in Time

When enabled by an adequate built-environment, humankind can find both welfare and meaning within the act of dwelling.This thesis explores the potential of the act of dwelling by framing an understanding of the built-environment as both the setting for, and the product of, dwelling.Humankind's instinctive need for shelter has placed the house at the crossing point of rational and emotional action.In order to build good homes -that, beyond being economically conscious, are also socially meaningful -an exploration of the social, cultural, political, and economic factors pertaining to their construction, and a reflection on the theorization, education, production, and evaluation of residential architecture, are necessary.Driven by the dual goal of achieving meaning and economy in dwelling, and supported by historical and contemporary built examples, this thesis develops an architectural proposal that integrates concepts of user agency, spatial flexibility, variable density, and financial feasibility in the form of a medium-rise residential complex sited in Ottawa's Centretown neighbourhood.And this is not easily achieved.From this answer then arises a new set of questions.Namely: How can dwelling maintain its relevance to the practice of building and the formation of the built-environment in the face of the brute forces of logical pragmatism?More specifically, what means can architects and builders avail themselves of in order to imbue residential architecture with a fuller interpretation of dwelling's meaning and potential with respect to humankind's existence?Political theorist Peter King provides a telling answer to these two questions in his book Private Dwelling: Contemplating the Use of Housing.King points out that it is dwelling's two rudimentary characteristics, its innate "ambiguity" and its "ubiquitous" nature which enable dwelling to resist reductive rationalism.4 Together these two traits empower dwelling to uphold a degree of contingency in favour of its future actions, and place it in direct defiance of new-thinking's reductive practices.From this position, dwelling is able to engage with, navigate through, and mediate between, the seemingly incongruent yet interdependent realms of humankind's mortal-being.II In other words, in its abstraction and open-endedness, dwelling manages to elevate all that is banal in human existence, towards a meaningful consciousness.But contrary to dwelling's impulse toward conceptual transcendence, its 4 King, Private Dwelling, 17. II The term Mortal-Being is extracted from Heidegger's etymological examination of the German term bauen, meaning: to build.He writes: "Now, what does bauen, to build, mean?The Old High German word for building, buan, means to dwell.This signifies to remain , to stay in a place.The proper meaning of the verb bauen, namely, to dwell, has been lost to us.… Wherethe word bauen still speaks in its original sense it also says how far the essence of dwelling reaches.That is, bauen, buan, bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be.What then does ich bin mean?The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean I dwell, you dwell.The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling.To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal.It means to dwell." (

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