Explanation of the Conceptual Model of the Relationship Between Place and Dwelling in Architecture Based on the Hermeneutic Method of Gadamer and Ricoeur

Architecture plays a fundamental role in inhabitants' understanding and relationship to the world. The focus of architectural practice on this role has the potential to support the inhabitants' interaction with the larger sociocultural reality. This qualitative research aims to develop a methodology for this relationship with a hermeneutical approach and interpretative objective (studying the comparative literature of philosophy and architecture). Using library studies as the methodology, the research was intended to find foundations and operational steps to order early scattered and incoherent materials. Data were gathered based on library research. ‘Understanding Hermeneutics and Mimesis’ starts with Heidegger’s account of understanding as the fundamental human mode of being. Heidegger’s thinking was very influential in the development of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, and this article therefore situates Gadamer in relation to Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology. The research then outlines Gadamer’s hermeneutic ontology and Ricoeur’s narrative theory of hermeneutics. It lays out the basis of the theoretical framework and develops the relevant concepts. As Gadamer’s hermeneutics is tied up with ontology – the philosophical study of being in general – his theory of interpretation is all-encompassing. Gadamer’s hermeneutics lends itself to thinking about architecture in relation to human life and the meaning that informs it in a general way. It does not, however, lend itself easily to application to a specific example. To this aim, this article draws on Ricoeur’s narrative theory of hermeneutics, which offers a structure through which we can analyze an individual work in this hermeneutic context. The research uses Ricoeur’s theory of narrative hermeneutics to account for the productive act – the ‘doing’– and its impact on understanding. Then, it explores Gadamer’s ontology in existing architectural theory and the connection Ricoeur made himself between architecture and his narrative hermeneutics. Within architectural theory, hermeneutics is often put forward as an answer to problems within the practice and discipline of architecture. It is put forward, for example, as an answer to the overemphasis of technology in contemporary practice and the objectifying logic this engenders. Hermeneutics is also proposed as a framework through which contemporary architecture can enter a dialogue with its past and negotiate this often ambivalent relationship without falling into conservatism. Ricoeur applied his narrative theory of hermeneutics to architecture in his paper ‘Architecture and Narrativity’. In the paper, Ricoeur draws parallels between narrative as the configuration of time and architecture as the configuration of space. Ricoeur goes so far as to say that there is an entanglement of space and time in architecture. The final step in this research accounts for the development of the hermeneutic model of architecture. This is achieved through building on what Ricoeur refers to as the entanglement of space and time in architecture to provide an account of the built world as a key element of the hermeneutic situation. It does this in relation to Gadamer’s account of the temporal nature of human existence, as well as Ricoeur’s account of the temporal character of human experience. Regarding the temporal nature of human existence, Gadamer puts forward the concept of “effective history”. This article proposes the concept of “effective place” to describe how we are similarly affected by the constructed space in which we exist. This is proposed not simply as a spatial counterpart to Gadamer’s account of the temporal nature of human existence, but as an elaboration of the entanglement of space and time in the built environment. The model further develops the entanglement of the spatial and the temporal in the configuration of architecture, particularly the configuration's relationship to the previously existing structures of meaning and the rethought of these structures in light of that configuration. Ricoeur’s theory adapts well to a holistic temporal account of architecture in terms of the work being conceived in a time and place, then becoming a built reality, and finally, impacting inhabitation. The model developed in this research offers a holistic approach to architecture’s relationship to sociocultural structures of meaning and highlights the importance of the built environment to these structures. It also offers a holistic approach to architecture’s relationship to time, where the acts of building and inhabitation are part of a continuous process of interpretation and reinterpretation. Therefore, architecture must prioritize its connection to life and the human experience.