Norberg-Shultz

Reflecting on my own life as it relates to the ideas of Norberg-Shultz, I thought of the places, the buildings, the cities I have lived in.  His reference to the common linguistic usage of phrases like “I’m a New Yorker” to describe one’s self made me question my own answer to this query.  Am I an “Atlantan” or a “Southerner”?  I could relate myself fairly well to the home I grew up in, but my neighborhood and city and even state I found particularly difficult to relate to.  Had I perhaps not “lived” in these places or where these places not “living” or as Norberg-Shultz put it, where these places lacking an identity?  Looking back on Heiddeger’s fourfold concept, I could not say all those things were happening in these places.  What Norberg-Shultz was doing was qualifying the ideas of Heiddeger and others to a particularly modern life.  Today’s architects and buildings mostly do not engage their place or even their occupants.  These buildings lack the necessities for Heiddeger’s dwelling as well as the orientation and identification of place that Norberg-Shultz describes for a place to be alive.  There have been few places in my life I believe have done this, an apartment in Paris being one and a cabin in the Appalachian Mountains being the other.  Both of these could be easily described in poetry like the places described in Norberg-Shultz’s text.  It seems Norberg-Shultz is suggesting poetry as a sort of litmus test for a living place.  If it easily creates a poem that is alive and pleasant, that place is living.  If it creates a harsh, unprotected vision, the place is not alive and cannot be dwelled in.

-jd gutermuth