Interpreting Environments: Tradition, Deconstruction, Hermeneutics

by Robert Mugerauer

In this pioneering book, Robert Mugerauer seeks to make deconstruction and hermeneutics accessible to people in the environmental disciplines, including architecture, planning, urban studies, environmental studies, and cultural geography. Mugerauer demonstrates each methodology through a case study. The first study uses the traditional approach to recover the meaning of Jung's and Wittgenstein's houses by analyzing their historical, intentional contexts. The second case study utilizes deconstruction to explore Egyptian, French neoclassical, and postmodern attempts to use pyramids to constitute a sense of lasting presence. And the third case study employs hermeneutics to reveal how the American understanding of the natural landscape has evolved from religious to secular to ecological since the nineteenth century.

Genres: Architecture

232 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1995

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robert Mugerauer wrote this book in the mid-1990s prompted by his observation that hermeneutics and deconstructionism had not been taken up by spatial researchers in their work, despite these philosophical ideas having been around for a while. At the time of writing Marxist and phenomenological approaches held sway. The import of this book is therefore pedagogical. Mugerauer presents two case studies in which he demonstrates the application of a deconstructionist and a hermeneutic approach to understanding spatial data, respectively. These are complemented and contrasted by a third section which foregrounds a 'traditional' approach to interpreting environments. In general this aims to understand an artifact in the light of its origin or creation, its forms, materials, and content. The author himself does not want to advance an argument, or make a case in favour of any of these approaches.

The opening chapter usefully discusses the overall orientation of each method. Then follow three chapters, each devoted to an approach. Hermeneutics appears in the third chapter because it tries to steer a middle course between tradition and deconstruction.

Within the scope of the traditional approach Mugerauer weaves Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Carl Jung’s life stories and their cultural contexts together with their theoretical views and the houses they designed and built. Wittgenstein aimed for simplicity and modernist austerity in the design of his sister's residence in Vienna, while Jung sought complexity and the integration of symbolic meaning in the layered genesis of his Bollingen tower near Lake Zurich. For both, the design and construction of a dwelling marked an important stage in their lives and in the construction of their personal identities.

The deconstructionist framing of pyramids that follows is necessarily somewhat unequivocal. Pyramids have traditionally been seen as the paragon of solidity. They reflect foundational acts and sustaining principles. A deconstructionist reading discloses fissures that reveal what his hidden: "the fictive web spun as the strategy and posture of cultural forms of desire." In this chapter the author moves from Egyptian pyramids to 18th century France to the postmodern pyramids we find in contemporary malls and cultural centres.

The final chapter is devoted to a hermeneutics of the American landscape. It strikes me as the richest and most layered. Involves uncovering the religious meanings that have been concealed and forgotten, particularly through the lens of 19th century American landscape painting.

In a short postscript the author pleads "to continue questioning the approaches and most importantly, through them, the subject matter." Almost half of the book is devoted to notes, bibliography and index.

3,5 stars