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Architectural Theory Review

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RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE WAY: TheArchitecture of Excursion and Return

Adrian Snodgrass

To cite this article: Adrian Snodgrass (2001) RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE WAY: TheArchitecture of Excursion and Return, Architectural Theory Review, 6:1, 1-15, DOI:10.1080/13264820109478412

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13264820109478412

Published online: 24 Jul 2009.

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Random Thoughts on the Way: The Archi tecture of Excursion and Return

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE WAY: The Architecture of

Excursion and Return

ADRIAN SNODGRASS

Drawing from the metaphor of excursion and return and Sino-Japanese notions of the Way, five way-stations are visited: architecture as a model for Bildung; design as an aimless wandering allowing the spontaneous appearance of ideas; the study of architectural history as a way of understanding prejudice; the encounter with alien traditions as the most provocative means of transforming prejudice; and metaphor as a means for this transformation.'

For reasons best known to the conveners, the theme of this Conference is 'Fellow Travellers'. During the cold war, you will remember, the 'fellow traveller' was someone sympathetic to Communism and its aims (not the Red under the bed, but the Pink in the closet); someone who shared with card-carrying comrades a greater or less degree of commitment to the ideology and political ends of the cause; who journeyed with like-minded companions toward a common, Utopian goal.

This paper will develop another metaphor of travel, that of excursion and return. Fellow travellers on this path do not share an ideology, if this is taken to mean a prescribed set of beliefs or rules for action; nor do they share a telos, since they have no clear idea of where the path is heading. This being so, even those travelling in the opposite direction are not necessarily enemies, but might turn out to be friendly and helpful, bearing tales of what lies in store.

The theme of excursion and return, as you know, is ubiquitous and perennial in the myths, legends, folklore and literature of all peoples. It also serves as a master metaphor in philosophical hermeneutics, where it is seen as the movement at work in all processes of interpretation and understanding. Here the metaphor will be deployed to bring out its relevance for architectural education. Five variations of the metaphor will be visited in the manner of way-stations, temporary stops on the way.

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• First Way-station — Bildung The German word Bildung corresponds roughly to 'education', but it carries rich connotations lacking in the English term. It "designates primarily the properly human way of developing one's natural talents and capacities."2 It is 'education' in die sense of a self-formation, the learning of a way of knowing and a way of being, education as a self-cultivation and growth. Gadamer uses Bildung as a metaphor for the process whereby understanding is attained.

Hegel, as cited by Gadamer, says that,

When a man gives himself over to work so wholly that it becomes distanced from his personal needs and private desires, he not only allows what he makes to assume its own form but does die same to himself. In die selflessness of serving, he becomes himself more fully.3

The idea here is that in Bildung one gives oneself over to something other than oneself, and by this process of giving over, becomes more fully oneself. Giving oneself over to somediing odier is a going out to the other, so that Bildung involves die nodon of leaving home, the locus of what one already understands and is at home with, and going out into a new place that is strange and unfamiliar. As one comes to understand this other place, as it becomes familiar, it comes to be a new home. You now feel at home in the place that was previously alien. This new homeliness has changed who you are. Returning to your starring point, your original home, it is changed. You see it in a new way, and understand it differendy. As Heraclitus says, when the traveller returns home, he is different from and more than when he set out.

One's prior home is now understood not as a final homestead, a home where one stands steadfast, but a way-stadon, a starting place for entry into the alien; and what was alien is now one's own. One has not only found a new home in what was seen as alien, but found a part of oneself in the alien. What was foreign is no longer distant, but brought home to oneself (as when we say "it was brought home to me that..."). It seemed strange simply because we did not recognise ourselves in it. The alienness of the other was a projection of our own self-alienation; we did not realise it as a possibility we already possessed. Going out to the unfamiliar, and making it familiar was a disclosure of one's own latent potentialities.

This trajectory of alienadon and reunion, of finding more than what one started out with, is the story, recurrent in myth and folklore, of those who go in search of treasure, and return home to find it buried under their own hearth. The 'treasure' is understanding; by going out into die unknown and coming back to where we started, we enrich our understanding.

In its most fecund interpretation, excursion and return is not going out in a straight line and then retracing one's step, coming back over what is now familiar ground to where one started, but is movement in a circle. In this kenning, every step of the way, right back to the home whence one started, is a movement into and through the strange and otherwise. Having returned, enriched, the intrepid traveller starts out again, tracing a wider, more encompassing circle, thus inscribing circles within circles, as in the metaphor of the hermeneutical circle, discussed in the following.

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Bildung and the Design Studio Gadamerclaims tix&Bildung is the very essence of the human sciences. In contrast to the methodological sciences, which aim to impart techno-rationalist skills, the human sciences give a training in Bildung, processes that foster the growth of understanding and practical reasoning. Whereas the methodological sciences are concerned with the teaching of techniques and rational thinking in the service of quantitatively definable outcomes, the human sciences pertain to enculturation in the sense of a growth of the whole being. It hardly needs to be stated that education in this latter sense, in the sense of Bildung as the formation of being, is rapidly disappearing in our universities, in the humanities as elsewhere. Education as a growth of understanding, the learning of'culture' in its fullest meaning, has given way to an utilitarian ethos of learning skills aimed solely at satisfying a narrowly vocational indigence.

There is, however, one place in the universities where Bildung still persists in a schematic form, even if unrecognised by those who teach it. If the movement of excursion and return constitutes Bildung, then the design studio is essentially a site for a training in this form of education. As Coyne and 1 have attempted toshowelsewhere,'' the design process is hermeneutical, proceeding byway of interpretations that move back and forth in a movement of excursion and return, of repeatedly venturing out into the unfamiliar and returning to the starting point with enlarged understanding. Designing is a continuing cycle of expeditions into the foreign, and design teaching is a training in a mode of Bildung.

This being so, architectural educators should realise that they are almost the sole heirs of a rich pedagogical tradition, one under threat of extinction. Rather than seeking ways in which to modernise architectural education, that is, to bring it into line with modem techno-rationalist and utilitarian practices, accompanied as these are by all the paraphernalia of clearly defined aims, measurable outcomes and vocational relevance, they should hold up design education as a model for teaching in the humanities.

The manner in which design is taught involves unique educational values. Rather than seeing present 'methods' of design training as antiquated relics or the products of an uncritical acceptance of habit, they should be viewed as a viable alternative to the pedagogy of expedience that currently rules in our universities. Rather than a form of education that needs defending, in the manner of a reactionary conservatism, the hermeneutical processes that obtain in the design studio could or should be the focus for studies aimed at understanding the processes at work.

This first way-station lies in familiar territory,5 and is a home base and starting point for the meandering path traced in the following.

• Second Way-station — The Aimless Wanderer As usually understood, the fellow traveller is one who journeys with an aim. She and her companions travel with a destination in mind. By contrast, there is the traveller who wanders aimlessly.

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'To wander', is 'to go from country to country, or from place to place without settled route or destination; to go aimlessly.'6 The word relates to 'wending' and 'winding'.7 To wander is to ramble, which is 'to walk for pleasure, with or without a definite goal'. The OED says that the word 'ramble' probably comes from Old Dutch rammalen, 'to wander about in a state of sexual excitement'. Both the Old Dutch and I seem to have lost something with the passage of time, but the basics remain: wandering and rambling both imply going randomly, without a goal, but with an anticipation that interesting things will happen on the way.

Wandering and rambling are unplanned; they are haphazard; they simply happen; they are happenings, a word not used here by happenstance. The 'hap' of'happen' is 'chance, luck, lot; a chance occurrence; or to come about by chance.' To wander is to give oneself over to whatever happens by chance.

During my time in Tamilnad in South India, I learned a lesson that impressed me deeply. When you meet someone on the path, he will ask, "Where are you going?" It is good manners to reply, "I am simply going," or, "Simply" (summa), with a vague gesture with the hand in the direction you're going.8 That is sufficient. It is enough that you are simply walking on the path. You aren't required to give reasons. If, on the other hand, you say, "1 am going to the market," then politeness requires the other to ask, "And what is the purpose of your going to the market?" You have missed the opportunity to avoid the metaphysical imperative to give reasons for your going, the need to explain why you are going to the market or wherever. You have been asked to specify the utilitarian goal of your walking. You are in the realm of techno-rationalist justification. You must reply, "I am going to buy plantains," and all is explained. The questioner is happy, and moves on. But he is just as happy, or even more so, when you simply say, "Simply." You are simply going, perhaps just for the fun of it, or just for the sake of walking, or for no reason whatever. That you are wandering aimlessly does not seem to worry the Tamil interrogator. It's taken me a lifetime to begin to accept that it doesn't worry me too much, either.

Simply going is following where the legs take you, the mind following the feet. Or else, and better, the mind and the legs following the path as one, without the mind ordering the legs about, or the legs tripping up the mind. This is conveyed in the Chinese character for Tao, the Way, which combines the radical for a foot (indicating 'going') with that for the head. You will be aware that the Way, which is the way of one's life, is a master metaphor in the East. Taoism ('Way-ism') and the Way of Buddhism (symbolised by a Wheel, to indicate that it is a circular, and not a straight, or strait, Way) are two great expressions of the metaphor. One follows a Way that is a training for living one's life. In Japan, as elsewhere in the Far East, this training takes specialised forms: chadb, the way of tea; kendo, the way of the sword; judo, the way of gentleness; and so on. One's craft or profession is a way, a way of gaining an understanding of the Way. One goes out to, gives oneself over to one's work, and thereby grows in being. All who work are journeymen (or, now, journey-persons?), who perform a 'journey', that is, literally, 'a day's work'. In this context the fellow traveller is anyone who works or walks on or in whatever way.

Eastern Way-ism teaches that those who aimlessly walk a path are walked by the path. It is not so much that they follow where the path leads, but that the path and she who walks it are one; they move along together. This notion may sound strange in English, but is less so in Chinese, where there is a confluence

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of thing and event. In Chinese nouns and verbs are interchangeable, so that the ideogram for Tao, is at once 'the Way' and 'going on the Way'. Each Chinese ideogram carries a twofold meaning; it is at once the thing and its thinging, reflecting to some extent the meanings of English gerunds such as 'shipping', and in words like 'ship' itself, which can be used as a verb or a noun. In Chinese, a thing has an implicit quality of unfolding in time. The thing does not merely stand as an object in space, but continues in time. Space and time merge in the thing, and also in the ideogram that represents it. Thus, in the ideogram 'Tao,' the distinction between the going on a path and the pathway itself is collapsed. The path and the person going on the path move forward together.

This fusion of the thing and its thinging in the Chinese ideogram carries the import that a thing is not thought of as an 'object', but an e-vent (literally, a 'coming out'). 'Things' in Chinese are happenings, which arise by chance. The event of a thing, the 'fact of its happening', is a 'coming from' or a 'coming out' by chance. It is a phenomenon, which is etymologically an 'appearance', a 'coming into sight, a showing'. Things appear to us, show themselves forth, by chance, and chance (from OF. cheoir, 'to fall') is a be-falling, by accident (from zc-cidere, 'fall before').9 Things and events both 'be-falT by chance.

Thus it is not so much we who 'see' or experience things as we travel, but that they are revealed,10 or unfolded, before us. They present themselves and are themselves presents, dis-covered not by but to us, and thus given as gifts. Our part is to accept these presents in a spirit of acceptance, allowing them room to reveal themselves, just as they are. Then the path reveals things; as you follow the path, prospects unfold. The job of the rambler is to keep moving, keep the eyes (and the mind) open, be aware and receptive.

This presencing applies equally to thoughts as it does to other things. Thus, when we say 'it occurs to me that...', if we take the word 'occur' in its etymological sense, ideas run to meet us, present themselves by chance. We don't have ideas; they come to us; thoughts are revealed to us in an appearing, just in the same way that 'objects' in a seemingly outside world 'appear' to us."

The 'thinker', therefore, is one who has happened upon things on the way, and wishes to share the happy discovery with others. To 'happen upon' implies that something happens to you; it happens out of its own accord. It makes itself noticed; it appears or discloses. Mahayana Buddhism teaches that things (riipa, 'forms') and mental phenomena, just as they are, sono mama}1 appear to us out of the Void, and recede back into the Void. Like the Buddhas, they are thus come and thus gone, tathagata. 'Experience', whether of thoughts or of phenomena, is not 'ours'; both thought and phenomena are simply happenings that occur from out of the Void.13

The Way of going that accords with this sense of happening is a \eaving-be,sono-mama, 'simply' going, and going simply. Simple in the senses of uncomplicated; and not very bright. The Tao-te-ching extols the dull, the imprecise, the blurred, the ephemeral, all those qualities that are anathema to rationalism. Going on this Way is an 'actionless activity' (wei-wu-wei), the action that accompanies and rises from 'no-mind', the mind that does not 'know' or think out what to do, orrefer to principles and rules in order to make decisions. The closest thing to this in Western thought is the Greek and hermeneutical notion of phronesis. In the exercise of pbronesis you do not 'know' how to act or judge until it happens, and

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//?en you know. You don't act by reference to a set of principles that are already applied in prospect, but are moved to action or judgment by and in the happening."

This letting-be is not mere passivity; it is a form of receptive awareness. It is a tension between oneself and what is encountered; it requires attention (a 'stretching towards'). It allows the thing to ex-press itself as it is, and so im-press us. The (famous) rose that blooms without a reason only has significance for those who pause to look at it and ad-mire ('look to') it.

Aimlessly Wandering in the Design Studio Some design teachers might feel threatened or embarrassed if it is suggested that much of what takes place in the design studio is aimless wandering, or, going yet further, tJiat aimless wandering is an essential part of designing. Nothing could be more alien to the path of the presendy ruling techno-rationalism, which demands a clearstatement of the eventual destination of any course of action, ruling that just as every thing must have a reason for existing, so every action must have a purpose,15 and every procedure must be governed by rules or principles that guarantee projected outcomes.

By contrast, when involved in the process of designing, a designer has no sense of eventual destination. She does not know where the path leads; she does not seek reasons for what is encountered, but simply accepts them as given; and she has no rules to govern her reactions to them. She is caught up in and carried along by the process of going out into the unknown. She manifests, that is to say, all the characteristics of the aimless wanderer.

The design process involves a good deal of aimless wandering, and could not function in its absence. Although there might be goals laid down for the design program as a whole, in its actual working out designing takes on a life of its own, and no-one knows exacdy where it is leading. The greater the involvement of the designers and the more they give themselves over to the task and follow where it leads, die better the designing moves along. When designing is moving on nicely, it leads and the designer plays along; and it is then that ideas begin to emerge spontaneously.

The designer does not ask the reason why certain ideas come to the fore at certain stages of the working out of the design. Design ideas simply appear. They are suddenly now and here, coming from nowhere. They were 'in the air', and happen upon the designer, just as the designer happens upon them. They appear by chance, and are worked out, or worked into the scheme or abandoned, as it works out at the time and on the spot. This is not done by reference to principles or rules, but simply happens, by way of practical understanding.

Designing, in the ordinary state of affairs and if it is going well, has no need to resort to rules or principles. Quite simply, principles stand in the way. A principle is a general rule that does not change with circumstance, but stands firm in every particular case of its application. In its standing firm the principle stands against the flow of the way. The principle, in so far as it is 'timeless', sacrifices kinesis to stasis.

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A principle, to warrant the name, must be immutable, that is, unmoving. It stands still. Thus a 'person of principle' is one who has a stance, who stands for something; he or she is prepared to stand up for and stand by certain principles that stand forever, unchanging. The notion of principle is the very antithesis of movement. Principles are rules that have set solid; they are (excuse me) a curdling of the way; when one turns to principles, the way of design loses its fluidity of movement, and sets into solid globules of 'timeless' truth. Time, the 'essence' of movement on the way, is stopped and fixed in place.

Therefore, when designing is flowing along properly, the designer is not a person of principle, because recourse to principles brings the process to a standstill. The free movement of excursion and return is stopped in its track, and the designer is reduced to working to rule. The absence of movement precludes any enhancement of understanding.

Designers, by contrast to those who have principles, do not take a stand, thus coming to a standstill, but are always on their way. They do not stop moving, but are moved', that is, are moved toward something, go out towards and are drawn to it. Moving toward is a being moved, in its several senses. The designer is moved towards things and ideas as he or she designs, and is moved by them. They propel her on the path.

The person of principle is committed, and so also is the designer when caught up in designing, but in a different sense. Commitment in this context is a joining with and sending out (L. com-mittere) to the work tobedone,16 a careful and sympathetic openness to and awareness of what comes into one's mind or through the end of the pencil (or onto the screen), an easy-going and trustful willingness to accept what reveals itself, not casting it aside as irrational or valueless because it does not seem to have a reason or use. Commitment in this sense is a willingness to experience whatever is met with on the path of designing with an anticipation, and an acknowledgment, that what it manifests is true and relevant to the taskat hand. This openness is prerequisite forany understanding.17 Without that initial commitment, that prior acknowledgment, there is no point in even looking to whatever the way unfolds.

Commitment is defined in the OED as "engagement or involvement that restricts freedom of action." The person who is playing out and playing along with the movement of the way of design, is both engaged and involved, caught up in the game, but without any restriction of freedom of action. On the contrary, giving herself over to the game, a skilful player of the game of design moves freely with its movement.

In sum, architectural education, at its vital core in the design studio, represents everything that is anathema to prevailing orthodoxies in education theory. It is aimless, lacks principles, and subverts commitment. Far from being reprehensible, however, these traits offer a model for other disciplines in the humanities. They are Bildung in action.

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• Third Way-station — History

The Hermeneutical Circle and Prejudice Let us imagine a motorist driving along a road on which she has recently encountered a large number of stop signs. When she sees a sign coming up ahead, she takes it to be yet another stop sign, and begins to slow down. As she get closer to the sign, however, she sees that it is a sign for a pedestrian crossing, and since there are no pedestrians in sight, she begins to speed up again. Her understanding of the meaning of the sign has altered. The next time she sees a sign in the distance, she will not automatically assume that it is a stop sign but understand that it might be another pedestrian sign, so while preparing to stop she also looks out for pedestrians.

This cycle of understanding is what hermeneutics calls the hermeneutical circle.18 The motorist projects an interpretation onto the approaching sign on the basis of previous experience; she then revises this interpretation when it is found to be a misunderstanding; but the revised understanding also alters the way in which she interprets what she encounters later. Thus understanding goes, back and forth, round and round.

This is a variation on the theme of excursion and return. On the way, our encounter with what lies ahead alters our understanding of what went before; and the altered understanding of what went before in turn alters our pre-understanding of what lies ahead. In projecting our understanding, we develop understanding. Our understanding grows by projection, by anticipating what's to come, and our understanding appropriates what it understands.

Therefore it can be said that fellow travellers on the way of excursion and return are always already further along the path than they are 'in fact'. Where they are on the way at any moment is a projection from where they were before; and where they will be is already thrown ahead of them. They are, in a sense, always already at a destination, but the destination is never reached, because it changes at each step they take.

Further, walking on the way is not so much a matter of walkers directing their steps but of being dirown, impelled, from and by the past into what lies ahead. The past plays into the future. The way that has been traversed shines forward into present understanding, both conscious and tacit, and ahead into what is yet to come. In this way it establishes a continuity between past, present and future.

This involves the strange paradox that in looking to the past we are looking ahead. What we understand from the past plays into what we understand of what lies before us; but as we encounter what lies ahead, as it comes into the headlights of our understanding, as it were, our revised understanding of what we encounter loops back, in a circle, to transform our stock of pre-understandings.

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All understanding, then, involves a prior understanding. There is no zero point from which we interpret meaning. Not only does each person carry and cast ahead prior understandings, but without them would not be able to understand anything at all. These prejudgments, which are inbuilt and largely tacit, derive from our past.

Gadamer, challenging Enlightenment thinking, calls these prejudgments'prejudices'. For Enlightenment thinkers die term 'prejudice' has wholly negative connotations, being an unfounded judgment based on a blind belief that closes itself off from the domain of reason, a one-sided distortion of truth to be eradicated in the name of objectivity. For Gadamer, by contrast, prejudice forms the precondition for all understanding. Without a projection of preconceptions brought with us to the site of interpretation from our past experience, no understanding would take place. This is not to deny the existence of negative prejudices that disable and diminish understanding, but is to recognise that prejudice is indispensable for any act of interpretation.

For Gadamer, prejudices are understandings that derive from living in a tradition, the experience which predisposes us to understand things in one way rather than another. Prejudices are handed to us from our culture. They have an ontological significance in that we are our pre-understandings. The hermeneutical circle of understanding, which constitutes our ontological condition, what we are, the way we are in the world, is thus a participation in the transmission of tradition. Our prejudices are transmitted to us; and by our interpretations we transform them; and these transformed pre­suppositions flow back to transform tradition. So tradition is not static, but a flowing movement of transmission; it, too, participates in the hermeneutical circle and is a way of excursion and return.

Tradition plays into our present understandings and, in contradistinction to the Enlightenment's strictures, is not to be rejected out of hand as outmoded, irrational, and constricting. On the contrary, it is to be seen as potentially enlarging, enabling and conducive to freedom. Further, the cultivation of an understanding of tradition is at the core of education as Bildung.

Thence the importance of history, which can now be interpreted as the study of tradition. The history of our culture and precedents plays into our fore-structures of understanding, and therefore into the way we interpret the world. It follows that the greater our understanding of history, the greater the store of pre-judgments at our disposal to understand whatever happens, now and on the road ahead.

Prejudice and Architectural History The relevance of this for architectural pedagogy is not the platitudinous observation that teaching architectural history is important—it has always been seen as an important part of the curriculum—but in adding a new dimension to what history signifies: it is not simply the study of what happened in the past, but is a means for uncovering our inbuilt pre-judgments. By the study of history we dredge up from unawareness, as it were, the sediment of prejudice, so that it can be judged and evaluated.

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The study of architectural history, viewed hermeneutically, is the study of our own formations of prejudice; where they are coming from, and their present 'status'. It has a different function to the study of history as a mode of critical thinking, the hermeneutics of suspicion, which attempts to strip away the masks of deception that conceal reality, and in the name of 'objectivity' aims to wipe away the influences of tradition to create a tabula rasa of the student's mind. Hermeneutics, by contrast, goes out into the past as into a foreign country in order to bring tacit prejudices to foreground awareness so that they can be judged as enabling understanding or not.

Rather than attempting to clear away the debris in the student's mind so as to start the educational process from scratch, the hermeneutical study of architectural tradition begins with an acknowledgment that students bring to the site of learning a wealth of experience of architecture, since they all have been in daily contact with buildings and dwelling spaces from the moment of birth. The prejudices deriving from this experience are to be dis-covered and discussed in the design studio and the lecture hall, not in order to exorcise them in the manner of demons of irrationality, but to see if they can serve as a base for projecting understanding beyond its present boundaries. This process of education is by way of question and answer, starting with questions such as, "What experiences have you had?" "What does your experience tell you?" "How does your experience weigh up in the present case?" "How does your experience stand up in the light of the experiences of others?" "What alternatives and precedents are there, so a judgment can be made?"...

This is not a deconstruction, in the sense of a destruction of what previously exists, but a leading out (educate) into new and less restricting ways of understanding. It has nothing in common witJi the Modernist enterprise of cutting away tradition so as to be able to think from first principles. It is, rather. a recognition, a 'knowing again', that pre-judgments are inherent, and far from being inhibiting, are the basis for all understanding and therefore potentially liberating. It is a re-membering, a reconstruction, a re-formation, of what is already understood. It is, in a word, Bildung.

In the context of architectural education, whether in the design studio or the lecture hall, the study of history involves the study of precedents. The danger in this, as many of you will realise, is that reference to precedent can merely serve to reinforce the cult of the architectural hero, or to provide a model to be blindly copied. But acquaintance with a sufficiendy large number of precedents brings an element of comparison and choice into play, which involves judgment by way of practical reasoning, phronesis. The study of historical precedents could be taken as a training inphronesis, honing the skills of ethical decision making according to the play ofprohairesis.19

• Fourth Way-station — Alien Traditions When the traveller returns home she has more than she had when she left. What she brings home, however, depends on where she's been and what she experienced. The value of the treasure of understanding she brings home is proportional to the difficulty of the terrain and the remoteness of the country in which she travelled and, in particular, the unfamiliarity and foreignness of the culture she encountered.

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Travelling widens one's horizons says the old adage; and, it could be added, the more foreign the country visited, the wider the expansion of horizons. Access of insight is proportional to unfamiliarity: the more alien the cultural landscape the more it calls forth ('evokes') prejudices, and leads forth ('educates') greater understanding.

Hegel... declares the world and language of antiquity to be especially suitable [for the fostering of Bildung), since this world is remote and alien enough to effect the necessary separation of ourselves from ourselves.20

By 'antiquity' Hegel here means Greek culture, thus betraying his Euro-centric and classicist prejudices,21

but in this present age of increasingly unimpeded access to other cultures, the 'ancient traditions' are not simply those of Europe, but those of humanity as a whole. If, as Gadamer says, "history does not belong to us; we belong to it," in this globalised world we belong to the history not of our own people, our tribe, but of all peoples on planet earth.

It is not long since International Architecture claimed to speak the architectural language of the world. Even if now clothed in other guises, this pernicious form of prejudice is still deeply ingrained in architectural schools the world over, and the teaching of architectural history is still, for all intents and purposes, an instance of parochial tribalism, reducing all modes of architectural thinking to a single, hegemonic and exclusively Western paradigm. This hardening of horizons is not so much a form of xenophobia, a fear of the foreign, as an inability to begin to imagine the existence, let alone the relevance, of other ways of thinking. How can dialogue begin if it is taken for granted that one's own way of thinking automatically excludes every alternative?

The counter to this claustrophobic chauvinism is an hermeneutical excursion into other architectural traditions, preferably those most remote from the one in which we feel at home. We need to venture beyond the home horizon, not in order to increase our general knowledge of architecture or to build up a store of aesthetic forms to be drawn upon in the design studio, but to keep alive an awareness that there are types of architectural understanding other than the home-grown variety.

Technologies of travel and information have increased ease of access to alien traditions and histories. Offered this smorgasbord, which alien tradition or history does one choose to study or to teach? The operative word in this question is 'choose'; it is a matter of choice, of judgment, and thus oiphronesis. One already understands the answer to questions like this, if guided by one's better judgment. As a rule-of-thumb, however, the very degree of strangeness, even the seeming grotesqueness of a culture, would be criterion enough for choosing it. The more estranged the architecture may seem, the better it serves to stir up the sediments of prejudice.

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• Fifth Way-station — Metaphor

Metaphor as Excursion and Return To advocate the teaching of alien histories, however, is not simply to recommend adding courses to the existing curricula. The aim is wider and more encompassing. It is to indicate, in general terms, ways in which the existing manner of teaching architecture could be 'reinforced' and made more explicit. If the design studio is already a site for hermeneutical procedures, the aim is not to introduce new pedagogical techniques that would disrupt the hermeneutical processes already in place, but to bring those processes into sharper awareness. This hinges on the hermeneutical notion of metaphor. In hermeneutics, metaphor is itself a metaphor for the event of understanding, of how interpretation takes place. As such, the metaphor of metaphor is die correlate and complement of the metaphor of excursion and return.

Bildung, the hermeneutical circle and metaphor all display the structure of excursion and reunion. Metaphor is the trope in which one thing is seen as another, as in the classical example, in vogue since Aristotle's time, 'man is a wolf.22 In this man is seen as a wolf. The metaphor involves a movement of excursion and return. One term of the metaphor, the familiar (or 'home') term, goes out into the alien territory of die second term, and by this going out assimilates and integrates the two terms, so that the first term is released from its confines and expanded by taking on some of the characteristics of the second term. Its borders are extended; it now means more than it meant before.

This transference of meaning, however, is not merely in one direaion. There is an interchange of meanings, so that die second term takes on some of the characteristics of the first term. Thus, when it is said diat 'man is a wolf, die term 'man' goes out, as it were, to the term 'wolf and is expanded by taking on some of the characteristics associated with the animal; but at the same time the term 'wolf, to however small a degree, takes on certain elements of the human. There is a two-way interaction between the terms, a circular movement of excursion and return, corresponding to diose ofBildung and the hermeneutical circle.

Metaphor and Design Bringing these considerations back to architecture, they open up a way of going out to the architecture of the odier. This is to see our architecture, by which I mean the architecture with which we are familiar, the architecture coming out of the Western tradition, as the architecture of some other culture. This is not simply comparing one with the odier, as in a simile, when we say that one thing is like somediing else. This latter is the form of trope employed, for example, when Gropius or Bruno Taut compared Modern Architecture with traditional Japanesearchitecture, citing similarities in their honest expression of structure, in their simplicity, eschewal of ornament, and so on.23

Metaphor, by contrast, reveals qualities that are unfamiliar in both terms of the trope. For example, to see the steps of the Opera House as ma, the ambiguous between-space found in Japanese architecture,

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is to set up a circular transference of notions: just as ma in Japan is a between-space in which human activities happen, and simultaneously an interval between events in time, such as a pause between the notes played on a flute or between the actions of an actor, so die steps of the Opera House, understood as ma, are die inter-space between the inner and the outer; and an interval in the movement from the outside world of the everyday to die special world of opera. The steps have the ambiguity of meaning that ma has: they are used for ascending and descending; for the meeting and seating of large groups; for the photographing of small groups; and so on, serving undefined and overlapping functions. They are not simply steps, but form a between-space in which events happen of their own accord (sono mama).

In this example, unlike the previous comparison of Modern and Japanese architectures, both terms of the metaphor remain distinct, but acquire added meaning. One term is not simply subsumed within or appropriated by the other, but adds meaning to the other, and in turn has its meaning enlarged.

The power of the metaphor to change our preconceptions and enlarge our horizon of understanding is strengthened to the degree that we understand the meanings associated with each of the terms. If we understand that ma is not simply a word for 'space', but has rich connotations in Japanese philosophy, relates direcdy to Buddhist concepts of the Void and No-Mind, and is a fundamental concept governing all the Japanese arts, from architecture and Noh drama to music, then these meanings are added to those we associate with the Opera House. On the other hand, the metaphor adds, even if peripherally, to the Japanese notion of ma if it is known that there are Western examples of architecture that display the workings of the concept, even if the designers are wholly unaware of it.24 This is not to 'Nipponify' the Opera House, or Westernise the Japanese concept of ma, but to bring out previously undisclosed meanings in each. Metaphor is not an assimilation, identification, comparison, appropriation or expropriation, but what Gadamer calls a 'fusion of horizons'.25

As I see it, the task of the teacher of architectural tradition is to indicate metaphors of this type, and then 'fill in' the background, indicating the wealth of meaning associated with the alien concept. This is to translate tradition. If the study of tradition is to be relevant in other ways than instilling and reinforcing the culture of Western architectural heroes, it must ask the question, "How does such-and-such translate into our present situation?" The teaching of history is, for me, a teaching of translation, and translation is not a transformation of the thought of the other so as to make it an imitation or reflection of one's own, nor is it a taking possession. It is, rather, a fusion, in which the understanding of the foreign comes home.

Notes 1 I dedicate this paper to the memory of my fellow-traveller and good friend Narikutti Swami, who spent his

life venturing far into the most alien and unknown, and found his home there. His life was one of extraordinary courage and an inspiration to me. I mourn, with deep-felt shock, his brutal murder in the cave that was his home on Arunachalam in South India. Sumairul

2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, London: Sheed and Ward, p. 11.

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3 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 12. 4 Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyne, "Is Designing Hermeneutical?" Architectural Tbeory Review, 1.1

(April 1997): pp. 65-97. 5 See Adrian Snodgrass, "On "Theorising Architectural Educauon/'ArcMecfMra/ Tbeory Review 5,2 (Nov

2000): pp. 89-93. 6 OED. 7 'Went', the part tense of 'to go', was originally the past tense of 'wend'. 8 Summa-iru is simply going, simply being, and being simple. If a child is making a noise or misbehaving, the

mother will snap, "Summa-iru", which, depending on the degree of snappiness, means something between "be simple," "simply be" and "shut up."—Summa-iru has its equivalent in the Japanese words sono mama, which is something like "just as it is." The notion of sono mama plays an important role in the Jodo Shinshii, whose teachings have had an informing influence on my understanding. Unlike other schools of Buddhism, the Shinshii has no practice, no method to follow in order to approach whatever is supposed to be the end of the Way. It is a profound awareness of one's own inability, of the insufficiency of one's own efforts to understand the mysteries, or to use one's own power (jiriki) to advance. It is the Way of the powerless, those who realise that they are in a double bind of selfishly desiring to rid themselves (or their selves) of selfhood. The answer to this dilemma, and the many others that crowd in upon us when we come to consider where we are on the Way, is to accept that this is how things are, just as they are (sono mama), and to shut up about it and simply be. If we're going to get anywhere, it will be by a power other than our own, an other power (tariki) that indwells things just as they are, and will reveal itself, emerge, if we leave it alone and don't poke at it—and if it doesn't reveal itself, never mind and no matter, things are as they are, sono mama.

9 They show themselves forth, and this 'showing' is etymologically a 'shining', a shining forth or shining out. —Is it going too far to see in this notion of things and events befalling, as if from die sky, one of those uncanny resonances that languages reveal? It is a basic tenet of the Mah'ayana that forms ('things') fleetingly appear from the Void and then return to it; and the Sino-Japanese ideogram that represents 'Void' is also that for 'sky'. The Mahayanist would have no difficulty in understanding the notion of the appearance of phenomena as if they had appeared, or 'fallen', from the sky.

10 The verb 'to reveal' contains a seeming paradox, It comes from Lat. re-velare, from velum, 'veil', and literally is a 'reveiling'. This makes sense, however, in the light of Heidegger's insight that every revealing is a re-veiling; every disclosure is simultaneously a closure, a closing over. As some trees emerge from the mists, others are hidden; as figures emerge from a background, others merge back; as one thing presents itself, another absents itself. This interplay of presence and absence is the experience of the Way. As one walks, things emerge in front of you; they catch your attention; and as you proceed, they merge back into the background, receding behind you.

11 The wisdom that inheres in language bears this out; we say, "it appears to me", meaning "it seems to me," and 'to seem' and 'to be seemly' both stem from ON scema, 'honour'. It is fitting (scemr) I honour what appears, because it has 'repute' (L. honor), that is, it is a re-thinking (L. re-putare) of what was always.

12 For sono-mama, see footnote 8 above. 13 For example, the 'Consciousness Only' doctrine ofYogacara orVijhanavada 0- Hossb) Buddhism, dis-locates

(and does not re-locate) the 'centre' of consciousness, showing that it is neither 'inside' nor 'outside'. Since consciousness is 'nowhere' it is everywhere. What seem to be 'inside' and 'outside', subject and objects, merge in a consciousness that includes them both. Phenomena arise in this consciousness as the sprouting of seeds that lie within the Mind. That is, thinking is not 'ours', but 'arises' spontaneously in a consciousness that we imagine, erroneously, to belong to the self.

14 forphronesis, see Snodgrass and Coyne, "Is Designing Hermeneutical?"; and Snodgrass, "On 'Theorising Architectural Education'."

15 This is Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason, the principle that "nothing exists unless a sufficient reason for its existence is able to be rendered." See Adrian Snodgrass, "Technology, Heidegger's 'Letting-be,' and Japanese New Wave Architecture," Architectural Tbeory Review, 2,2 (Nov 1997): pp. 83-104.

16 The word 'commit' comes from Latin committere, 'to join, to trust.'

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17 Thus Gadamer says that we only understand a text when we read it with an initial acknowledgment that what it says is in some way true or is worth listening to. Without that initial acknowledgment, there is no point in reading the text.

18 See Snodgrass and Coyne, "Is Designing Hermeneutical?", where many references are given. To these should be added Joel Weinsheimer, Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991; James Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other-. Re­reading Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics, New York: State University of New York, 1997; Lenore Langsdorf and Stephen H. Watson (eds), Phenomenology, Interpretation, and Community, New York: State University of New York, 1996;Jean Grondin./w/rodttcfibw to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. N. Weinsheimer, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994.—The theme of the hermeneutic circle is famously developed by way of the metaphor of reading a text, but Shaun Gallagher (Hermeneutics and Education, New York: State University of New York Press, 1992, Ch. 10) proposes that educational experience offers a better paradigm for the hermeneutical experience. It is broad enough to include textual interpretation as well as conversation and play. It takesprocexs rather than interpretational object as its focus. Since, however, excursion and return is the core structure of educational experience, it could be argued that this can serve as the master metaphor for the process of understanding. This is to see education as inherendy interpretational. Further, since one learns by excursion and return, the 'object' of learning need not be a text as such, or some other thing seen as if it were a text, but can be anything that calls for interpretation, a building, an an work, a road sign, or whatever.

19 See Snodgrass, "On "Theorising Architectural Education'." 20 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 14. 21 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 15. 22 On metaphor as it relates to designing, see Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyne, 'Models, Metaphors and the

Hermeneutics of Designing," Design Issues, 9, 1 (Fall 1992): pp. 56-74, which gives extensive lists of references.— Although Gadamerdidnotanalysemetaphorinanydepth.itsimportanceforthe hermeneutical enterprise cannot be overstated. Many see metaphor as the basic structure of language and an ineradicable element of any understanding, including die understanding of what we perceive through the senses.

23 What such a simile implies is that the architecture of the other (in this case, Japan's) is worthy to the extent it resembles our own. The unfamiliar is valued precisely to the degree that it reinforces the prejudice that privileges the familiar. Funher, the comparison conveniently overlooks major discrepancies, such as the fact that the columns at Ise, one of the examples of structural honesty they eulogise, don't support anything; that ornament abounds; that the photographs they use are singled out precisely because theysupport their thesis; and so on.

24 This is an example of the hermeneutical position that interpretation adds meanings to the text that were unsuspected or unplanned by its author.

25 See Adrian Snodgrass, "Asian Studies and the Fusion of Horizons," Asian Studies Review, 2,3 (April 1992): pp. 81-94.

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