Owing to Martin Heidegger’s accounts of our everyday experiences—whereas we fluidly encounter entities in a number of hitch-free activities—our primary way of understanding hardly becomes an issue for us. Here, we always already have an implicit understanding of a meaning-giving context that we are unreflectively immersed in, namely “the world”, whereby entities are inconspicuously understood to make sense in a certain way. In other words, since we are unreflectively “thrown into” the world, thereby presupposing (so feeling familiar with) what entities are in terms of their significance in our concern, the way we can be always fluidly familiar with them becomes possible, so to speak, by keeping ourselves estranged from them. In this sense, the more it is familiar to us in our everyday experience, the more we overlook it.
The most ordinary things, thus, possibly have the most extra-ordinary background as it has been the least observed while it is always already implicitly understood by us. This thesis, by applying this interpretation of what lies behind the ordinary to the context of architecture, postulates that if such overlooked side of architecture in our everyday experience can be illuminated, we may have a chance to re-encounter the ordinary kind of architecture in an extra-ordinary sense: With that in mind, this thesis aims to explore notion of ambiguity in architectural design in terms of its capacity to allow us to re-discover the ordinary.
The methods of study take a form of hermeneutic circle, moving back and forth between illustrating few architectural works that supposedly embody ambiguity and examining notion of ambiguity in general by incorporating a case study with Jacques Tati’s films, grounded in some thoughts of Martin Heidegger. The evidence for study is thereby composed of interpretations of few architectural works and Tati’s films, reflected against Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of our everyday experience.
The study of ambiguity results in an overview of how phenomenological interpretations of ambiguity in architecture allow us to re-discover the ordinary in architecture, where a certain kind of ambiguity is found to play a crucial role in illuminating the background of our everyday experience, shedding light on what inconspicuously lies in our implicit understanding of the world. This result argues that the particular kind of ambiguity can be a means of leading us to concern architecture in terms of its way of being while we at the same time concern it in terms of what it usually is.
The thesis also explores notion of ambiguity in the context of architectural theory in general, by reinterpreting Robert Venturi’s view of it; here, the thesis aims to examine his articulation of ambiguity not only in terms of the basis of form/matter dichotomy (i.e. theoretical understanding alone) but in the sense of both pre-theoretical (implicit) and theoretical understanding. This study of ambiguity results in differentiating ambiguity into the three modes in terms of what kind of understanding the source of ambiguity is based on (pre-theoretical understanding alone, both pre-theoretical and theoretical understanding, or theoretical understanding alone). Thus, the thesis argues ambiguity in terms of its possibility to illuminate what grounds our ways of understanding the reality
