Dalibor Vesely (19 June 1934 – 31 March 2015) was a Czech-born architectural historian and theorist who was influential through his teaching and writing in promoting the role of hermeneutics and phenomenology as part of the discourse of architecture and of architectural design.
Vesely was one of the most outstanding architectural teachers of the late twentieth century. As well as inspiring generations of students, he taught some of the current leading architects and architectural historians, such as Daniel Libeskind, Eric Parry, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow. He began teaching at the University of Essex, before moving to the Architectural Association in London and in 1978 to the University of Cambridge Department of Architecture, where he also started an M.Phil. programme in History and Philosophy of Architecture with Peter Carl. Together with Peter Carl, his teaching and theoretical approach became associated and dominated the Cambridge Architecture School in the 1980s and early 1990s. After retiring from his full-time post in Cambridge, Vesely continued to teach there, remaining Director of Studies at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and he also taught Architectural History and Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and was an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the Manchester School of Architecture. In 2005 he was recipient of the CICA Bruno Zevi Book Award granted by the International Committee of Architectural Critics for his book "Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation". In 2006 the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) honoured Dalibor Vesely with the Annie Spink Award for Excellence in Architectural Education and in 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the RIBA in recognition of both his lifetime contributions to architectural theory and to teaching.
Vesely was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1934. He studied engineering, architecture, art history and philosophy in Prague, Munich, Paris and Heidelberg and obtained his PhD from Charles University in Prague. This was supervised by Josef Havlicek, Karel Honzik, and Jaroslav Fragner. He studied with Hans-Georg Gadamer, with whom he kept a correspondence until Gadamer's death. He stated it was the philosopher of phenomenology Jan Patočka who, in his own words, "contributed more than anyone else to [his] overall intellectual orientation and to the articulation of some of the critical topics" it was under the influence of Gadamer and Patočka that he developed the lifelong interest in the poetics and hermeneutics of architecture that defined his teaching and research.
Vesely was in England with his brother in 1968 when the Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. He stayed in London, first teaching at the Architectural Association, taking charge of the 'Unit 1' studio and then moving to the University of Essex where he and Joseph Rykwert established a master's degree in architectural history. He was invited to Cambridge by Colin St John Wilson in 1978. There he, Rykwert and Peter Carl initiated MPhil and PhD courses in the history and philosophy of architecture, thereby bringing the emerging studio culture which had been cultivated at the AA which came to define the school in the 1980s and 1990s.
Vesely's work may be understood primarily as a contribution to cultural hermeneutics, and his exploration of the historical background of modern science in the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries is particularly rich in detail and insight onto the changing nature of representation. Vesely polemises on concepts such as perspective and anamorphosis, which are traditionally understood to have taken departure from Renaissance culture. Vesely contributes to the current debate with the depth of the problem of representation; a question which has divided Western philosophy with regard to the epistemological possibility of representation and understanding of natural phenomena. The 'birth' of modern science and its increasing challenge on traditional views has also marked the divide within the possibilities of representation. In the context of the seventeenth century, this was especially clear as a polemics surrounding the nature of scientific work and philosophical understanding.
According to Vesely, the inevitable partiality of such views is at the very core of the problem that affects the cultural understanding of representation. Its contingent nature was not always understood as a divide originating all kinds of dualisms. Before modern science, representation was naturally contingent and the universal aspirations of science (metaphysics) were bound to the nature of the epistemological ground (arché). Vesely's work traces back the ontological foundations of the problem to the Greek context, helping to clarify its original meaning. In Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (2004), Vesely presents the notion of ground as having a provisional nature, that can only be seized as a continuity of reference through different levels of representation, ranging from the more explicit, visible world down to a latent world of potential articulation. Precisely this continuity is what may allow us to address the modern, fragmented notion of representation as a task of rehabilitation, which would trace the fragment back to its original whole.
Architecture and representation
Vesely's written work was mostly in articles in journals and many of the arguments developed over the years in lectures and seminars. There is thus no comprehensive overview of his thought or his range of interests. However Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (2004), provides a summary of his thinking and this work remains the main source for understanding his approach. Many of his other ideas which were expressed in lectures and seminars remain unpublished.
Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation
In Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (2004), Vesely sets the argument from the experience of architecture, as it constantly works through different modes of representation, including "built reality". In it, Vesely defines the present cultural situation as divided and ambiguous, especially when it comes to architecture (pp. 4–12, 36, 44 ss). Twentieth-century architecture, he argues, places its trust in the epistemological model of modern science and technology that is today largely reflected in instrumental concepts of city and suburban landscape. Today, he states, the attempt to rehabilitate the primary tradition of architecture faces the problem of bridging the gap between different modes of representation and concepts of knowledge that in some cases precede modern science, i.e., precede the historical notion of scientific knowledge as it takes course from the seventeenth- and sixteenth centuries.
Vesely's research delved into these historical settings that are understood to be the birthplace of modern science, in the general hope of exposing the origin of our modern notion of knowledge and how it came about to emancipate from traditional representations of the world. Vesely's research was accordingly a working out the historical notion of representation, as it constituted a central issue in this historical affair; and how the construction of a modern notion of knowledge had much to do with a changing nature in the concept of representation (pp. 13–19). The concept as it is generally understood today largely surpasses the history of epistemology. According to Vesely, this is because representation is generally understood on the basis of a certain "continuity between a particular mode of representation and what is represented" (p. 14), a notion which has been current throughout the whole of European architectural history.
When looking at the modern situation, Vesely finds that the problem is generally structured on the basis of an ontological difference that is intrinsic to representation itself. This is precisely the difference that allows modes of representation to emancipate from that which is represented, and from particular, given circumstances (pp. 4–5). The discussion of ontological difference therefore constitutes an epistemological difference affecting the conditions and possibilities of knowledge. And speculative thought, which we so associate with modern science, is built on this difference. Charles Taylor (1995) points out how the question for modern science is to fit a particular mode of representation to another, extrinsic representation: what we commonly call the "outer reality". The difference between the two constantly jeopardizes their epistemological value; and affects not only the way in which representation relates to what it means to represent, but also between different modes of representing it.