This thesis is an effort to unfold the disclosing power of mood as the basic character of all experiencing as well as theorizing in architecture. Having been confronted with the limiting ways of the scientific approach to understanding used in the traditional theoretical investigations, (according to which architecture is understood as a mere static object of shelter or aesthetic beauty) we turn to Martin Heidegger’s existential analysis of the meaning of Being and his new interpretation of human emotions. Translations of philosophers Eugene Gendlin, Richard Polt, and Hubert Dreyfus elucidate the deep meaning of Heidegger’s investigations and his approach to understanding mood. In contrast to our customary beliefs, which are largely informed by scientific understanding of being and emotions, this new understanding of mood clarifies our experience of architecture by shedding light on the contextualizing character of mood. In this expanded horizon of experiencing architecture, the full potentiality of mood in our experience of architecture becomes apparent in resoluteness of our new Mood-Consciousness of architecture.
Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of ‘human condition’ goes against the traditional notions we have inherited from Descartes’ scientific way of thinking. “Dasein,” Heidegger’s new term for ‘human condition,’ is not an object but an “interrelation with the world.” This “mediation” between “ourselves and the world” takes place in a deeper “pre-ontological” level. Dasein’s structure can be analyzed by “attunement” of “understanding” of “mood.” Based on this “interpretation,” architecture, rather than taken as a static object of use or perception, is characterized within a phenomenal mode of experience.
Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals project in Vals, Switzerland, unfolds the “disclosive” power of mood in our experience of space, while “maintaining” the “resoluteness” of the “phenomenal ground” of our experience. In making “transparent” the ultimate “work” in a ‘work of architecture,’ this project gives us a more concrete mode of thinking in our discussions of architecture and discloses the fundamental role of mood in attuning an architectural experience.