Abstract
Martin Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking lays out a troubling view of the world which holds true today much as it did at the time of the speech:
 "The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. This relation of man to the world as such, in principle a technical one, developed in the seventeenth century first and only in Europe. It long remained unknown in other continents, and it was altogether alien to former ages and histories" (50).
 
 As an architecture professor in an age of modern technology, I believe it critical that design students cultivate an ability to see more comprehensively and learn how to think more meditatively (as Heidegger later suggests). Coming into a state of attunement with context, culture, and environment must be considered to be the most basic criteria for building in the world, as these are the elements that preserve the feeling and identity of ‘place’. 
 
 Considering being-in-the-world as a stance that necessarily moves more toward complex understandings of the environment, this paper outlines an effort given to the pedagogical implementation of Martin Heidegger’s description of the phenomenon of ‘world’, the three-fold structure for Being-in as a means of teaching students a more attuned comportment toward place, building, and site. I will discuss how these ideas were used in an preliminary design exercise, then clarified and elaborated through a lecture on Terrance Malick’s film The New World.
Highlights
The world appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist
In order to elucidate the importance of developing rich relationships with place in architectural design, I draw upon Terrence Malick’s film The New World, both in class and in this paper, in part because Malick’s vision demonstrates how divergent architectural responses can emerge as a result of differing modes of comportment within a world. This is told in the film through the contrasting stories of the English settlers at Jamestown and the Algonquin tribe known as the Powhatan (“Native Languages of the Americas: Powhatan”), both living and building in the same locale
One of the defining characteristics of the Algonquin Natives, or “Naturals” as Malick refers to them in the film, is their reciprocation with the natural environment, conveyed at the outset of the film with a shot of flowing water and a voice-over saying: come spirit help us sing the story of our land you are the mother we a field of corn we rise from out of the soul of you
Summary
One of the defining characteristics of the Algonquin Natives, or “Naturals” as Malick refers to them in the film, is their reciprocation with the natural environment, conveyed at the outset of the film with a shot of flowing water and a voice-over saying: come spirit help us sing the story of our land you are the mother we a field of corn we rise from out of the soul of you. Instead of “being-there,” participating with phenomena as it wells up before them, we find the English mostly “being-away”; that is, they are preoccupied by their own scheming, with their attention seemingly everywhere except their current involvements.3 These settlers and their Cartesian worldview arrive in ships that bob in the harbor like displaced corks, a contrasting scene to that of the witnessing natives, who scuttle about the trees and underbrush of the shoreline like inquisitive animals. Perhaps the English are Malick’s ode to the rational animal, as they come ashore wearing ungainly suits of armor looking at all aspects of their new environment with a rigid and measured opportunism This disposition appears puzzling to the Naturals, since it is exactly opposite to their manner of unqualified participation. In this way experience can become meaningful and allow the interdependent nature of things to be revealed
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