“Speaking with Houses,” A Talk by Mike Linzey

Friday 21 November 2025, 12.00 noon-1.00 p.m., in 423-348, Design Theatre, 22 Symonds St. 

Mike Linzey’s new book, Speaking with Houses: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Heidegger’s Ontology (Routledge, 2025), examines the Western concept of “Being” in relation to architecture. It challenges Martin Heidegger’s assertion that “language is the house of Being.” Linzey argues that “Being” is a peculiar grammatical construction that was specific only to Western ontology. A noun that means a metaphysical entity became entangled with the practical copula verb “is” that means actively joining any one thing with any other thing.

An architectural detail is an example of a copula. It joins one part of a building to another; and Mies van der Rohe famously said that “God lies in the detail.”

Heidegger believed that Being was nothing more than an artifact of language. But other cultures in the world were not “infected” with Greek philosophy. Being did not dominate the ancient Egyptian world, nor the medieval Japanese language, nor that of New Zealand Māori in the colonial period. And slowly today the arts and architecture are emerging into what Linzey calls a post-Being epoch.

For information on the book, see here.   

Dr Mike Linzey joined the staff of the University of Auckland School of Architecture, as it was then known, in 1979, teaching a range of courses through to his retirement in 2014. Since completing a doctorate at the University of Melbourne, his research interests have been in the history and theory of architecture, from antiquity through to contemporary, including multiple significant papers on Māori architecture. A 1991 article, “Architecture to a Fault,” first published in Italian and republished in Interstices 2 (1992), gave name to the Venice Prize-winning exhibition mounted by the School at the 5th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 1991.