Phenomenology (architecture)

Edmund Husserl is credited with founding Phenomenology, as a philosophical approach to understanding experience, in the early 20th Century. The emergence of Phenomenology occurred during a period of extensive transformation referred to as Modernism. During this time, Western society was experiencing rapid technological advances and social change. Concurrently, as the theory and practice of architecture adapted to these changes, Modern architecture emerged. Consistent within the broad context of Modernism which was characterized by the rejection of tradition, systemization, and standardization; both phenomenology and modern architecture were focused on how humans experience their environments. While Phenomenology was focused on how humans can know things and spaces, modern architecture was concerned with how to create the places of human experience aligned to the modernist ethos of the time.[1]

Architects first started seriously studying phenomenology at Princeton University in the 1950s under the influence of Jean Labatut. In the 1950's, architect Charles W. Moore conducted some of the first phenomenological studies of architecture during his doctoral studies under Labatut, drawing heavily on the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, which were published in 1958 as Water and Architecture.[2] In Europe, Milanese architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers advanced architectural phenomenology during the 1950's and early 1960's through his influential editorship of the Italian design magazine Casabella Continuità.[3] He collaborated with philosopher Enzo Paci and influenced a generation of young architects including Vittorio Gregotti and Aldo Rossi.[4]

In the 1970's, the School of Comparative Studies at the University of Essex, under the direction of Dalibor Vesely and Joseph Rykwert, was a breeding ground for a generation of architectural phenomenologists, including David Leatherbarrow, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, and Daniel Libeskind. In the 1980s, Vesely and his colleague Peter Carl continued to develop architectural phenomenology in their research and teaching at the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. As architectural phenomenology became established in academia, professors expanded its considerations through theory seminars beyond Gaston Bachelard[5] and Martin Heidegger, to include Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,[6] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt and theorists whose modes of thinking bordered on phenomenology, including Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Paul Virilio, Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus and Edward S. Casey. George Baird called the Essex School "the most significant recent mode of phenomenology in current architectural theory" and credits Vesely for architectural phenomenology's historical reliance on Heidegger instead of Merleau-Ponty, who was championed by Rykwert, Moore, and Labatut.[7] During the 1980's, Kenneth Frampton became an influence in architectural phenomenology.[7]

In 1979, Norwegian architect, theorist and historian Christian Norberg-Schulz's book Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture became an important reference for those interested in the topic in the 1980's[8] for its readily accessible explanations for how a such an approach could be translated into design. The book was markedly influenced by Martin Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology.[9][10][11] Norberg-Schulz spawned a wide following, including his successor at the Oslo School of Architecture, Thomas Thiis-Evensen.[12]

Recent scholarly activity in architectural phenomenology draws on contemporary phenomenology and philosophy of mind authors Gallagher and Zahavi.[13] Some examples include a 2018 issue of Log with the theme "Disorienting phenomenology" as well as Jorge Otero-Pailos' Architecture's Historical Turn, Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, Dylan Trigg's The Thing, Alexander Weheliye's Habeas Viscus, and Joseph Bedford's dissertation Creativity's Shadow: Dabilor Vesely, Phenomenology and Architectural Education (1968 - 1989). With the expansion of virtual reality as architectural experiences there is new attention to Phenomenology. Heather Renee Barker's Designing Post-Virtual Architectures, Wicked Tactics and World Building addresses the phenomenological method and the life-world within this context.[14] Contemporary scholarship has become more skeptical of Heidegger's influence.[7]

As a phenomenological perspective on being in society and dwelling within a social world took focus, expanded interest in the urban and social experience became central to the thinking of social philosophers like Alfred Schutz.[15] The phenomenon of dwelling, as explicated in Heidegger's essay "Building Dwelling Thinking" (originally published in 1954 as "Bauen Wohnen Denken"), became an important theme in architectural phenomenology. Heidegger links dwelling to the "gathering of the fourfold," namely the regions of being entailed by the phenomena of "the saving of earth, the reception of sky (heavens), the initiation of mortals into their death, and the awaiting/remembering of divinities." The essence of dwelling is not architectural, per se, in the same manner that the essence of technology for him is not technological per se.[16][17]