Phenomenology (architecture)

Phenomenology (architecture)

Phenomenology is both a philosophical design current in contemporary architecture and a specific field of academic research, based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties.

In phenomenology, the environment is concretely defined as "the place," and the things which occur there "take place." The place is not so simple as the locality, but consists of concrete things which have material substance, shape, texture, and color, and together coalesce to form the environment’s character, or atmosphere. It is this atmosphere which allows certain spaces, with similar or even identical functions, to embody very different properties, in accord with the unique cultural and environmental conditions of the place which they exist. Phenomenology is conceived as a “return to things,” maneuvering away from the abstractions of science and its neutral objectivity. Phenomenology absorbs the concept of subjectivity, making the thing and its unique conversations with its place the relevant topic and not the thing itself. The man-made components of the environment become the settlements of differing scales, some large - like cities, and some small - like the house. The paths between these settlements and the various elements which create the cultural environment become the secondary defining characteristics of the place. The distinction of natural and manmade offers us the first step in the phenomenological approach. The second is to qualify inside and outside, or the relationship of earth-sky. The third and final step is to assess character, or how things are made and exist as participants in their environment.

Beginning in the 1970s, phenomenology, with a marked influence from the writings of Martin Heidegger, began to have a major impact on contemporary architectural theory. In the 1970s, the School of Comparative Studies at the University of Essex, under the influence of Dalibor Vesely and Joseph Rykwert, was the breeding ground for a generation of architectural phenomenologists, which included David Leatherbarrow, professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, professor of architectural history at McGill University, and the architect Daniel Libeskind. In the 1980s, the phenomenological approach to architecture was continued and further developed by Vesely and his colleague Peter Carl in their research and teaching at the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge.

However, the philosophical writings of phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Hans-Georg Gadamer were perhaps not as accessible to the student of architecture as Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (1951) or Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (English version 1962). Christian Norberg-Schulz was, for many architecture students of the 1980s, an important figure in this movement. His book Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980) provided a readily accessible explanation of a phenomonological approach to architecture and was widely read in architectural schools. Thomas Thiis-Evensen, a follower of Norberg-Schulz, also contributed with the book Archetypes in Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Although interest in phenomenology has waned in more recent times, prominent architects, such as Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor are described by Juhani Pallasmaa as current practitioners of the phenomenology of architecture.

Present-day architectural phenomenology has widened its scope to include theorists whose modes of thinking are bordering on phenomenology, such as Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, and Paul Virilio (urban planner).

Notable architects of this academic movement include:

• Christian Norberg-Schulz
• Peter Zumthor
• Caruso St John
• Steven Holl
• Juhani Pallasmaa