Phenomenology in architecture can be understood as a discursive and realist attempt to understand and embody the philosophical insights of phenomenology. According to Dan Zahavi:
Phenomenology shares the conviction that the critical stance proper to philosophy requires a move away from a straightforward metaphysical or empirical investigation of objects, to an investigation of the very framework of meaning and intelligibility that makes any such straightforward investigation possible in the first place. It precisely asks how something like objectivity is possible in the first place. Phenomenology has also made important contributions to most areas of philosophy. Contemporary phenomenology is a somewhat heterogeneous field.
The contributions of phenomenology in architecture are among the most significant and lasting in architecture, due to architecture's direct involvement with experience.
Overview
The phenomenology of architecture is the philosophical study of architecture. In contrast, architectural phenomenology is a movement within architecture beginning in the 1950s, reaching a wide audience in the late 1970s and 1980s, and continuing until today. Architectural phenomenology, with its emphasis on human experience, background, intention and historical reflection, interpretation and poetic and ethical considerations stood in sharp contrast to the anti-historicism of postwar modernism and the pastiche of postmodernism. It was never a movement proper because it did not have an immediate aesthetic associated with it, thus is should be understood as more of an orientation to thinking and making.
Historical development
American architects first started seriously studying phenomenology at Princeton University in the 1950s under Prof. Jean Labatut, whose student Charles W. Moore was the first to write a PhD dissertation, titled Water and Architecture, that drew heavily on the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard. In Europe, Milanese architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers, through his influential editorship of the journal Casabella Continuità helped to advance architectural phenomenology in Europe. He collaborated with philosopher Enzo Paci, and influenced a generation of young architects including Vittorio Gregotti and Aldo Rossi. By the 1970s, the Norwegian architect, theorist and historian Christian Norberg-Schulz achieved international acclaim with his book "Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture", which was markedly influenced by Martin Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology. Christian Norberg-Schulz was, for many architecture students of the 1980s, an important reference in architectural phenomenology, especially because the combination of texts and images in his books provided readily accessible explanations for how a phenomenological approach to architecture could be translated into designs. Norberg-Schulz spawned a wide following, including his successor at the Oslo School of Architecture, Thomas Thiis-Evensen. In the 1970s, the School of Comparative Studies at the University of Essex, under the direction 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 historyand theory at McGill University, 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. As architectural phenomenology became established in academia, professors developed theory seminars that tried to expand the movement's range of ideas beyond Gaston Bachelard, and Martin Heidegger, to include Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg GadamerHannah Arendt and an ever wider group of theorists whose modes of thinking bordered on phenomenology, such as Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Paul Virilio, Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus and Edward S. Casey. The phenomenon of dwelling was one research theme in architectural phenomenology. Much of the way it was understood in architecture was shaped by the later thought of Martin Heidegger as set in his influential essay: "Building Dwelling Thinking." He links dwelling to what he refers as the "gathering of the fourfold," namely the regions of being as entailed by the phenomena of: "the saving of earth, the reception of sky, 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.
Influence in practice
Prominent architects, such as Daniel Libeskind, Steven Holl, and Peter Zumthor were described by Juhani Pallasmaa as current practitioners of the phenomenology of architecture.
Notable architects
Notable architects and scholars of architecture who are associated with architectural phenomenology include:
