phenomenology final
TRANSCRIPT
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ARCT3310: History and Theories of the Built Environment
20751209
Tutor: Dirima Cuthburt
Is a historical understanding of architecture opposed to a phenomenological one?
Rudolf Wentzel
Abstract
Architectural theory continually finds itself at odds with the methods of enquiry favored by the wider studies
of history, art-history and antiquarianism. Of central importance is the treatment of the building as text.
Architectural phenomenology was not the first movement that resisted the characterization of architectural
elements as parts of a tectonic language and the treatment of architects as the patrons of stylistic trajectories.
To understand what has come to be known as architectural phenomenology it is necessary to understand
modernism, which phenomenology aimed to succeed and postmodernism, its contemporary. This essay will
examine all three movements. It will demonstrate that architectural phenomenology was a beleaguered
attempt to transform the pure philosophical ideas of Heidegger into a new theory of architecture, but that it
was also a tool leveraged by architects to subvert the dominance of the art historian within their field. In
exploring the translation from modernism to phenomenology to postmodernism, the essay finds that
Architectural phenomenology cannot be separated from the struggle of its advocates against the modernism
that preceded it and the postmodernism that succeeded it. Thus, though it seemed to espouse existentialist
ideas that were apparently in conflict with critical history, it never came into its own as a theory opposed to a
historical understanding of architecture.
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Any treatment of what has come to be known as architectural phenomenology must necessarily be a
study of the architectural history becoming a discipline in its own right. Architectural
phenomenology advocated a break from the dialectical, narrativistic approach to history that
preceded it and substituted a mode of understanding that emphasized direct experience, theirreducible spirit of place, and the idea that architecture belonged to the moment it was
experienced. Architectural phenomenology cannot be isolated from the struggle of its advocates
against the modernism that preceded it and the postmodernism that succeeded it. A
phenomenological understanding of architecture cannot be opposed to a historical or environmental
understanding because it never truly succeeded in excising itself from them, and was in the end
absorbed into them. The idea of an anti-history that nonetheless employs scholarly conventions
and traditional rhetorical methods to demarcate a timeless, experiential non-history was a
paradox that could not stand. The fact that historians now point to phenomenological trends or
aspects within new theories testifies to architectural phenomenologys seamless integration
within the canon of critical history.
Before we can understand phenomenology and how it differs from critical history we must first
examine what is meant by critical history in the context of Architecture. This traditional history
presupposes a division of knowledge along Cartesian lines; placing emphasis on dates, times, and
locations. The world is conceived of as objects and subjects acting and reacting against each other,
and there is the assumption of a hierarchy of knowledge. Broadly conceived, critical history is
dialectical. ThisHegelian idea of thesis, antithesis and synthesis suggests that in the passage of time
the useful component of every opposing idea is lifted out and the paradox of opposition is resolved
in the process of synthesis. This dialectic implies a history that is in constant evolution, and implies
that the path of history is determinedby the material facts surrounding objects and subjects.
Critical history assumes that historians can know things about the world, and that things can be
meaningfully classified and referred to by the use of language. When they are deemed to sharesufficiently similar attributes, buildings are grouped into styles and categories which in turn form
typologies. On what basis categories are discriminated is not important. What is important is the
idea that we can divide and compartmentalize groups of buildings and that such a hierarchical
ordering of groups is a prerequisite for historical knowledge. Closely related to categorization is the
idea ofArchitecture as language, as a coherent complex of signs.1
The structuralist approach to architectural history was based upon the assumption that architecture was a sign-system, a
means of communication that was analogous to verbal or written language.2
Units of buildings, doors and windows, columns and partitions, were seen as words3 within this
language. But this structuralistmethod of study had its limitations, proving to encourage superficial
readings of faade and plan, and failing to account for how a building was experienced by itsinhabitants.
4
Architectural phenomenology arose in the 1960s and matured in the 1970s as a reaction to the
perceived inadequacies of both language and historical determinism. The early proponents of
phenomenology (Norberg-Schulz, Frampton,Labatut, Moore) leveraged Martin Heideggers
existentialist ideas outlined in his 1951 lecture Building Dwelling Thinking as the point of departure
for their new philosophy. The new phenomenological approach to history prioritized direct sensual
1William Whyte, How do Buildings Mean, History and Theory 45(2) (2006): 153-177
2
Whyte, How do Buildings Mean3Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 6
thed. (London: Academy Editions, 1991), 39-62
4Whyte, How do Buildings Mean
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experience and made the radical assertion that buildings belonged to the moment that they were
experienced5
instead of the period in which they were built. At the core was the search for the
unbiased architectural experience free from prejudice and therefor free from politics.6
Architecture
was the built manifestation of human experience and the architect was the interpreter of this
experience.7
On the one hand the roots of architectural phenomenology are to be found in philosophy, and yet
the likes of Norburg-Schulz clearly took wide license with their interpretations of Heidegger8. For this
reason it is important to cast a critical eye on the translation from philosophy to architecture theory.
(For example, the concept of Place or Genius-Locithat Norberg-Schulz introduced as the cornerstone
of his phenomenology was a Roman appropriation9) It is important to understand the culture of the
late 1960s in which Architectural Phenomenology began to germinate:
Architectural phenomenology was the product of a generation born during the interwar period and reaching maturity in
the postwar era, at a time when French existentialism stood as the emblem of intellectual sophistication in the west. Jean
Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was particularly relevant to the new generation both in his insistence on political commitment and
in his demand that people should reject bad faith, stop leading lives according to the false conventions of prewar society,
and opt instead for the pursuit of an authentic existence.
10
Norberg-Schulzs theory outlined in Genius Lociwas not the only interpretation of Heideggers ideas,
but it was certainly the dominant one at publication11
and the book remains an authoritative text
today. The origins ofgenius-lociand the phenomenological movement can be traced to Heideggers
ideas presented in a 1951 lecture in Germany where he directly addressed a group of architects.
These ideas were later published in an essay called Building, Dwelling, Thinking, which Norburg-
Schulz quotes heavily in his book.
Building Dwelling Thinking opens with the questions:
1. What is it to dwell2. How does building belong to dwelling
These questions form the basis of a metaphysical enquiry into the nature of things; what defines a
thing, how the interrelatedness of things gives the thing meaning, and the paradox of the thing-in-
itself depending on the totality for its meaning. Heidegger addresses the highly metaphysical
question of the duality of relations between object and subject, between sign and signifier, between
the external world of senses and the internal world of mind. What the architect can take away from
all of this is that Heidegger is making a critique of the Cartesian worldview, which is directly related
to modernism. He is arguing against a deterministic worldview where every effect is predetermined
by the series of causes and effects that preceded it. He rejects the assumption that humans find
things within nature (and in buildings) and afterwards attach labels to them via language, arguing
that this subversion results in the false primacy of text and an alienation from the true thingness.
5Jorge Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern
Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxxiii6Otero-Pailos, Architectures Historical Turn, xxvii
7Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, 11
8Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, 10
9
Patricia Martin, Is Phenomenology In Architecture Dead10Jorge Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, xvi
11Jorge Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, xxix
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Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the shaper and master of
man. Perhaps before all else it is mans subversion ofthis relation of dominance that drives his nature into alienation.12
The concept ofalienation is later tied by others to the alienating effect of technology on Modern
architecture that robs buildings of the representational power they were believed to have in ancient
times13
. Phenomenologists argue against determinismon the basis that it restricts architecture to
mere class relations, technological and climatic concerns, market constraints and the like. The
textualworld of deconstruction is rejected as being a false abstraction of truth and a world of
irreducible thingness where objects have true belonging is substituted.
In other words, writes Norberg-Schulz, we have to give thought to the thingness of things in order
to arrive at a total vision of our world.14
Heidegger presents a traditional Farmhouse in the German
Black forest as the paragon of the harmonious integration of the universal elements (which he calls
the fourfold) in the process of building. Here the central thesis is revealed. Dwelling implies more
than shelter; it requires that man experiences his environment as meaningful.
The critique of the Cartesian understanding of space and time is illustrated in the metaphor of the
bridge.
Gathering or assembly, by an ancient word of our language, is called thing. The bridge is a thing-and, indeed, it is such as
the gathering of the fourfold which we have described. To be sure, people think of the bridge as primarily and merely a
bridge; after that, and occasionally, it might possibly express much else besides; and as such and expression it would then
become a symbol. If we take the bridge strictly as such, it never appears as an expression. The bridge is a thing and only
that. Only? As this thing it gathers the fourfold.15
Heidegger is arguing that the textual interpretation of the bridge is trapped within the limits of
causality. Does the idea of the bridge exist before or after its physical construction? To Heidegger
this is a false paradox that understates the nature of the thing, and evades the problem of its true,
irreducible thingness.
To be sure, the bridge is a thing of its own kind; for it gathers the fourfold in such a way that allows a site for it. But only
something that is itself a location can make space for a site. The location is not already there before the bridge is. Before
the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be occupied by something. One of them
proves to be the location, and does so because of the bridge. Thus, the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in
it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge.16
Heidegger proceeds to criticize the Cartesian idea of absolute, infinitely divisible space existing
externally and objectively, something Modernism was heavily invested in.
..space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience.
..Building is closer to the nature of spaces and to the origin of the nature of spaces and to the origin of the nature of
space than any geometry and mathematics.
The following extract from Genius Lociperfectly demonstrates Norburg-Schulzs appropriation of
Heideggers ideas about the alienation induced by the modern imposition of a Cartesian division of
space.
12Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking, Trans. Albert Hofstadler (Harper Colophon Books, New York,
1971)13
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Phenomenology and the Rise of the Architectural Historian, 10114
Christian Norberg-Schulz,Heideggers thinking on Architecture. Perspecta 20 (1983): 61-6815Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking
16Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking
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The need for planned development [of Khartoum] thus induced the government of Sudan to commission a master plan
for the Three Towns from the Greek architect Doxiadus (1959). Without demonstrating the slightest understanding of the
genius loci, Doxiadis placed an orthogonal grid over the whole conurbation, forcing the natural Gestalt as well as the
various settlement structures into the same abstract straight-jacket.17
So far we have presented phenomenology as having key disagreements with Modernism.
Phenomenology emphasized the experiential, subjective, the anti-historical.
Severed from historic specificity and essentialized, bodily experience became the point of entry for spiritualist and religious
interpretations of architecture.18
This seems a far cry from the secular objectivity of the Modern Movement, but it is important to
understand that phenomenology grew out of modernism. The two theories had in fact much in
common. Both are humanistphilosophies. Though secular objectivism was central to modernism,
modernism remained humanist, its adherents inclined to veer toward utopianism. Up to the 1960s
there was a genuine belief that technology could lead to a better age and the figure of modernist
architect-genius was to help achieve this age within the medium of architecture. This contrasts with
the coldly anti-humanistic postmodernism in which humanism is dismissed as a bourgeois
indulgence.19The phenomenologists claimed to be pursuing a return to modernisms roots, or asOtero-Pailos put it, to reconcile modernism with its own history.
20The 1960s marked a period of
disenchantment with modernism both within the public sphere and architectural circles. As Otero-
Pailos argues, the new generation of modernists who became phenomenologists took issue with
what they saw as the subversion of Modernisms social program by capitalism.
..this [return to roots] was only an apparent return, since it was separated from the historical Modern movement by a
negative reference to what the Modern movement had become in the 1960s. To neophytes like [Norberg-Schulz, Kenneth
Frampton et al] their elders had lead Modernism astray by making it subservient to the market economy, a phenomenon
that they thought was particularly acute in America. They unleashed their hostility towards Paul Rudolphs fetishistic
articulation of structure, towards Gordon Bunshafts corporate functionalism, towards Eero Saarinenss complicity with big
business and the like.
The Modernists seemed incurably invested with the genius-creator, an idea that was in crises in the
1960s because it seemed irreconcilable with the new commercial realities of big corporate firms. The
genius of the phenomenologist avant-gardes solution to this crisis of confidence was that instead of
resurrecting the genius-creator, they invented a whole new mode of scholarship that put the
architects back in control of their own discipline: creative reading. If phenomenology firstly,
demanded an existential reading of architecture, and secondly, posited that theory and practice
were inseparable21
, who better to make phenomenological appraisals than the architects
themselves?
To compensate for their ambition to be actors in the field, they focused on the notion of creative reading as something
equivalent to creative design.22
The phenomenologists could not directly challenge modernism, as the platform for doing so did not
exist. Thus the goal of the would-be architectural historians was to subvert the dominant high
17Christian Norberg-Schulz, Towards a phenomenology of architecture, (Rizzoli, New York, 1980)
18Otero-Pailos, Architectures Historical Turn, xxxiii
19Perez Zagorin, Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations, History and Theory 29 (1990): 263-
274, 265
20Otero-Pailos, Architectures Historical Turn, xxxi
21Otero-Pailos, Architectures Historical Turn, xxix
22
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Phenomenology and the Rise of the Architectural Historian.(Paris, INHA, 2005)
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modernist ideology from within the universities and wrest back self-determination from the art
historians.
The invocation of phenomenology helped architects leverage the academic credibility of philosophy against art historians.
It was a response to the hostility of art historians in the form of a new type of discourse by architects and for architects
that privileged the authority of architects to speak about architectural history. They resisted the mediation of art history to
understand what they felt was their own tradition.23
Slowly, the universities transitioned away from a pedagogical system aimed at producing architect-
heroes24
towards programs that encouraged socially committed architects, team players whose
energies were directed towards bringing architectural expression to the communities where they
practiced.25
The phenomenologists did not so much banish the image of the genius creator as they
transformedit.
Architectural phenomenologists set about resolving the age old problem of reconciling
intellectuality, bodily experience, and history, weaving these into a new unity and making them
seem inseparable26
. As early as the 18th
century there was already a desire for a return to the
primitive statement unsullied by the historical accumulation of metaphor.27
Now, it is generallyaccepted that the influence of architectural phenomenology is on the wane.
28The unapologetic
mysticism of Heideggers philosophy and its architectural offshoots made it easy to criticize from the
position of critical theory29
.
It was one thing to proclaim the primacy of the immediate sensory experience of place, and quite
another to invoke this sense of existential primacy in the audience or readership. Phenomenology
has often been accused of being anti-intellectual30
. How do we reconcile the preference for the
experiential world over the textual world of deconstruction31
with the sheer volume of text
published by the proponents of the theory? As William Whyte argues:
The post-structuralists could not escape their linguistic and philosophical training.32
The question of how to disseminate ideas was the driving force behind the transformation of
phenomenology into postmodernism. The industrious publication of the likes of Frampton, Schulz
and Moore seems to be in a paradoxical conflict with the thrust of the return to things. The
resolution to the problem of the inadequacy of language lies in the pioneering role of the
phenomenologists in bringing photography and illustrative diagrams to the forefront of a historical
medium dominated by text. The Phenomenologists transformed the textual medium through the
synthesis of text with the visual image in a way that transcended the sum of its parts.
As chairman of the Yale Department of architecture in the 1960s, Charles Moore attempted to
subvert modernist orthodoxy within the school by teaching what he called Supergraphics. By
painting directly onto buildings, students were encouraged to exteriorize their inner feelings without
23Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, 11
24Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, 143
25Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, 143
26Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, 252
27Alan Colquhoun, Essays in Architectural Criticism: modern architecture and historical change (Virginia, MIT
press, 1985), 1228
Adam Sharr, Heidegger for Architects (Abingdon, Routledge, 2007), 11329
Sharr, Heidegger for Architects, 11130
Otero-Pailos, Phenomenology and the Rise of the Architectural Historian 18
31
Fikret Yeghul, Multidisciplinary choice in the history of Architecture (Abingdon, Routledge, 2006), 6532
Whyte, How do Buildings Mean
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the mediation of thought.33
Moore actively sought to turn Yale into a center for research into a new
type of architecture by hiring new staff.34
His lectures consisted mainly of unscripted commentary on
slides of his favorite eccentric places. This straightforward categorization of buildings was solely
based on image gathering and the architects loose recollection of what he deemed personally
important about the building (e.g., the proportions of space, the quality of the light, the shape of a
stair).35
Moores brand of phenomenology in the late 1960s was beginning to spill over into pop artand would later come to be called postmodernism. Again, we see the crisis of the paradox of an
experiential historiography that claimed to be anti-intellectual but was nonetheless elitist in its
mode of dissemination. The idea of the genius creator had been supplanted, but the architect
remained the mediator of direct experience.36
The average person could aspire to reach the
architects level of experiential understanding. Phenomenology was caught in a dialectical, inward
looking relationship with the history it was trying to supplant.
Supergraphics aimed at teaching the average person outside the classroom how to improve his or her experiential
capacities. But it was also aimed squarely at the very structure of learning that was institutionalized in architecture schools.
In academia, the experiential elitism of supergraphics served to exclude and delegitimize art historians as a group
incapable of feeling the very thing that made buildings truly authentic37
.
In a parallel development to supergraphics, Kenneth Frampton championed the use of graphic
design to experientially represent the essence of buildings, even suggesting that the photo essay
could yield a surplus experience. The striking outcome of his practice as an editor was that
Frampton began to theorize graphic design as a means to transform an essentially visual medium
(print) into a tactile experience.38
Frampton claimed that by intimately photographing buildings in a
way that had not been attempted before, he was bringing the reader into an experiential
appreciation of the building as opposed to his contemporaries who were simply photographing the
superficial likeness and the facades. And here we have the strange generaltendency of our times
he comments. the trend to stress information at the expense of experience.39
The examples of Frampton and Moore demonstrate that the legacy of phenomenology is not so
much a historiography as it is a toolset for presenting ideas about architecture.
Architectural phenomenology grew out of the preceding modernist movement and added a whole
new dimension to the methods of uncovering and transmitting historical knowledge about buildings.
It integrated history, sensory experience and intellectuality more coherently than ever before. An
exploration of the emergence of phenomenology reveals that it is as more a story of architects
establishing a position from which they could dictate their own history than it is a story about the
creation of a new theory of history. This essay has explored the paradoxes inherent in
phenomenology, and in doing so demonstrates that the theory was perpetually trapped in a
dialogue with the old historiography. Theorists trying to isolate phenomenology from academic
history when they were themselves trapped within academia meant that the radical Heideggerian
principles could not be cleanly applied to architecture. Instead, this process left us a legacy of acreative reading. The process and results of this integration of pure philosophy with architectural
theory show that a phenomenological understanding of architecture could not stand apart from a
historical one. To quote Otero-Pailos: Architectural phenomenology did not change the rules. It
developed a new possible move within the existing game, the position of the architect-historian.
33Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, 128
34Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, 134
35Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, 134
36Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, 134
37
Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, 13438Otero-Pailos,Architectures Historical Turn, 202
39Otero-Pailos citing Kenneth Frampton,Architectures Historical Turn, 202
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Bibliography
Otero-Pailos, Jorge.Architectures Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Otero-Pailos, Jorge. Phenomenology and the Rise of the Architectural Historian. Repenser les
limites, Paris: INHA, 2005
Whyte, William. How do Buildings Mean. History and Theory 45(2) (2006): 153-177.
Patricia Martin, Is Phenomenology In Architecture Dead? Martin Del Guayo, Architecture and
Urbanism accessed May 1 2012, http://www.martindelguayo.com/internal-
blog/isphenomenologyinarchitecturedead
Jencks, Charles. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. London: Academy Editions, 1991. 39-62
Heidegger, Martin. Building Dwelling Thinking, Trans. Albert Hofstadler. New York: Harper
Colophon Books, 1971.
Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Heideggers thinking on Architecture. Perspecta 20 (1983): 61-68.
Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Towards a phenomenology of architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1980.
Zagorin, Perez. Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations. History and Theory 29
(1990): 263-274
Colquhoun, Alan. Essays in Architectural Criticism: modern architecture and historical change.
Virginia: MIT press, 1985.
Sharr, Adam. Heidegger for Architects. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007.
Yeghul, Fikret. Multidisciplinary choice in the history of Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.
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Kenneth Frampton, graphical abstraction of the crossover scissors staircase system used in the Craven Hills Gardens
Building. Cover of Architectural Design 34 no 9 (September 1964)
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Supergraphic aedicule enclosing Moores bed in his New Haven House, 1966.
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