Concept

Phenomenology (architecture)

Overview

Architectural phenomenology is the discursive and realist attempt to understand and embody the philosophical insights of phenomenology within the discipline of architecture. The phenomenology of architecture is the philosophical study of architecture employing the methods of phenomenology. David Seamon defines it as "the descriptive and interpretive explication of architectural experiences, situations, and meanings as constituted by qualities and features of both the built environment and human life".

Architectural phenomenology emphasizes human experience, background, intention and historical reflection, interpretation, and poetic and ethical considerations in contrast to the anti-historicism of postwar modernism and the pastiche of postmodernism. Much like phenomenology itself, architectural phenomenology is better understood as an orientation toward thinking and making rather than a specific aesthetic or movement. Interest in phenomenology within architectural circles began in the 1950s, reached a wide audience in the late 1970s and 1980s, and continues today.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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To cover all the practical-social-aesthetic objects involved, the term "thought" has to be so stretched that the situation might as well be called by any other name that describes a typical form of experience. More specifically, when the difference is minimized between the organized and arranged scheme out of which reflective inquiry proceeds, and reflective inquiry itself (and there can be no other reason for…
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
States what Phenomenology is.
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The logical basis of the theory alone belongs to philosophy, and alone will occupy us to-night. The way the problem of continuity enters into philosophy is, broadly speaking, the following: Space and time are treated by mathematicians as consisting of points and instants, but they also have a property, easier to feel than to define, which is called continuity, and is thought by many philosophers to be destroyed when…
Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy
States what Phenomenology is.
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We found in fact that it is exhibited by a photographic plate, and, strictly speaking, by any particular taken in conjunction with those which have the same "passive" place in the sense defined in Lecture VII. The particulars forming one perspective are connected together primarily by simultaneity; those forming one biography, primarily by the existence of direct time-relations between them.
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what Phenomenology is.
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Philosophers who discussed Phenomenology (architecture)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Phenomenology (philosophy).

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