phenomenology final

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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


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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





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.





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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