A Short Take on Phenomenology in Space
Dena Baker
In Genius Loci Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, author Christian Norberg-Schulz explains that there can be two different approaches to understanding place: functional and qualitative. Both the functional approach to place and the qualitative approach to place have cons—they create an impasse. The functional approach to place connects actions to their environments and argues that architecture is specific to what is happening in it. This strips a place of its identity and its sense of “here” and leaves one no space to describe place in qualitative terms. A qualitative approach to place makes one lose the ability to describe place by “means of analytic scientific concepts,” this means one loses the ability to be objective (8). Phenomenology is a way out of this cycle. According to an online journal, phenomenology is the “the study of an individual’s lived experience of the world” (Neubauer, Witkop, and Varpio 1).
The harmony between understanding a place qualitatively and functionally being a more experience-based approach reminds me of a practice in psychological trauma healing in which doctors inform victims of abuse that their experiences and their feelings about experiences, whether accurate or not, are still real. I understand phenomenology in architectural discourse to be about validating and emphasizing the experience of inhabitants.
Some of Robert Venturi’s points in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture are relevant when considering the validity of the inhabitant’s experience in architecture. Venturi makes a point that complexity and contradiction in architecture, rather than incoherence and arbitrariness, are preferable. He names a person’s experience in architecture as ambiguous and rich, which to me implies that the human experience is uncontrollable, and in direct juxtaposition with architecture—architecture is the attempt to control the human experience (16). So when we juxtapose the architectural attempt to control people versus the ambiguous, uncontrollable nature of the human experience, an ironic narrative arises here. Architects are unable to extensively reach into the minds of its inhabitants and control whatever narrative takes place in there, but they can certainly try. It is worth examining the study of semantics here, in that in a cycle of communication, there are two players: the sender and the receiver. In this example, the image is the sender and the inhabitant is the receiver. Architecture is composed of images. Images are also bound to their cultural connotations, for example, one must consider than an image of a red rose in America might mean something different that a rose in Hungary (Red roses symbolize romance in American culture while they are traditionally gifted at funerals in Hungarian culture). Just as the human experience is uncontrollable, the cultural connotations attached to the images we witness every day are also outside the jurisdiction of control. Architecture is not immune to this. Architects may have a certain goal in mind when designing a project but are endlessly bound by the connotations various architectural elements, such as materiality, light and form. They are even more uncontrollable due to Venturi’s points on complexity, i.e. how modern architecture features hybrid elements rather than straightforward ones (16). This strikes me as meaning that a building has many elements that combine to become something bigger than the sum of its parts. It can be valuable to examine this part-to-whole relationship because it influences human perception, experience, and narrative even further in massively nuanced and uncontrollable ways.
Bibliogaphy
Christian Norberg-Schultz, Genius Loci Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture
(New York: Rizzoli 1980) 6-23
(New York: Rizzoli 1980) 6-23
Neubauer, B.E., Witkop, C.T. & Varpio, L. How phenomenology can help us learn from the experiences of others. Perspect Med Educ 8, 90–97 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-019-0509-2
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: MoMA,
1981), 16-22
1981), 16-22
