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That a room is experienced as architectural space is not
dependent upon its characteristics and elements as such, but
instead on the type of experience that is involved. Dagobert
Frey has said that to ‘identify the essence of architecture’
means to determine the specific way in which we experience
it, specifically in contradistinction to the aesthetic experience
of images. A work of architecture does not stand across from
us like a picture; instead, we ourselves belong to architectural
reality, so that instead of being mere beholders, we enjoy the
status of ‘actors’. As a social discipline, on the one hand, ar-
chitecture generates complex situations in which we partici-
pate through our diverse states of mind and motivations and
through individual and collective behaviour. On the other,
situations are influenced, articulated and reflected by architec-
ture through its forms and spaces, its atmospheres and mean-
ings.
Because these situations contain self-reflexive moments
(we perceive ourselves within them), an aesthetic perspec-
tive now comes into play, i.e. the distanced self-awareness
of the situation for its own sake. Although in the context of
habitual and incidental everyday perceptual experience this
aesthetic point of view remains subliminal, it does rise to the
level of explicit expression when one asks oneself how one
‘is’ in a certain place, when one becomes aware of feeling ex-
posed, stimulated, or simply ‘good’ in various spaces. Helmut
Plessner’s general definition of a human individual’s relation-
ships to the world as ‘excentricity’ claims that fundamentally,
we are disposed towards self-awareness in relation to our own
actions: ‘What is my body, which obeys my will, other than
an active figure, which I perceive like the figure of another
[...] Simultaneously actor in a scene and spectator.’ (1923, 41)
For the scenic character of this self-reflexive experience, archi-
tecture so to speak offers a stage (> scene). Since we always
experience architecture as a situation, the role of its elements
is explained more fully through a characterization of our in-
tercourse with them than through their description as mere