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for featuring everyday events in which actors and spectators
are involved.
With architecture, however, in contradistinction to the
theatre and to scenography, it is not generally a question of
a performance before an audience; instead, we experience ar-
chitecture scenically primarily as actors, and as the spectators
of our own actions. This becomes possible because we are
capable of regarding ourselves and our position in the world
with some measure of distance. ‘He not only lives and experi-
ences; he also experiences his own experience’(1928, 292).
With these words, Helmut Plessner characterizes this particu-
lar form of human experience of the world, at the same time
coining for it the term excentricity. ‘If the life of an animal
is centric, then the life of the human being is – and with-
out breaking out of this centring – at the same time emerging
from it, excentric.’ (ibid.) Since our bodies always assume po-
sitions in space, having their own extension and boundaries,
and since our relationship to the world is always shaped spa-
tially, this particularity of our excentric self-understanding is
also experienced in specifically spatial terms. To become self-
aware, to watch oneself, then, means to be aware of oneself
in space, to regard oneself with and in a spatial > situation.
In a fundamental sense, then, human > experience is always
scenic experience. Based on our excentric self-perception, we
can consider any place where we abide, as the stage where
we enter, first and foremost for ourselves, sometimes but not
necessarily for others as well.
For the human individual, space – and in particular de-
signed space – plays an elementary role as the setting for such
scenic experience. The excentric disposition of human experi-
ence already contains an aesthetic moment: the aesthetic at-
titude too is based on a sense of distance in relation to specific
situations; it detaches the situation like a scenic > image from
purely functional reality. Architecture favours this aesthetic
perspective through the scenic framing of everyday situations.
But it is neither a question of theatre architecture nor of the-