PHENOMENOLOGY
Phenomenology may be defined as the study of how phenomena appear. However, this is
not limited to the visual domain. Phenomenology demands a receptivity to the full
ontological potential of human experience. It therefore calls for a heightened receptivity
of all the senses. Nor should this be perceived as some shallow, superficial level of
reception. Phenomenology, as it was developed by Heidegger and Gadamer, necessarily
entails a deeper, interpretative dimension in the form of hermeneutics. To engage with
architecture involves an openness not only to the realm of the sensory, but also to the
potential revelation of some truth. Hermeneutics allows for the reception and
understanding of that truth. The nature of this revelation varies from thinker to thinker.
For Heidegger and Gadamer the work of art ‘represents’ some form of symbolic truth,
while for Lefebvre the process takes on an overtly political twist. Within the lived
experience Lefebvre claims that there are ‘moments’ which reveal the emancipatory
capacity of potential situations.
The writers within this section have been concerned broadly with exploring the
ontological significance of architecture. Space for them is to be perceived not as abstract,
neutral space, but as the space of lived experience. Their project has been to reclaim an
ontological dimension to the built environment, a dimension that has been eroded
progressively, according to Lefebvre, since the invention of linear perspective. There has
been a tendency to perceive space as increasingly abstract and remote from the body and
its sensations. In privileging the visual, perspective has impoverished our understanding
of space. The other senses need to be addressed, and space needs to be perceived with all
its phenomenological associations. Space should be experienced as much through the
echoes of singing in the cathedral evoked by Lefebvre or the odour of drying raisins in
Bachelard’s oneiric house, as it is through any visual means of representation.
Phenomenology offers a depth model for understanding human existence, no less than
structuralism or psychoanalysis. Yet the difference with structuralism is revealed
throughout the texts included here. Structuralism, in the form of semiology, operates
merely at the level of signs. Phenomenology, meanwhile, claims to have recourse to a
deeper symbolic level; it seeks to go beyond the codifying capacity of semiology to
reveal a richer understanding of the world. Yet it is in its very ‘claims’ that the weakness
of the project is revealed.
As Derrida has convincingly exposed, there is an appropriation at work in the very
moment of hermeneutics. Phenomenology is, in effect, a self-referential system. There
can be nothing to legitimize its ‘claims’. Phenomenology lacks, as Habermas observed,
any normative foundations. There is a constant tendency to seek authority by slipping
into the realm of the ontological, and to resort to a discourse of self-referential
authenticity. It was precisely this ‘jargon of authenticity’ that Adorno attacked.
Nevertheless, despite the epistemological fragility of its project, phenomenology
continues to prove popular within architectural circles. Furthermore, the recent work of
Vattimo is evidence that the questions raised by Heidegger, Bachelard and others are—if
anything—more relevant today. Not least they offer a timely reminder that in an age of
virtual reality the very corporeality of the body cannot be ignored when addressing the
experience of space.