[first draft of a chapter for The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History, edited by Duanfang

Lu and to be published by Routledge, London, tentatively in 2018; © 2017 David Seamon and not to be cited
without permission; comments and corrections welcomed; reply to triad@ksu.edu]

Architecture and Phenomenology

David Seamon
Department of Architecture
Kansas State University
https://ksu.academia.edu/DavidSeamon

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rising in continental Europe at the start of the twentieth century, phenomenology is a
way of understanding that emphasizes the description and interpretation of human
experience, awareness, and meaning, particularly their unnoticed, taken-for-granted
dimensions (Moran 2000; van Manen 2014). The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–
1938) was the founder of phenomenology, which he envisioned as “the descriptive, non-
reductive science of whatever appears, in the manner of its appearing, in the subjective and
intersubjective life of consciousness” (Moran 2005: 2). Over time, other European philosophers,
including Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), shifted their
phenomenological explications beyond “consciousness” toward related philosophical topics such
as the nature of human being, the various modes experientially by which human meaning arises,
and the central role of bodily presence and action in human life. Examples of questions relevant
to architecture that might be explored phenomenologically include the following:

▪ In what ways does architecture nurture or disrupt human life, whether via everyday,
ordinary experience or via intense, extra-ordinary encounter?
▪ How do qualities of the designable world—materiality, spatiality, tectonics, aesthetic
qualities, and so forth—contribute to human well-being and aesthetic sensibilities?
▪ How does the design of a particular building play a role in sustaining or undermining the
lives, actions, and needs of that building’s users?
▪ Have the everyday uses, experiences, and meanings of specific buildings and building
types (e.g., places of residence, work, education, worship, incarceration, and so forth)
changed over historical time? How are those uses, experiences, and meanings alike or
unlike for different places, cultures, lifeways, social groups, and historical eras?
▪ What impact do advances in digital technology and virtual reality have on the lived
nature of architecture and real-world places?
▪ If virtual reality is eventually able to simulate “real” reality entirely, will this shift
radically transform the lived nature of places, buildings, and everyday human life?

In this chapter, I encapsulate the complex, shifting relationship between phenomenology and
architecture by speaking of an architectural phenomenology, which I tentatively define as the
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descriptive and interpretive explication of architectural experiences, situations, and meanings as
constituted by qualities and features of both the built environment and human life (Otero-Pailos
2012; Seamon 2017). In demonstrating that architectural phenomenology has significant research
and design value today, I first describe the phenomenological approach more fully, highlighting
two key phenomenological concepts relevant for architectural understanding—lifeworld and
natural attitude. Second, I overview the thread of theoretical and practical events whereby
architects and architectural thinkers became interested in phenomenology. Third, I discuss two
phenomenological topics that have come to have value for architecture and architectural theory:
(1) lived embodiment; and (2) architectural atmospheres. Last, I suggest what value
phenomenology might have for the future of architecture, particularly in regard to the imminent
arrival of virtual reality, virtual places, and virtual buildings.

The Nature of Phenomenology

The phenomenologist’s primary aim is to strive for a mode of openness whereby the
phenomenon studied can be understood and described in an accurate, comprehensive way
unencumbered by any pre-given theoretical, speculative, or common-sense points of view. One
of Husserl’s descriptions of phenomenology was “back to the things themselves,” by which he
meant setting aside personal, societal, ideological, and conceptual understandings, assumptions,
and prejudices so that one might offer the phenomenon a supportive venue in which it can be
known most clearly, appropriately, and thoroughly (Moran 2005: 9–17).

Most broadly, phenomenologists direct this mode of openness toward generating clear-sighted
explications of concrete human experience and the lived reality of everyday life. Using the word
“lived” in phrases like “lived reality” or “lived experience” may seem tautological, since,
obviously, experience is always lived. For phenomenologists, however, “lived” is an integral
descriptor because it “announces the intent to explore directly the originary or prereflective
dimensions of human existence: life as we live it” (van Manen 2014: 28). “Lived” in this sense
refers to the wide-ranging spectrum of human experiences, meanings, situations, and events—the
mundane or exotic, the dull or penetrating, the unquestioned or surprising. How, for example, do
we experience the everyday buildings of our ordinary lives and are there moments when we
experience those buildings in a deeper, more memorable way (Pallasmaa 2005)? What delineates
experientially the special moment when we encounter a great architectural work, and might such
exhilarating moments of architectural engagement be better understood by drawing on
phenomenological principles and methods (Bermudez 2015)?

Phenomenologists claim that human consciousness, experience, and action are always
intentional—i.e., necessarily oriented toward and finding their significance in a world of
emergent meaning. Human beings are not just aware but aware of something, whether an object,
living thing, idea, feeling, environmental situation, or the like.. As described by Merleau-Ponty
(1962: xvii), the distinguishing feature of intentionality is that “the unity of the world, before
being posited by knowledge in a specific act of identification, is ‘lived’ as ready-made or already
there.” The concept of intentionality leads to a central phenomenological claim crucial for
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understanding human experience: that human beings are always already inescapably immersed
and entwined in their worlds (Casey 2009; Moran 2011; van Manen 2014). How,
phenomenologically, do we describe the way in which, existentially, selves and world are
reciprocally related and mutually dependent? How, phenomenologically, do we locate and
understand the complex, multivalent ways in which we, as human beings, are intertwined,
intermeshed, entrenched and submerged in the worlds in which we find ourselves?

The everyday, intentional structure through which human-immersion-in-world unfolds is what

Husserl identified as the lifeworld—a person or group’s day-to-day world of taken-for-
grantedness normally unnoticed and, therefore, concealed as a phenomenon: “As conscious
beings, we always inhabit—in a pre-theoretical manner—an experiential world, given in
advance, on hand, and always experienced as a unity” (Moran 2005: 9). One aim of
phenomenological study is to identify and describe the various lived structures and dynamics of
the lifeworld, which always includes spatial, environmental, and place dimensions. Unless it
shifts in some unusual way, we are almost always, in our typical human lives, unaware of our
lifeworld, which we assume is the only way that life can be. This typically unquestioned
acceptance of the lifeworld is what Husserl called the natural attitude, a mode of awareness “that
obscures itself and remains unknown to itself. It is an attitude with blinkers on, as Husserl often
said” (Moran 2011: 69). Because of the natural attitude, any lifeworld is transparent in the sense
that it is normally tacit and just happens, grounded in spatial-temporal situations and events more
or less regular (Moran 2005: 9–17; 2011; van Manen 2014).

In applying the concept of lifeworld to architecture, one realizes that there are the individual
lifeworlds of all users associated with a building as, at the same time, there is the more complex
lifeworld of the building itself generated by those individual lifeworlds. The lived dynamic and
character of the building’s lifeworld may support or interfere with the individual lifeworlds
housed within that the building (Seamon 2017). Later in this chapter, I make further reference to
architectural aspects of lifeworlds, but first I delineate how, beginning after World War II,
phenomenology came to have significance for architects and architectural thinking.

The Development of Architectural Phenomenology

The progressive influence of phenomenology in architecture is a complex narrative involving
several different disciplines, professional efforts, and intellectual events. Beginning in the 1940s,
philosophers working phenomenologically explored a wide range of themes implicitly relevant
to architecture. Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) demonstrated how the lived body plays a key role in
human spatiality (Hale 2017; McCann and Locke 2015), and Heidegger (1952/1971) contended
that human-being-in-the-world is always human-being-grounded-in-place, especially as that
place sustains and is sustained by engaged caretaking—what Heidegger identified as dwelling
(Sharr 2007; Malpas 2006; Mugerauer 2008). Other thinkers produced phenomenological studies
that incorporated architectural topics directly. In Poetics of Space, philosopher Gaston Bachelard
(1957/1964: 8) delineated a research focus he called topoanalysis,” the systematic psychological
study of the sites of our intimate lives.” In Sacred and the Profane, phenomenologist of religion
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Mircea Eliade (1957/1961) examined hierophany, the lived ways that spiritual reality can break
through into lifeworlds, including through place and architecture. In Human Space,
phenomenological philosopher Otto Bollnow (1963/2011) developed a phenomenology of space
as experienced, including the lived dialectic between “the wide world” and “the security of the
house.”

In the late1940s and 1950s, architects became interested in phenomenology directly. In his book-
length historiography of architectural phenomenology during this post-war period, architectural
theorist Jorge Otero-Pailos (2010) highlighted several key figures, beginning with the Italian
modernist architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909–1969), who promoted “some of the earliest
contacts between architects and phenomenologists” and gathered around himself “a small but
influential group of young European architects… who explored phenomenology as an
intellectual framework for rethinking modernism” (2010: xxiv). Another key figure discussed by
Otero-Pailos is the French-American architect Jean Labatut (1899–1986), who saw
phenomenology as a conceptual tool for envisioning innovative designs arising from and aiming
to enhance human experience (2010: 35–40). For example, Labatut designed a series of
architectural and environmental works that generated a sense of participatory exhilaration and
architectural sacredness through visual, acoustic, and tactile encounter. One such effort was
Labatut’s “Lagoon of Nations,” a 1,400-nozzle fountain designed to create a nightly spectacle for
the 1939 New York World’s Fair (2010: 40–57).

As founder of the first American Architecture doctoral program at Princeton in 1949, Labatut
played a critical role in promoting architectural phenomenology academically (2010: 95-99).
One of the most influential doctoral students under his direction was American architect Charles
Moore (1925–1993), who completed in 1957 one of Princeton’s first Architecture dissertations,
which focused on a Gaston-Bachelard-inspired “Water and Architecture.” Frustrated that, at the
time, architectural scholarship was largely controlled by architectural historians, Moore (and
Bloomer 1977) worked “to legitimatize a notion of intellectuality based on different standards of
competency, including visual proficiency and the ability to grasp the historical essence of
buildings experientially” (2010: 100).

In the transformational 1960s, academic and professional interest in architectural

phenomenology continued, partly via the development of “environment-behavior studies”
(“EBS”), an interdisciplinary research and design field that became an important component of
many American, Canadian, and British architecture programs in the 1970s and early 1980s
(Sachs 2013). Identified variously as “architectural psychology,” “behavioral geography,”
“environmental psychology,” or “human factors in design,” this movement was driven by the
work of such innovative thinkers as architects Christopher Alexander (1964), Kevin Lynch
(1960), and Oscar Newman (1973); anthropologist Edward Hall (1966); psychologist Robert
Sommer (1969/2007); and urbanists Jan Gehl (1987), Jane Jacobs (1961) and William Whyte
(1980). Though much of the EBS research was positivist, quantitative, and limited to the
cognitive dimensions of architectural and environmental behavior, thinkers like Alexander (et al.
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1977) and Jacobs (1961) produced work that was qualitative, interpretive, and implicitly
phenomenological. Also appearing during this time were the writings of so-called “humanistic
geographers” like Edward Relph (1976) and Yi-Fu Tuan (1974). Strongly influenced by EBS but
drawing directly on phenomenological concepts like place, rootedness, dwelling, and
placelessness, these geographers provided one academic reference point for later
phenomenological efforts examining architectural embodiment, environmental atmospheres, and
architectural design as it might facilitate place and place making (Casey 2009; Malpas 1999;
Mugerauer 1994; Shatzki 2007).

One important architectural theorist considerably influenced by EBS was the Norwegian
Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000), who, during the 1970s and 1980s, played a crucial role
in keeping phenomenology in sight for architects. Like Rogers and Labatut before him, Norberg-
Schulz sought to re-conceptualize how architects understood architecture, partly through
phenomenological reformulations of the work of EBS researchers like Kevin Lynch and Edward
Hall. Norberg-Schulz aimed for “a return to the roots of modernism by visualizing the self-
renewing origin of architecture,” which he located in foundational lifeworld patterns and
structures such as lived-space, home, at-homeness, and environmental ambience (Otero-Pailos
2010: 146). In his first major phenomenological work, Existence, Space and Architecture
(Norberg-Schulz 1971: 14, 37), he contended that a comprehensive architectural understanding
requires “a theory where space is really understood as a dimension of human existence…”
Architectural space, therefore, is best envisioned as “a “concretization” of existential space.” In
his many later books and articles, he explored the architectural and environmental dimensions of
human “lived space,” including place (Norberg-Schultz 1988, 2000a), dwelling (Norberg-Schulz
1985), and sense of place and genius loci (Norberg-Schulz 1980).

Particularly because of Norberg-Schulz’s work, architectural interest in phenomenology

continued through the 1990s into the 2000s, though the perspective began to be challenged in the
1980s by newer conceptual approaches, including poststructuralism, deconstruction, and feminist
and critical points of view (Mugerauer 1994; Otero-Pailos 2010, 2012; Parella 1988). Although
these and other “cutting-edge” perspectives have come to dominate architectural theory today,
consequential phenomenological work continues to appear, including the writings of
philosophers Edward Casey (2009), Karsten Harries (1997), Jeff Malpas (1999, 2006), and
Robert Mugerauer (1994, 2008); and architectural theorists David Leatherbarrow (2002), Rachel
McCann (McCann and Locke 2015), Juhani Pallasmaa (2005, 2009, 2016), Alberto Pérez-
Gómez (2016); Jorge Otero-Pailos (2010, 2012), Thomas Thiis-Evensen (1989), and Dalibor
Vesely (2004). At the same, time, the design work of such eminent architects as Alvar Aalto,
Tadao Ando, Stephen Holl, Louis Kahn, Aldo Van Dyke, and Peter Zumthor has come to be
associated with an explicit or implicit phenomenological sensibility (Hale 2017; Holl, Palasmaa,
and Pérez-Gómez 1994; Malgrave and Goodman 2011: 210–214; Norberg-Schulz 2000b; Rush
2008; Sharazi 2015; Sharr 2007).

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In describing architectural phenomenology as it is practiced today, architectural theorists John
Macarthur and Naomi Stead (2012: 127) wrote that the approach “proposes to explain directly
how the spaces we inhabit make us feel.” Otero-Pailos (2012: 136) extended this understanding
when he defined architectural phenomenology as “the study of architecture as it presents itself to
consciousness in terms of so-called archetypal human experiences, such as the bodily orientation
of up and down, the perceptions of light and shadow, or the feelings of dryness and wetness.”
Highlighting the perceptual, sensuous, and affective aspects of buildings and architectural
experience, these two definitions of architectural phenomenology are a useful starting point,
though it is important to recognize that phenomenological research can probe other relevant
dimensions of architectural experience. For example, other recent phenomenological studies
have examined such topics as environmental wholeness (Alexander et al. 1977); pre-reflective
and symbolic languages of architectural experience and meaning (Alexander 2002–2005; Harries
1997; Janson and Tigges 2014); and the phenomenological contribution to cognitive science,
particularly in relation to architectural behaviors, aesthetic sensibility, and environmental
wayfinding (Hale 2017: 50–54; Mallgrave 2013; Mallgrave and Goodman 2011: 229–230;
Robinson and Pallasmaa 2015).

In short, phenomenology continues to be an important conceptual and practical force in

contemporary architecture and architectural theory. To illustrate this claim, I highlight two
phenomenological topics often drawn upon in architectural thinking today—environmental
embodiment and architectural atmospheres.

Environmental Embodiment and Architecture

Environmental embodiment refers to the lived body in its unself-conscious perceptual awareness
as it encounters and coordinates with the world at hand, especially its environmental and
architectural aspects (Casey 2009; Pallasmaa 2005, 2009; McCann and Locke 2015; Mallgrave
2013). Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) contended that the taken-for-granted foundation of human
experience is perception, which he interpreted as the typically unnoticed, immediate givenness of
the world undergirded by a lived body that is conscious of, acting in, and experiencing a world
that automatically reciprocates with familiar pattern, meaning, and contextual presence. Merleau-
Ponty argued that perception incorporates a lived dynamic between the body and world such that
aspects of the world are understood because they instantaneously evoke in the lived body their
corresponding experienced qualities. For example, one “sees the springiness of steel” or “hear[s]
the hardness and unevenness of cobbles in the rattle of a carriage” (1945/1962: 229, 230).
Through bodily perception, we immediately engage with and are aware of the world because it
immediately engages with us to offer a reciprocating, pre-reflective sensibility and signification.

In the last several years, there has appeared an expanding body of studies considering what
Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception might mean for architectural thinking and design
(Hale 2017; McCann and Locke 2015; Rush 2008). Central here is the work of Finnish
architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa (2005, 2009), who drew partly on Merleau-Ponty to argue
that much contemporary architectural design is dominated by sight with the result that buildings
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may be striking visually but have largely lost any expression of plasticity and multivalent
sensuousness. For Pallasmaa (2005: 71), architects must aim to “create embodied and lived
existential metaphors that concretise and structure our being in the world.” He argued that
“Significant architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual
beings” (2005: 11). He found examples of such rich, afferent design in the buildings of architects
like Alvar Aalto, Glenn Murcutt, Steven Holl, and Peter Zumthor (2005: 70–71).

More recently, Pallasmaa (2009) examined the relationship between the lived body and the
process of architectural design. He contended that architectural education today places too much
emphasis on cerebral and verbal knowledge at the expense of embodied processes, particularly
the importance of the hand in envisioning and actualizing design possibilities:

Architecture is… a product of the knowing hand. The hand grasps the physicality and
materiality of thought and turns it into a concrete image. In the arduous processes of
designing, the hand often takes the lead in probing for a vision, a vague inkling that it
eventually turns into a sketch, a materialization of an idea (2009: 16–17).

To argue for the continuing importance of the hand in architectural design and fabrication,
Pallasmaa reviewed the lived quality of craft and the importance of manual tactility in
architectural drawing whereby the hand is in a “direct and delicate collaboration and interplay
with mental imagery. It is impossible to know which appeared first, the line on the paper or the
thought… (2009: 91). In this sense, the process of drawing is a “pulling out” in which the hand
“feels the invisible and formless stimulus, pulls it into the world of space and matter, and gives it
shape” (2009: 92). Pallasmaa contrasted this embodied way of designing with architecture’s
current emphasis on digital technology, which differs from previous design instruments because
it largely unfolds in an abstract, mathematized space that bypasses the “direct haptic connection
between the object, its representation, and the designer’s mind” (2009: 95–96). Pallasmaa argued
that computer-aided design is a valuable architectural tool but should not be introduced in design
education until students have first mastered hand drawing and physical-model making: “[T]he
computer probably cannot do much harm after the student has learned to use his or her
imagination and has internalised the crucial process of embodying a design task” (2009: 99).

Environmental Embodiment, Body-Subject, and Place

Merleau-Ponty also demonstrated that, besides its more passive perceptual dimension, the lived
body incorporates a more active, motor dimension of perception—what he termed body-subject,
or pre-reflective corporeal engagement expressed via action and typically in sync with the spatial
and physical environment in which the action unfolds (Merleau-Ponty 1945/1962). Emphasizing
that everyday, taken-for-granted actions and behaviors are grounded bodily rather than
cognitively, Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962: 138–139) wrote that “Motility… is not a handmaid of
[cognitive] consciousness, transporting the body to that point in space of which we have formed
a representation beforehand. In order that we may be able to move our body towards an object,
the object must first exists for it, our body must not belong to the realm of the ‘in-itself’.”
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Integrally related to the lived body, body-subject, and environmental embodiment is the
phenomenological concept of place, which can be defined as any environmental locus that draws
human experiences, actions, and meanings together spatially and temporally (Casey 2009,
Malpas 1999, Relph 1976, Seamon 2013). In discussing the lived relationship between place and
environmental embodiment, the phenomenological philosopher Edward Casey emphasized that
“lived bodies belong to places and help to constitute them” just as, simultaneously, “places
belong to lived bodies and depend on them” (Casey 2009: 327). Through corporeal actions and
encounters, individuals contribute to the constitution of a place as, at the same time, those actions
and encounters contribute to the person or group’s sense of lived involvement and identification
with that place. In short, lived bodies and places “interanimate each other” (2009: 327). This
interanimation of lived bodies and places is significant because the habitual, unself-conscious
familiarity of body-subject is one way by which individuals and groups actualize a taken-for-
granted involvement with place.

Drawing on the concepts of environmental embodiment and place-body interanimation,

phenomenological researchers have considered the spatial and environmental versatility of the
lived body as expressed in more complex corporeal ensembles extending over time and space
and contributing to a wider lived geography (Casey 2009; Jacobson 2010: 223). One such
ensemble is body routines—sets of integrated gestures, behaviors, and actions that sustain a
particular task or aim, for example, preparing a meal, mastering the use of carpentry tools,
building a stone wall, and so forth. Another such bodily ensemble is time-space routines—sets of
more or less habitual bodily actions extending through a considerable portion of time, for
example, a getting-ready-for-work routine, or a Sunday-afternoon-going-to-the-park routine
(Seamon 2013).

Particularly pertinent to architectural design is the possibility that, in a supportive spatial and
physical environment, individuals’ bodily routines converge and commingle in time and space,
thereby contributing to a larger-scale environmental ensemble identified as place ballet—an
interaction of individual bodily routines rooted in a particular environment, which often becomes
an important place of interpersonal and communal exchange, meaning, and attachment such as a
well-used office lounge, a vibrant city plaza, or an exuberant urban neighborhood (Jacobs 1961;
Oldenburg 1999). A major phenomenological question is how environmental design might
generate thriving place ballets, whether at architectural or wider environmental scales (Alexander
et al. 1977; Jacobs 1961; Seamon 2013).

Atmosphere and Architecture

In the last several years, the phenomenon of atmosphere has become a major topic in
architectural and phenomenological research (Borch 2014; Böhme, Griffero, and Thibald 2014;
Griffero 2014, 2017; Pallasmaa 2016; Pérez-Gómez 2016; Zumthor 2006). Atmosphere refers to
the ineffable architectural presence and ambience of a building that make it unique or unusual as
an environment and place. Several phenomenological philosophers have linked atmosphere with
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feelings and the tacit emotional tone of environments, spaces, or places. Gernot Böhme (2014:
43, 56), for example, explained that atmospheres involve “a spatial sense of ambience” and the
“total impression that is regarded as characteristic” of an environment or place. Tonino Griffero
(2014: 37) defined atmospheres as “spatialized feelings” and “the specific emotional quality of a
given ‘lived space’.” One important lived aspect of atmosphere is its ambivalent, liminal quality:
it belongs to neither the experiencer nor the situation experienced; it varies in its lived intensity,
for different experiencers in the same moments and for the same experiencer in different
moments. As Böhme (1993: 122) explained:

[A]tmospheres are neither something objective, that is, qualities possessed by things, and
yet they are something thinglike, belonging to the thing in that things articulate their
presence through qualities…. Nor are atmospheres something subjective, for example,
determinations of a psychic state. And yet they are subjectlike [and] belong to subjects in
that they are sensed in bodily presence by human beings, and this sensing is at the same
time a bodily state of being of subjects in space.

Several architects and architectural theorists have examined the lived relationships between
atmosphere and buildings. Alban Janson and Florian Tigges (2014: 26), for example, claimed
that atmosphere is “the expressive force through which a situation that has been engendered by
architecture seizes us in affective terms all at once and as a totality.” In proposing atmosphere as
a creative vehicle for an architecture that is more than “pictorial image,” Alberto Pérez-Gómez
(2016: 21, 24) contended that “good architecture should be primarily concerned with creating the
moods appropriate to positive emotions that support ethical human action….” In asking why
some buildings seem more pleasurable, enticing, or comfortable than others, Peter Zumthor
(2006: 13) argued that one defining feature is atmosphere: “I enter a building, see a room and—
in a fraction of a second—have this feeling about it.” Zumthor (2006: 10, 19) described
atmosphere as “a beautiful natural presence” and the “magic of things, the magic of the real
world.” Juhani Pallasmaa (2014: 20) defined atmosphere as “the overarching perceptual, sensory,
and emotive impression of a space, setting, or social situation. It provides the unifying coherence
and character for a room, space, place, and landscape….” In proposing that all buildings,
whether prosaic or monumental, project some degree of ambience and mood, Pallasmaa (2016:
132–133) went so far as to suggest that atmosphere, rather than visible building form, is usually
the most important dimension of architectural experience for non-architects and the lay public:
“All buildings, monumental or commonplace, ritual or utilitarian, create atmospheres through
which we experience the world and ourselves. This unconscious orientation and articulation of
mood is often the most significant effect of a space or a building. I believe that non-architects
sense primarily the atmosphere of a place or building, whereas attention to visible form implies a
distinct intellectual and theoretical position.”

Atmosphere, Natural Symbols, and Architectural Archetypes

If architectural atmosphere is as important as Pallasmaa claimed, then two provocative questions
arise, the first of which is whether there are heuristic means whereby one might become more
9
sensitive to the ineffable qualities of architectural atmosphere. Can we, asked Pallasmaa (2014:
29) generate “a deepened sense of materiality, gravity, and reality?” A second related question is
whether architectural atmospheres can be created directly? Can architects and other responsible
parties “bring about the conditions in which atmospheres of a particular character are able to
develop” (Böhme 2014: 58)?

In answering these two questions, the phenomenological work of philosopher Karsten Harries
(1988, 1997) and architectural theorist Thomas Thiis-Evensen (1989) offers helpful guidance.
Focusing on the visceral, pre-reflective, bodily aspects of environmental experience and
meaning, both thinkers developed revealing conceptual languages for becoming more alert to
architectural atmospheres. Harries proposed a “natural language of space” (Harries 1997: 125)
that draws on natural symbols—normally taken-for-granted, experiential qualities integrally
associated with essential qualities of human nature and life, for example, lived qualities of
materiality, of weight, of light, of temperature, of direction, of sociability, of privacy, and so
forth. Harries suggested that the experiential structure of any natural symbol incorporates some
manner of lived binary—for example, experiences of moving or resting, lying down or standing
up, sensing lightness or heaviness, or feeling inside or outside. In his work, he explored such
natural symbols as vertical and horizontal, up and down, light and darkness, and down, and
inside and outside.

One example is Harries’ explication of how the lived binary between verticality and horizontality
arises from the upright human body’s postural uprightness as it exists in lived relationship with
the earth’s horizontal plane (Harries 1988: 40–45; 1997: 180–192). There is the vertical’s
anchoring power of dwelling and rootedness existing in tension with the mobility and the
horizon’s lure of open spaces. There is the vertical’s skyward movement toward sacredness and
spiritual presence, which contrasts with the horizon’s expression of material extension and
worldly success. Different cultures, historical eras, and architectural styles express the vertical-
horizontal tension in a wide range of ways but, whatever the particular manifestation, it
“presupposes an understanding of the meaning of verticals and horizontals inseparable from our
being in the world” (Harries 1988: 45).

As an interpretive means for pondering Harries’ natural symbols as they might be actualized in
specific buildings, one useful guide is Norwegian architect Thomas Thiis-Evensen’s Archetypes
in Architecture, a phenomenology of architectural experience as encountered through the lived
body and originally his doctoral dissertation done under the direction of Norberg-Schulz (Thiis-
Evensen 1989). Thiis-Evensen’s aim is to understand “the universality of architectural
expression”; his interpretive means is what he called architectural archetypes—“the most basic
elements of architecture,” which he identified as floor, wall, and roof (1989: 8). He argued that
the lived commonality of floor, wall, and roof is their making an inside in the midst of an
outside, though in different ways: the floor, through above and beneath; the wall, through within
and around; and the roof, through over and under.

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Thiis-Evensen proposed that a building’s relative degree of insideness and outsideness in relation
to floor, wall, and roof can be clarified through what he called the three “existential expressions”
of architecture: motion, weight, and substance (1989: 21). Motion refers to an architectural
element’s lived sense of dynamism or inertia—i.e., whether the element seems to expand, to
contract, or to rest in balance. In turn, weight refers to the element’s lived sense of heaviness or
lightness, and substance involves the element’s lived sense of material expression—whether it
seems hard or soft, fine or coarse, cold or warm, and so forth. Using examples from architectural
history as descriptive evidence, Thiis-Evensen generated an intricate lived language arising from
and describing the corporeal and sensory dimensions of architectural experience and meaning.
For example, he discussed stairs as one kind of directed floor and explored how a stairs’ material
and spatial qualities of slope, breadth, form, and relative connectedness to the ground contribute
to varying sensuous and bodily experiences of motion, weight, and substance (1989: 89–113).
Thiis-Evensen’s architectural interpretation offers one inventive heuristic means for detailing the
tacit, pre-predicative perceptual relationship between experiencers and the built world (Seamon
2017).

Both Harries’ natural symbols and Thiis-Evensen’s architectural archetypes provide perceptive
architectural languages that offer discerning interpretive means to locate and understand less
effable, unself-conscious, haptic qualities that contribute to a building’s architectural
atmosphere. In turn, an awareness of these normally tacit, taken-for-granted architectural
qualities might help architects better to envision an appropriate “fit” between what a building
needs to be lifeworld-wise and what it might be as a field of ambient presence. As this discussion
of architectural atmosphere indicates, a large portion of architectural experience is pre-cognitive,
corporeal, and hidden from conscious awareness. In this sense, the insightful languages of
Harries and Thiis-Evensen bring direct intellectual attention to architectural qualities and
situations that are otherwise unspoken and concealed in the natural attitude of architectural
experiences and meanings.

Architecture, Architectural Phenomenology, and Virtual Worlds

For the future of architecture, the question of virtual worlds becomes increasingly pressing, both
theoretically and practically. If virtual places, including virtual buildings, come to be
experienced as “real” as their real-world counterparts, does this development mean the eventual
demise of many “real” places and “real “buildings as we currently know them? On one hand,
there is the optimistic argument that virtuality can extend real reality and improve and amplify
the real world in ways impossible before its availability. In envisioning long-term trends that he
claimed will revolutionize human life in the next thirty years, futurist Kevin Kelly (2016: 216)
included virtual reality and suggested that, within a decade, virtual-reality displays will be so
“real” that users will think they are “looking through a real window into a real world. It’ll be
bright—no flicker, no visible pixels. You will feel this is absolutely for sure real. Except it isn’t.”
Kelly (2016: 229) contended that, in three decades, virtual reality will be as commonplace as cell
phones and used to play “virtual sports,” perform in “virtual plays,” and visit “virtual places” and
“virtual historic sites” that are so “real” that the user entirely forgets that they are not:
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 Cheap abundant VR will be an experience factory. We’ll use it to visit environments too
dangerous to risk in the flesh, such as war zones, deep seas, or volcanoes. Or we’ll use it
for experiences we can’t readily get to as humans—to visit the inside of a stomach, the
surface of a comet…. Or to cheaply experience something expensive, like a flyby of the
Himalayas.

On the other hand, there is the less sanguine argument that virtual reality too readily fabricates
experiences that might seem real but could never fully happen in actual lifeworlds. For example,
phenomenological philosopher Albert Borgmann (1992: 87–102) identified several lived
qualities via which virtual reality facilitates distortions, reductions, or embellishments of real
reality when recast virtually. One such embellishing quality is pliability, the ways that virtual
reality can generate virtual objects and experiences impossible to be had in real reality (for
example, the virtual ability to fabricate, reshape, or destroy virtual buildings and places at will).
Borgmann also highlighted brilliance, the facility of virtual reality to highlight and enhance an
experience’s attractive features and de-emphasize or eliminate any uninteresting, unpleasant, or
irrelevant dimensions (for example, virtual places that are always “picture perfect” and never
deteriorate, become soiled, or expose untoward or unkind aspects of human life).

Borgmann (1992: 96) pointed out that, underlying these lived aspects of virtual reality is the
more basic existential principle that the real world “encumbers and confines.” Though virtual
reality may superficially seem real, it can readily escape from and replace the lived messiness of
real lifeworlds with more convenient, vivid, or fantastical situations that require no stakes,
answerability, or efforts of will. On one hand, virtual reality holds extraordinary promise in that
it may become a welcome means for repairing a good number of the world’s problems. Who, for
example, needs an automobile if she can simply put on her virtual headset and “go to” her virtual
workplace, grocery store, or favorite recreation place? Who needs a real house, place of worship,
or vacation destination if all these “places” and “experiences” might be produced virtually? On
the other hand, virtual reality may involve potential risks and problems, including time wasting,
titillation, addiction, and withdrawal from most things real. Why make the efforts that an
encumbering, confining real world necessitates if virtual reality can provide ease, pleasure, and
enhanced vividness without the downside of demands, exertions, obligations, or consequences?

I end this chapter with virtual reality because phenomenology offers singular insights as to its
benefits, limitations, and experiential impacts. Phenomenological concepts like lifeworld, natural
attitude, intentionality, body-subject, environmental embodiment, place, and atmosphere identify
integral constituents of any human experience, whether of the past, present, or future; whether
real or virtual. Human beings are always already immersed in their worlds, even if that
immersion becomes virtual. Understanding the many lived dimensions of human-immersion-in-
world, including its architectural aspects, is perhaps the most central aim, responsibility, and
value of phenomenology broadly and of architectural phenomenology specifically.

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