I believe the Phenomenology is a kind of connection between the community and the architecture itself. It is a bridge between what architects is doing and what community is requiring. “Everything that an architect does is first of all answerable to an institution of man before it becomes a building.”(31. Khan) is what Kahn believes in his text. Also the architecture can be a joint that connect all communities, architects should know both philosophy and psychology to learn what the citizens need from the architecture. This means the architects need to know how the community with its citizens and the relationship between neighbors will work during the time.
The most interesting thing is “being at home does not mean there is a roof over one’s head. “This is the idea of Dwelling from Christian Norberg Schulz. (58, Christian). Instead of this, being at “home” is more like to have a feeling of home. This is an example of Phenomenology in real life. The environment makes the person thinks about the feeling of tender, then he/she will feel with safety, then this is the feeling of home. “Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth.” (350, Heidegger). I will say this is like a study of living, for how to build a more suitable space for citizens to live.
Heidegger, Martin. Building Dwelling Thinking, 1954.
Norberg-Shulz, Christian. Kahn, Heidegger and the Language of Architecture, n.d.
Overall Xin, I think you’re getting a lot of the major points from the readings. If anything, I’d challenge your sentiments in the first paragraph, using Kahn’s notion of ‘institutions’ as something not necessarily responsive to specific functions or ‘community needs’, but as timeless structures that precede any specific citizenry.