Week 7: Relevance of Phenomenology

The “importance of phenomenology”, as the title goes, is the inevitable question which I keep asking myself when reading about “bauens” and “dwellings” and “gewhontes”. I was able to elicit the relevance which typology bore on architecture as Rossi so eloquently spelled it out, but I’m not sold on phenomenology yet; and that is to say that I don’t really grasp it in a way that is substantial enough to apply it to architecture in a way that really sticks. My failure in establishing such a connection between phenomenology and architecture was however alleviated, to some degree in Dalibor Vesely’s “On the Relevance of Phenomenology”. The human (as opposed to academic) dialogue between the Schneider and Vesely takes phenomology out of the academic sphere in favor of a more conversational exchange of thought. That is, it made Heidegger’s arguments more contextual. Schneider opens the exchange with the question the reader has likely been searching for, “why should an architect study phenomenology”. I feel the most telling line from Vesely’s response comes in “people in practice take it for granted that what the understand is reality, yet one needs to question this understanding from the very beginning” (Vesely, 59). If that isn’t the most phenomenological response possible I don’t want it is. But that’s just the thing about phenomenology as far as I’ve been able to tell. The proper consideration of phenomenology–that is, the proper way to practice the idea of phenomenology–calls for a reassessment of the very foundation of your knowledge, and while this is a fairly specific task, phenomenology, by nature of what it calls the thinker to do, tends to lose people like me in its complexity. In this sense, contemplating our knowledge of what knowledge is, seems to invariably land phenomenology in the discipline that is philosophy, but according to Vesely, you’d be wrong to assume so as “phenomenology is not a philosophy as such, but a tendency to restore to the modern situation a global and consistent conceptual direction” (Vesely 59). Rather than set me back in my understanding, I find it more helpful to think of phenomenology as an attitude instead of a school of thought because attitudes affect design more so than philosophy. And to that end, I understand this particular attitude, the attitude of phenomenology, as one which questions architecture at its most foundational level because it questions reality.