Phenomenology In Architecture Essay

Phenomenology is flow of philosophy which influence modern architecture and a field of research, experiencing to build materials and space in aesthetic aspects. In phenomenology, the environment is determine as ‘’the place’’. This place is not like locality but comprises of some specific things like shape, colour, material and texture, and all these merge to form the atmosphere. Phenomenology takes the idea of subjectivity and makes the situation and its unique conversation with its place the proper topic and not the thing itself.

The history of phenomenology in architecture begins in 1970, over the last 30 years, from the writings of Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, who starts to have significant effects in modern architectural theory. Christian Norberg – Schulz was an important person for the architecture students of the 1980s. He wrote a book: ‘’Genius Loci, towards a phenomenology of architecture’’. He explains the phenomenological approach to architecture and was reading largely in architectural schools. Architects like Peter Zumthor, Herzog Demeuron and Caruso St. John have been cast under the generic banner of phenomenology and much of this approach to design dates back to Christian Norberg – Schulz book.

A philosopher Edmund Hursserl believed that beneath the changing flow of human consciousness and experience, there are some unchanged structures awareness, which he claimed the phenomenological method could identify. Also he says that humans should focus on the experience that they have in doing architecture instead of any absence of perception about architecture. Heidegger followed Hurssel’s theory and looked more at experience, and gave an example of a hammer. ‘’When a craftsman is hammering the hammer...

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...ing belong to dwelling and to the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice’’.5

The strictly reduced palette of materials has the same effect as a silent space, and we get an increase awareness of physical presence of church, a presence onto which we can project meanings. ‘’In attending to the raw, existential nature of his materials, Lewerentz privileges a subjective and shifting experience of the world... By adopting a phenomenological approach, Lewerentz recognizes prayer as an individual, meditative activity. St. Peter’s is a church to humanism. Paradoxically, the material intensity of St. Peter’s is almost too much to bear. In this the church is all too closely reflects the character of its architect... It is as though Lewerentz is compelling us to confront the condition of our existence, all of the time.’’6