[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 2017; 2016 David Seamon and not to be cited
without permission; comments and corrections welcomed; reply to triad@ksu.edu]

Architecture and Phenomenology

David Seamon
Kansas State University, USA
https://ksu.academia.edu/DavidSeamon

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, nonreductive 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 (18891976) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (19081961), 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 worldmateriality, spatiality, tectonics, aesthetic
qualities, and so forthcontribute 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 buildings 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, and social groups?
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
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
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 2017a). 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 complicated thread of events whereby
1

architects and architectural theorists became interested in phenomenology. Third, I discuss two
phenomenological topics that have come to have value for architecture and briefly discuss their
significance for architectural thinking: (1) lived embodiment; and (2) place. Last, I identify some
key criticisms of architectural phenomenology and suggest what value it 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 phenomenologists 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 Husserls 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: 917).
Most broadly, phenomenologists direct this mode of openness toward generating insightful
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 eventsthe
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 (Seamon 2017)? 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 in understanding
human experience: that human beings are always already inescapably immersed and entwined in
their worlds (Moran 2011; Seamon 2014: 5). 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? Because of this lived interconnectedness between person and world, one cannot
assign specific phenomena to either person or world alone. Everything experienced is given but
also interpreted, is of the world but also of the person (Compton 1997: 208).

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

Husserl identified as the lifeworlda person or groups day-to-day world of taken-for-grantedness
normally unnoticed and, therefore, concealed as a phenomenon: As conscious beings, we always
inhabitin a pre-theoretical manneran experiential world, given in advance, on hand, and
always experienced as a unity (Moran 2005: 9; 2014). 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, because of which we habitually assume that the world as we know and
experience it is the way that life is and must necessarily be. 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: 917; 2014; Seamon
2014). Even if unexpectedly, we become aware of our lifeworldfor example, our city is badly
damaged by flood and we suddenly realize how much about our city we took for grantedwe
experience that awareness in the natural attitude. Once our city is repaired and back to normal,
we tumble back in to our taken-for-granted lifeworld and, because of natural attitude, mostly
forget that our lifeworld could be otherwise.
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 buildings lifeworld may support or interfere with the individual lifeworlds
housed within that the building. 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 (1951/1971) contended
that human-being-in-the-world is always human-being-grounded-in-place, especially as that
place sustains and is sustained by engaged caretakingwhat Heidegger identified as dwelling
(Harr 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
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 booklength 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 (19091969), 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). Rogerss central interest was the
interplay among experience, tradition, and history. He worked to re-conceptualize basic
architectural conventions and to replace them with the notion that a certain kind of experience,
at once of the moment and timeless, was what was really at work driving architectural history
(2010: xxiv). Rogers called into question the conventional historical claim that buildings
belonged to the age in which they were built. Instead, he put experience before history, arguing
that a building was better defined via the particular range of architectural experiences it evoked
and, thus, belonged to the moment when it was experienced (2010: xxxiii).
Another key figure discussed by Otero-Pailos is the French-American architect Jean Labatut
(18991986), who saw phenomenology as a conceptual tool for envisioning innovative designs
arising from and aiming to enhance human experience (2010: 3540). 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 Labatuts Lagoon of Nations, a 1,400-nozzle fountain designed to create a
nightly spectacle for the 1939 New York Worlds Fair (2010: 4057). As founder of the first
American Architecture doctoral program at Princeton in 1949, Labatut played a critical role in
promoting architectural phenomenology academically. One of the most influential doctoral
students under his direction was American architect Charles Moore (19251993), who completed
in 1957 one of Princetons first Architecture dissertations, which focused on a GastonBachelard-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 urban critic Jane Jacobs (1961). 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. 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 YiFu Tuan (1974). Strongly influenced by EBS but drawing directly on phenomenological
4

concepts like place, rootedness, dwelling, and placelessness, these geographers provided one
academic reference point for later phenomenological efforts examining architectural
embodiment, environmental atmospheres, sensuous dimensions of architectural experience, and
environmental design as it might facilitate place and place making (Mugerauer 1994; Seamon
2013; Shatzki 2007).
One important architectural theorist considerably influenced by EBS was the Norwegian
Christian Norberg-Schulz (19262000), who, during the 1970s and 1980s, played a crucial role
in keeping phenomenology in sight for architects. Like Rogers and Labatut before him, NorbergSchulz 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 selfrenewing origin of architecture (Otero-Pailos 2010: 146), which he located in foundational
lifeworld patterns and structures such as lived-space, home, at-homeness, and environmental
ambience. 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-Shultz 1988, 2000a), sense of place and genius
loci (Norberg-Shulz 1980), and dwelling (Norberg-Shultz 1985).
Particularly because of Norberg-Shulzs 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, and Robert Mugerauer
(2008; Seamon and Mugerauer 1985); religious scholars Belden Lane (2000) and Lindsay Jones
(2000); and architectural theorists David Leatherbarrow (2002), Rachel McCann (McCann and
Locke 2015), Juhani Pallasmaa (1985, 2005, 2009, 2016), Alberto Prez-Gmez (1983, 2006);
Jorge Otero-Pailos (2010, 2012), Thomas Thiis-Evensen (1989), and Dalibor Vesely (1988,
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 PrezGmez 1994; Malgrave and Goodman 2011: 210214; Norberg-Schulz 2000b; Rush 2008;
Sharazi 2015; Sharr 2007). 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 important phenomenological topics often drawn upon in architectural thinking
todayenvironmental embodiment and place.
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 (Pallasmaa 2005, 2009; McCann and Locke 2015; Seamon 2013). Merleau5

Ponty (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 (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-Pontys 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
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 finds examples of
such rich, afferent design in the buildings of such architects as Alvar Aalto, Glenn Murcutt,
Steven Holl, and Peter Zumthor (2005: 7071).
One of the most perceptive and comprehensive efforts to understand the corporeal, sensory, and
perceptual dimensions of architecture is Norwegian architectural theorist Thomas ThiisEvensens 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-Evensens aim is to understand the
universality of architectural expression; his interpretive means is what he called architectural
archetypesthe 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.
Thiis-Evensen proposed that a buildings 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 elements
lived sense of dynamism or inertiai.e., whether the element seems to expand, to contract, or to
rest in balance. In turn, weight refers to the elements lived sense of heaviness or lightness, and
substance involves the elements lived sense of material expressionwhether it seems soft or hard,
coarse or fine, warm or cold, and so forth. Using examples from architectural history as descriptive
evidence, Thiis-Evensen generated an intricate lived language arising from and describing corporeal
and sensory experience. 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: 89113). Thiis-Evensens architectural interpretation offers one innovative heuristic means

for detailing the tacit, pre-predicative perceptual relationship between experiencers and the built
world (Seamon 2017b).
Merleau-Ponty also demonstrated that, besides its more passive perceptual dimension, the lived
body also incorporates a more active, motor dimension of perceptionwhat he termed bodysubject, 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 1962; Seamon 2013).
Emphasizing that everyday, taken-for-granted actions and behaviors are grounded bodily rather than
cognitively, Merleau-Ponty (1962: 138139) wrote:
Consciousness is being towards the thing through the intermediary of the body. A
movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it
into its world, and to move ones body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow
oneself to respond to their call, which is made upon it independently of any [cognitive]
representation. Motility then is not a handmaid of [cognitive] consciousness,
transporting the body to that point in space of which 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 initself.
Drawing on the concept of body-subject, phenomenological researchers have considered the
lived bodys spatial and environmental versatility as expressed in more complex corporeal
ensembles extending over time and space and contributing to a wider lived geography (Casey
2009; Seamon 1979/2015, 2014). One such ensemble is body routinessets 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 routinessets 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 1979/2015).
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 balletan
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, Seamon 1979/2015). A major phenomenological question is how
environmental design might generate thriving place ballets, whether at architectural or wider
environmental scales (Jacobs 1961; Seamon 2013). In this regard, architectural
phenomenologists have become interested in space-syntax theory, which claims that the spatial
configuration of pathways (whether corridors, rooms, sidewalks, or streets) plays a major role as
to whether individual users come together spatially in co-presence and potential co-encounter or
remain apart physically and experientially (Hillier 1996). Though not phenomenological but
instrumentalist and analytic, space-syntax theory is relevant phenomenologically because it
suggests that one significant element of place ballet and place making is environmental design

facilitating habitual bodily behaviors grounded in body-subject and brought together spatially via
supportive pathway configuration (Liebst 2015; Seamon 2015).
Place and Architecture
From a phenomenological perspective, place 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 2014). Phenomenologically, place is not the physical
environment distinct from the people associated with it. Rather, place is the indivisible, typically
transparent phenomenon of person-or-group-experiencing-place. The phenomenologist
recognizes that places are dynamic, shifting, and encountered differently by different
experiencers (Seamon 2013). For example, the same physical place can invoke a wide range of
place experiences and meanings existentially. Similarly, over time, a person or groups
experience and understandings of particular places may shift (Relph 1976).
An integral constituent of place is environmental embodiment in 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 particular constitution of a place as, at the same time, those actions and
encounters contribute to the person or groups 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, as explained earlier, the
habitual, unself-conscious familiarity of body-subject is one way by which individuals and
groups actualize a taken-for-granted involvement with place.
One architectural example of this interanimation is architect Howard Daviss historical portrait
of the shop/housea mixed-use building incorporating some combination of residence and
business (Davis 2012). Davis demonstrated how the shop/house is an architectural type found in
almost every culture and every historical period. Much of his study is implicitly
phenomenological in that he offered a multi-dimensional picture of the flexible lifeworlds that
the shop/house sustains. One phenomenological question suggested by Daviss study is whether
one might understand more precisely the place wholeness of a building type like the
shop/house. Are there certain building configurations that allow lifeworlds to unfold efficiently
and to sustain human and place wellbeing in the ways that the shop/house does? One might
speak of a buildings lived topologyhow its spatial configuration of rooms, corridors, and
other physical spaces plays a role in sustaining (or undermining) particular human needs, actions,
interactions within the building and between the building and its surroundings.
In relation to the shop/house, for example, Davis (2012: 142170) identified several
configurational aspects that allow the contrasting needs of home and work to be efficiently
integrated architecturally and experientially. First, shop/houses typically have narrow frontages
that directly connect to the public realm of sidewalk and street. This narrowness allows for many
shop fronts per block, which in turn contributes to functional diversity, shopping choice,
exuberant street life, and serendipitous walk ins. Second, shop/houses spaces are typically
arranged to support a workable balance between the contrasting needs and functions of residence
and commerce; for example, work-related spaces are often placed at the front of the building,
while domestic spaces occupy the buildings back portion or upper floors above sales and work
8

spaces. Third, the kitchen in many shop/houses is an in-between space that helped make the shop
a social place; allowed for family members to tend the shop as they prepared family meals; or, in
the case of cafs and restaurants, was the shop.
Definitions and Criticisms of Architectural Phenomenology Today
Architectural theorists John Macarthur and Naomi Stead (2012: 127) wrote that architectural
phenomenology proposes to explain directly how the spaces we inhabit make us feel. OteroPailos (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 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 experiencefor
example, the themes of environmental embodiment and place overviewed above. Other
phenomenological studies have examined additional dimensions of architectural experience and
meaningfor example, architectural atmospheres (Borch 2015; Bhme, Griffero, and Thibald
2014); environmental wholeness (Bortoft 1996; Alexander et al. 1977; Seamon 2017a); prereflective and symbolic languages of architectural experience and meaning (Alexander 2002-05;
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: 5054; Mallgrave and Goodman 2011: 229230;
Robinson and Pallasmaa 2015).
Academic and professional criticisms of architectural phenomenology are various and cover a
wide range of methodological, epistemological, and ideological concerns (Leach 1997: 8485;
Otero-Pailos 2010: 251262; Richards 2012: 103123; Seamon 2013). Otero-Pailos (2012: 139)
summarized the criticisms well when he wrote that detractors of architectural phenomenology
see it as essentialist, ahistorical, anti-theoretical, irrational, and subjective. For sure,
phenomenology begins by emphasizing foundational, generative structures underpinning the
reality of everyday life and said to be inescapable, essential lived aspects of human experience
and human meaningfor example, lived embodiment and place. One must recognize, however,
that these foundational structures can be drawn upon to locate and describe how architectural
experiences and meanings vary individually, socially, culturally, and historicallyfor example,
Thiis-Evensens archetypal language provides an innovative perspective for understanding, via
sensuous, pre-reflective expression, a particular architectural style or a particular architects
oeuvre (Seamon 2017b).
Also questionable is the criticism that architectural phenomenology is ahistorical, antitheoretical, and irrational, since phenomenological approaches offer inventive ways to interpret
architectural history and to develop integrated architectural theory grounded experientially and
meaning-wise. One of the most powerful examples of fruitful phenomenological theory today is
the extensive on-going phenomenological research on place, which offers helpful knowledge as
to why places are important in human life; how, design-wise, places might be better envisioned
and fabricated; and how digital technologies and the development of virtual worlds is

dramatically shifting the lived nature of place (Casey 2009, Malpas 1999, Relph 1976, Seamon
2013).
Architecture, Architectural Phenomenology, and Virtual Worlds
For the future of architecture, the question of virtual worlds becomes increasingly significant,
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
virtually the real world in ways impossible before its availability (Horan 2000; Mitchell 2000).
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 (Seamon
2014). For example, phenomenological philosopher Albert Borgmann (1992: 87102) identified
several lived qualities via which virtual reality facilitates distortions, reductions, or
embellishments of real reality when recast virtually. For instance, he spoke of 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 reshape or destroy virtual places at will). He also
highlighted brilliance, the facility of virtual reality to highlight and enhance an experiences
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 unsettling aspects of human life).
Borgmann (1992: 96) pointed out that, underlying these lived aspects of virtual experience, is the
more basic existential principle that Reality 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,
responsibilities, 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 worlds 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 dangers, including time wasting,
titillation, addiction, and withdrawal from most things real. Why make the efforts that an
encumbering, confining real world inescapably requires 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
potential benefits limitations, particularly in regard to human experience. Phenomenological
concepts like lifeworld, natural attitude, intentionality, body-subject, environmental embodiment,
and place 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 humanimmersion-in-world, including its architectural aspects, is perhaps the most central aim,
responsibility, and value of phenomenology broadly and architectural phenomenology
specifically.
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