[from Dwelling, Seeing and
Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology, David Seamon editor.
Chapter 1
Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing:
An Introduction
David Seamon
In the last several years, I have come to believe firmly
that phenomenology provides an important intellectual means for healing the
rifts between art and science, seeing and understanding, knowledge and action,
and design and building. As an
environment-behavior researcher working with architects and landscape
architects, I have sought to communicate with scholars and designers who use a
phenomenological perspective, either explicitly or implicitly, and to
synthesize their work in review articles and edited collections.1 Dwelling, Seeing and Building is one
step toward this aim and in many ways can be seen as a companion to Dwelling,
Place and Environment, an earlier volume of phenomenological essays that I
edited with philosopher Robert Mugerauer (Seamon and Mugerauer, 1985).
The greatest contrast between these two books is that
this new collection represents fewer disciplines and gives more attention to
environmental design and the built environment.
Of the thirteen contributors, seven are environmental designers‑-four
architects, two landscape architects and one planner; and six are in the
sciences and humanities‑-three geographers, two philosophers, and one
ecologist. In requesting essays, I
suggested in my letter of invitation that contributors might focus on such
themes as environmental awareness, environmental aesthetics, architectural
experience, architectural meaning, and environmental design as place
making. I was particularly interested in
design and scholarly work that illustrates the reciprocal relationship between
human livability and the built environment.
I hoped for real-world examples of environmental design nurtured by
phenomenological and related understandings.
Eventually, I received the thirteen articles presented
here, which I have arranged around three major themes: First, modernity and the built environment;
second, architectural and landscape meaning; and, third, relationships among living, understanding and
designing. This introduction overviews
these three themes and considers underlying commonalities. My hope is that the essays of this collection
illustrate how phenomenological and similar qualitative approaches can lead to
environmental understanding and design more in tune with our experiences and
lives as human beings in the everyday world.
PART I. MODERNITY
AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT: PROBLEMS AND
POSSIBILITIES
The three articles in part I of the collection are by
geographer Edward Relph, philosopher Karsten Harries, and landscape architect
Catherine Howett. These authors suggest
that current Western environments are too often determined by economic,
technological or aesthetic concerns alone and do not always relate to the full
range of human experience, particularly a sense of place and dwelling. In various ways, the three authors argue that
the built environment contributes to who we are as human beings and partly
establishes how we see, understand and live in the world.
In "Modernity and the Reclamation of Place,"
Edward Relph emphasizes that a sense of place is not a romantic anachronism as
some modern thinkers, particularly post-structuralists and deconstructivists,
claim. Rather, places are an integral
part of psychological and social well-being.
Relph points out that a sense of place cannot be designed and created in
all its details, since by its very nature, place is largely ineffable and
indeterminate. Yet Relph suggests that
an explicit understanding of place might contribute to political, economic and
design decisions that would support and enhance particular places.
A key need is the involvement and commitment of people
who live and work in these places, which must be made "from the inside
out." In this sense, designers and
policy-makers are no longer environmental manipulators but, rather, environmental
midwives who provide "direction and advice based on their special skills
and breadth of experience that allow them to resolve specific technical
matters, overcome parochialism, and see the broad effects and implications of
local actions." Relph concludes
that an understanding of place might help to facilitate locally committed
development that is self-consciously aware of wider contextual issues and
relationships.2
Karsten Harries, in his "Thoughts on a
Non-Arbitrary Architecture," speaks of modern architecture in much the
same way that Relph speaks of modern places:
Neither buildings nor planned environments do full justice to the needs
of human dwelling because they have been made arbitrarily rather than allowed
to arise spontaneously out of the requirements and concerns of particular
people and landscapes. Harries begins by
criticizing postmodernist approaches to design, which are valuable in that they
are creative and free, but troublesome in that they are eclectic and without
conviction. The modern Western world is
fortunate in that people are no longer constrained geographically or
historically and can borrow freely from buildings and design styles of any time
or place. The result too often, however,
is architecture that is arbitrary in the sense that it could readily be other
than what it is formally and stylistically.
Harries argues that the dilemma of arbitrariness cannot
be solved by aesthetic, functional, or historical solutions because meaning
cannot finally be made or invented. Instead,
meaning can only be discovered through the lives and worlds that a building is
meant to support and reflect. Harries
suggests that the thinking of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1890-1976),
especially his notion of dwelling (Heidegger, 1971), provides one
conceptual means for considering building as it might sustain and mirror the
worlds of particular persons, groups and environments. Harries is not the first scholar to suggest
the value of Heidegger's philosophy to architecture (cf. Mugerauer, 1988;
Norberg-Schulz, 1980, 1985). What is
innovative about Harries's presentation is its call for a language of natural
symbols‑-essential meanings that provide identity and orientation in
human life, for example, up/down, heavy/light, inside/outside,
vertical/horizontal, front/back, left/right, natural/human-made, and so forth.
A key question with which Harries concludes is how
architectural elements such as column, lintel, door, and window might be
understood as physical expressions of natural symbols and thereby provide one
kind of tacit order to particular worlds and places (also see Harries,
1988). Several essays in part II of the
collection illustrate how architectural elements like roof and porch can by
their very nature express and sustain essential qualities of human experience
like insideness, outsideness, threshold and betweenness. In this sense, these articles provide
concrete examples of what Harries identifies as the key task of environmental
design: "Interpreting the world as
a meaningful order in which the individual can find his or her place in the
midst of nature and community."3
If architecture, from a phenomenological perspective,
deals largely with buildings as they support a sense of place and dwelling,
then landscape architecture works to place people in a harmonious way with the
world of nature. But as Catherine Howett
explains in her essay, "'If the Doors of Perception Were Cleansed': Toward an Experiential Aesthetics for the
Designed Landscape," landscape architecture has often ignored the full
range of environmental experience by reducing the landscape to a set of views
that satisfy various aesthetic and visual design criteria. Howett summarizes the intellectual history of
this "scenographic" approach to landscape architecture and calls for
a more comprehensive perspective that would create places where "we are
invited to experience nature‑-and ourselves in community with nature and
with each other‑-more profoundly, more intimately, more physically, than
is possible when conventional scenographic values are enforced."
Practically, Howett suggests that a more holistic
experience of nature and landscape might be helped if designers gave attention
to three themes. First, she advocates an
emphasis on genius loci, or spirit of place. She believes that a deeper understanding of a
place's essential qualities would better attune the landscape architect to the
ways that the natural environment contributes to a particular sense of place. Second, Howett suggests that landscape architects
should continually be aware of their taken-for-granted design definitions and
preferences. How, for example, does one
think of "the beautiful," "the tasteful," or "the
pleasing"? Through such directed
attention, landscape architects might be better able to bypass unself-conscious
biases and predilections and open themselves to other design
possibilities. Third, Howett suggests
that it might be useful to consider landscape design as a living process rather
than a static product. In this way, the designer
might be better able to create a more holistic environmental experience that
would incorporate other senses besides sight and give people the opportunity to
participate with landscapes more thoroughly, particularly in terms of bodily
and emotional encounter.
As a group, the three essays of Part I suggest that
current environmental design and policy are often arbitrary and
incomplete. Environmental scholars and
professionals need to find ways whereby places, buildings and landscapes can
say for themselves what they are rather than being constricted by a language
and interpretation that is imposed from without. The three essays suggest that if academic and
professional descriptions of the built environment can be more accurate and
thorough, then this deepened understanding might provide the foundation for
more humane and harmonious environmental design.4
PART II.
INTERPRETING ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPE
The essays of Part II illustrate ways in which deepened
understanding might be had in regard to particular architectural elements,
buildings and landscapes. In "The
First Roof: Interpreting a Spatial
Pattern," architect Murray Silverstein explores the roof in implicit
phenomenological fashion. He suggests
that the roof is an essential architectural element because it expresses three
polarities that are an integral part of human living: inside/outside, self/world, and
practical/ideal. Silverstein examines
each of these polarities as they simultaneously shape and are shaped by the
roof. Next, he illustrates their
practical application in a house designed by Jacobson Silverstein Winslow
Architects, the Berkeley architectural firm in which he is a partner.
In Karsten Harries's terms, the polarities described by
Silverstein are natural symbols, and his explication of the roof demonstrates
how they can be supported, mirrored and drawn together through built form. For example, the roof expresses the
inside-outside polarity because it naturally divides the world into two spaces‑-one
that contains and the other that excludes.
The automatic, accompanying result is the two distinct experiences of
insideness and outsideness. Silverstein
also explains how the roof helps to establish the two related existential
polarities of self/world and practicality/idealism. Just by being what it is, the roof
allows particular human meanings to unfold and thereby helps to define and
support a human world that is one way rather than another.5
This tacit reciprocity between the built environment and
human experience is a central phenomenological insight, and philosopher Robert
Mugerauer's "Toward an Architectural Vocabulary: The Porch as a Between," draws on Martin
Heidegger's interpretation of dwelling and building to clarify this reciprocity
further, using Midwestern and Texan porches as an example. In agreement with Harries and Silverstein,
Mugerauer suggests that a building element such as porch best joins
people and world when through its very nature it provides particular situations
and meanings that are present automatically and require no direct action or
attention to happen.
Mugerauer demonstrates in his essay that the porch, like
the roof, naturally expresses meaning and directs experience just by being what
it is, though the specific nature of these meanings and experiences is
considerably different from the roof's.
If the latter relates to such essential human qualities as centeredness
and selfness, the former relates to betweenness, in the sense that the
porch makes itself into a place by providing a threshold between inside and
outside, people and nature, and individual and society. Mugerauer explains that there are many modes
of betweenness and no doubt each is evoked by specific architectural elements
such as door, window, foyer and stair.
The need he says, echoing Harries, is a phenomenology of architectural
elements as they support particular human experiences, situations and events.6
A start toward such an architectural phenomenology is
suggested by architect Ronald Walkey's
"A Lesson in Continuity: The
Legacy of the Builders' Guild in Northern Greece," which identities the
special architectural qualities of one particular building type‑-the
multi-story, guild-built houses of mountainous northern Greece, western Turkey,
and the adjoining Balkan states. Built
from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth century, these houses and their
communities had a powerful sense of order and place. Walkey examines the building process
responsible for these houses and then identifies eight architectural qualities
that mark the buildings' essential character.
These qualities include seasonal activities, sense of front and back,
protection versus openness, ascending lightness, centeredness, and so forth.
Walkey emphasizes that these qualities do not involve
imposed, arbitrary rules that the guild builders were forced to incorporate in
their construction as, say, a contractor must in building suburban tract houses
today. Rather, these qualities resided
intuitively in the builders' imaginations and were automatically called forth
when a particular dwelling was built. Iconic
house is the term that Walkey gives to this architectural image arising
naturally in the builder's imagination.
A major question that Walkey's article suggests is whether such iconic
images might be cultivated in a modern design context. One significant tool may be the kind of
qualitative explication illustrated in Walkey's study. His work is an important complement to the
approaches of Harries, Silverstein, and Mugerauer because he integrates a
series of relationships among various natural symbols and architectural forms
and demonstrates how they come together as a whole to create a specific
building type that is effective both practically and aesthetically.
In "Toward a Phenomenology of Landscape and
Landscape Experience: An Example from
Catalonia," geographer Joan Nogué i Font moves from the built to the
natural environment. He seeks to
describe the essential landscape character of Garrotxa, a region in
Spain's Pyrenees foothills north of Barcelona.
Nogué i Font's aim is a phenomenology of region, and to carry out this
aim practically, he involves himself in extended discussions with two groups of
people at home in the Garrotxa landscape‑-farmers and landscape
painters. Nogué i Font's study is
innovative methodologically because it uses the descriptions of insiders to
Garrotxa to discover its underlying regional qualities. The study is also important conceptually
because it addresses a crucial ontological question that a phenomenology of
environment must sooner or later face:
Can there be a phenomenology of landscape in its own right, or does
there exist only a phenomenology of that landscape as particular individuals
and groups experience it?
Nogué i Font answers this question by concluding that
both phenomenologies exist and one does not exclude the other. In exploring, first, the Garrotxa experience
for the farmers and landscape painters separately, he points out that in some
ways the environment has significantly different meanings for the two
groups. The farmers, for example, know
the landscape most thoroughly at a sensual, bodily level, since practical
success provides the farmers' means of livelihood. In contrast, the painters first interpret
Garrotxa aesthetically in terms of mass, form and color; they strive to touch
the landscape intuitively and discover its underlying character and
atmosphere. Yet, in spite of the
differences in the way the two groups speak about Garrotxa, there are certain
physical elements and experienced qualities that mark the uniqueness of
Garrotxa as a "thing in itself."
Perhaps most striking is the environmental characteristic marked by the
meaning of Garrotxa‑-a wild, tangled landscape of gorges,
precipices and forests that, because of their harshness and difficult access,
inspire a sense of respect and endurance.
The last essay of Part II, ecologist Mark Riegner's
"Toward a Holistic Understanding of Place:
Reading Landscape Through Its Flora and Fauna," also provides an
innovative way to interpret the natural environment phenomenologically. Unlike Nogué i Font, however, who seeks to
discover the landscape through people's environmental experiences, Riegner
draws on a way of science developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832),
who believed that thoughtful, dedicated looking at a particular phenomenon
would eventually lead to a vivid moment of seeing in which the phenomenon and its
various aspects are understood in a deeper, more holistic way (Amrine, Zucker
and Wheeler, 1987; Bortoft, 1985, 1986).
Goethe's own descriptive investigations included studies
of plant form and shape‑-that is, plant morphology (Goethe, 1988). In turn, the zoologist Wolfgang Schad (1971)
drew on Goethe's approach to plants as a way to study animal morphology
descriptively. Riegner uses the work of
Goethe and Schad as a base from which to read the character of landscape. He argues that there is an intimate
relationship between a landscape and its living forms; thus, a deeper
understanding of a landscape's plants and animals should foster a deeper
understanding of the landscape, and vice versa.
Riegner first explains that there is a relationship between
a plant's morphology and specific environmental qualities, such as degrees of
light and moisture. Plants with leaf
silhouettes more rounded, for example, generally are associated with darker and
moister environments, while plants with leaf silhouettes more incised generally
are associated with lighter and drier environments. Similarly an animal's form and shape says
much about its environment‑-for example, whether it lives underground or
in the water, or whether it is active by day or by night. In one sense, Riegner's work suggests that a
landscape and its living forms comprise a kind of language, and that through a
Goethean way of science, they can be "read" in terms of underlying
patterns and interconnections. His
research illustrates how landscape and its living forms are part and
parcel. He suggests that creatures are immersed
in their world and that to look carefully at one can provide insights into the
other.
Of all the essays in the collection, Riegner's work is
perhaps the most provocative because it describes an intimacy between living
form and world that is profoundly different from conventional biological and ecological
perspectives that tacitly divide environment and organisms into parts and flows
of energy. In his essay, Riegner provides
no detailed reading of a particular landscape or its living forms because he is
marking out a research terrain‑-what he calls phenomenological ecology‑-that
has barely been explored.
In spite of its preliminary quality, however, Riegner's
work is important because it points toward certain relationships‑-for
example, roundness/wetness/darkness/flatness versus
angularity/dryness/lightness/ undulation‑-that would seem to serve as
directives for further Goethean research in regard to landscapes and their
living forms. Riegner notes, for
instance, that a prairie landscape expresses uniformity, both in its own
appearance and through its living forms.
What would a detailed exploration of prairie landscapes from this
perspective lead to, and would one find parallel descriptive patterns if one
conducted a complementary study of people who live on prairies, through an
approach like Nogué i Font's? And what
if the living forms of different prairies suggested differences as well as
commonalities? Could such differences
perhaps point toward other environmental qualities‑-geology, relative
location and so forth‑-that define the differences among the prairies
more precisely?
In addition, Riegner's approach would seem to have
potential value for architectural phenomenology. For instance, do the vernacular architectures
found in particular landscapes like prairies, forests or river plains reflect
and highlight qualities of the landscapes themselves? Consider Walkey's guild-built houses. Does their form or organization say anything
about the rugged, mountainous landscape in which they were built? And are there commonalities with other
vernacular buildings in similar mountainous terrains? In short, Riegner's use of the Goethean
approach suggests creative possibilities for qualitatively exploring the
relationship between worlds and the things and living forms that reside in
those worlds.
Considering the essays of Part II as a whole, one can
say that they illustrate a crucial aspect of architectural and landscape
meaning: It is not added on cognitively
but arises directly through immediate unself-conscious experience of what the
natural and built environments offer.
For example, the meaning of the roof is first of all existential
in the sense that it spontaneously establishes such basic experienced qualities
as inside/outside, self/world and so forth, simply by being present and
being what it is (Seamon, 1990; Thiis-Evensen, 1987). Similarly, the meanings of Walkey's
guild-built houses, Nogué i Font's Garrotxa landscape, or Riegner's plants and
animals in their natural environment are always already present. Landscapes, objects, buildings, creatures and
people all have particular ways of being in their worlds. The essays of Part II illustrate approaches
whereby these ways of being-in-the-world can be studied empathetically and
critically.
PART III. LIVING,
UNDERSTANDING AND DESIGNING
The essays of Part III move away from material entities‑-architectural
elements, buildings, and landscapes‑-and move toward less visible
processes that exist in time as well as space‑-designing, learning,
understanding, living, and creating community.
All of the essays deal with relationship, whether between
teaching and learning, designing and building, building and using, individual
and group, or client and designer.
My essay, "Different Worlds Coming Together: A Phenomenology of Relationship as Portrayed
in Doris Lessing's Diaries of Jane Somers," directly explores
relationship, which I define as the coming together of two separate worlds in a
widening sphere of interaction, experience and concern. I argue that all relationships involve a
cyclic process that can be described by seven progressive stages that begin
with dissatisfaction and search and move toward understanding and deeper
involvement. I call this temporal
process the "relationship cycle," which I explicate through
British-African writer Doris Lessing's Diaries of Jane Somers, a novel
that describes the growing friendship between two unlikely people‑-an
indigent old woman and a stylish London editor of a fashionable women's
magazine.
By using Lessing's novel as a descriptive base from
which to extract more general characteristics of these two different worlds
coming together, I argue that the development of relationship involves hazard
and offers no guarantee that any growth or understanding will occur. In contrast to relationship is what I call connection‑-an
arbitrary linkage between worlds that is susceptible to failure when changed or
stressed in any way. I argue that social
policy and environmental design often fail today because they are founded on
the superficiality and forced contact of connection rather than on the depth
and genuine contact of relationship. In
the last part of the essay, I attempt to illustrate the generalizing value of
the relationship cycle by using it to examine the student-teacher and
client-architect relationships.
In "Putting Geometry in Its Place: Toward a Phenomenology of the Design
Process," architect Kimberly Dovey explores the client-architect
relationship directly by drawing on the phenomenological notion of lived-space‑-everyday
environments and places as people live in and use them. He examines design translations between
lived-space and geometric space‑-space as objective
measurement. He points out potential
disjunctions that cause confusion between architect and client and lead to a
poorly conceived design that does not work well for its users.
Dovey describes the design process in terms of a
"cycle of lived-space." In
this cycle, the designer, first, must understand clients' everyday
environmental needs‑-their lived-space, in other words; second, he or she
must translate those needs into geometric expression‑-distances, heights,
spaces, and so forth. In turn, this
built environment becomes the context for human actions and, thus, another
lived-space. Dovey examines two phases
of the lived-space cycle‑-sketch planning and working drawings. He shows how in each phase there can be a
failure in translation from experience and lived-space to measured expression
and geometric space. Dovey ends by
suggesting changes in the design process that might overcome breakdowns in the
lived-space cycle. These changes include
experiential simulation, a design process that involves piecemeal change, and
phenomenological evaluations of environments already built.
Landscape architect Randolph T. Hester, Jr.'s
"Sacred Structures and Everyday Life:
A Return to Manteo, North Carolina," echoes Dovey's lived-space
cycle in that Hester returns to evaluate a community design that he did in 1983
for the Outer Banks town of Manteo, North Carolina (Hester, 1986). Hester's aim is to overview the design
process that led to the Manteo plan and determine its various successes and
failures in the five years since it was implemented.
Hester's work is important because it is an effort to
develop community planning that arises from the everyday lives and needs of the
insiders of place‑-one of Edward Relph's key emphases in his opening
essay. Hester discovers that the
elements of place important for Manteo residents were often difficult to
identify and to articulate because these elements were seemingly mundane and
not striking visually or aesthetically.
Through the use of behavior mapping, surveys, and interviews, Hester and
his team eventually identified Manteo's "Sacred Structure"‑-a
set of settings, situations, and events that marked the heart of Manteo as a
place for its residents. This Sacred
Structure was then used as the basis for Manteo's community design.
In returning to Manteo, Hester informally evaluates how
successful the Sacred-Structure design has been in maintaining Manteo's
traditional sense of place while at the same time helping to stimulate the
town's economy. Overall, he finds that
the master design has helped strengthen Manteo's small-town quality, though
some new commercial development is overscaled and, therefore, out of
place. He also traces the politics of
the town design and finds that some residents' opposition to the design has
slowed and changed its development. He
concludes that, as a design tool, the Sacred Structure provides one way to
reduce differences between insiders and outsiders. In Relph's terms, Hester illustrates one way
in which the environmental designer can become a midwife who helps insiders
articulate local needs and then translates those needs into design
incorporating wider contextual concerns‑-in the case of Manteo, a secure
economic base.
The relationship between community and design is also a
central theme in Clare Cooper Marcus's "Designing for a Commitment to
Place: Lessons from the Alternative
Community Findhorn." Marcus,
a community planner, examines how the physical environment has contributed to a
sense of community at Findhorn, a small alternative community founded in 1962
on the coast of northeastern Scotland.
Like nineteenth-century utopian experiments such as Oneida, Harmony, and
Shaker settlements, Findhorn is important because it is an intentional effort
to establish a sense of group and community.
In a modern era when designers, planners and policy-makers seek to
create a sense of place self-consciously, Marcus believes that Findhorn might
offer some useful design and policy lessons.
To organize her study conceptually, Marcus draws on
Rosabeth Moss Kanter's Commitment and Community (Kanter, 1973), a
sociological study of nineteenth century utopian communities. In this work, Kanter identified six
"commitment mechanisms"‑-sacrifice, investment, renunciation,
communion, mortification and transcendence‑-that fostered community
loyalty and strength. Drawing on
descriptive accounts, surveys, and her own experience of living at Findhorn for
a year and visiting several times since, Marcus uses Kanter's six commitment mechanisms
as an organizational framework to examine qualitatively the social patterns and
structures that have led to a sense of togetherness at Findhorn. Next, Marcus considers the contribution that
the physical environment makes to Findhorn's sense of community and, last, points
to lessons for the design and policy of more typical residential settings.
Marcus's conclusions are important because, like
Hester's, they indicate that the creation of community and place takes time and
involves a developmental process that is grounded in commitment. One crucial point she makes is that a
community involves some degree of shared human values which, if not present in
a planned residential setting, may immediately mean failure. In the case of Hester's Manteo, shared values
grow historically out of many people living in the same place for generations;
at Findhorn, those values arise from a shared world view and way of
living. One question with which Marcus
concludes is whether a sense of community can be guided and designed to happen self-consciously,
particularly the promotion of shared values.
She highlights such potential design and policy tools as residents'
having a stake in community management and maintenance; pedestrian-scaled
environments that facilitate informal social interaction; and beautiful
settings, which are more likely to foster residents' affection and pride. She concludes that physical design alone can
not create a sense of community, but it can make important contributions.
The last article in part III, architect Gary Coates and
my "Promoting a Foundational
Ecology Practically Through Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language: The Example of Meadowcreek," focuses on
the relationship between understanding and designing in upper-level
architectural design studios. We speak
of design education that fosters what philosopher Joseph Grange (1977) calls a foundational
ecology‑-that is, a respect for natural environments and places that
arises out of care and concern. We argue
that architect Christopher Alexander's "Pattern Language"‑-an
effort to identify design qualities that support and evoke a sense of place‑-is
one way in which design students might gain a practical sense of foundational
ecology (Alexander et al., 1977, Alexander, 1979; Coates, Siepl and Seamon, 1987).
The design focus in our article is Meadowcreek,
an environmental education center in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas. Meadowcreek aims to provide an educational
program that emphasizes an intellectual understanding of ecology and the
environment as well as practical skills like forestry, farming and land
conservation. Coates and I examine the
efforts of a studio of upper-level architectural students to understand the
environmental needs of Meadowcreek and to translate those needs into a master
design. Our major learning and design
tool in the studio is Pattern Language, and the essay summarizes the studio's
results in terms of the master design itself as well as students' evaluations
of the studio process and their resulting understandings.
DICHOTOMIES, HEALING AND A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ECOLOGY
There are many commonalities that link the thirteen
essays of this collection: An interest
in accurate seeing and thoughtful description, a concern for creative design
that evokes a sense of place, and a focus on experiential patterns and
processes that mark the foundation of our lives as human beings immersed in a
natural and built world. Beneath these
interrelated topics, however, might there be some deeper theme that marks the
center of a vortex flowing outward toward these other issues?
As I have worked with this collection for over three
years, one theme that continually returns to mind is dichotomies, healing
and a phenomenological ecology. Our
world is injured in many ways, the essays seem to say. How can scholarship soothe the wounds of the
world and speak to a sense of use, wholeness and harmony? How can design, planning, and policy be a
midwife to the world and nurture buildings, places, and communities that are
livable and life-enhancing?
A major wound that the thirteen essays seek to heal is
the modern Western tendency to divide and isolate, both intellectually and
practically. Conventional Western
philosophy assumes a division between person and world, between body and mind,
between subject and object, between theory and practice, between nature and
culture. These Cartesian-Kantian
dichotomies emphasize isolation over togetherness, specialization over
generalization, things over processes, matter over spirit, and secondhand
cerebral knowledge over firsthand lived-experience. The wholeness of the world and human
experience is fractured. At the same
time, this ethos of separation affects practical life, thus the design
professions debate such divisions as beauty versus practicality, form versus
function, art versus life, designing versus building, and understanding versus
designing.
But what if these divisions are not the most accurate
way of marking out our situation as human beings? This, I believe, is the central question
suggested by the essays of this collection.
If we split the world into a series of parts that may not really be in
touch with what the world is, how can any real understanding or change happen,
either intellectually or practically?
Might one be able to bypass these taken-for-granted dichotomies and to
find new ways to differentiate the parts without isolating them or converting
them into things they may not be?
In various ways, the following essays take on this task
to return to human experience afresh and to look at the world anew. A first way the essays attempt this aim is
through method: there is an
effort to approach the subject kindly and thoughtfully so that it can say who
and what it is. For example, Silverstein
and Mugerauer seek to elucidate the essential nature of roof and porch, while
Hester and Marcus look for central qualities of community and sense of
place. Yet again, Nogué i Font and
Riegner hope to get landscapes to speak for themselves, and Dovey and I strive
to highlight general patterns of human relationships. It is true, of course, that each author's
specific research method varies, thus Nogué i Font, Hester, and Marcus make
varying use of interviews, while Relph, Walkey, and Riegner rely on careful
observation and interpretation. In spite
of procedural differences, however, the shared aim is a practical method that
minimizes the distance between student and subject studied so that the student
has the freedom to see, and the subject has the freedom to speak. The aim is "an imaginative sympathy
[that is] receptive without ceasing to be critical" (Harvey, 1958, p. x).
A second way that the essays work for openness and
fairness is epistemologically.
How, in other words, can we as human beings come to know the world? How can the human and environmental
disciplines come to know the world?
Conventional scientific research generally relies on empirical
information that can be identified and correlated mathematically. A thing does not exist if it cannot be
measured. Knowledge becomes factual and
material. In contrast, ways of knowing
represented by the essays in this collection are wider-ranging and incorporate
qualitative description, intuitive insight, and thoughtful interpretation. The suggestion is that human beings,
including scholars, "know" in many different ways‑-intellectually,
emotionally, intuitively, viscerally, and so forth. A full understanding of any phenomenon
requires that all these modes of knowing belong and have a place.
Perhaps the most striking example of a multi-dimensioned
knowing is Riegner's Goethean approach to landscape and living forms. Goethe's way of knowledge is grounded in
sincere interest, heartfelt dedication and growing sensitivity. The student's knowledge of the phenomenon
changes and deepens as he or she becomes more intimate with it. In a similar way, Harries argues that a study
of natural symbols requires openness and patience. He says that any langauge of natural symbols
must first be understood emotionally rather than intellectually: "If we can speak of a language at all,
this is a language addressed, first, to sense and imagination. Before attempts are made to articulate it in
words, it needs to be felt." The
possibility of such a language is illustrated by Silverstein, Mugerauer
and Walkey, who make use of careful looking, thoughtful
seeing, and inspired interpretation in their perceptive explications of
architectural elements and buildings.
Overall, the essays in this collection, as well as those
in the earlier Dwelling, Place and Environment, point toward a new
discipline and profession whose substantive focus is environment and place,
whose methodological thrust is openness and fairness, and whose
ontological vision is togetherness, belonging and wholeness. There are several labels that might describe
this discipline‑-for example, "phenomenology of place,"
architectural phenomenology," or "phenomenological
geography." Perhaps the designation
that Riegner coins in his essay‑-phenomenological ecology‑-provides
the best description. Phenomenological
ecology is an interdisciplinary field that explores and describes the ways that
things, living forms, people, events, situations and worlds come together
environmentally. A key focus is how all
these entities belong together in place, why they might not belong, and
how they might better belong through more sensitive understanding, design and
policy-making.
Phenomenological ecology supposes that beneath the
seeming disorder and chaos of our world and daily life are a series of
underlying patterns, structures, relationships and processes that can be described
qualitatively through heartfelt concern, sustained effort, and moments of
inspired seeing and interpretation.
Phenomenological ecology, therefore, not only widens and deepens our
knowledge of the world outside ourselves but also facilitates our own
growth as individuals whose abilities to see and understand can become keener
and more refined. We become more awake
to the world, and see things in a more perceptive, multidimensioned way.
More than likely, the world cannot be healed only by
technological solutions provided by a materialist science. Nor is the hope only in political and
cultural changes that restructure the world economically and socially. We must also change ourselves as individual
persons‑-the ways we understand, feel, decide and act. Especially, we must discover ways to be less
self-centered and to put other human beings, living forms and things first
before our own selves. On one hand, we
must find ways to celebrate difference, complexity, uniqueness, freedom,
disorder, chaos, and flux.7
On the other hand, we must believe that‑-beneath this diversity,
entropy, and continuous change‑-there may lie an existential order and
commonality that help to reconfigure and to transform such traditional
divisions as theory/practice, unity/plurality, stability/mobility,
nature/culture, Western/non-Western, black/white, male/female, straight/gay,
and so forth.
In seeking this intellectual and applied
transfiguration, a phenomenological ecology could well be important because it
seeks to allow the person, group, place or thing to speak in an appropriate
language, yet also realizes that this speaking may hold points of commonality
with the languages of other people, groups, places, and things. Phenomenological ecology works to foster a
sympathetic and systematic contact between student and thing studied, between
particular real-world instance and wider conceptual pattern, and between
specific individuals and the larger natural and human worlds of which those
individuals are a part. In this sense,
phenomenological ecology opens our feelings outward and evokes a sense of
positive obligation toward nature, toward our own immediate worlds, and toward
worlds that, at least on the surface, are greatly different from our own. Where there was an either/or, a
phenomenological ecology nourishes a both/and.
Notes
1. See Seamon,
1982, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1990. At the
start, the reader should realize that there is not one phenomenology but many
(Spiegelberg, 1982). The
phenomenological approach represented by the essays in this volume, either
explicitly or indirectly, relates to the tradition of existential
phenomenology, fathered by philosophers Martin Heidegger (1962) and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1962) and transcribed into use for the human sciences, especially,
by the Duquesne School of Phenomenological Psychology (Giorgi, Barton, and
Maes, 1983). A central aim of
existential phenomenology is a generalized description and understanding of
human experience, behavior, meaning and awareness as they are lived by real
people in real times and places. The
reality of these concrete experiences and situations are not an end in
themselves, however, but a field of descriptive evidence out of which can be
drawn underlying patterns and structures that mark the essential core of
humanness.
Though many authors in the present volume would not call
themselves phenomenologists or their work phenomenological, I feel their
studies are significant phenomenologically because there is a search for
general experiential patterns that arise from real-world situations and
circumstances. Just as quantitative,
aggregate studies have the larger conceptual framework of "positivist
science" around which to organize their evidence and claims, so
qualitative descriptive research also requires such an overarching conceptual
structure, which I believe is best provided by existential phenomenology, or phenomenology,
as I call it for convenience here. For
one discussion that opposes this interpretation, particularly as it has been
used in the environmental disciplines, see Pickles, 1985. For a rebuttal, see Seamon, 1987. Also see Cloke, Philo, and Sadler, 1991,
chap. 3.
2. Much of
Relph's other writings work to explore in depth the broad themes of this
article. See, for example, Relph, 1976,
1981, 1987, 1989, 1991.
3. Other works by
Harries that explore these issues in various ways include: Harries, 1978, 1982, 1984a, 1984b, 1985a,
1985b, 1987, 1988a, 1988b. On the
relationship of natural symbols to architecture, see Thiis-Evensen, 1987.
4. For another
thoughtful philosophical discussion of these issues, see Corner, 1990.
5. For further
discussion of the way that experienced polarities can be used in the design
process, see Jacobson, Silverstein, and Winslow, 1990; Thiis-Evensen, 1987.
6. For a
discussion of what this phenomenological argument means for deconstructionist
architecture, see Mugerauer, 1988.
7. On the
contrasts between phenomenological and post-structural-deconstructionist
approaches to diversity and difference, see Cheney, 1989, 1990; Cloke, Philo
and Sadler, 1991; Mugerauer, 1988; Relph, 1991; Seamon, 1990; and Zimmerman,
1990.
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