A study of the architectural ramifications of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s rendering of the human body’s capacities.
Karan August, Victoria University of Wellington
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Abstract
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Phenomenology offers a conceptual framework that connects and strengthens the architect’s intuitive understanding of the human experience of space with the theorist’s more critical approach. By these means phenomenology is an ideal vehicle for architectural theorists to avoid the friction between firsthand or subjective experience and generalized or abstracted accounts of experience.
Through this paper I examine the implications of Maurice Merleau Ponty’s description of embodied space. I extract an account of human spatial experience implicit in Merleau Ponty’s writings. My focus concerns the body’s manner of inhabiting space with intentionality and without reflection — a capacity I label the thinking body and conceptually divide into two aspects: form and function. I then analyze how this understanding has been employed in architectural scholarship and practice.
I find that the explicitly theoretical works of Juhani Pallasmaa’s description of the phenomenological experience of space is incompatible with Merleau Ponty’s. By necessitating a faculty of reflective thought for the experiencing of space is non-reflective being-in-the-world. The strategic importance of these different accounts emerges when projecting their implications for designed space. Pallasmaa’s account points towards an architecture that prioritizes sensory experiences synthesized by the mind. The design focus of Merleau Ponty’s philosophy leads the architect to consider the continuous process of creating spatial situations through the interaction of the thinking body and that-what-is-independent-of-it. In other words, rather than fundamentally altering the conventional architectural understanding of human experience, Pallasmaa’s account merely shifts the design emphasis from catering to the eye to catering to the five senses, while maintaining the dominance of the mind over the body.
As I consider built architectural spaces in light of Merleau Ponty’s implicit structure of the human experience of space I signal a simple design premise for how architects can cater to the thinking body.
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[1] Merleau Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, New York, NY. (110,138)
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Author biography
Karan August is a Guest Lecturer and Tutor at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She received her B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. Following a year interval in Florence, she moved to New Zealand to pursue the Epicurean ideal of happiness; i.e., good friends, good food and good wine, in a garden. After a gardening apprenticeship ran its course, Karan returned to academia and received her Masters in Architecture with distinction from Victoria University of Wellington in 2009. Her current research is at the intersection of Merleau Ponty’s metaphysical structure of human space and artistic ornamentation as a political act.