“lived” experience and away from Husserl’s abstract “essences”. The reason for this shift came from Heidegger’s overall intention, to study the nature of being, not merely the nature of knowing. This distinction caused the argument between Heidegger and Cassirer on the status of art discussed in Chapter 2 and Heidegger felt Husserl had restricted his thinking, by considering epistemology at the expense of ontology. It was this larger preoccupation with the “meaning of being” that was to drive Heidegger’s philosophy throughout his long and prolific career.

         His approach to this question has also proved influential in architecture, as he set out to study the philosophical implications of the concrete experience of everyday reality. He followed Husserl’s instruction to go “back to the things themselves”, but this time as part of a larger historical context. Here emerges Heidegger’s attempt at deconstruction, as we saw in Chapter 2, in terms of his “overcoming” of Western philosophy. He blamed that tradition for suppressing these difficult questions, partly by its insistence on the separation of the mind and the body – expressed in philosophical terms as the split between the subject and the object. This same split occurs in the debate between rationalism and empiricism – or between the reliability of data from the senses versus the “pure” concepts of the reasoning mind. This is the argument that phenomenology initially set out to transcend, by its concentration on the link between the two realms of the body and the mind. This overlap that occurs in the acts of perception and cognition was the underlying theme of Heidegger’s study of the meaning of being – seen in terms of the German word Dasein, or “being-there”. The first hints of phenomenology as a “philosophy of bodily experience” are contained in the first part of Heidegger’s major book, Being and Time (1927). This book, which has since become a founding document for phenomenology, was published at the same time as he was editing another book with Husserl. The influence of his master’s teaching is clear from his overall intentions, but his detailed concerns are directed more towards the description of everyday experience. The focus on “being-there” as the concrete counterpart to “being-as-such” was Heidegger’s means of overcoming the abstractions of 

extended to apply to a “transcendental subject”. All this was meant to provide the necessary scientific objectivity to the kind of philosophy which Husserl was developing, and it was suggested that this would achieve a certainty of knowledge that even the “normal” sciences could barely approach. As one commentator described it:

          … it appears that all non-philosophical sciences start from a complex of presuppositions which are not clarified in these sciences themselves. Philosophy, on the other hand, does not want to leave anything unsolved; it wants to reduce everything to primary ‘presuppositions’ which do not need to be clarified because they are immediately evident … 2

         Husserl’s attempt to claw back the ground that had been lost to the physical sciences, in his claim to provide objective truths about the world, led him to an over-ambitious goal for his philosophy, which he admitted in his later work had failed to fully materialize. Even his famous slogan “back to the things themselves” had been somewhat belied by his emphasis on the study of universals. This abstraction in his approach cut him off from history and culture, and failed to capture the full depth of our experience of the world and, with his leaning towards a purely intellectual analysis, the role of the body in perception was played down. While in his later writings, particularly The Crisis of the European Sciences, he did suggest the important of considering these wider themes, it was left to Husserl’s students to develop them in detail, in ways that have since become significant in the course of recent philosophy.

         Martin Heidegger was perhaps the most illustrious of those students. He came to study with Husserl at the University of Freiburg, and most of the leading figures in later Continental philosophy owe a great deal to his influence, whether direct or not. Although in Heidegger’s later work he moved back to the study of language – as the ultimate source of knowledge or, as he described it, the “house of being” – it was in his early writings that he turned the phenomenological methods towards

2 Joseph K. Kockelmans, Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and its Interpretation, Anchor Books, New York, 1967.

In one sense this notion of a scientific philosophy could be seen as part of the continuing Enlightenment “project”, with many disciplines including even the new social sciences still under pressure to fit the definitions of objectivity. The method that Husserl adopted for his study of phenomena and the ways that they present themselves to the mind were also reminiscent of the Descartes’ thought process, in his earlier search for the foundations of true knowledge. Like Descartes, Husserl began by abandoning all previous experience, regarding it as doubtful, uncertain or misleading and, having suspended his preconceptions he would “bracket off” a particular object, allowing him to contemplate it detached from its context. Having achieved this with the thing under study he then set about uncovering its essence. He did this by a process of “free variation” where an object’s attributes are each considered in turn. By varying the characteristics an object possesses until it ceases to be the thing that it is, a core set of properties can eventually be identified which express the thing’s underlying essence. One can try this with an everyday object like a table lamp and imagine substituting each of its features – one can change the flex or the shade without it ceasing to be a lamp, but removing the light source would transform it beyond recognition.

         This is a crude example of what was a complex process for Husserl, referring to it as an eidetic reduction, from the Greek eidos, meaning ideal or essence, which Plato had also used in a similar sense. For Plato this referred to the unchanging idea or universal “type”, of which any object was a particular example, and in Husserl’s work this formed the first step of a larger process, which he referred to as the “phenomenological reduction”. The initial element in this method is the bracketing off mentioned above, which leads to the isolation of the object from its context. By reducing the cultural world to the “life world”, or the realm of immediate experience, Husserl hoped to achieve an unobstructed view of reality. The final movement in this sequence is the “transcendental reduction” which assumes that the experience of the individual can be applied universally. From the individual subject one is meant to extrapolate towards the universal realm of subjectivity in general – the unique experience of the particular individual is

the dictionary definition adds some clarity to the issue it still leaves much room for debate. The word itself translates as the study of how phenomena appear to the consciousness, based on the Greek words phaino and logos. Phaino means “to show” or “come to appearance” and is also the root word of phantom and fantasy, while logos can mean “reason”, “word” or “speak”, hence its use in the sciences for “the study of”.

The Meaning of “Being” – From Husserl to Heidegger

The current understanding of the term phenomenology comes from the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, who wrote in the early part of the twentieth century and who influenced much of the later work on the subject. Hegel, too, had used the term in his philosophy, as in the Phenomenology of Spirit already mentioned and in his case this also referred to a “coming to appearance” of things, in the sense that all objects were seen as manifestations of the creative force or spirit. Like Hegel, Husserl was also concerned with the search for certainty in our knowledge of the world, and both philosophers also referred back to the work of Kant. Kant had addressed this question of the relations between the mind and the world in his enquires into the “conditions of possibility” of knowledge, but he had concluded that reality “in itself” was unknowable – that the mind was denied complete access to the outside world. In Kant’s view the mind produces its own version of reality, one shaped by our cognitive capacities, although this can result in the conclusion that we see the world through a veil, or a distorting mirror which – inevitably, some would argue – obstructs our understanding. Later philosophers would interpret this in a more positive light but in Husserl’s time this was seen as a shortcoming – the admission by philosophy that its ideas were unreliable and lacking the objective truth of modern science. The desire to raise philosophy to the level of a “rigorous science” inspired Husserl in his quest for a new approach: he was determined to find a way in to this realm of things-in-themselves, by examining the way things appeared to the mind.

Today”, this split is actually brought about by a false opposition between purposeful and purpose-free objects. He was writing in response to the call by Adolf Loos for an architecture that was free of “unnecessary” ornament, but this definition of what was necessary in the design of a building was seen by Adorno as fundamentally problematic. He described how the two issues were historically connected – such that ornament often derived from construction – and, by the same token, how supposedly “pure” technical objects soon acquired symbolic significance for their users. In the latter case this would apply to large scale structures, like the Eiffel Tower or the Brooklyn Bridge, and on a smaller scale this can also be seen in people’s relationships with their cars or computers. The implications of Adorno’s essay for this discussion concern the notion of architectural expression, the fact that even though one might attempt to design a purely functional building, one can’t avoid the question of meaning. As soon as one produces something, of whatever description, one unavoidably enters the realm of representation. To use a linguistic analogy to express this idea more simply, one cannot separate what is said from the manner of the saying. If architecture, thus, is inevitably caught up in the complex web of cultural “languages”, then questions of interpretation become more important, in order to understand the full potential of design.

         Having established that architecture should be seen as a “language” of expression, as well as a means of providing useful enclosure, the final three chapters of this book set out possible strategies of interpretation, as a means of bridge to gap between the two cultures mentioned above. All three involve some compromise between the two tendencies described already, in terms of the “objectivity” of science versus the “subjectivity” of art, although in this chapter the debate leans somewhat towards the latter.

         Phenomenology is a philosophy that considers the individual’s experience – although with the ultimate aim of producing a solid basis for knowledge – and as such has proved particularly influential in architecture, due in large part to its emphasis on perception and cognition. The term itself has been the subject of considerable confusion, as different philosophers have made use of it in different ways, and although