DISSERTATION PROPOSAL- MAIN IDEA:

Architecture, light and senses: How philosophy can help us understand

architecture and how we experience it through the senses.

TOPIC STATEMENT:
Architecture, when applied, intervenes with space and landscapes and has a direct
impact in our sensory experience. This paper will explore and analyze how the
diachronic philosophical theory of phenomenology can help us understand and
expose this impact, not only as a flattened visual experience, but also as a holistic
body sensation. It will further argue that the phenomenological approach can lead us
to fathom the essential meaning of architecture, not only as a trade or a profession,
an art, a science, a technology, an ideology but also as a condition that pertains
human life in all its aspects.

OVERVIEW
An analysis of architecture in conjunction with light and the senses, using the
phenomenological philosophical framework as a starting point, is not a new approach
but it has always been a quest in the application of architecture, in construction, in
aesthetics, in functionality, in our actual everyday sensory experiences. Since
architecture is directly connected with human life and activity, it can take the form of
many meanings, but it remains an invariable intervention in spaces and landscapes.

According to Juhani Pallasmaa, architecture is the main means we have in our

perpetual effort to assign human dimensions in space and time, by taming the first
one in order to become habitable. So while, trying to practically build our
surroundings, existential questions arise that can only be answered through
philosophy. This is how philosophy can help us understand architecture.
EXAMPLES & EVIDENCE
In order to examine how architecture stimulates the senses and make us, humans,
belong and intergrade in our environment, firstly we have to be guided down the path
of phenomenology: a diachronic philosophical theory of exploring the phenomena by
studying the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first person point of
view, that is, how and what we experience. Many philosophers have contributed and

infiltrated into this theory, from G.W.F. Hegel, Kant, Edmund Husserl, Martin
Heidegger to contemporary architects who managed to incorporate this philosophy in
their ideas, designs and buildings. From Frank Lloyd Wright, to Juhani Pallasmaa,
Peter Zumthor and Christian Norberg-Schulz, phenomenology on architecture was
an essential movement in the early stages of post-modern architecture, emphasizing
on how the senses and our body perceive and understand the relationship between
object and subject. By adopting this particular knowledge in architecture, a specific
approach emerged, that many of the so-called architectural phenomenologists
followed, while others found it its application more contradictory, or even managed to
take it a step further, such as Alvar Aalto and his organic architecture.
THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS PAPER
The importance of this architectural approach and the reason it evolved lies in the
fact that modern architecture, mostly dominated by the visual experience, tends to
flatten our other sensory images. Modern sharp-edged buildings with unreal material
are the products of instrumentalised technology while the sense of alienation and
unreality is reinforced by their reflective windows, losing the continuity of the external
and the internal and all ontological meaning. So the question that we will attempt to
answer is whether phenomenology in architecture can add more essential meaning
to it, since it is not merely a trade, a profession, a science, an art, a technology, but
all the above with all the necessary hints of political, social and symbolic ideology
that pertain human life in general, if we can experience it all at once with all our
senses.
METHODOLOGY
This paper will lay the necessary theoretical and historical- framework in order to
understand phenomenology as a philosophy, how it has been applied in architectural
designs, ideas and projects and will examine how such architecture is related to the
senses and light (since light in perceived via at least one of our senses). It will
examine selective works by the above-mentioned architects and theorists and it will
actually apply the phenomenological method to their study: that is, it will include a
substantial amount of photographic material and designs not only to support its case,
but also to use it as an experience of what is written.

Suggested bibliography:

Hauptmann, Deborah (Ed), The Body in Architecture (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers,

2006)
Moran,

Dermot,

and

Timothy

Mooney. The

Phenomenology

Reader. Oxon:

Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2002.

Norberg-Schulz, Christian,

Genius

Loci:

Towards

Phenomenology

of

Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980)

Pallasmaa, Juhanni

(2005) 2nd ed.The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the

Senses London: John Wiley & Sons

Wright, Frank Lloyd (1971) The Future of Architecture New York: Dover Publications