April 8, 1985Response to article "The Phenomenology of Architecture," a seminar with Dalibor Vesely at the University of Houston in 1984. Sent by Lovy to T:
You arty types are all alike. Go ahead, make fun of phenomenology, go ahead and make my day...
Ahem, well...Hegel wrote his "Phenomenology of Mind" but even Russell says that Hegel is the hardest to understand of all the great philosophers. So why bother? Isn't life hard enough?
Let's try Kant. From "The Critique of Pure Reason" Kant states that the immediate objects of perception are due partly to external things and partly to our own perceptive apparatus. Simple enough--dualism. There's more...Locke said that secondary qualities (color, sound, smell, etc.) are subjective and do not belong to the object as it is in itself. Kant goes further and says that primary qualities are also subjective. Our sensations do have causes, thing-in-themselves which he calls "noumena" (got your notebook handy? You should know this). What appears to us in perception, which he calls a "phenomenon" consists of two parts: that due to the object (sensation) and that due to our subjective apparatus (the form of the phenomenon). The latter is not itself sensation and therefore not dependent upon the accident of environment. It is always the same, we carry it around with us, and it is a priori in that it is not dependent upon experience. A pure form of sensibility is called a "pure intuition" (Anschauung) and there are two such forms, space and time, one for the outer sense, one for the inner.
And on and on.
So why should the architect study this? He shouldn't. The architect should study architecture. The philosopher should study philosophy (the phenomenologist phenomenology) and in this age of specialization it is rare to find both lodged in the same mind and body, but that is exactly what should happen.
When an architect studies architecture, his architecture, an artist his art, he is studying his own creation of form and I would think that any artist creating form outside of the marketplace would naturally come to a fork in the road of his thinking, mainly when do the materials being dealt with stop being material and start being form. New form, adequate form. When does paint become PAINT, line LINE, art ART? Difficult questions for the poor dumb artist to come to terms with and enough to make him stop altogether. And so he passes it on to the critic, the philosopher, whomever, to hash out so he can get on with his work.
And the artist is kind of a poor, dumb animal because he can only think what can be thought, know what he knows, and the more he works the more he discovers how much he knows and the more lost he can become. He needs structure, a structure of words and a vocabulary that can be understood by others. Because T. Wolfe was right--we can't see a painting until we read it and we only read words. Actually, Duchamp knew this before Wolfe, and Leonardo before them both. It's a matter of Public Relations.
The point is to develop this structure from the work, not the other way around. An artist who is working, creating form will, as I said, stumble upon the whole idea of phenomenology--if only in desperation. It may not be Merleau-Ponty, or Kant, but it is a basic idea and usually comes out as "why the fuck am I doing this."
The artist creating "for the market," be it aesthetic or commercial, is another matter and I won't go into that here (though it seems to be a central point in the article).
I also won't go into "reality" because I'd much rather talk about form and as long as we're being esoteric let's go all the way.
I have great sympathy for the architect as artist because he must deal with a problem so great that I can only see defeat in trying to overcome it---realization, the actual creating of form and just what method to use to create that form. A painter can scale down his ambitions but an architect cannot scale down his form without creating a model that is suppose to represent something else. But maybe we all do that in one way or another. It's a toss-up. A very tricky question. Is an architect who writes his architecture really an architect? Probably, unless you give qualitative interpretations to words (titles, really) like architect, artist etc. And reading through Doxiadis it appears that Greek builders thought their cities more than built them.
We often create adequate form (not new form, that's a modernist conceit) when we least expect it. But that doesn't mean we created it without thought. Perhaps because the Greeks had their religion (in the sense Jaynes talks about) they did not need phenomenology--they already had it. That common ground that both expressed and formed their thoughts.
Only an academic could think that an architect was superior to an engineer because an academic must specialize. And an academic must have his "talk" down pat in order to get that tenure, that job, that credential, the respect. So he has to toss out a few names and I suppose Heidegger is as good a name as any.
But just because an academic uses these ideas to improve his worth in the marketplace doesn't mean the nonacademic shouldn't deal with them, and deal with them in a way that others can join in the discussion (and by "others" I mean the artist's other, his philosopher, his critic, etc.).
You flinch at the mention of context but it is really a nice, convenient, easy term and I'm even tempted to use it instead of phenomenon (but I won't). We all live in the same world but we dwell in our own context. And if you agree with Kant that all sensation is subjective we can only perceive through what we know, our context. And adequate form created becomes part of the context, your's and their's, and the context changes even, I suppose, after we blow everybody up and there is no one to "think" anymore.
So why does the artist need the philosopher? Because any artist has to come to terms with limits, his own technique and the material he works with, and the best way to overcome those limits is through words, be they phenomenology, hermeneutics or anything else that uses words. But the artist never forgets, can't forget, the work (the drawing) because that is how the artist thinks.
Forgive the typos, my editor is on vacation as is the proofreader. My advice is to forget the article and think these thoughts on your own.