Phenomenology and the rise of the Post-Modern

Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern

by Jorge Otero-Pailos Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 Review by Bryan E. Norwood

menology as a related but separate movement from philosophical phenomenology, one that attempted to combine the intellectual with the corporeal through a variety of media treated as means of providing embodied, experiential communication. Further, Otero-Pailos—pointing to phenomenology’s key role in the intellectualization of architecture through Ph.D. programs and in the development of studio methodologies focused on a direct, individual “experience” of architecture—reminds us of an important thread in the fabric of contemporary architectural education, theory, and practice.

Active engagement with architecture’s history was essential to the program of the first generation of phenomenologically oriented architects, but purposeful ahistoricism, according to Otero-Pailos, was actually fundamental to their approach. After an overview of the phenomenological project in chapter one, Otero-Pailos takes up Princeton architecture professor Jean Labatut’s “Eucharistic” or “poetic” architecture in chapter two, an architecture that erased “every aspect of the building that made it historical” through what Labatut called “intentional forgetting” (AHT 93). Labatut made architecture and its history an immediately accessible presence. What mattered was the contemporary architect’s interpretation of the experience a historical building afforded. Chapter three discusses Charles Moore, a student of Labatut’s, who continued the tradition of phenomenology as presence by seeing architecture as what Otero-Pailos calls “a vessel for transhistorical meanings that he believed to be universally accessible through immediate, preverbal experiences” (103). The authenticity of immediate experiences—experiences Moore obsessively tried to capture with his small aedicule spaces and oversized “supergraphics”—made the observer the ground of history. Although the subject of Otero-Pailos’s fifth and final chapter, Kenneth Frampton, is set apart from the others in terms of his political and social tone—a result of his Marxism and his reading of Hannah Arendt— Otero-Pailos insists that Frampton’s idea of “critical regionalism” was his earlier concept of “surplus experience” renamed (238) and thus still relied on the bodily experience of the architect-historian for its decoding and encoding (243).

Throughout Architecture’s Historical Turn, OteroPailos repeatedly accuses these three and others of being more or less reductive and ahistorical, misreading philosophy, conflating key terminology, and namedropping and invoking philosophical language for

Over half a century ago, Maurice Merleau-Ponty began Phenomenology of Perception with a question: “What is phenomenology?” He continues: “It may seem strange that this question has still to be asked half a century after the first works of Husserl. The fact remains that it has by no means been answered.”1 However, stranger than this is the fact that many architectural thinkers seem to treat this question as largely settled. Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, Peter Zumthor, and many of their acolytes have been identified (and self-identified) as architectural phenomenologists. Appropriating terminology from phenomenological philosophers, most recently Merleau-Ponty (intertwining, chiasm, etc.), these contemporaries have branded and institutionalized their approach with varying levels of surety.2 Rejecting what they perceive as the technological, nihilistic, consumeristic, and disembodied trends of what we might call Postmodern (or late Modern) architecture and culture, they see their practice as an ethically motivated clearing in the middle of a chaotic, superficial culture.

Phenomenology, at large and in architecture, is both a method of theorization that proceeds by “showing” and a historical movement. Even if we are able to point to contemporary and historical groups of practitioners that can be branded as phenomenological, we are still left with a fundamental question: What is architectural phenomenology as a method and way of thinking? The attempt at an answer is what makes Jorge Otero-Pailos’s recent book, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern, intriguing. OteroPailos, an architect and assistant professor at Columbia University, through a self-styled “polygraphic” historiography (opposed to a monographic historiography based on the narratives of self-identified groups or styles), traces the development of phenomenology and architectural historiography in the late 1940s through the early 1980s and offers a different take on the relation of phenomenology to Postmodernism, one in which phenomenology makes the Postmodern possible.3 Through discussions of Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton, Otero-Pailos historically situates architectural pheno-

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theoretical credibility. However, he saves some of his most aggressive criticism for the subject of chapter four, Christian Norberg-Schulz: “[H]is photo[historio]graphy was fundamentally antihistorical; it attempted to ward off critical reflection by concealing its own historical construction. Norberg-Schulz passed off his photographs as universally valid visions of a timeless natural order that modern architects were invited to return to, in order to escape history” (AHT 146). Because of the assertive nature of this chapter and what I perceive to be its lack of rigor and accuracy, I would like to spend time unpacking it.

Otero-Pailos repeatedly insists that topology—a term Norberg-Schulz appropriates from the psychologist Jean Piaget that describes mathematical relations based on deformations such as twisting and stretching—is used in Norberg-Schulz’s first major work, Intentions in Architecture (1968),4 to refer to “the invisible origin of architecture and its history” (AHT 158). NorbergSchulz’s most sustained discussion of topology in Intentions occurs in the midst of his theorization of formal analysis, in which he suggests that topological and geometrical relations are the two basic categories that can be used in the analysis of the elements and relations that make up architectural form. On the one hand, topological relations have no necessary space but instead are based on how things hang together in sequences, clusters, closures, and breaks (IN 44, 140–46). One of his examples of topological relations is the Agora in Athens, where the arrangement of spaces depends on sequences, not on strongly rationalized lines. Geometrical relations, on the other hand, are defined by perspective and spatial properties. These two analytical categories are the result of the development of what Norberg-Schulz calls “schemata”; a “schema” is defined as “a typical attitude or a characteristic coherence-system” (41)—essentially, a way of making sense of the world.5 Since Kant, a difference between the “transcendent” and the “transcendental” has been drawn.6 Roughly, the transcendent is completely beyond immanent experience, whereas the transcendental sets the conditions for the possibility of immanent experience. God is transcendent, while Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception acts like a computer waiting for content to be input and output. It seems clear that NorbergSchulz’s schemata create a transcendental but shapable system (not a transcendent, inaccessible origin) that sets the conditions for the possibility of experience. In Kant’s terms, they act as a form through which content gets

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ordered, and as Norberg-Schulz writes, “To ‘learn to see,’ above all means to acquire schemata which allow an adequate intentional depth,” and “[t]he schemata give form to the world, because they organize the phenomena as manifestations of objects” (IN 42–43). In Intentions, topology is initially described as one of the first schemata the child develops. However, adults always use several schemata, and the ways in which a person uses her schemata changes and develops through education, experience, and exercise (46, 196– 97).

As one reads through Intentions, one finds very little of what Otero-Pailos calls a “topological historiography” (AHT 167–68) in the sense of architecture being reduced to a topology.7 Norberg-Schulz does point out that primitive architecture tends to be topological, but this does not amount to a claim that all architecture is essentially topological or that we need to look at primitive architecture to find architecture’s truth.8 In fact, NorbergSchulz is anything but reductive in defining architectural experience, since he allows that most architecture is a result of a combination of geometrical and topological relationships (IN 145, 196). He even goes so far as to suggest that while furniture and towns are often topological, pieces of architecture are more often dependent on geometrical relations in organization (176). Even further, in regard to his theoretical framework’s relation to history, Norberg-Schulz writes that “[a]lthough the theory should be able to cover the architectural structures of any epoch, this does not imply that architecture has an absolute basis. In itself the theory is ‘empty’” (102).

This theory provides a basis for the analysis of “any architectural totality” or “intermediary object” (102) through various schemata, topology being one, but he does not insist that his theory is “timeless.” If NorbergSchulz insisted that schemata were absolute and unchanging, he could be criticized for creating a transcendental, ahistorical foundation without content (empty form), but he sees the schemata that make up his theoretical lenses as flexible and part of the cultural milieu of a particular time (41–51, 79–82, 114).

Topologies are not invisible figures beyond representation (they are a form of schematization), they are not the mystical origin of architecture (they are transcendental, not transcendent), and they are not a totalizing historical methodology (although they take part in historical investigation). Topologies are quite simply a form of schematization that played a major role in early architectural form and continue to play a major role in the urban environment. Topologies are not “figures” beyond

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representation; they simply are one of many transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience.9

relatively stable, some of which are “universal elementary structures (archetypes),” some “socially or culturally constructed conditions,” and some “personal idiosyncrasies” (ESA 11). Just as in Intentions, Norberg-Schulz points out that a person’s schemata are “somewhat modified” by each new experience. Experiencing “architectural space” helps create and modify a person’s schemata, while at the same time a person’s schematic totality, or existential space, is concretized into architectural space through the creation of an environment that matches up with his existential space (12–15). As a product of concretized schemata, architectural space is distanced from immediate experience by NorbergSchulz: “It is impossible to discuss architectural space systematically when perceptual space is taken as the point of departure. What one describes in this way are subjective architectural experiences, and one would have to arrive at the absurd conclusion that ‘architecture comes into being only when experienced’” (13). The concept of existential space—or environmental image or schemata—concretized as architectural space is meant to overcome architecture treated as mere Euclidian space but also as mere immediate perceptual experience.

For Norberg-Schulz, a theory of existential space comprises both abstract schemata (topological and geometrical) and concrete elements of the image of the environment (landscape, townscape, buildings, and physical things) (ESA 18). Just as in Intentions, the topological schemata is one of the most basic or elementary schemata and is a fundamental property of existential space. It is one of the first schemata developed by the child and was the main way primitive man managed the world. A human is, in her infancy, at the center of her own topological space, but as her schemata develop, she establishes stable “places,” or centers, where particular social interactions occur (for example, the home of a friend or family member, an office space, a gym) (19–20).

These places—formed by “proximity, centralization and closure”—are “the basic elements of existential space” (20). However, just as in Intentions, Norberg-Schulz realizes that places have an “inside and an outside,” and that place is thus always “‘situated’ within a larger context” (20). Paths depend on places to be between, places depend on the ability to be departed from and returned to, and domains unify existential space through a field of potentiality in which paths and places congeal (20–25). These three basic schemata are “the constituent elements of existential space,” and “geometrization” is used to make the relations more precise.13

ARCHITECTURAL EXPERIENCE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE DENSITY OF WHAT IS NOT SEEN AND WHAT IS UNKNOWN. It seems that at the core of Otero-Pailos’s reading is a conflation of experience simpliciter with architecture itself (AHT 157–58), a conflation that Norberg-Schulz explicitly rejects (IN 195–196). The experience of architecture depends on a combination of the relevant schemata used in the correct way, and it is the experience of a concrete intermediate object, not the thing-in-itself. Otero-Pailos’s confounding arises from his unsubstantiated claim that Norberg-Schulz equated the child’s development with the (adult) architect’s creative capacity.10 The systematic overestimation of topology by Otero-Pailos renders his claim that NorbergSchulz should have realized that “his topological history was incapable of determining its topological source” irrelevant, because it proceeds from a general confusion (AHT 158). In fact, counter to Otero-Pailos’s claim that this failure was the result of not following Wittgenstein far enough, Norberg-Schulz actually explicitly quotes Wittgenstein in making this point: “That the objects exist, means only that they are constituted as the most permanent relations between phenomena. Thus they have no independent existence and it is meaningless to talk about ‘das Ding an sich’” (IN 28–29). NorbergSchulz no doubt misunderstands the philosophical project of phenomenology in Intentions when he writes, “A ‘phenomenological’ description is an illusion, as it necessarily has to classify the phenomena, that is, it has to be carried out in terms of objects” (53). However, the failure here is not one of naïve realism, which insists that what we see is what exists, but rather a failure to realize that phenomenology is ontology.11 Otero-Pailos then moves on to discuss NorbergSchulz’s second major book, Existence, Space & Architecture (1971), where he suggests that Norberg-Schulz renamed topologies “existential spaces” (AHT 165). As with some of the claims discussed above, the supporting evidence is weak.12 Norberg-Schulz defines existential space as the unification of our schemata, which are

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THE FIRST GENERATION OF ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMENOLOGISTS REINSTATED A VERSION OF POSITIVISM BASED ON CLICHÉS ABOUT THE PRIMORDIAL NATURE OF THE EXPERIENCING SUBJECT, LEAVING MODERNISM’S SCIENTIFIC PROJECT MORE INTACT THAN EVER. This seemingly systematic structure is complicated

by Otero-Pailos by insisting that Norberg-Schulz runs two contradictory arguments in Existence, using the text to say that existential spaces are unrepresentable while using photographs and diagrams to represent these existential spaces: “In the midst of sentences unequivocally stating that topologies are beyond representation, a topology [or existential space] was diagrammatically represented as a circle with a marked center” (AHT 165).

Unfortunately, it is hard to understand where this claim comes from—Otero-Pailos provides no citations or quotes to support it.14 In fact, Norberg-Schulz explicitly asserts the opposite: “The ‘field’ of ‘existential space’ is represented (concretized) by a corresponding architectural field” (IN 99). The architectural object is the structure of an inner condition; concretization is a process of representation. Are the photos not just showing examples of architectural spaces that concretize existential spaces?

Are the diagrams not just another semi-architectural medium for concretizing the existential schemata that structure our experience? While right about NorbergSchulz’s tendency to glorify the genius loci in Existence (although it is not nearly as simpleminded as it is presented in Architecture’s Historical Turn) (ESA 68–69, 105, 114), Otero-Pailos’s uncharitable and inaccurate reading of Intentions and Existence leads to a conclusion filled with robust claims about an argumentative straw man: “topological historiography.”

The final terminological shift Otero-Pailos finds in Norberg-Schulz is the replacement of topologies, or exist-

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ential spaces, with “genius loci” or “aletheic images” (AHT 173), the first of which is the title for NorbergSchulz’s third major work. Because of its broader philosophical implications, I will return to the issue of aletheic (from Heidegger’s reading of truth as aletheia) images in a moment and for now turn attention to Genius Loci (1979). In discussing Genius Loci, Otero-Pailos continues to insist that the text suggests that the hidden essence could never be grasped, but the images, in contradiction, showed it (and as with his discussion of Existence, very little support for this claim is given) (AHT 177).

In a rough summary of the book, Otero-Pailos reconstructs Norberg-Schulz’s argument as a plea to reground man-made architectural order in the more primordial natural, visual order. This, however, according to Otero-Pailos, “was not nature’s visual order; it was Norberg-Schulz’s disguised prejudices elevated to the plane of the natural” (AHT 179). Essentially, the claim is that Norberg-Schulz fails to understand that there are many ways of interpreting the environment and thus many ways of constructing place: “Indeed, Norberg-Schulz’s architectural phenomenology undermined local specificity by limiting its possible manifestations to a set of a priori universal archetypes. More problematically, the theory of genius loci created a place of exception where modern architects could appear tolerant of all historical cultures while acting out their prejudice against theories of history that demanded a practice be historically accountable” (181). Although this criticism is on the right track, it still seems largely heavy-handed and unfair, as I will explain.

Genius Loci continues with many of the earlier developed themes—topology, geometry, schemata, paths, places, and domains. Norberg-Schulz still insists that the schemata the child develops “comprise universal structures which are interhuman, as well as locally determined and culturally conditioned structures.”15 The schemata of a particular person, at least partially, are a product of place from which she comes (for example, “I am a Bostonian”), which is a collection of natural and man-made conditions. With more direct appeals to Heidegger than appear in his earlier work, Norberg-Schulz suggests that dwelling occurs when humans concretize (structure), and thus make meaningful, their environment through architecture (and art) that makes a space into a place. Genius loci, “the spirit of place,” is the “concrete reality man has to face and come to terms with in his daily life” (GL 5, 18–19).

An interesting tension develops between the subjective schemata of an individual, which collectively make up

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his “identity” that determines the accessible “world,” and the fundamental and independent genius loci of a particular place. Dwelling reconciles these poles through “identification,” which means “to become ‘friends’ with a particular place” (21).

Norberg-Schulz’s architectural desire is for the concretization of the structure of our “being-in-theworld,” and Otero-Pailos’s reduction of the argument to a simple plea for copying the natural order in a concretized, man-made environment misses the double relativity to man and world that Norberg-Schulz sets up. The unstated example on which Otero-Pailos rests his case is Norberg-Schulz’s discussion of the Dipoli by Reima Pietilä (1961–66) (AHT 179; GL 199–201). In paraphrasing this discussion, he suggests that Norberg-Schulz thinks place can be recovered through the “‘universally valid approach’ of visualizing the topological structure of the landscape” (AHT 179). Norberg-Schulz originally suggests that the Dipoli is not a “‘model’ to be imitated” but that the approach of Pietilä is universally valid, one that uses “a new kind of topological space which visualizes the structure of the Finnish landscape, and the choice of materials and forms gives the intention the most convincing presence” (GL 200). What exactly about this approach is universal? Is it the topological space? Is it the materials and forms? Is it the presence of the intention? Fortunately, Norberg-Schulz immediately gives several other “analogous” examples. First, the metal-and-glass buildings of James Stirling are “eminently English and seem to embody ‘the dream of the people of the factory.’”16 Second, the houses by Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull, Whitaker concretize the “American genius,” and these architects are quoted as saying “[t]he dreams which accompany all human actions should be nurtured by the places in which people live.”17 Finally, Ricardo Bofill’s pyramid-monument gathers the shapes of the surrounding mountains into a “man-made geometry, whereas the crowning ‘temple’ recalls a decisive moment in the history of Catalonia.” Norberg-Schulz sums this up as a “most convincing synthesis of general, local and temporal factors” (GL 200). It seems that the universally valid approach is not so much the visualization of the topology of natural landscape as it is capturing the existential structure of the everyday lifeworld. This includes capturing both the schemata that characterize the inhabitants and the genius loci of local, natural, and man-made environments.

Looking back at Existence, we can now see that the division of existential space into abstract schemata and concrete environmental properties maps onto the double

relativity of architecture to human schemata and environmental properties in Genius Loci. Genius loci is not a replacement for existential space, it is one- half of existential space. The focus on schemata in Intentions covers the other half of existential space, and topology is merely the more originary half (the other being geometry) of architectural schematization. The systematic relation of these terms produces a relatively clear analytical method, but as I mentioned earlier, it seems that Otero-Pailos is on the right track with his final critique of Norberg-Schulz. Filling out this critique of NorbergSchulz’s overall system will then occupy the remainder of this discussion as I return to the notion of aletheia, or truth. Unfortunately, Otero-Pailos’s muddled discussion of Heidegger continues the architectural tradition of conflating and confusing terminology by glossing complicated philosophical relationships, and this underdeveloped discussion leads to a very confused account of aletheia and thus of aletheic images.18 Thus I will try to clarify the nature of this term in Heidegger, which I hope can bring some clarity to what can be a very strong critique of Norberg-Schulz.

Norberg-Schulz has been disparaged for interpreting the loss of place as something the architect can easily remedy. Although the debate over exactly what Heidegger thought was possible through poiesis and techne is important, it seems to me that Norberg-Schulz’s problem is more fundamental. The real shortcoming is a failure to understand Heidegger on the derivative nature of presence from a more primary absence, a relationship that Norberg-Schulz consistently overlooks.19 According to Otero-Pailos, Norberg-Schulz’s aletheic image is a visual phenomenon that cuts across history, once again finding its roots in experience, albeit an experience that he thought was universal, ringing in harmony with the natural universe. Otero-Pailos suggests that by reading aletheia “to be a purely visual phenomenon… Norberg-Schulz used Heidegger as a theoretical mask to add philosophical credibility to the visual project of modernism, at the precise moment modernism seemed destined to die” (AHT 176). The problem with this claim is that nowhere is any evidence provided that aletheia and image were combined by Norberg-Schulz into the phrase “aletheic image.” However, another way into this critique directly from Genius Loci is through the issue of presence. In discussing manmade places, Norberg-Schulz writes that “all these ‘places’ begin their ‘presencing’ (being) from the boundaries” (GL 58). Indeed, throughout all of these books, Norberg-Schulz repeatedly treats existential space and

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its concretization into architectural space as an issue of presence, and presencing as “truth” (and in the above quote explicitly as “being”), which we might alternately read as aletheia (Norberg-Schulz, “Heidegger’s Thinking,” 39; GL 6, 15, 170, 185).

NO MATTER WHAT PERSPECTIVE I TAKE OF THE TABLE BEFORE ME, IT NEVER FULLY REVEALS ITSELF TO ME. THE TABLE AND I ARE IN A PHENOMENOLOGICAL RELATIONSHIP OF BRINGING FORTH FROM CONCEALMENT AND RETURNING TO ABSENCE. Assuming that the phrase “aletheic image” is used in unpublished work, the question we should be asking is why Norberg-Schulz insists on alethia while forgetting lethe, truth rather than the hiddenness of untruth.

For Heidegger, particularly in the middle period of his writing, aletheia is a privative concept, a-letheia, with the a depriving lethe of its originary hiddenness.20 The negative word presents a positive condition; truth is unhiddenness, the making presence out of an absence.

Truth is a revealing of the hiddenness characteristic of beings in their Being. To take a simple phenomenological example, the table in front of me reveals itself in a certain perspective; it partially shows itself to me. However, much of the table’s possibilities remain hidden, and no matter what perspective of the table I take, it never fully reveals itself to me. The table and I are involved in a constant phenomenological relationship of showing, or bringing forth from concealment and a returning to absence. In the same way, a piece of architecture is a manifestation of a deeper movement of Being that always remains at least partially unseen and can never be made fully present at once.21 The modern technolog-ical mindset seeks to overcome these limitations, but Heideggerinsists that what presences itself to humanity out of the more basic absence of lethe is not entirely our choice and that technology simply covers up its inability to make everything present.

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The presencing of an architectural experience is bound up with a more originary absence, and the determination of what presences itself to humanity is intertwined with the historical movement of Being. In a proper Heideggerian vein then, architectural experience is not simply derivative of a transcendental subject and the world horizon of present nature; its history is not simply a history of built forms and interpreted nature.

Instead, architectural experience is made possible by the density of what is not seen and what is unknown.

In the Beiträge, through the distinction of Geschichte and Historie, Heidegger distinguishes history as Being’s historical movements, the primordial presencing and absencing of Being (an event that Dasein does not fully control), from history as a represented object, the complete presence of historicism.22 In the former sense, architecture comprehended as being-historically (seinsgeschichtlich) overcomes Modernism’s ahistoricism by acknowledging that both subjective schemata and objective nature are instances of presence within absence. Norberg-Schulz’s shortcoming is then in his failure to be historically accountable, but not because he makes architecture ahistorical in relation to Historie; in fact, counter to Otero-Pailos’s criticisms, he very clearly acknowledges that different places and different times produce different forms. However, Norberg-Schulz continues Modernism’s ahistoricism in respect to Geschichte, because he fails to follow Heidegger in his regress from truth to untruth (so does Otero-Pailos), from presence to absence. This then is a fundamental critique of Norberg-Schulz, and indeed of architectural phenomenology, that has great potential.23 Despite the extreme shortcomings of the fourth chapter, Otero-Pailos’s general conclusion about Norberg-Schulz’s generation of architectural phenomenologists seems right. Although they did significant work in freeing architecture from the dominance of the art historian’s typically linear history and from some of Modernism’s deterministic functionalism, the first generation of architectural phenomenologists also reinstated a version of positivism based on clichés about the primordial nature of the experiencing subject, leaving Modernism’s scientific project more intact than ever.

Otero-Pailos rightly takes phenomenology to task for its simplistic foundationalism and warns that we are not free of the grasps of architectural phenomenology and its ahistorical tendencies (AHT 262). However, his focus on architectural phenomenology as a historical trend leads to an often simplistic, if not reductive, version of architectural phenomenology as a methodology.

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Proceeding with this warning in mind, this book should certainly be read by those interested in architectural theory, since it reminds us so well of an important part of the beginnings of this young discipline. The importance of experience and its relationship to architectural intellectualization, as well as the relationship of architectural practice to its history, played a major part in the agenda of Labatut, Moore, Norberg-Schulz, and Frampton, and Jorge Otero-Pailos has given us a good history of these influential figures.

Finally, Otero-Pailos’s book helps us understand the roots of self-aggrandizing rhetoric of contemporary architectural phenomenologists, who suggest that the way back to authentic, meaningful architecture is through a specific mode of phenomenological practice focused on embodied experience. While claiming an ability to resist late-modern culture, architectural phenomenology still voices a metaphysics of presence by assuming the world is constituted by observing subjects and architectural objects. As long as architectural phenomenology proceeds from the subject who experiences architecture, as an architectural method it will conceive of experience in a foundational way. In its essence, the danger of architectural phenomenology is to denounce positivism while at the same time sneaking it in the backdoor. However, these shortcomings should not automatically lead to a hasty move past phenomenology; they may suggest that we need to think about phenomenological methodology more carefully.

Merleau-Ponty recognized this shortcoming in his shift from Phenomenology of Perception to the unfinished The Visible and the Invisible, where he writes in an oft cited working note: “The problems posed in [Phenomenology of Perception] are insoluble because I started there from the ‘consciousness’-‘object’ distinction.”24 Through careful, critical self-reflecti`on on phenomenology as an architectural method, a task to which I hope to have contributed in a small way here, architectural phenomenology can still have a productive future.

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