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Epilogue: After Architectural Phenomenology
- University of Minnesota Press
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EPILOGUE After Architectural Phenomenology Architectural phenomenology radically transformed architectural historiography , expanding traditional theories of history beyond mere writing conventions to include a more ambiguous experiential intellectual realm expressed through photography, graphic design, camouflage studies, and in short, a wealth of visual techniques imported from architectural practice. Yet the intellectual history of architecture has once again become surprisingly text-centric. Contemporary textbooks and compendia on the history of architectural intellectuality invariably mention phenomenology as a major movement and include the writings of architectural phenomenologists.1 What is transmitted in these reprints are the words, but not their visual context. A lot of information is lost through this operation, such as the original graphic layout, image quality, and size. The assumption is that architectural intellectuality is exclusively textual. Presenting the texts ripped from their historic visual context grants them the autonomy from aesthetics that is precisely in question. The problem of decontextualization is compounded by the fact that the presentation of architectural ideas is seldom tied to the social history of the discipline. Yet, it was the social struggle to legitimize a more inclusive, and indeed ambiguous, understanding of architectural intellectuality that motivated architectural phenomenologists to engage and transform architectural history. A history of architectural intellectuality that accounts for the multiple ways intellectual work manifests itself, in light of the social struggle to recognize those alternative practices as legitimate forms of understanding, has been sorely missing from our field. Whether we agree or not with the claims about architectural intellectuality made by architectural phenomenologists is not the issue. The question is to properly account historically that those claims were made, and to grasp the manner in which they were put forth. The history of architectural intellectuality would be distorted if we had begun our inquiry with the assumption that words are the only thing that goes into theories of architectural history. What was written is 251 clearly important, but it is only a part of what was really going on in architectural discourse. Architectural phenomenology involved the rise of a generation from within another, individuals, institutions, and dates: the prewar generation of Labatut; the postwar generation of Moore, Norberg-Schulz, Frampton; and the American university system during the 1960s and 1970s. But architectural phenomenology was not willed into being by these individuals and their social circles. Within architectural phenomenology, these names designate not just persons or subjects, but a way of dealing with a particular concern—just as the names of some musicians are associated with certain genres of music. These architectural phenomenologists did not consciously collaborate with one another to create architectural phenomenology. They did not write a collective manifesto. Architectural phenomenology emerged as the intersection of what mattered to these individuals and how these concerns functioned, or were functionally woven together in architectural discourse. What mattered to architectural phenomenologists was intellectuality, bodily experience, and history. Each of these matters had a long history within architecture. But architectural phenomenologists wove them into a new coherence , making them appear inseparable. Architectural phenomenologists functionally wove these three matters together primarily through publications, courses at schools of architecture, and the social unity that comes from a shared mark of distinction, which in this case was becoming architect-historians. Architectural phenomenology functioned through platforms that, as Jean-Louis Cohen has pointed out, are the mechanisms of affirmation and constitution used traditionally by the avant-garde, namely the social sect, the school, and the press.2 But we should be careful not to depict architectural phenomenology as an avant-garde. The word avant-garde denotes a consciously willed phenomenon, even an oedipal sense of killing one’s predecessors, that we would be hard-pressed to find in architectural phenomenology. Indeed the history of architectural phenomenology calls into question the bestowal of the power to change discourse on avant-garde groups. The profound impact of architectural phenomenology on the transformation of architecture’s cultural order during the 1970s reveals the blind fetishism of those who insist on reducing architectural history to selfidentified groups of architects. Architectural phenomenology shows the 1970s turn toward history, which was so central to postmodernism, to be imbricated in matters of intellectuality and bodily experience. The rethinking of architectural intellectuality effected by architectural phenomenology was partly an attempt 252 EPILOGUE [18.208.203.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:55 GMT) to resolve long-standing tensions and contradictions between existing architectural discourses on history and bodily experience. Modern architects’ understanding of experience was a product of crucial nineteenth-century debates in physiology...