Phenomenology

The non-material values of a building can be discovered through a phenomenological approach by applying the perception of spa-tial intelligence. The creative method of my study involves spaspa-tial interventions, where, on the basis of phenomenological sensibility, I create spatial solutions that help to discover the values of space and refer to its multi-layered nature. Highlighting these layers is an important step in transmitting invisible spatial values in interior architecture in the course of functional re-purposing.

In addition to the pragmatic approach, the contemporary world deals with the theme of re-use at the mental level as well, where the functional re-purposing of buildings requires a relation to the surrounding spatial environment and to its inhabitants. The starting point for phenomenology is a person’s direct contact with the world:

the concreteness of this way of thinking, its closeness to actual life, and the way that phenomenology manages to combine the everyday experience of the world with philosophical thought has fascinated its followers.⁴⁸ According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology is a philosophy in which the world is always ‘already here’, before reflection, as an inalienable presence, and the aspiration of which is to rediscover the original connection to the world in order to ultimately give it philosophical status.⁴⁹

Phenomena are things as we consciously perceive them, not things as they really are, independent of our experience. Phenomenology is the study of things in the experience of our consciousness, the study of how things appear to be, not of how they actually are.

Phenomenology broadens the concept of the content of conscious-ness, which is not such states of mind as sensory contemplations or theoretical thinking, but the perception, recollection, imagination, wishing, reflection, intuitive cognition or repulsion of something:

syntheses of acts on different levels of consciousness are formed, which are necessary for perceiving the narrative as a whole, the formation of one’s own ‘self’.⁵⁰

48 E. Annus, Modernsuse filosoofiad. – 20. sajandi mõttevoolud. Ed. E. Annus. Tallinn-Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2009, pp. 9–29.

49 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [1945]. Trans. C. Smith. London/New York:

Routledge, 2009, p. i.

50 T. Viik, Fenomenoloogia. – 20. sajandi mõttevoolud, p. 216.

In short, phenomena are very natural and universal. Phenomenology is both philosophy and method, where the little things that are in use are studied, where notions and perception are studied instead of reality. Phenomenological analysis shows that syntheses of different levels and cognitive horizons that the consciousness synthesises into a single whole characterise the perception of an object. According to the founder of phenomenological philosophy, Edmund Husserl, the whole is polarised into internal (the thing as a whole) and external (the object is perceptible in the field of other things) horizons. ‘Spa-tial synthesis’ occurs when internal and external objects are joined together. Temporal horizons are also added, for instance a synthesis of perceptions from the past and potential perceptions in the future emerge when listening to a melody. A kind of horizon of expecta-tion is also formed in the consciousness in relaexpecta-tion to the perspec-tives that the movement of things brings forth.⁵¹ In Merleau-Ponty’s view, phenomenology was aimed at studying the bodily horizons of experience in order to create a general theory of corporeality that makes sense of how phenomenology can, in mutual cooperation with science and art, describe the existence of the bodily in the world.

According to him, language develops from bodily experience of the world, since it is an organ of perception and communication. Think-ing is embodied in speech just as the spirit is embodied in the body.

Language does not come from a space free of communication, but rather from common pre-linguistic communicative behaviour.⁵² Since the phenomenological method analyses and describes experiences, it is also empirical in a particular way. In Edmund Husserl’s opinion, the phenomenological method can be applied from the position of the self. Following Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have placed value on people’s social involvement with others: we habitually deal with the perception and comprehension of the experiences of others, sometimes mistakenly.⁵³

In order to draw broad-ranging generalisations concerning why people like particular environments, it is important to more broadly under-stand the preferences and behavioural patterns of the user of contem-porary space. Arnold Berleant has formulated environmental aesthet-ics as the flow of aesthetic experience or feelings of the involvement of people, and of meanings that denote participation and different points of contact in life that are affected by knowledge, experiences

51 T. Viik, Fenomenoloogia, pp. 219–221.

52 T. Viik, Fenomenoloogia, pp. 279–285.

53 T. Viik, Fenomenoloogia, pp. 224–225.

and memory, creating meaning for space.⁵⁴ According to Berleant, the aesthetic raising of awareness of the environment is extremely impor-tant because people vitally need to become aware of their personal environmental experience, which not only has a cognitive aspect but also relates to memory and knowledge. His emphasis that both the individual experience of a person and culture are decisive in the per-ception of environment is important. Berleant considers the relation-ship between people and the natural environment, where the abstract site-centred concept of space free of people is replaced by a human-oriented environmentally theoretical treatment. He also discusses the perception of architecture as art: unlike observable art, architecture requires entrance, being inside, and exiting. The architect and cultural heritage expert Lilian Hansar has analysed the city as a space of phe-nomenological sensibility and meanings. According to her, the envi-ronment (including the surroundings, the atmosphere) is not only an external phenomenon, but also contains people, and therefore atmos-phere is tied in primarily with the person’s perception.⁵⁵

The Norwegian modernist and architectural phenomenologist Chris-tian Norberg-Schulz used five concepts of space as his point of departure: pragmatic, perceptive, existential, cognitive and abstract.

According to him, pragmatic space helps the individual to perceive the surrounding environment, perceptive or perceptible space shapes identity and allows direct experience, existential space connects people to social and cultural structures, experiential space allows the contemplation of space, and abstract space provides means for perceiving these different spatial levels.⁵⁶

Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin – Architecture and the Senses (1996) developed out of the collected work Questions of Percep-tion: Phenomenology of Architecture (1994) and has become a basic text for the phenomenological treatment of architecture. The repro-duction of Caravaggio’s suggestive The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602)⁵⁷ illustrates the author’s guiding principle of multi-sensory

54 A. Berleant, Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment. Lawrence:

University Press of Kansas, 1997, pp. 3–11.

55 L. Hansar, Nähtav ja nähtamatu linnas. – Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi 2005, vol. 14 (2/3), p. 93.

56 C. Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space and Architecture. New York/Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1971, p. 11.

57 According to St John’s Gospel, Thomas the Apostle missed one of Jesus’s appearances to the Apostles after His resurrection, and said ‘Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.’ John 20:25. A week later Jesus appeared and told Thomas to touch Him and stop doubting. Then Jesus said,

‘Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ John 20:29.^.

experience or, according to Bachelard, the polyphony of the senses.⁵⁸ As in his publications, in the public lecture Forest Architecture. Land-scape, Space and Metaphor. Architectural Atmospheres of the North:

Forest, Light and Silence, he visualises his thoughts, comparing a pair of photographs or reproductions, the combined effect of which is harmoniously complementary or contrastingly adversarial: ‘the city of participation – the city of alienation; architectures of hear-ing and smell (church); spaces of intimate warmth; the significance of shadow and darkness, vision and hapticity’.⁵⁹ Pallasmaa defends the sensory and sensual qualities characteristic of architecture and art, which retreat before the commercial thinking of the consumer world, highlighting the important aspects of the phenomenological cognition of space, such as the time factor, components of sound and silence, light and darkness, which function as the result of com-bined effect and opposite effect. Architecture articulates time just as it articulates space. He poetically calls ‘place a container of the soul, and the soul is a container of place.’⁶⁰ Yet architecture also has a one-of-a-kind protective function, which protects nature in silence. Light becomes a spatial quality of architecture.⁶¹ In today’s pragmatic approach to a building, light has become more of a quantitative element. The window as a mediator has lost its meaning between two worlds: enclosed and open, interiority and exteriority, private and public, light and shadow, the movement of light in space, the mutual effect of light and shadow as inhaling and exhaling. Dimness and darkness also play an important role in space, creating solidarity and amplifying the power of words (e.g. in Alvar Aalto’s Säynätsalo town hall). The sensory experience is directly connected to the body.

Pallasmaa places the human body in the central position.

Architectural space frames, reinforces and focuses our thoughts, protecting them from dissipation. Contact with architecture is a multi-sensory experience: the attributes, materiality and size of space can be experienced equally by way of the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue and muscles. All of the senses are extensions of the sense of touch, including vision, because the gaze only confirms what the skin touches. The eye discerns from a distance the intimate experience of touch.⁶² The gaze isolates, sound incorporates, or the eye arrives at something, while the ear receives. The perception of 58 G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. Boston: Beacon

Press, 1971, p. 6.

59 J. Pallasmaa, Forest Architecture: Landscape, Space and Metaphor. Public lecture, Universitá Roma TRE, Rome, 23 March 2015 (author’s notes).

60 J. Pallasmaa, Forest Architecture.

61 J. Pallasmaa, Forest Architecture.

62 J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, pp. 40–49.

acoustics is subconscious, yet it is acoustics in particular that create an intimate experience of spatial interiority. Contemporary interi-ors often absorb sound, which does not allow sounds and voices to carry and echo naturally. Old houses take people back to the silence and slowness of the past. More permanent images in the memory are preserved by way of scent. Scents and tastes are spe-cific in the sense of geography. ‘Vacant, abandoned houses generate a particular hollow smell. [---] The nose makes the eye remember.’⁶³ According to Pallasmaa, architecture at its fundamental level con-sists of verbs. For instance, the door is an invitation to step over the threshold, while the window is an invitation to look. [---] Pallasmaa calls them images that can be experienced and are not just visual.⁶⁴

The phenomenological values of space are primarily perceptible and among other things also visible. Pallasmaa speaks of creating spatial values in architecture, yet the preservation of perceptible phenomena is equally important. Preservation should also accom-pany the creation of new values, which are possible only in that space and are relevant at the moment of their creation.

63 J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, pp. 51–55.

64 J. Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image. Chichester: Wiley, 2011.