Architects talk about experience in strange ways. Educating (indoctrinating?) students on (into) this special way of encountering the world is one of the first pedagogical missions of most architecture schools. It is rooted in at least two traditions. The older of these is the Beaux Arts’ concern for representing the world in precise and beautifully idealized ways. The newer roots lie in middle and later 20th century expansions of the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger about the nature of experience and Being – broadly speaking, phenomenology.
The central figure linking European phenomenology to architecture and architectural education is Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and The Primacy of Perception (1964) are essential readings for anyone interested in this tradition. While Maurice Merleau-Ponty and other late phenomenologists like Gaston Bachelard and Paul Ricoeur were more subtle in their parsing of experience and Being than Husserl or Heidegger, it is important to acknowledge that phenomenologists were interested, by and large, in perception as a tool to get to some truth about our existence – stated differently, they were interested in experience only insofar as it revealed something about our essence. The first sentence of the title essay of Primacy of Perception reads: “We never cease living in the world of perception, but we go beyond it in critical thought – almost to the point of forgetting the contribution of perception to our idea of truth.”[i] Jean-Paul Sartre acknowledged this grander purpose in the subtitle of his magnum opus: “An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.”
The problem with this is, well, its backwards. It assumes a sort of innate objectivity in naïve human perception that could reveal deeper truths if only we understood it better. Instead of phenomenological ontology I believe we need to think in terms of ontological phenomenology – or, to drop the jargon, dissecting our experiences to understand human nature hides from us the fact that our beliefs about who we are, our culture, our myths, our fictions of Being all frame and shape our experiences. Without an ontology, we don’t perceive (see again Marilynne Robinson’s comment in “Fiction Making Animals,” previously posted). We need to come to terms with our fictions, our ontologies, before we can study our experience. More importantly, our experiences are not case studies to probe universal truths but are instead the very things to be sought, celebrated, and cherished.
Without our internal beliefs/stories/myths, we could not communicate to ourselves much less to others. You could say, without them we could not see. Sensation (and as I’ve noted elsewhere, seeing striped of meaning) is very different from perception and experience. There are very few raw sensations – these are mostly limited to our pre-linguistic infancy and, in adulthood, to encounters with radical novelty – and these are fleeting. The sensations of infancy are overwritten when language is acquired; and the sensations of adulthood get woven into the tapestry of meaning as quickly as the mind can do its work.
You might detect a circular argument forming. Encounters with the unfamiliar merge with enculturated beliefs to form new stories and myths; we carry these revised and enlarged stories about and through them we experience and understand the world anew; these new experiences and understandings then alter our internal stories and thus reframe the world of experience; and so on. Yes. It works that way: an elementary sequence of A leads to B/B leads to A’/A’ leads to B’/B’ leads to A’’/ad infinitum.
Why state the obvious? Recall what I said about architecture’s special notion of experience. It is often presented, if only implicitly, in narrowly bracketed ways: E(experience of objects) leads to U(understanding, for the conceptually-driven sort) or A(pure affect, for the spectacle-oriented). And the raison d’être of architects is the making of things people Experience. The fallout, in terms of the on-going nature of learning/experience/re-learning, is seldom discussed. Nor are the range of possibilities. Making architecture is creating information. And once that is understood, architects realize what is possible and impossible to achieve in their work. More importantly, architects can frame for others what is perceived as possible and impossible.
[i] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, and other essays on phenomenological psychology, the philosophy or art, history and politics, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, edited by James Edie, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 3.
Architecture is Fiction 