New Phenomenology in architecture: embodied environmental communication for meaningful situations

This article investigates the ideas of New Phenomenology, as developed by Hermann Schmitz. Schmitz distinguishes between the physical body that can be seen and touched, and the felt body that is the place of affective involvement. By locating the felt body as the basis of all human experience, Schmitz radically transcends the division between subject and object in favour of understanding human relations with the world as a question of embodied communication and meaningful situations. Basic principles of philosophical phenomenology, as described by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, are outlined, and New Phenomenology as conceived by Schmitz is presented. The aim is to investigate the relation of human being to the built environment. The Church of St Peter in Klippan designed by Sigurd Lewerentz, the Salk Institute in San Diego designed by Louis Kahn, and the Nordic Pavilion in Venice designed by Sverre Fehn are described, analysed, and discussed through the lens of New Phenomenology. The findings are located in relation to various scholarly writings on phenomenology in architecture, and it is argued that the content of the work of architecture may be emotionally gripped as meaningful presencing in specific situations. It is concluded that – in a world where we desperately need to rethink human relation to the environment in general, and the architect’s relation to building in particular – New Phenomenology can draw attention to human and environment as intrinsically connected. As such, understanding architecture in terms of embodied communication and meaningful situations may be one way to activate environmental awareness.