As well as inspiring generations of students, he taught some of the current leading architects and architectural historians, such as Daniel Libeskind, Eric Parry, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow.
There he, Rykwert and Peter Carl initiated MPhil and PhD courses in the history and philosophy of architecture, thereby bringing the emerging studio culture which had been cultivated at the AA which came to define the school in the 1980s and 1990s.
Vesely's work may be understood primarily as a contribution to cultural hermeneutics, and his exploration of the historical background of modern science in the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries is particularly rich in detail and insight onto the changing nature of representation.
Vesely's work traces back the ontological foundations of the problem to the Greek context, helping to clarify its original meaning.
However Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (2004), provides a summary of his thinking and this work remains the main source for understanding his approach.
Twentieth-century architecture, he argues, places its trust in the epistemological model of modern science and technology that is today largely reflected in instrumental concepts of city and suburban landscape.
Today, he states, the attempt to rehabilitate the primary tradition of architecture faces the problem of bridging the gap between different modes of representation and concepts of knowledge that in some cases precede modern science, i.e., precede the historical notion of scientific knowledge as it takes course from the seventeenth- and sixteenth centuries.
When looking at the modern situation, Vesely finds that the problem is generally structured on the basis of an ontological difference that is intrinsic to representation itself.
Schilder's experiment addressed the discontinuity between the visual and other fields of perception, and exposed the situated human body as a basic structure of spatial reference (pp. 48–49).
Vesely investigates how the subjects of the experiment found that their bodies were the first instance they could rely on when trying to situate in a visual world that was not only upside down, but also turned from left to right; and when trying to perform simple gestures like picking up a book, or reading.
The example from inverted vision also means to show that such a basis is far from being immediate; it is constituted in the process of a search within the actual space and comes about in the reciprocity between different levels and forms of representation such as visual, tactile, and so forth.
Vesely shows how the task of bridging different plateaux of representation can only be fulfilled by covering the distance to a common 'ground' (pp. 61–63).
Vesely's notion of ground consists of a primary source of reference that in many ways coincides with the traditional Greek understanding of arché.
Arché is not an absolute source of reference, but only a primary one that works as a point of departure towards our notion of "earth" and our understanding of "world" (pp. 50–52).
On the epistemological level, this means that for Vesely, the nature of 'ground' allows an understanding of 'spatial structure'; like a hermeneutical key granting access to phenomena of spatiality.
The experiment of the 'inverted vision' seems to show exactly that: the touch of ground helps to define the vertical and the relative distances of objects, orientation, and to recognize the physiognomy of the space.
At the same time, architects are conscious that it is precisely the implicit nature of ground as a structure of references that makes the task of its architectural exploration so difficult.
In a situation without light or gravity, one of the Sky Lab astronauts also described how a single touch on one of the walls of the space compartment would be sufficient to enact the knowledge of the relative position of the body with respect to all objects (pp. 52–54).
This seems to be particularly relevant to show how a particular point of visual or tactile reference can provide with orientation; a physiognomic recognition of the space; and be related to the spatial disposition of the whole.
The fact that there are discrepancies between different levels of representation should perhaps be no surprise as it is the case of the above-mentioned examples of reading a map, or orienting oneself in a space under zero gravity.
In the cases of aphasia and apraxia, which rank among others of what is generally known as mental blindness, there is a blatant discontinuity between the possibilities of notional understanding and the actual performance of a purposive act or standard articulation of speech.
On the contrary, it has become increasingly clear that such conditions do not take place solely as a result of mental functions; neither can they be enacted by the situational structure, as both contribute to the failure and success of treatment (p. 57).
Husserl's process of representation shows that our knowledge of spatiality intakes different levels of articulation, which are not always as clearly defined as we would wish.
In this sense, representation takes place as a spectrum ranging out of explicit forms of articulation into an implicit background, a concept that seems to be confirmed by later phenomenology of perception.
Such reciprocity is a schematic constituent of phenomena of continuity and metaphoricity, that have been constantly described throughout the primary tradition of Christian humanism in the nature of being and becoming.
On the other hand, the rise onto the explicit level of visibility primarily seems to express the problem of representation in terms of what is kept from the prereflective world.
Vesely challenges this concept of representation, and widens it as a spectrum that ranges from the explicitness of our world down to implicit levels of articulation.
Finally, this means that we construe our knowledge of 'world' largely on the basis of invisible, implicit references which are only symbolically re-enacted by the visible realm.