David Seamon defines it as "the descriptive and interpretive explication of architectural experiences, situations, and meanings as constituted by qualities and features of both the built environment and human life".
[1] Architectural phenomenology emphasizes human experience, background, intention and historical reflection, interpretation, and poetic and ethical considerations in contrast to the anti-historicism of postwar modernism and the pastiche of postmodernism.
This suggestion of seamless synthesis of past experience, present senses, and premonitions suited very well the school of Romantic architecture by providing absolute judgements on rights and wrongs without rationalizing and devolving into science.
[5] In Europe, Milanese architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers advanced architectural phenomenology during the 1950s and early 1960s through his influential editorship of the Italian design magazine Casabella Continuità.
[8] In the 1970s, the School of Comparative Studies at the University of Essex, under the direction of Dalibor Vesely and Joseph Rykwert, was a breeding ground for a generation of architectural phenomenologists, including David Leatherbarrow, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, and Daniel Libeskind.
As architectural phenomenology became established in academia, professors expanded its considerations through theory seminars beyond Gaston Bachelard[9] and Martin Heidegger, to include Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,[10] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt and theorists whose modes of thinking bordered on phenomenology, including Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Paul Virilio, Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus and Edward S. Casey.
[11] In 1979, Norwegian architect, theorist and historian Christian Norberg-Schulz's book Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture became an important reference for those interested in the topic in the 1980s[12] for its readily accessible explanations for how a such an approach could be translated into design.
[11] The phenomenology has been gradually displaced in the architectural theory by other "cutting-edge" ideas since 1980, but remains associated with works of Alvar Aalto, Tadao Ando, Steven Holl, Louis Kahn, Aldo van Eyck,[verification needed] and Peter Zumthor.
Heidegger links dwelling to the "gathering of the fourfold," namely the regions of being entailed by the phenomena of "the saving of earth, the reception of sky (heavens), the initiation of mortals into their death, and the awaiting/remembering of divinities."
Phenomenologists believe that proper architectural design can combine bodily routines of multiple bodies into a converged "place ballet", when interpersonal exchanges occur in an office lounge or shopping mall.