David Seamon

In this chapter, I draw on one film by American independent filmmaker John Sayles to consider the relationship between place and spirituality. To provide a conceptual context, I begin with theologian Philip Sheldrake’s Space for the Sacred, a book that probes the spiritual dimensions of place, place experience, and place meaning (Sheldrake 2001). Sheldrake argues for jettisoning any nostalgic, idealized understandings of place, home, rootedness, and environmental belonging. Instead, he calls for a ‘workable theology of place’ that moves beyond environmental and place naivety to ‘contend with estrangement, with what is flawed and damaged in material existence’ (Sheldrake 2001: 63). The need is ‘a sacramental sensibility in which the particularities of places may point beyond themselves to the mystery of God’ (Sheldrake 2001: 63).

To illustrate one place rendition toward which Sheldrake’s sacramental sensibility points, I draw on Sayles’ 1999 Limbo, a film that dramatizes shifting relationships between people and one specific place that provokes both existential possibilities and limitations. This place is early-21st-century Alaska, both the setting and antagonist for the film’s three main characters who face personal and interpersonal risk impelled by place in both its natural and human forms. Other, less central characters in the film illustrate other modes of place relationship, some that are more real, necessary, and ethically engaged; others that are more self-serving, delusive, and ethically irresponsible.

To locate and specify Limbo’s range of place relationships, I draw on the existential concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity. On one hand, authenticity relates to a way of being in which individuals accept responsibility for their lives and seek to be honest and consistent in their dealings with the world. On the other hand, inauthenticity relates to a way of being in which individuals deal with the world unrealistically: they accept it as fated and immutable, or understand and act only via blindered, self-centered motivations out of touch with the world at hand. Obviously, no human being is totally authentic or inauthentic, and different situations provoke varying degrees of autonomy or dependence, candor or deceit, appropriate or inappropriate actions. From the perspective of existentialism, the key point is that individuals best choose for themselves how to live, basing that choice on who they are, who they wish to be, and how that choice does good (or bad) for their worlds (Golomb 1995; Pollard 2005). Drawing on personal determination and progressive insight, individuals may find ways to overcome estrangement with place and move toward Sheldrake’s sacramental sensibility.

In this chapter, I begin by overviewing Limbo’s story line and introducing its main characters. I then draw on several contrasting definitions of ‘limbo’ to discuss how the film’s characters illustrate a range of authentic and inauthentic relationships with Alaska as a place and as a natural and human environment. I conclude by relating this range of relationships to Sheldrake’s sacramental sensibility.

This summer/fall 2018 issue of Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology includes the following items:
• A “book note” on the recently published 2nd edition of philosopher Jeff Malpas’ groundbreaking Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, originally published in 1999. This expanded version includes a new chapter on place and technological modernity, “especially the seeming loss of place in the contemporary world.”
• A “book note” on EAP editor David Seamon’s recently published Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds and Place Making, which gives particular attention to the generative aspects of place and locates six place processes that Seamon identifies as place interaction, place identity, place release, place realization, place intensification, and place creation.
• An essay by the late philosopher and science educator Henri Bortoft, who focuses on ways of thinking holistically, including the conceptual efforts of proto-phenomenologist Wolfgang Johann von Goethe; physicists Niels Bohr and David Bohm; and philosophers J. G. Bennett, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
• An essay by retired environmental educator John Cameron, who begins a new series of essays on the lived relationship between interiority and exteriority, particularly as qualities of the natural world and place contribute to that relationship.

[abstract for a chapter to be published in Phenomenology and Educational Theory in Conversation, P. Howard, T. Saevi, A. Foran, and G. Biesta, eds. NY: Taylor & Francis, 2020].

One pedagogical value of phenomenology is its conceptual and methodological power to help students discover unnoticed, taken-for-granted aspects of everyday life and experience. In this chapter, I illustrate how phenomenology can be useful pedagogically to understand the central importance of places in human life and for making those places better, particularly via architecture and environmental design. I begin by overviewing phenomenology broadly, highlighting the concepts of lifeworld and natural attitude. I then draw on educator and phenomenologist Max van Manen’s five existentials of human life and my work on lived emplacement to illustrate how more focused phenomenological concepts provide a pedagogical means for locating and disclosing aspects of environmental and place experience typically out of sight. Last, I turn to the work of architect Christopher Alexander, particularly his method of “pattern language,” which provides an invaluable pedagogical tool for envisioning architecture and environmental design as place making. If a major aim of education is to facilitate greater and deeper awareness and knowledge, one important starting point is realizing how much of human experience we overlook because it is obscured by life’s taken-for-grantedness. Bringing this unquestioned matter-of-factness to self-conscious attention is a major phenomenological aim. In this chapter, I illustrate how phenomenological understanding contributes to a pedagogy of place and place making.

In this presentation, I discuss architect Christopher Alexander's work in relation to a broader body of research and design focusing on a "phenomenology of place and place making." I begin by describing two contrasting ways of understanding wholeness-what I call analytic relationality and synergistic relationality. In analytic relationality, wholes are pictured as sets of arbitrary parts external to each other and among which are located linkages involving stronger and weaker connections and relationships. In contrast, synergistic relationality interprets wholes as dynamic, generative fields that sustain and are sustained by intensive parts that integrally belong to and support the whole. I suggest that, in terms of synergistic relationality, places can be envisioned as interconnected fields of intertwined relationships gathering and gathered by a lived intimacy between people and world. I illustrate how Alexander's approach to wholeness assumes a synergistic relationality and contributes to both understanding and making places that are whole, robust, and life-enhancing.

LIFE TAKES PLACE argues that, even in our mobile, hypermodern world, human life is impossible without place. Seamon asks the question: Why does life take place? He draws on examples of specific places and place experiences to understand place more broadly. Advocating for a holistic way of understanding that he calls “synergistic relationality,” he defines places as spatial fields that gather, activate, sustain, identify, and interconnect things, human beings, experiences, meanings, and events.
  Recognizing that places always change over time, Seamon examines their processual dimension by identifying six generative processes that he labels interaction, identity, release, realization, intensification, and creation. Drawing on practical examples from architecture, planning, and urban design, he argues that an understanding of these six place processes might contribute to a more rigorous place making that produces robust places and propels vibrant environmental experiences.
  Written in an accessible style that will appeal to academics, practitioners, and the lay public, this book is a significant contribution to the growing research literature in “place and place-making studies.”

In this chapter, I consider the lived relationship between atmosphere and place, drawing on three works by British-African novelist Doris Lessing (1919–2013), who regularly in her writing offers lucid accounts of place atmospheres in London, the city she emigrated to from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) shortly after World War II [2]. These three works are:
 Lessing’s 1969 novel, The Four-Gated City, which depicts the emigrant experience of a young Southern Rhodesian woman named Martha Quest, who arrives in battle-scarred London immediately after World War II (Lessing 1969);
 Lessing’s 1960 In Pursuit of the English, a journalistic account of the author’s first year in London (Lessing 1960);
 Lessing’s short story, “Dialogue,” published in the 1978 Stories and one of her most encompassing depictions of the lived complexity of place atmospheres (Lessing 1978).

In this chapter, I encapsulate the complex, shifting relationship between phenomenology and architecture by speaking of an architectural phenomenology, which I tentatively define 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 (Otero-Pailos 2012; Seamon 2017). In demonstrating that architectural phenomenology has significant research and design value today, I first describe the phenomenological approach more fully, highlighting two key phenomenological concepts relevant for architectural understanding—lifeworld and natural attitude. Second, I overview the complicated thread of events whereby architects and architectural theorists became interested in phenomenology. Third, I discuss two phenomenological topics that have come to have value for architecture and briefly discuss their significance for architectural thinking: (1) environmental embodiment; and (2) architectural atmospheres. Last, I identify some key criticisms of architectural phenomenology and suggest what value it might have for the future of architecture, particularly in regard to the imminent arrival of virtual reality, virtual places, and virtual buildings.

REFERENCE:: David Seamon, Merleau-Ponty, Lived Body and Place: Toward a Phenomenology of Human Situatedness, a chapter in T. Hünefeldt and A. Schlitte (eds.), Situatedness and Place (pp. 41-66). Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018.

ABSTRACT: In this chapter, I draw on French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's understanding of perception and corporeal sensibility to consider the significance of human situatedness as expressed via place and place experience. To illustrate how Merleau-Ponty's conceptual understanding might be applied to real-world place experiences, I draw on two sources of experiential evidence, the first of which is a passage from Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez's magical-realist novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967/1970). The second source is a set of first-person observations describing events and situations that I happened to take note of during weekday walks between my home and university office over the course of several months. My aim is to use these two narrative accounts as a means to illustrate, via vignettes of everyday human experience, Merleau-Ponty's central concepts of perception, body-subject, and lived embodiment. I contend that these accounts substantiate Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological claims and point to additional significant elements of human situatedness and place experience.

In this chapter, I draw upon the phenomenological concepts of lifeworld, natural attitude, homeworld and place to clarify what human-immersion-in-world and lived obliviousness might mean for research in well-being. To provide a real-world context for my argument, I present three narrative accounts of ordinary and out-of-the-ordinary place experiences written by interior designer Jane Barry (2012); British-African novelist Doris Lessing (1984); and sociologist Eric Klinenberg (2002). Using these three examples as evidence, I contend that place is an integral, non-contingent aspect of human life and helps to explain why well-being can typically be out of sight and thus not recognized as a significant dimension of one’s day-to-day experience. I conclude that, because of the always-already-present reciprocity between human-immersion-in-place and lived obliviousness, professional efforts to enhance well-being might sometimes be more successfully accomplished indirectly by changing aspects of place, including creative neighborhood design and planning that facilitate place attachment and a strong sense of environmental belonging.

FULL REFERENCE: Seamon, David. Well-being and Phenomenology: Lifeworld, Natural Attitude, Homeworld and Place, a chapter in Kathleen Galvin (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Well-being (pp. 103-111). London: Routledge, 2018.

[The edited volume of which this chapter is a part is now available. Contact the author for a PDF of the published version].

This chapter draws on a phenomenological approach to examine three ways in which buildings work as places: first, as lifeworlds; second, as architectural atmospheres; and, third, as physical and spatial fields sustaining or stymying environmental and place wholeness. Architecture as lifeworld refers to the fact that a building can be understood as a constellation of actions, events, situations, and experiences associated with individuals and groups that use that building. Architecture as atmosphere refers to the fact that a building can be understood to include a certain ineffable character or ambience that contributes to the particularity or uniqueness of that building as a place. Architecture as environmental and place wholeness refers to the fact that a building can be understood as it facilitates or undermines a lived integration and connectedness between architecture and users. This chapter highlights these three themes because they have been given only minimal attention in the growing literature on architectural phenomenology, which can be defined as the phenomenological study of architectural experiences, actions, and meanings as constituted by qualities and features of both the built environment and human life.

Key words: architecture, architectural archetypes, architectural phenomenology, atmosphere, buildings, lifeworlds, natural symbols, pattern languages, phenomenology, place, sense of place, space syntax, spirit of place, wholeness.

[The edited volume of which this chapter is a part is now available. Contact the author for a PDF of the published version].

To illustrate what phenomenology and hermeneutics offer architectural research, I examine the Seattle Public Library from four different perspectives for which I procure real-world evidence via a range of research methods. I begin with a phenomenology of naïve architectural encounter in which I draw on visceral, visual reactions to the building on the part of laypersons who have never before seen the building. Second, I ask how the Seattle Public Library might be interpreted and better understood via Norwegian architect Thomas Thiis-Evensen’s hermeneutic phenomenology of architectural experience, of which a central premise is that architecture is the making of an inside in the midst of an outside (Thiis-Evensen 1989). Third, drawing on over 200 social-media “reviews” of the building by voluntary contributors, I delineate possibilities for a phenomenology of place as these accounts provide one kind of interpretive evidence. Last, I examine three reviews of the building written by Seattle architectural critic Lawrence Cheek. Using these reviews as an illustration, I suggest that our experience and understanding of a building may shift over time and that a comprehensive phenomenological and hermeneutical interpretation of architecture must incorporate the lived history of any building, including its design origins and uses and users over time.

In this chapter, I consider the significance of hermeneutics for architecture. I begin by locating some key concerns that a hermeneutics of buildings and other architectural works entails. As a heuristic context for discussing these concerns, I draw on comparative-religion scholar Lindsay Jones’ The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture, a two-volume work that is perhaps the most exhaustive recent effort to identify the diverse, multi-dimensioned ways in which an “architectural hermeneutics” might proceed (Jones 2000).
        I identify two major research dilemmas toward which Jones’ work points: first, the contentious question of whether buildings-in-themselves, as opposed to the personal, social, and cultural experiences and meanings of those buildings, can be examined hermeneutically; and, second, the difficult matter of interpretive trustworthiness. If, in other words, one assumes that buildings evoke divergent meanings for different experiencers and interpreters, how is he or she to evaluate the relative accuracy and validity of competing interpretations?
        As evidence of a hermeneutic approach that might circumvent these two interpretive concerns, I discuss two significant efforts to generate what might be called a hermeneutics of the language of architecture: first, philosopher Karsten Harries’ language of natural symbols; and, second, architect Thomas Thiis-Evensen’s language of architectural archetypes. I consider the relative interpretive power of these two hermeneutic languages to describe accurately and non-arbitrarily the lived experience of “buildings-in-themselves.”