follies of epoché

KATHRYN HOBERT

University at Buff aloDepartment of Architecture

Adviser Sergio Lopez-Pineiro

An Undergraduate Senior Thesis 2013

Table of Contents

1-2 PROJECT BREIF

3-4 NARRATION STREAMS

5-12 RESEARCH SUMMARY

13-14 BOOK PROCESS

15-23 LIGHT BOX

24-27 MUSIC BOX

28-33 SAND BOX

34-35 CONCLUSION

Follies of Epoché1

“We should set aside all previous habits of thought, see through and break down the

mental barriers which these habits have set along the horizons of our thinking…We shall

start from the standpoint of everyday life,from the world as it confronts us, from consciousness as it presents

itself in psychological experience…We shall then develop a method of ‘phenomenological Reductions,’

according to which we may set aside the limitations to knowledge essentially involved in every nature-directed

from of investigation…Pure of transcendental phenomenology will be established not as a science of facts, but

as a science of essential Being…a science which aims exclusively at establishing ‘knowledge of essences’ and

absolutely no ‘facts.’ The corresponding Reduction…leads from the psychological phenomenon to the pure

‘essence,’ of…from factual (‘empirical’) to ‘essential’ universality.”

-I d e a s -Edmund Husserl

Phenomenological R e d u c t i o n

“Where all judgments about the existence of the external world, and consequently all action in

the world, is suspended. One's own consciousness is subject to immanent critique so that when

such belief is recovered, it will have a firmer grounding in consciousness.”

This thesis takes this theoretical concept and places is into an architectural

context. It takes away perscribed form and focus on experiential

p h e n o m e n a .

What are the books all about?2

MUSIC BOXLIGHT BOX SAND BOX

[HEARING][VISION] [TOUCH

There are three books in the set created for this thesis.

Each is a representation of the phenomena or sense-evoking experience

produced by each theoretically designed folly within a park landscape. They

function as a scaled representation of these experiential spaces and also on

their entities, as books that produce the phenomenon which it represents.

Constrained to a 11 1/2” x 11 1/2” x 2” volume, these books tell the story

of a single experiencer’s impression of the three follies.

They tell the story through this verbal narration, the process of reading the

pages, and the phenomena the books physically produces.

3 Three Streams of Narration: DESCRIPTION

a . Me

E x p e r i e n c e rb .

You [Project Critic]c .

UNLEARNING is about suspending one’s preconceived beliefs and notions while allowing ones senses to re-interpret the present reality. It’s about letting one’s mind open to

explore the totality of possibilities this reality, along with other realities, have to offer. This type of freedom of thought is the most universal and important. The design of this

landscape and these books for me, is about imagining space, experience and methods of representation in new ways.

I AM a human searching for an understanding of being and the world. The purpose of this project for me, is to explore an integration of architectural imagination and my

philosophical thoughts, research, and intuitions. Hopefully, this project will be able to serve as a starting point for my future design thinking.

The BOOK is a means of expressing the follies within the designed landscape. This narrative process allows me to express the user’s experience.

As the designer of this LANDSCAPE, an attempt is being made to create follies which enhance one’s scene of reality by providing a focus on interpretation through the

senses. Through my imagination, I am extracting these spaces through a photograph taken of an “everyday image.” Here, I have taken the dimensionality out and replaced it

with a re-imagined one.

The UNLEARNING for the experincer is the process of entering these follies as an escape from the everyday, suspending their preconceptions, and re-establishing a more

true connection to reality (and their everyday life) upon exiting. By honing in on and interpreting particular senses in isolated instances, the expeiencer should be able to

critique and re-imagine their everyday life in more meaningful ways.

HE/SHE IS a human within this designed reality seeking a meditative and perceptive experience.

The BOOK is an interpretation of the experiencer’s journey through the park (each book represents each folly). It combines architectural convention with methods of

representing feelings and sensual experience extracted from the design of each folly. The book is not a physical representation of the park, it is a re-telling of the experience.

SENSES in the moment will prevail over “previous habits of thought”

A VIEWER of the project.

The BOOK (starting from the “standpoint of everyday life”) is meant to spur the imagination. I have interpreted the photograph in a particular way and have created these

books that depict each folly design. But, I hope that the viewer will also allow their mind to imagine their own folly from the selected photograph, and maybe even in their

daydreams.

There is no set location for the follies within the LANDSCAPE. Their order and orgainization is not important, therefore, the viewer is allowed to see them as they would

like.

These books, and the suggested landscape, are supposed to allow A VIEWER to enter the body of the experiencer and imagine their perceptions and feelings evoked from

the designed space.

4 A diagram of the three Streams of Narration

a . M e

E x p e r i e n c e r

You [Project Critic]

b

c .

Suspends preconceptions, senses the space within a landscape,

personal re-interpretation

interprets into a

narrative.

Experiences the narrative of the book

Imagin

es the exp

erincer,

thro

ugh

a

photograph,

susp

end

s preco

ncep

tions , allo

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g

imagin

ation an

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eience to

prevail,

tries to p

rod

uce a sen

se-evokin

g space

,

imagin

es a land

sape o

f follies,

materializes a b

oo

k.

invites to critique thro

ugh

sen

sing,

imag

inin

g th

e la

nd

scap

e,

and

han

dlin

g an

d p

erce

ivin

g th

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oo

k.

“Experience by itself is not a science.”

“I must first lose the world… in order

to regain it by a universal self-examina-

t i o n . ”

“What makes the appropriation of the

essential nature of phenomenology…-

so extraordinarily difficult, is that in

addition to all other adjustments a new

way of looking at things is necessary,

one that contrasts at every point with

the natural attitude of experience and

t h o u g h t . ”

“I am conscious of a world endlessly spread out in space, endlessly becoming and having endlessly become in time. I am conscious of

it: that signifies, above all, that intuitively I find it immediately, that I experience it. By my seeing, touching, hearing, and so forth, and in

the different modes of sensuous perception, corporeal physical things with some spacial distribution or other are simply there for me,

“on hand” in the literal or the figurative sense, whether or not I am particularly heedful of them and busied with them in my consider-

ing, thinking, feeling or willing. Animate beings too—human beings, let us say—are immediately there for me: I look up; I see them; I

hear their approach; I grasp their hands; talking with them I understand immediately what they mean and think, what feelings stir

within them, what they wish or will.”

“What makes the appropriation of the essential nature of

phenomenology…so extraordinarily difficult, is that in

addition to all other adjustments a new way of looking at

things is necessary, one that contrasts at every point with the

natural attitude of experience and thought.”

5

Reality

Merleau-Ponty Husserl Inaki Abalos David SeamonPallasmaa Le CorbusierSteven HollGaston Bachelard

“…you find

countless remedies

for boredom, and an

infinite number of

things that deserve

to occupy your mind

for all time…”

“All we communicate to others is an orientation towards what is secret without ever

being able to tell the secret objectively. What is secret never has total objectivity. In this

respect, we orient oneirism but we do not accomplish it.”

“…it is not a question of describing houses, or enumerating their

picturesque features and analyzing for which reasons they are

comfortable. On the contrary, we must go beyond the problems

of description-whether it gives facts or impressions-in order to

attain to the primary virtues, those that reveal an attachment

that is native in some way to the primary function of inhabiting.”

“…the world is not so much a noun as an adjective.”

“The imagination can never say: was that all, for there is always more than

meets the eye. And as I have said several times, an image that issues from the

imagination is not subject to verification by reality.”

“Indeed, the imagination sharpens all of our senses. The imagining

attention prepares our attention for instantaneousness”

“For the positive man, everything that is unreal is alike, the

forms being submerged and drowned in unreality; and the

only houses that are capable of possessing individuality are

real ones. But a dreamer of houses sees them everywhere,

and anything can act as a germ to set him dreaming about

t h e m . ”

“Memory-what a strange thing it is!-does not record

concrete duration, in the Bergsonian sense of the word.

We are unable to relive duration that has been destroyed.

We can only think of it, in the line of fan abstract of

fossilized duration concretized as a result of long sojourn,

are to be found in and through space.”

“Daydreams…are invitations to verticality, pauses in the narrative during which the reader is invited to

d r e a m . ”

“All that makes the woods, the rivers of the air

Has its place between these walls which believe they close a room”

“Like countless others, our poet is sitting dreaming at the window. But he discovers in the glass itself a slight

deformation, which spreads deformation throughout the universe…but what happens to the outside world,

when it is seen through this little glazed lune, this pupil of a cat’s eye? ‘Does the nature of the world change, or

is it real nature that triumphs over appearances? In any event, the experimental fact is that the introduction of

the nucleus into the landscape sufficed to make it look limp…Walls, rocks, tree-trunks, metal constructions,

lost all rigidity in the area surrounding the mobile nucleus.’…Under his guidance, the dreamer can renew his

own world, merely by moving his face. From the miniature of the glass cyst, he can call forth the entire world

and oblige it to make ‘the most unwonted contortions.’ The dreamer sends waves of unreality over what was

formerly the real world…We no longer look at [the landscape] while looking through it. This nucleizing nucleus

is a world in itself. The miniature deploys to the dimensions of the universe”

“In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may

have seemed cold in the winter and hot in the summer.

Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams,

it is hard to say through what syncretism the attic is at once

small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.”

“Indeed, the imagination sharpens all of our

senses. The imagining attention prepares our

attention for instantaneousness”

“Yet I wonder if an image of the imagination is ever close

to reality. For often when we think we are describing we

merely imagine.”

“…a house build by and

for the body, taking form

from the inside, like a

shell, in an intimacy that

world physically.”

“In reality, however, the poet has given concrete

form to a very general phychological theme,

namely, that there will always be more things in a

closed, than in an open , box. To verify images

kills them, and it is always more enriching to

imagine than to experience”

“The cosmic daydream….gives the reader a

sense of restfulness, in that it invites him to

participate in the repose to be derived from

all deep oneiric experience. Here the story

remains in a suspended time that is favorable

to more profound psychological treatment.

Now the account of real events may be

resumed; it has received its provisions of

‘cosmicity’ and daydream.”

“’My house…is diaphanous, but it is not of

glass. It is more of the nature of vapor. Its walls

contract and expand as I desire. At times, I

draw them close about me like protective

armor…but at others, I let the walls of my

house blossom out in their own space, which is

infinitely extensible…Here, geometry is

t r a n s c e n d e d

“If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope,

he always sees the same thing.”

“To great dreamers of corners and holes

nothing is ever empty, the dialectics of

full and empty only correspond to

two geometrical non-realities.

The function of inhabiting

constitutes the link between

full and empty.”

6

Reality


“The weakening of the experience of time in today’s

environments has devastating mental effects...We have a

mental need to grasp that we are rooted in the continui-

ty of time, and in the man-made world it is the task of

architecture to facilitate this experience. Architecture

domesticated limitless space and enables us to inhabit it,

but it should likewise domesticate endless time and

enable us to inhabit the continuum of time.”

“Greek architecture, with its elaborate

systems of optical corrections, was already

ultimately refined for the pleasure of the

eye…Western architectural theory since

Leon Battista Alberti has been primarily

engaged with questions of visual

perception, harmony and proportion.”

“Architecture is our primary instrument in relating us with space and

time, and giving these dimensions a human measure.”

The sense of gravity is the essence of al architectonic

ructures and strengthens the experience of the vertical

mension of the world. At the same time as making us

ware of the depth of the earth, it makes us dream of

vitation and flight.”

“Architecture strengthens the existential experience,

one’s sense of being in the world, and this is essentially a

strengthened experience of self.”

Architecture articulates the experiences of being-in-the-world and

rengthens our sense of reality and self; it does not make us inhabit worlds

mere fabrication and fantasy…The sense of self, strengthened by art

d architecture, allows us to engage fully in the mental dimensions of

eam, imagination and desire.”

“The space traced by the

ear in the darkness

becomes a cavity

sculpted directly in the

interior of the mind.”

7

Reality


“Architecture is a plastic thing. I mean by ‘plastic’

what is seen and measured by the eyes”

“One needs to see clearly in order to understand.”

8

Reality


“I am not in space and time, nor do I

conceive space and time; I belong to them,

my body combineswith them and includes

t h e m ”

9

Reality


“A walk through a Japanese garden is

invigorating and healing because of the

essential interaction of all sense modalities

reinforcing each other; our sense of reality

is thus strengthened and articulated.”

“A walk through a Japanese garden is invigorating and healing because of

the essential interaction of all sense modalities reinforcing each other; our

sense of reality is thus strengthened and articulated.”“The patina of wear adds the enriching experience of

time; matter exists in the continuum of time.”

“Anyone who has become entranced by the sound of water drops in

the darkness of a ruin can attest to the extraordinary capacity of the

ear to carve a volume into the void of darkness.”

“We behold, touch, listen and measure the world with our

entire bodily existence and the experimental world is

organized and articulated around the center of the body.”

10

Reality


“’The eidetic reduction,’ the Husserlian epoje is a technique of forgetting every

preconception and reestablishing direct links between phenomena and individual

perceptions. It is, in that respect, a technique for suspending time, for ‘bracketing’

the historicity of knowledge and of the human being in favor of an idealist return

to ‘the things themselves,’ whose essence is revealed to us though ‘purified

experience.’ This purified experience is nothing other than the total supremacy

of perception over the remaining forms of approximation to reality. In the

phenomenon, as the phenomenologist ‘sees’ it, the thing itself is grasped due to

his meaningful intention: he stands by intuition and intention, but the union of

both as the basis of his knowledge. And as the latter involves the intensification

of experience needed, so to speak, to freeze time, to isolate, to forget, to return

to the very act of experiencing its purity.”

“If we wish to learn to think and plan by making this contemporary way of

thinking our own, we must make the effort to learn to forget afresh, training our

intelligence and our senses in order to see the world-architecture-through the

eyes of this subject for whom probably nothing-absolutely nothing-of what the

positivist formula for thinking the house proposes, and which still obtains today in

almost all kinds of architecture has importance or interest.”

“The phenomenological project represents a vagabondage of both mind and

senses that neither knows nor wishes to arrive at any prearranged image. On the

contrary, it seeks above all else to avoid it.”

11

Reality


“Time is not

a line but a

network

o f

i n t e n -

t i o n s . ”

“Merleau-Ponty begins by pointing out that the concrete space in which we

live is prior for us than the abstract space spoken of by Newton. It is true, of

course, that we have an abstract idea of endless space as the container of

everything and we easily conceive this space as prior to whatever is placed

into it. This idea however, is abstract and largely a product of our thought. We

form this idea on the basis of the concrete space in which our life runs its

course. But this ‘lived’ space is already oriented. In this space things are for us

far-away or close-by, high or low, right or left. This oriented space is

‘space-for-us,’ i.e., it extends around us. The orientation of this space

apparently is not a datum existing independently of us. For in absolute space

it is meaningless to speak about far-away or close-by, high or low, which refer

to space only as it is for a subject.”As a possibility of moving, the body already gives meaning to space; it projects a

eaningful space around itself. Thus, the body is a meaning-giving existence. As

ossibility of moving, the body makes what is outside us space-for-us.”

We see the depth, speed, softness and hardness of objects.”

can think…that I am on the moon and

ok at earth from this standpoint. But in

my concrete existence I am bound by

mensions from which I cannot escape.”

“…the body has to situate itself if the

meaning in question is to arise. Freedom and

consciousness play no role in this assumption

of a situation, for we do not at all know what

takes place and through our body while we

are not seeing.”.

The body itself is already in dialog

with the world and makes this

world meaningful in many ways.”

12

Reality

Merleau-Ponty Husserl Inaki Abalos David SeamonPallasmaa Le CorbusieSteven HollGaston Bachelard

1. Select a photograph/image from everyday reality-Image may or may not have spatial qualities or implications-Has to be an instance that a hurried eye would glance over

2. Daydream abou this image-look for inspiration within research and from experience-Go with intuitions

3. Sketch ideas on how to extract a spatial realm from the 2D-keep in mind texts and selected quote

4. Discover a sensorial experience and represent it using the image as the focal point or origin-This experience will be a part of a larger parkscape. People are to occupy them to gain a sojourn from everyday reality (concentrating on the senses instead of other thoughts). This way, a person could re-enter the world with a greater con-nection and clarity (by being more aware, observant and appreciative of our bodily connection to an external world).

Book Making Process1413

The

Ligh

t B

ox

14

“I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them.”David Seamon [140]

“At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequene of fi xations in the spaces of the being’s stability-a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to ‘suspend’ its fl ight. In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.”Poetics of Space-Gaston Bachelard [8]

15

1 2

16

Expands up to expose sections Pages form layers of the plan in a progression over time; each page gets deeper into the Earth

4 53

17

Captivated by the heaviness of my feet being pulled down and forward, I instinctively counterbalance my weight back. I emerge and fi nd myself surrounded by an encompassing wave of grass, fl owing upwards to where I was just standing. The light bouncing off some spots makes patches of snow on this spring day, including the path I left behind of distorted blades of grass. I picture myself standing at the edge of this crater-like indentation just moments ago, and run now, being drawn in by something unknown and unseen.

I stop when I see what I am running towards, though I do not understand it. About thirty irregular-shaped openings into the earth spread in an array. I walk between them, on top of the layer of glass at their surface, and look down into them. It seems there is only darkness below. Then, I notice one of the more elongated forms presses into the earth, allowing for a hole for one to descend into. On it’s vertical face is an opening and I realize it is the entrance. After sticking my hand into the cold, wet darkness and having my foot extend to feel the ground change from the spongy grass to grainy dirt, I know this is the way.

18

Expl

oded

axo

n of

box

Trusting the emptiness ahead not to turn the ground into an unperceived ledge, I outstretch my fi ngers to my sides and feel the dirt dislodge from its rest. The only light here exists in my memory, and I strain my eyes, hoping to see it in this current reality. Pressure builds up in my ears as I descend. I could not tell you what direction I am facing, but feel myself turning right and at last I see specks on the wall being lit from a source around the bend. I quicken my steps and things become brighter still. Suddenly, my head brushes against the top of the tunnel and I lean into to a crouch, but keep moving fast. Ahead is a circular opening with bright light gushing from within.

I immediately understand the reason for the holes above. Protruding through this expansive cave-like space are columns of light, each pulling down the daylight through these holes. Large spots of light push and pull the glassy fl oor vertically, making a gradual sloping landscape. A second, mysterious source of light beneath the glassy fl oor shines up pin-sized streams of light concentrated near the bumps and indents. They come up at angles, defi ning spaces by intersecting with the large light columns, with each other, and the landscape itself. I stand directly below a column, and feel the warmth of above transfer through the stream. I step to the left and there are two pin lights hitting my side. I duck down and am enclosed in a triangle of shadow. I see children across the room playing a game: one is standing in the pathway of a light and the other has their hand over that light. The fi rst child has to jump to avoid being hit by the light the instant the other move his hand away. A girl nearby is concentrating on moving through to avoid the light, and another is attempting to have it hit her constantly. I fi nd a high shadowy nook to rest and watch people moving through the streams of light as though they were solid and fi nding pleasure when they can walk through them. I get up to pet the panting dog that is taking a break from trying to fi nd the source of these streams of light. Then, I start my ascent to reality.

(Later that night...)It is nightfall now, and as I am walking up the hill to leave the park, I see the same tone of light I saw earlier in the underground cave, only muted, and spilling over the large indentation. I am again, drawn down into the crevice and this time, fi nd the columns protruding from the surface towards the sky. At this time, the darkness of night allows for the light below to escape into it, as the darkness of the cave allowed the daylight to cut through.The columns of light deliniate space, and I see children dancing in their wake. I play and ponder a little longer, jumping over one here and there, trying to touch multiple at the same time, and imagining how these holes got here, what it would be like if they were ten times larger, and where the highest speck of light disappears into the sky.

I then really make my way for the park exit, thinking my eyes will be more harmonic with my everyday reality, at least until I forget again to observe and be entertained by the light and shadows.

19

20

Sides of boxes expand into collaged sections of the space

22Below view of “light columns” from holes above

The

Musi

c B

ox

24

4

14

5

13

8

9

12

3

7

1

6

10

2

11

“’My house…is diaphanous, but it is not of glass. It is more of the nature of vapor. Its walls contract and expand as I desire. At times, I draw them close about me like protective armor…but at others, I let the walls of my house blossom out in their own space, which is infi nitely extensible…Here, geometry is transcended.’”Georges Spyridaki in Poetics of Space-Gaston Bachelard [51]

25

How to read it

Opens out

Pages

1

3 4

2

27

The warm grass crunches as I let my muscles relax and my head slump back, becoming cradled by hundreds of blades. My eyes shut and mind drifts away. A steady rhythm of a couple’s shoes disturbing the gravel with equal pressure and speed, overlaid with the fl uctuating urgency of children’s, accelerating forward, stopping, faster, slowing, reversing, pulls me back to reality.

As soon as I give up on straining my ears to hear the fading footprints, they catch a peculiar sound. Intrigued, I rise to follow it, and at the same time try to match the audible memory of the running children with the footsteps they left behind. The current sound pulls me upwards and at some instance I identify it as a harp-like hum. Getting closer, I can distinguish a melody of tones. The top of a structure emerges at the peak of the hill with rectangular frames protruding from the Earth. Finally, I am at the entrance and observe the rectangular frames extending through and anchoring into the Earth, allowing for a pathway between the spans. Equally spaced wires span these frames vertically.

26

I climb through the fi rst frame easily as the wires are about two feet apart. The second obstacle stands about thirty feet away, appearing to have the same number of strings but closer together. Inside the tunnel, the vibrations linger, leave and come back, being sucked into the original source. The deeper into the tunnel I venture, the sweeter the sounds and the shorter the echoes. The sound escaping each subsequent frame initiates a pattern of prediction and I am able to hear it in my head before the strum actually occurs.

Off to the side, embedded within the Earth adjacent to the carved-out pathway were a series of doors opening into a small jagged tunnel. Standing inside this secondary side tunnel with various doors opened and closed, no prediction can be made as to what sound will be produced at that moment. It is obscure and arbitrary as others playing in the space shape the sound I hear. I fi nd a spot and rest my back along the carved-out dirt and try to guess which frames are being played. After some time and a few groups of visitors later, I duck under the smallest door out and continue my climb up. I squeeze through the last frame’s wires with the top less than a foot from the top of my head, emerge on the other side, and continue down the grassy hill. The sounds fades into one and then is erased from my hearing and is replaced by other thoughts and preoccupations.

27

The

Sand

Bo

x

28

“So this is why when often as you came home to it, down the road in a mist of rain, it seemed as if the house were founded on the most fragile web of breath and you had blown it. When you thought it might not exist at all as built by a carpenter’s hands, nor ever; and that it was only the idea of breath breathed out by who, with that same breath that had blown it, could blow it all away.l”Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space

...It is better to live in a state of impermanence than one of fi nality.”Gaston Bachelard

29

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30

How to read book

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31

1. A small stream intersects at the end of the pathway, kinking in each direction away from it. Groups of people are gathered, sitting on rocks with their feet dipped into the water, apparently just as unsure of where to go next as I am. I remove my shoes and let the particles of water wrap around my feet instead.

3. Suddenly, the ground becomes extremely hot, and I step back in shock. I look up to see if anyone is experiencing this as well, I see a group of people running a little ways ahead of me, with their shoes dangling from their hands, I decide to follow them.

5. I enter through the door-like cut into the earth, which weaves around itself, fi ltering out the light. I follow the path by hold-ing my hands to my sides and feeling the inside of the tunnel.

7. I walk forward slowly with my arms outstretched. After a few anxious steps forward, my fi ngers bump into a wall-like object, but is not a wall as it gives slightly as I push it forward. I orient myself perpendicular to this object and run my hands along its length. After a few feet, it disappears and I can only feel a mesh-like material which I can assume is holding it up.

9. I feel the next cube within the mesh, and then the next, and a whole series of them, until I hit the edge of the carved-out hill. This forces me to turn inward now, and I make my way between the mesh. I zig-zag through, unsure of where I am going and utterly disoriented. I stand still as I try to regain my coordinates. Suddenly, I realize that my still shoeless feet are cold. I know I am away from the sun, but it is a peculiar cold as if there is a layer of ice beneath the soil.

2. The cool is almost unbearable at fi rst, but slowly fades into the rest of my body and I am overcome with relaxation. Anxious to keep moving, I get up and walk barefoot in the grass along the stream.

4. After the fi rst few steps, the ground becomes bearable and with each stride I become adjusted to the temperature. I do not know if it is, like the water, being adjusted by my body or physically changing. But I continue on until I come to a protrusion from the earth with a steep slope and a whole that I assume is the entrance. By now, the ground is what I believe to be a regular temperature.

6. By the end, even after I am adjusted to the darkness, I can barely make out my hand in front of my face. I realize I am at the end because the walls suddenly stop and I am left stranded in the darkness.

8. Luckily, I was holding up my other hand, because it stopped me before I hit the fabric running in the other direction. After feeling around, I realized I have to duck under and step over lines of the mesh material while pushing the cubed objects out of the way in order to pass.

10. I begin to wonder if this is a clue to getting through this maze. I think back and remember too that the objects have become easier to push, and give a greater distance. I can easily pass through now where I had diffi culty before. Restored with a sense of what to concentrate on, I continue on, feeling my way to the end.

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Conclusion During my Introduction to Philosophy course last semester, I began to

consider how some of the concepts I was learning could be incorporated

within the realm of architecture. Beginning this thesis project, I thought

that by allowing some of these ideas to fl ow into my design thinking

and process, it would help me to understand and focus my interest

within this vast fi eld. Maybe I could even gain a greater purpose from

the work I produce before continuing on to grad school. This semester’s

thesis opportunity allowed me to explore the ideas I found fascinating

and re-imagine them in relevant ways. It has helped me to think about

what and how I want to design in the future. More importantly, it has

given me a better understanding of why I want to design that way.

After re-visiting my philosophy class notes and researching more in-

depth the various topics I enjoyed, I kept returning to Edmund Husserl’s

Phenomenological Reduction. It hit me as relevant and able to explain some

of my beliefs and interest in architecture, allowing me to think about them

from a diff erent perspective. Recently I have thought about how our society

has become consumed by our daily activities, trying to fi nd meaning in things

that for the most part, can only temporarily do so. We often forget to really look, smell, touch, taste and listen to the things that make up our world.

Husserl’s theory proposes we should focus on the pure essence

of things themselves opposed to how we can use them.

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I agree with the Phenomenologists in that, the “pure essence” of things are

these senses. The only way we can truly know the world is fro, our experience

through our bodies. Phenomenologists try to separate prior knowledge

from experience in order for the sensations of that instance to remain pure.

So, my question for this project was: How is/how can the concept

of Phenomenological Reduction (Epoché) be incorporated into

architectural design? Since my original interest was in how humans

interact within and perceive space, I wanted to use Husserl’s concept

to complete a project that brought these interests to light. Through

this project, I am questioning how architecture, something necessary

to day-to-day life, can enhance our connection to the only world

we can really know, through the only way we can really know it.

This project has allowed me to contemplate human experience and

how a designer can use our sensual experiences to shape a design.

The follies created are not meant to be functional for day-to-day

activities, but instead to provide an escape from these activities into

a pure experiential one. My next step will be to see how these two

things can combine. Can our daily activities gain more meaning if they

are conducted within spaces that provoke our connection to the world?

follies of epoché

Documents

mee x p e r i e n c

experiential p h e n

ones senses

project criticc

project breif

narration streams

streams of narration

science of facts