Bryan E.
Norwood
1. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Existence,
Space, and Architecture (New York: Praeger,
1971), 18.
2. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation,
trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1997), 5.
Opposite page: Christian Norberg-
Schulz’s diagram in Existence, Space,
and Architecture (1971; above) and
Édouard Glissant’s diagram of the
Middle Passage in Poetics of Relation
(1990).
Disorienting
Phenomenology
The baggage that phenomenology carries with it in architec-
tural discourse is weighty. This issue of Log aims to lighten
the load, or at the very least redistribute it. The suggestion
will be that the persistent limitations of architectural phe-
nomenology result from unchecked presumptions on how
humans should orient themselves. Here, we go about chal-
lenging this normativity not by dismissing the tools of phe-
nomenology but rather by working from within the tradition
to disorient.
Christian Norberg-Schulz’s diagram in Existence, Space,
and Architecture (1971) is a fitting representation of the way
phenomenology has traditionally been interpreted in archi-
tectural discourse.1 On the right is a place, a home, circum-
scribed and bounded off. In the middle, a dashed path with an
arrow at one end shows movement oriented by and toward
this destination. This place – Heidegger’s temple or hut per-
haps – represents, for Norberg-Schulz and the conservative
tradition of the architectural interpretation of phenomenol-
ogy, an imagined primitivity. It is a lost paradise authentically
organized around a center. It also signifies a projected future
wholeness, a place in which we, as individuals and collec-
tives, are at home and to which a proper phenomenological
attitude might attune us. But what are the smaller circles on
the left and inscribed in the center on the right? They are the
presupposition on which the coherence of the entire diagram
rests. They are not empty markers, but rather signifiers of a
particular conception of subjectivity – a universal, transcen-
dental subject on the left and an externalized re-presenta-
tion of himself at the center of place on the right. These two
marks are made whole by the dotted, and thus provisional,
path along which subjectivity orients toward its home. This is
a diagram for a kind of embodiment, a way of being-in-the-
world, for whom the orientation of self and the order of the
world align.
Édouard Glissant’s diagram of the Middle Passage in the
first pages of his Poetics of Relation (1990) looks different.2
The path is unified and the ends are frayed. The line repre-
sents forced travel across the abyss of the Atlantic Ocean in
11

3. Ibid., 143–44.
4. On Glissant’s human, see Alexander
G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing
Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist
Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2014), 38. Going further
than claiming merely another type of
human existence, Fred Moten suggests that
the Middle Passage is “the interpellative
event of modernity in general” and “the
brutal ekstasis of a global condition.” Fred
Moten, “Notes on Passage (The New
International of Sovereign Feelings),”
Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender,
and the Black International 3, no. 1 (2014):
65–66. Doing a phenomenology of
Glissant’s diagram, on this account, gets us
much closer to understanding modernity
than fetishizing the loss or recovery of
Norberg-Schulz’s.
5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s
Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics
Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A.
Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1993), 66.
the belly of the slave ship. Tendrils at each end spread out
across the lands of Africa to the east and the plantations of
the Caribbean and the Americas to the west. Rather than
Norberg-Schulz’s root identity – an identity “founded in the
distant past in a vision, a myth of the creation of the world,”
sanctified by a hidden violence against others, ratified by pos-
session of land, and preserved by projecting conquest onto
other territories – Glissant finds in the experience of the
Middle Passage and the enslaved space of the plantation a
relational identity.3 This is an identity “linked not to a creation
of the world but to the conscious and contradictory experi-
ence of contacts among cultures,” founded upon the chaos of
relations, circulated along paths across territories, and giving
“on-and-with” the land rather than grasping it. In the abyss
of the violence of colonialism and racial capitalism, another
type of human existence takes shape and makes a different
kind of place.4
The normativity of Norberg-Schulz’s root subjectiv-
ity has largely remained an assumed feature of architectural
phenomenology. This assumption, I will suggest, results not
from the consistent application of phenomenological method-
ology, but rather from an underlying ethical project that has
aimed – in the name of recovering something lost or reunify-
ing something fragmented – to sanctify the subject as whole
and complete. This ethical project is rooted in a presupposi-
tion of an ideal type of subject – one we can characterize as
essentially colonizing, enlightened, white, straight, male,
and able-bodied – whose orientation has functioned as the
implicit origin and goal of architectural phenomenology. It is
this ethical project that phenomenology needs to disorient.
Phenomenology and Architecture
Phenomenology was understood by the German philosopher
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and other early practitioners
as a philosophical practice that peels away the abstractions
obscuring the lived world. As a methodology of argumenta-
tion, to quote Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology set out
on an “endless task” of expressing and unveiling what exists.5
This philosophical project first came into architectural dis-
course in the postwar era as one in a set of strategies for gener-
ating a unique, disciplinary approach to intellectual work that
could position architectural research within the modern uni-
versity system (see my interview with Jorge Otero-Pailos in
this issue). Introduced into the discipline through the teach-
ing and writing of Norberg-Schulz and Jean Labatut, among
12 Log 42

6. See Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s
Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise
of the Postmodern (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2010). This is part
of a longer theoretical trajectory of
developing accounts of space and experi-
ence in architecture; see Zeynep Çelik
Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics,
Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 2017);
Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios
Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space:
Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893
(Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1994).
7. For a history of this school, see Joseph
Bedford, “Creativity’s Shadow: Dalibor
Vesely, Phenomenology and Architecture
Education (1968–1989),” PhD Dissertation
(Princeton, 2018). At a finer grain, the
Essex school might be called the third wave
if one distinguishes between Labatut and
Norberg-Schulz’s generations, as Otero-
Pailos does in the interview in this issue.
8. Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, “Give
me a Gun and I will Make All Buildings
Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture,”
in Explorations in Architecture: Teaching,
Design, Research, ed. Reto Geiser (Basel:
Birkhäuser, 2008), 80–89. See also K.
Michael Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 462–64.
9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology
of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New
York: Routledge, 2012), 101–103.
others, phenomenology was used in an effort to establish a
distinctly academic architectural theory in the wake of mod-
ernist critiques of the Beaux-Arts system of architectural edu-
cation.6 When the project’s second wave began to develop in
the 1970s, architectural theorists and practitioners more fully
converted the philosophical methodology of phenomenology
into a method of design that would provide a way to substi-
tute poetic meaning or mythopoeic primitivity for the ratio-
nal and technological. When this approach to design is joined
with a grand narrative of architectural history that positions
the invention of perspective and the European Enlightenment
as moments of devilish disenchantment, one senses that the
call for a return to the lived world also contains some sort of
Luddite plea, regardless of its authors’ protests.
The architectural phenomenology of this second wave,
often labeled the Essex school, provides the more immedi-
ate context and impetus for this issue.7 The primary critique
of the Essex school’s approach suggests that phenomenology
reinscribes the division of subjectivity and objectivity that it
seeks to overcome.8 If phenomenology’s application to archi-
tecture is indeed understood in the way Bruno Latour and
Albena Yaneva have described it – as having to “add human
subjective intentional dimensions to a ‘material’ world” –
then there indeed seems to be no way around its reaffirma-
tion of Cartesian dualism. But Latour and Yaneva are not
describing the practice of phenomenology as established by
Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, or the phenomenological methods
of epoché or reduction, or even the phenomenological-her-
meneutical ontology of Heidegger or Hans-Georg Gadamer.
They are naming, I want to suggest, the dominant way phe-
nomenology has been put into architectural operation.
Architectural Phenomenology as a Universalizing Project
Merleau-Ponty called the oriented, situational spatiality of
embodiment “in and toward the world” the body schema.9
This body schema is not an object but rather, like the world,
is a horizon against which objects and projects appear. Its
spatiality is intentional, directed, and involved. Objects in
the world are given or afforded to it; they are in and out of
reach in a variety of ways. It is the structure of this schema
of embodiment that architectural phenomenology has
treated as primary and as universal. As David Theodore puts
it, architectural phenomenology has tended to understand
historical specificity as “supervening” on a universal “phe-
nomenological body.”
13 Log 42
10. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “Introduction,” Architectural phenomenology’s universalizing ethical
in Steven Holl, Intertwining (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 9. project, one that aims at completeness or wholeness, comes
11. Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function out of positing the universal body as both architecture’s
of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1998), 12. I also think we need to challenge starting point and its goal; as Alberto Pérez-Gómez writes,
the frustratingly simplistic architectural a phenomenological approach can produce architecture that
histories with which many philosophical
writers continue to operate. If architectural “allow[s] the inhabitant to recognize a potential whole-
theory is held accountable for its attention
to the details of philosophy, the inverse
ness through experience.”10 This is not conceived as simply
responsibility should likewise be true. an aim for the individual; as Karsten Harries makes explicit
12. As Woessner says of Harries, “Even if
we think of ēthos in the broad sense as ‘the
in The Ethical Function of Architecture (1997), it is commu-
way human beings exist in the world,’ this nal. Architecture’s challenge is to form a common ethos, to
path of thought is problematic, explaining
too little while pretending to explain too
provide, he says, following Sigfried Giedion, an “interpreta-
much.” Martin Woessner, Heidegger in tion of a way of life, valid for our period.”11 Tellingly, from
America (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 253. the beginning Harries opposes ethos and difference (naming
13. For example, Harries writes, “To feel class, race, gender, and religion), but his move from ethos
at home in the world we not only require
shelter but need to illuminate the world to mythopoeic meaning is even more revealing. While ethos
with myths,” and that the discovery of the initially functions as a thin concept, asserting little more than
true ends of human actions “requires the
aid of myth.” Harries, Ethical Function, 282. the need for collective historical wayfinding, Harries further
14. This sentiment endures today. A passage uses it to argue for the foundational function of myth.12 The
in a recent essay by Harries revisiting The
Ethical Function of Architecture is telling: embodied experience of being at home is said to be mytho-
“Science can know nothing of persons poeic rather than objective, and thus a direct line is drawn
as things worthy of our respect. In this
sense, we can agree with Kierkegaard from the prioritization of embodiment to a way of life and
that subjective truth is higher than
objective truth, where we must resist the
thus to a type of being-in-the-world (in this issue, see Joseph
temptation to translate such subjective Bedford, Kevin Berry, and Benjamin M. Roth).13
truth into some version of objective truth,
as phenomenology too often has attempted
Architectural phenomenology has correctly told us that
to do,” Karsten Harries, “Some Thoughts embodiment matters, but it has done this largely by estab-
and Questions on Revisiting The Ethical
Function of Architecture,” in “Ethics in lishing embodiment as a set of values juxtaposed to scientific,
Architecture: Festschrift for Karsten technological, and capitalistic objectivity.14 These oppositions
Harries,” ed. Eduard Führ, special issue,
Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, International Journal of are explicit, for example, in the way that Juhani Pallasmaa
Architectural Theory, vol. 22, no. 36 (2017): uses a distinction between meditative and calculative think-
27. In the same issue, Juhani Pallasmaa
writes, “Architecture used to be the most ing in order to claim the superiority of designing architecture
important means of concretising mythical, by hand over by the computer.15 Operating in this vein simply
cultural and societal order, as well as
materialising and expressing the specificity sets a different universal against modernity’s objectivity – the
of place and culture. Today’s globalised,
instrumentalised, technologised and com-
subjective becomes the new measure. This tendency is carried
modified construction forcefully eradicates further by those who use contemporary cognitive science,
the sense of specific place and identity,”
“Architecture and Biophilic Ethics,” 59–60.
neurophenomenology, and embodied cognition as ways to
15. See, for example, Juhani Pallasmaa’s The shore up architectural phenomenology’s ethical project with
Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied
Wisdom in Architecture (Chichester: scientifically rigorous accounts of embodiment (see Winifred
John Wiley & Sons, 2009); his The E. Newman).16 For example, in his recent book Attunement:
Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery
in Architecture (Chichester: John Wiley Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science, Pérez-
& Sons, 2011); and his “Embodied and Gómez combines appeals to cognitive science and neurobi-
Existential Wisdom in Architecture:
The Thinking Hand,” Body & Society ology with a call to create “meaningful architecture” that
23, no. 1 (March 2017): 96–111. Harry reveals “the true temporality” and creates “spiritual whole-
Francis Mallgrave provides a helpful
summary in Architecture and Embodiment: ness.”17 What I’m trying to draw attention to here is not the
The Implications of the New Sciences
and Humanities for Design (New York:
specific workings of the sciences of embodied cognition, but
Routledge, 2013), 86. the way they are coopted to bolster an assumption about the

14 Log 42
16. On the scientific study of embodied
cognition and architecture, see Mallgrave,
Architecture and Embodiment; Sarah
Robinson and Juhani Pallasmaa, eds., Mind
in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment,
and the Future of Design (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2015); Sarah Williams Goldhagen,
Welcome to Your World: How the Built
Environment Shapes Our Lives (New York:
Harper Collins, 2017).
17. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Attunement:
Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of
Modern Science (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2016), 10, 215, 227, and 229.
18. See, for example, the abstractions of
Harries, Ethical Function, 180–200.
19. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,
trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove
Press, 2008), 89–93.
ethics of the subject and the aims of architecture. The ethical
project of architectural phenomenology – humanistic com-
pleteness through place – is set in a feedback loop with the
scientific study of the embodied subject to affirm the univer-
salization of anti-objectivity.
In other words, the architectural appropriations of phe-
nomenology have hinged their account of the primacy of
embodiment on the opposition of wholeness and place to sci-
entific and technological displacement to such a degree that
they have reified an alternative set of unbracketed, abstract
clichés. Further, this approach tends to reaffirm the concep-
tion of subjectivity that it intends to reject. A philosophy
aimed at stripping away abstractions and clichés is used to
universalize an able-bodied, sovereign subject oriented in the
world that is his place.18 But if one of the main tasks of phe-
nomenology is to destroy clichés, to bracket our natural atti-
tudes through the method Husserl called the epoché, why not
start with the ones that tell us the character and normativity
of the embodied subject? The argument is not that an able-
bodied, colonizing, male Enlightenment subject is not a form
of embodiment worth studying. It certainly is. But it is not the
form or measure of embodiment. My aim then is not to begin
from a rejection or acceptance of the ethical project of making
place that has marked much of architectural phenomenology
but rather to sidestep it, to suspend its judgments so that we
can question the stability and universality of this account of
subjective embodiment.
Orientation and Disorientation
In contrast to the harmony of Norberg-Schulz’s internal and
external centers, in Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon
describes an inner and outer displacement. The call of “Look!
A Negro!” hurled at him undercuts his body schema; his fun-
damental involvement in the world is arrested and reorga-
nized by a historical-racial schema that makes him “an object
among other objects.”19 The intentionality of his embodi-
ment is destabilized, divided up, repackaged, and thrown
back: “My body is returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed,
redone, draped in mourning.” He thus finds himself in a con-
dition of twoness similar to what W.E.B. DuBois described as
double-consciousness: “This sense of always looking at one’s
self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the
tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.
One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls,
two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals
15 Log 42

20. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of
Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago:
A.C. McClurg & Company, 1903), 3.
21. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 100.
22. See also George Yancy’s account of
being a black man in an elevator in his
Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing
Significance of Race (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2008), 1–31.
23. On facticity, see Martin Heidegger,
Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson (New York: Harper &
Row, 1962), 82–83.
24. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness
and the Acquisition of Language, trans. Hugh
J. Silverman (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1973), 14.
25. Dylan Trigg, The Thing: A Phenomenology
of Horror (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014),
67–73.
26. Ibid., 106.
27. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of
Perception, 224; Trigg, The Thing, 69.
28. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 60–73.
29. Racialization (differentiation) and
racism (hierarchization and exclusion) are
related but not the same. See Weheliye, 72.
30. Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes, 69–70.
in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from
being torn asunder.”20 Doubling is a process of both being-in-
the-world and simultaneously being written and objectified
from the outside and from the past. Active embodiment, as
Fanon says, is arrested by a “history that others have fabri-
cated for me.”21 This causes projective practices – the inten-
tionality of the body schema – to elaborate differently. Fanon
describes occupying public space reticently; his everyday
activities such as lighting a cigarette become both more pre-
cise and more limited as his awareness of his body is inten-
sified (see Adrienne Brown, Charles L. Davis II, and Rachel
McCann).22
Tools for considering the twoness that Fanon and Du
Bois describe are present in phenomenology, particularly in
the notions of facticity – that there always already are facts
about my existence – and intentionality – that my conscious-
ness is always in and toward the world.23 For Merleau-
Ponty, the situational spatiality of the body schema comes
with a preexisting past; we are born into a world of lan-
guage, already wrapped up in significations that precede us.24
Dylan Trigg, in The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror (2014),
describes how this preexistence characterizes Merleau-
Ponty’s account of the body itself, particularly as experienced
in the moments that my body resists the sense of mineness, in
those moments that reveal my body as something that is pre-
personal, something whose temporality is older than the “I.”25
The phenomenological body then is neither all subject nor all
object; it is “duplicitous,” always in itself, before itself, and
beyond itself.26 There is, Merleau-Ponty writes, “another self
which has already sided with the world.”27
However, the twoness of Fanon’s lived experience is not
simply one of having been before himself. It is a being before
himself as written and constantly given by whiteness, a pre-
existence determined by the racialized orientation of oth-
ers.28 In a phenomenological account, race – a condition of
experience rather than biological or physiological reality – is
an effect of this process of racialization (see Davis).29 George
Yancy, in Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance
of Race, labels this disorienting process as the phenomenologi-
cal return: the racialized body is not only a “here”, but also a
“here” experienced as a “there” against the white transcen-
dental horizon.30 He writes: “Within the white imaginary,
to be Black means to be born an obstacle at the very core of
one’s being. To ex-ist as Black is not ‘to stand out’ facing an
ontological horizon filled with future possibilities of being
16 Log 42

31. Ibid., 87.
32. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology:
Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006), 109–56.
33. Ibid., 159.
34. Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a
Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body
Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,”
Human Studies 3, no. 2 (1980): 137–56;
reprinted in Iris Marion Young, On Female
Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and
Other Essays (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005). See also Ahmed, Queer
Phenomenology, 138.
35. Nirmal Puwar, Space Invaders: Race,
Gender and Bodies Out of Place (Oxford:
Berg, 2004); Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology,
135, 157–79.
36. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 158–59.
37. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 108.
other than what one is. Rather, being Black negates the ‘ex’
of existence. Being Black is reduced to facticity. For exam-
ple, it is not only within the light of my freely chosen proj-
ects that things are experienced as obstacles, as Sartre might
say; as Black by definition, I am an obstacle.”31 Blackness is
positioned within the white imaginary as a body only thrown
into the world, not as a body that projects. The body schema
is doubled by a phenomenological return that positions the
black body as an object, a being without the ecstatic structure
of human existence.
In Queer Phenomenology (2006), Sara Ahmed, noting the
connection of orientation and the Orient, describes this expe-
rience of being objectified as one of becoming an object toward
which other subjectivities orient.32 Fanon is racialized as black
in order for whiteness to situate and orient itself – in order for
white subjectivity to create its place. The uneven processes of
objectification create asymmetries in the way different bod-
ies “involve” the world. The world is directed by and directs
orientations differently.33 Iris Marion Young describes this
experience of being a directional marker for others as living
one’s body as a burden. Rather than being at home in a world
of “I cans,” the experience of embodiment is structured in a
way that one’s body is not entirely one’s own and that aspects
of one’s world are defined by an “I cannot.”34 Being the orient
for others is thus experienced as a type of disorientation – a dis-
placement into another world that underlies and thus is con-
stitutional of one’s embodiment (see Lisa Guenther).35
Our response to disorientation, Ahmed says, can either
challenge the ways in which the oriented world, and thus
place, are considered, or it can seek to maintain stability in
the face of disruption.36 A conservative response preserves a
prioritized orientation, even if it engages with the disorien-
tation or deviation of others. It differentiates and positions
other forms of embodied existence as inferior to its orienta-
tion. The way disorientation – specifically that of modern
technology – has been treated by architectural phenomenol-
ogy is largely conservative, such that disorientation is used as
an impetus to call for a return to the stability of mythopoeic
primitiveness (see Ginger Nolan). Fanon saw this techno-
phobic exercise as clearly racialized. He quotes a friend in
the United States: “The Blacks represent a kind of insurance
for humanity in the eyes of the Whites. When the Whites feel
they have become too mechanized, they turn to the Coloreds
and request a little human sustenance.”37 The double move
here is key. Science and modern technology are positioned by
17 Log 42

38. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 174–79.
That is, the oriented architect disorienting
or aestheticizing the disorientation of
others.
39. See, for example, Rachel McCann,
“Crafting Contingency,” in Feminist
Phenomenology Futures, ed. Helen A.
Fielding and Dorothea E. Olkowski
(Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2017), 66–87; Katja Grillner, “A
Performative Mode of Writing Place:
Out and About the Rosenlund Park,
Stockholm, 2008–2010,” in Emergent
Writing Methodologies in Feminist Studies,
ed. Mona Livholts (New York: Routledge,
2012), 133–47; and Ronit Eisenbach and
Rebecca Krefting, “The Pedagogy and
Practice of ‘Placing Space: Architecture,
Action, Dimension,’” in Feminist Practices:
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Women in
Architecture, ed. Lori A. Brown (Farnham
and Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 169–98.
The literature of feminist phenomenology
is extensive, but in connection with this
issue of Log, see, for example, Gail Weiss,
Refiguring the Ordinary (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2008); and
chapters seven and eight in Young, On
Female Body Experience, 123–70.
40. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 8.
whiteness as forces that objectify and thus disorient human
existence. In order to save humanity from this, an anti-tech-
nological primitive is then, in turn, positioned as an other
that helps reorient whiteness. Thus the disorientation of the
privileged position is overcome by disorienting an other, by
making the other an object in the colonizer’s world that helps
them to restabilize.
The way to challenge hegemonic orientations, Ahmed
argues, is not simply to construct a phenomenology (or a
politics) of obligatory or legislated disorientation. Simply
lionizing disorientation or transgression, as occurs in some
architectural discourse, co-opts deviation as a ground in a
way that asks too much of those who are disoriented and
allows too much of those who are oriented.38 Rather, she
proposes that our fundamental challenge is to approach, or
“face,” disorientation. A phenomenological practice is not
to lay the ground in advance, but to unveil, to orient one-
self to experiences of disorientation. In architectural theory,
phenomenological propositions in this vein have been laid
out in particular by feminist approaches to questions of gen-
der.39 The challenge of orienting oneself to disorientation, as
Alexander G. Weheliye puts it in Habeas Viscus: Racializing
Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the
Human (2014), is to understand the subject: “What differ-
ent modalities of the human come to light if we do not take
the liberal humanist figure of Man as the master-subject but
focus on how humanity has been imagined and lived by those
subjects excluded from this domain?”40
The Disquietudes of Bracketing
I would like to suggest that the methodological approach we
should take to disorienting architectural phenomenology is
to perform phenomenological bracketing without the reduc-
tion, an approach Dorothée Legrand lays out in this issue. The
epoché, the method of bracketing or suspending our natu-
ral attitude about the world, and the reduction, the method
of turning our focus to transcendental consciousness, are
two fundamental tools in Husserl’s account of phenomeno-
logical research. Legrand suggests – following Emmanuel
Levinas, Eugen Fink, and Jan Patočka – that the epoché can
be performed without the reduction, and that the former can
in fact be turned on the latter. If this can be done, the result
would be the suspension of our stable clichés about the world
and, importantly, about the subject. That is, the goal would
be to focus on experience without reducing the treatment of
18 Log 42

41. See Stephen Perella, ed., “Form, Being,
Absence: Architecture and Philosophy,”
Pratt Journal of Architecture 2 (Brooklyn:
Pratt Institute School of Architecture
and Rizzoli International Publications,
1988). See also Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s
Historical Turn, 256–59; Mark Wigley,
“The Domestication of the House,”
in The Architecture of Deconstruction:
Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1993), 97–121; Hilde Heynen, “Worthy of
Question: Heidegger’s Role in Architectural
Theory,” Archis 12 (December 1993): 79–91.
42. Massimo Cacciari, “Eupalinos or
Architecture,” trans. Stephen Sartarelli,
Oppositions 21 (Summer 1980): 106–16.
43. Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and
Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern
Architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993),
199–200.
44. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural
Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
45. Harries, Ethical Function, 200. Harries
speaks of our essential unhomeliness in
the midst of critiquing techno-science for
being what underlies our modern condition
of unrootedness. There is a tension here
between the ontological unhomely condition
of Dasein and the critique of the specific,
modern technological moment of history as
one of a unique unhomeliness of Dasein. See
Heidegger, Being and Time, 233–35.
46. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 43.
47. See Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,
Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987):
65–81.
experience to one of a pure, idealized consciousness. The results
would then be to think humanness without narrowing it to a
holistic entity, to a transcendental identity that mirrors the root
identity of colonizing, Enlightenment man. This would pro-
duce, Legrand says, “the disquietude of the epoché,” a way of
facing uneasiness, difference, queerness, and otherness.
The idea of using phenomenology to think unhomely
disquietude rather than the homely is not new to architec-
ture. In a 1988 issue of the Pratt Journal of Architecture titled
“Form, Being, Absence: Architecture and Philosophy,” edi-
tor Stephen Perella and several contributors argued for the
need to emphasize unheimlich experience in phenomenology.41
Massimo Cacciari, in 1980, had called the history of contem-
porary architecture, particularly as written by Manfredo
Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, a “phenomenology of metro-
politan non-dwelling.”42 In Architecture and Nihilism (1993),
Cacciari asks us to imagine a phenomenology not of paths
proceeding to Heidegger’s temple but only departing and
leading away from it.43 And Anthony Vidler developed the
theme of the uncanny in Heidegger (among many others)
in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely
(1996).44 Even Harries, following Heidegger, speaks of our
“essential homelessness.”45
But what is more specific about Legrand’s description
of the epoché-without-reduction, and what builds on the
challenges to think the unhomely, is that she, like Ahmed,
suggests that to approach phenomenology radically would
not simply be to respond to the conservative universalizing
tendencies of orientation by disorienting. It would not be to
think a binary between orientation and disorientation, but
rather to suspend the opposition of “enrootedness and exile.”
It would not be to seek a human existence predicated on tran-
scendental universalization or wholeness nor on the dis-
placement of fundamental lack as its foundation, but rather
existence as integrating and disintegrating, orienting and
disorienting. It would be, as Weheliye describes, to think “an
alternate instantiation of humanity that does not rest on the
mirage of western Man as the mirror image of human life as
such.”46 Following Hortense Spillers (and to a lesser degree
Merleau-Ponty), Weheliye calls this condition “the flesh.”47
Several strategies arise in this project of understanding expe-
rience without presupposing the subject who experiences:
phenomenologies of disoriented bodies (see Brown, Davis,
and Bruce Janz), phenomenologies of the variability and dis/
integration of the body’s parts and sensations (Caroline Jones,
19 Log 42

48. See the introduction to Pallasmaa’s The
Thinking Hand, and the first chapter in his
The Embodied Image.
49. Donna-Dale L. Marcano, “Talking
Back: bell hooks, Feminism, and
Philosophy,” in Critical Perspectives on bell
hooks, ed. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson
and George Yancy (New York: Routledge,
2009), 112.
50. See Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the
Age of Divided Representation: The Question
of Creativity in the Shadow of Production
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004). Vesely’s
line of historical argumentation is, by this
point, widespread and recognizable: The
division of representation between the
intelligibility of reason and subjective aesthetic
experience has cursed architecture since at
least the 17th or 18th century, perhaps even
the 15th century. Architectural knowledge
has been reduced to productivity as
technology has become the universal
metaphysic of our age.
51. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 117.
Theodore, and Trigg), and phenomenologies of the varieties
of the body’s worldly comportments in relation to dis/ability
(Jos Boys and Sun-Young Park).
Theory and Practice
Performing the epoché-without-reduction is not a one-time
activity. It is part of the endless task of phenomenological
work. Lisa Guenther describes this relentless work of ques-
tioning the normativity of human existence as critical phenom-
enology – bracketing “the naturalness of these norms, without
presuming to be capable of setting the norms themselves
neatly aside.” Phenomenological practice can never except
itself from the world from which it begins. This is where the
tradition of architectural phenomenology has so often fallen
short – its authors assuming themselves able to exempt them-
selves from fallenness and make universal pronouncements
about capitalist, techno-scientific modernity that unwashed
masses inhabit.48 Acknowledging the incompleteness of the
epoché and rejecting the reduction’s “ruse of pure conscious-
ness,” as philosopher Donna-Dale L. Marcano calls it, are key
to a revival of phenomenology, efforts particularly apparent
in feminist phenomenologies.49 In the tradition of phenom-
enology dominated by white men, Marcano suggests, while
embodiment is intellectually figured “as any (abstract) body,”
it is practically and historically configured with their con-
crete specificity. What is brought to the forefront by feminist
phenomenologies, and in Marcano’s case the black feminist
phenomenology she finds in bell hooks, is acknowledgment
and expression of this unavoidable tension between transcen-
dental pursuits and facticity.
The ethical project of wholeness that has driven the tra-
dition of architectural phenomenology is one grounded in
a grand historical narrative, one in which enrootedness is
imagined as a privileged moment of history that has been
compromised.50 It is fitting, then, that Ahmed describes his-
tory as a process of domestication, a process of orienting
the world around a home (even if that home is one that is
lost).51 It may be that traditional architectural phenomenol-
ogy’s complaints about the disorientation and loss of meaning
in “our world” due to the objectivity of science and tech-
nology are in fact complaints about the collapse of colonial
models of history (see Mark Jarzombek). Traditional archi-
tectural phenomenology uses a grand history as its bound-
ary, as an inscription that wards off instability. To lament
paradise lost, to celebrate myth, is a way of shutting down
20 Log 42

52. Ibid., 164, 178.
53. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing
Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000).
54. bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and
Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press,
1990), 153.
55. Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom:
Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in
the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2004), 62–82.
56. Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism
and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2012), 173–87.
phenomenological research – a stabilization of a self-referen-
tial center point inside a boundary that we refuse to bracket.
But this does not mean that history needs to stay out of phe-
nomenology (or vice versa). History, Ahmed says, is also a site
of wonder, a potential tool for disorienting our orientation.52
Facing backward, Walter Benjamin and Paul Klee’s angel may
even go astray, taking an oblique path if she turns her histori-
cal gaze toward alternate genealogies.
Following Dipesh Chakrabarty’s reading of Heidegger
in Provincializing Europe, we may be able to say that it is at
the historiographical peripheries where a phenomenological
account of experience becomes particularly potent and per-
haps even politically operative.53 As bell hooks writes, “I am
located in the margin,” a site of oppression and resistance.54
As a tool of the historian, phenomenology could provide ways
for interrogating what lies at the bounds of the archive, for
expressing the diagrams of those who have been silenced.
For example, in her powerful analysis of enslaved women’s
experience of plantation space in the Antebellum South, his-
torian Stephanie Camp formulates a bodily threeness, instead
of the twoness Fanon and Du Bois describe. The enslaved
woman’s body was a site of domination by the slaveholder,
a body experienced as dominated and terrorized, and a body
experienced as a means of resistance and pleasure.55 Through
a triangulated account of these three bodies, Camp vividly
describes embodiment in the preparation and reclamation of
the marginal spaces of the plantation system such as woods
and swamps.
The account of phenomenology I have given here does not
provide a totalizing theory of architecture. It gives us neither
a grand historical narrative nor a way to make universalizing
ethical claims. Rather, it provides a method for activity. Ahmed
concludes her book On Being Included (2012) with an account
of phenomenology as a kind of diversity work.56 Rather than
applying pre-prepared knowledge about an institution in order
to change it, phenomenology, she suggests, is a way of gen-
erating knowledge through practice. The phenomenological
practice of bracketing clichés and describing experience effects
change by bringing one to face and understand others.
The practice of phenomenology can attune me to the
disorientation and disquietude of others. It can be a way to
unveil the particularities of different embodiments and to
bring these embodiments to bear on the theoretical dis-
course of what bodies, institutions, and architectures can do.
Likewise, the always incomplete practice of the epoché is a
21 Log 42
57. As Ahmed puts it, “The straight body is
not simply in a ‘neutral’ position.” Ahmed,
Queer Phenomenology, 159.
58. As a historical methodology, this means
making the unseen bodily, institutional,
and intellectual functions of whiteness
in architecture explicit. See Irene Cheng,
Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson,
“Racial Evidence,” Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 76, no. 4 (December
2017): 440–42.
59. I would like to thank Ben Roth and
Lisa Haber-Thomson for their helpful
comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
I would also like to thank the students
in my fall 2017 seminar “In the Built
Environment of the Lower Mississippi
River” at the Mississippi State University
School of Architecture, who listened and
assisted as I rambled through many of the
ideas discussed here.
way to disquiet and disorient oneself, a way of dis-placing
myself rather than projecting ways in which I can be more
at home in a world that is mine. I am not trying to claim that
an ethics of making humans at home is wrong. I am not sug-
gesting that we simply abandon Norberg-Schulz’s diagram in
favor of Glissant’s. Rather, I am suggesting that if this holistic
norm is posited in advance of the practice of phenomenology,
then a subjectivity that does not experience that home will be
positioned as damaged, as disabled, as inadequate, as the still
colonized Other. The way I am as a straight, white, middle-
class man has been and remains privileged in the way the ori-
entation and placing of the world is distributed. But it is not
the measure of having a body schema or a body; it is only one
configuration of a contingent set of practices and habits.57 The
practice of phenomenology should provincialize my embodi-
ment rather than universalize it.58 Architecture doesn’t need a
phenomenology; it needs phenomenologies.59

Bryan E. Norwood is a visiting assis-

tant professor at the Mississippi State
University School of Architecture and a
PhD candidate in the history and theory
of architecture at Harvard University.
His research focuses on the develop-
ment of professional architectural
practice in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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