The life-world
Our daily existence as human beings reveals itself in a world filled with things, persons, and events. We walk in the streets of our city; in the course of that walk we meet many people; we enter and leave various buildings, and at particular places we attend to our daily duties. We are continually surrounded by an arresting mass of objects: trees and plants, houses and house furnishings, the objects of our daily uses; and we cannot help being exposed to the good or bad weather of the place we live in.
Edmund Husserl uses the term life-world (Lebenswelt) to describe the determined world that, without intermediary, has its presence before us, and defines it as 'a space encompassing the things just as we experience them in their pre-cognitive being.' This kind of experience, in Husserl's reading, is a 'natural experience' and is — to the extent that it bears on 'the things themselves' — at the same time pre-cognitive. Natural experience has neither subjective nor objective quality, and never carries a rupture or separation between body and consciousness.
We human beings live together; we are within the life-world — within what Heidegger calls 'being-in-the-world', or, in German, simply Dasein.
Quality and language
Natural experience is directed toward the qualitative — and quality is always referred to an identity immediately present and accessible in the life-world. In this world every thing has a name — geographical phenomena, natural spaces and forms, in short every human (and non-human) creation has its own name. Language thus brings the contents of the life-world into expression, and reveals the truth that the words for things are arrayed in many kinds of two-sided meaningfulness. Many of these relations have hidden themselves chiefly in language, and it is the poet's task to unveil the most important of them for us.
The life-world is neither a clear, ambiguity-free world nor a harmonious, well-ordered one. The determinedness and the wholeness of this world, however, can offer a qualitative ground for a collective self-knowledge. Architecture is itself a part of the life-world, and is to be understood only as a function of it.
Scientific abstraction versus natural experience
If we ask what is taught to pupils in schools, the answer we receive will have nothing to do with the life-world. On the contrary, the answer we hear will belong to the world of scientific abstractions. We never learn, for instance, that water is one of the most complex and astonishing compounds in nature — and that there is now a consensus that water, precisely because of its astonishing properties, is the source and origin of the world. What we learn in today's schools is, instead, that water is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen, expressed in the formula H₂O.
In the same way, the determined and heterogeneous space of the life-world has given way to a three-dimensional coordinate system in which every point has a value equal to that of every other. Our daily experience tells us, on the other hand, that the world is flat and the heaven dome-like and starry. An expression like that should not be implicitly taken as a regression to old superstitions and ancient beliefs; it means recalling, to the forgetful mind of contemporary man, an idea about the objective nature of the life-world.
Husserl's phenomenology
Even before the First World War, Husserl had made the saying 'Let us return to the things themselves' the philosophical currency of his time, and in the middle years of the 1930s he had fully laid out his thought in his great book The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Science, in time, has parted man from the things themselves; the book stresses that only a phenomenological understanding can return that to him, and bring us back toward 'the things themselves'.
Husserl defined phenomenology in this way: 'the science of possible experience of the world.' Phenomenology is not a theory but a path whose aim is to make accessible the structures and significations / meanings of the life-world. By that token, phenomenology does not entertain the ambition of replacing the natural sciences. What it would replace is the relations and the whole body of principles and norms that are expressed merely by the natural sciences.
Things as 'modes of being'
The term mode of being (Seinsweise) brings into expression the fundamental role of things in the life-world, and reflects on the multiplicity or the possible plurality of fields, rather than a single static archetype. What is implied is that all the things that are revealed to us in nature keep an even greater depth hidden, and the task of phenomenology is to lay bare those depths.
In language, too, every noun denotes a mode of being / of existence of the thing — not the marker of a particular object. The word 'bird' does not mean either swallow or eagle, though it can refer to one or both — it does so when the word points to the shared mode of existence of swallow and eagle, that is, to what — Aristotle would perhaps have said — is the quality of bird-ness.
The history of architectural theory in the light of the life-world
Up to and through the eighteenth century, the texts of architecture were chiefly built upon 'instructions', for the duty expected of the architect in a relatively static society was something on a par with the duties of a baker or a cobbler. The architectural treatises that were written did not draw out into philosophical considerations of the architect's origin or intention; they considered, in the first place, matters of objective importance, of practical or aesthetic nature.
Vitruvius's book, titled De Architectura, is in fact a defence of the positive side of the various kinds of knowledge and skill that an architect needs in order to be able to use architecture in a fitting and a knowing way. Vitruvius's three famous principles — firmitas (firmness), utilitas (utility), and venustas (beauty) — are taken up only in a few lines of his great book; the rest of the text deals with the objective problems facing the architect in the course of construction. Vitruvius's text is a reflection of the nature of the life-world, and his book is now read as a manual.
Vitruvian thought lasted through the Middle Ages like an underground river, until in around 1450 in Alberti's De Re Aedificatoria — a book likewise written for practical use — it was, like its predecessor, divided into a number of books built on the principles proposed by Vitruvius. Books two and three deal with the firmness of the building from the standpoint of the materials used and the building's execution; books four and five examine the matter of utility and discuss the distinction between public and private buildings. Chapters seven, eight, and nine are addressed to the function of beauty and to such concepts as order; the tenth and final chapter is a discussion of hydraulics and of street systems.
The Renaissance: the human, nature, proportion
It was in the Renaissance that other concepts also rose to view. Filarete was the first to set out the primitive hut of early man as the origin of architecture. Francesco di Giorgio Martini worked on the relation between the building and the human body. Serlio sought to define carefully the relation between the creations of nature and the creations of man. Palladio insisted on the relation he believed to obtain between the building and its place. After him Francesco Giorgi put forward a theory of proportion built on the order of numbers. All those treatises, of practical and aesthetic nature, can be placed under the general heading of an inquiry into the qualitative.
1671: founding of the Royal Academy of Architecture
It was after the founding of the Royal Academy of Architecture in France in 1671 that the manner of reasoning and reflecting in the field of architecture underwent a fundamental and abrupt turn — and this came, beyond doubt, from the rationalist thought of Descartes (1596-1650). What followed was, in general, the freeing of architecture from the life-world, and its installation as an object of abstract reflection.
This freeing came in two seemingly opposed directions: first, geometry alone was put forward as the only certain matter; second, the human share in architecture was reduced to a question of sensual perception and aesthetics. François Blondel, the first director of the Academy, supported the normative theory of proportion; his rival, Claude Perrault, was the chief proponent of an 'empirical' approach that took the human as a tabula rasa. Even though Perrault's ideas left no immediate mark, they were the first fruits of the new distinction between thought and feeling — a distinction risen from the subject-object dualism of Descartes's philosophy.
From here onwards, the human came face to face with things, and things became, for him, objects. He thereafter received them all from the standpoint of modern reason, and not as objects existing for themselves and present independently of the existence of the subject.
