Architecture as a Humanistic Discipline

Abstract

Dissenting from the view in architecture that science is seen as the ultimate criterion of truth and what is real, Vesely considers the famous question of ‘two cultures’ raised by C.P. Snow. After setting the seventeenth century mathesis universalis against the sensus communis of Vico, Vesely places nineteenth century judgments on the significance of architecture alongside the history of phenomenology, which emerged within the effort to develop foundations for mathematics. The discovery that these foundations lay in the life-world led phenomenology into hermeneutics and the conditions for culture, on which Vesely draws to argue that architecture ‘is not in the first place a technical but a humanistic discipline’, concerned ‘to situate our life in a particular place and create the right conditions for our existence and coexistence, not only with other people, but also with the given natural conditions and cultural circumstances’.