The Urban and Architectural Space: Its Experience and Meaning from a Phenomenological Perspective

Abstract

What is the nature of the emotional and significant life produced by architectural forms, and how can specialists in urban-architectural design understand the psycho-affective needs - emotions, sensations, meanings and memories, etc. - of future tenants of their construction project? Through a bibliographic review of a historical and theoretical-critical nature, in the present work the theoretical framework of phenomenological architecture was addressed, What is the nature of the emotional and significant life produced by architectural forms, and how can specialists in urban-architectural design understand the psycho-affective needs - emotions, sensations, meanings, memories, etc. - of future tenants of their construction project? Through a bibliographic review of a historical and theoretical-critical nature, in this work, the theoretical framework of phenomenological architecture is addressed, considering the built context and the world of people, where the meaning of the aforementioned experiences gains life. It is suggested that the sensitive or phenomenal experience of the works built by designers, allows them to access cognitive resources - empathy, inter-corporeality, social cognition - that they can use in future construction and housing projects. In recently published works, epistemic alternatives are found about the nature of the emotional and subjective life of the hypothetical inhabitant, for example, in the cases of empathy (putting oneself in another person’s shoes), the appeal or rejection of certain places, and the 'atmosphere', or the collective sensation created by social interactions in public and other spaces. The results reveal that it is the socio-urban context where architecture’s meanings are interpreted for their application in such projects. It is concluded that this perspective is a subsidiary of philosophical and semiological pragmatism, which confirms the importance of the inhabited context to understand the meaning of what others do, say, or feel. The need for an interdisciplinary and humanistic approach is also confirmed, based on methodologies of an interpretative and phenomenological nature, which give preponderance to a posteriori knowledge, which is obtained through experience.