Husserl, Edmund

Bio Sketch

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was a German philosopher, founder of phenomenology. Husserl's method of phenomenological reduction sought to describe the structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. His work influenced Heidegger, Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty.

Key Works

• Logical Investigations (1900-1901)
• Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (1913)

Key Concepts

• phenomenology
• intentionality
• lifeworld

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Husserl's phenomenology is the foundation for Heidegger's ontology and the phenomenological tradition in architecture (Norberg-Schulz, Pallasmaa). His work connects to themes of dwelling, perception, and the lived body.

Source Support

• source-notes/kidder-gadamer-for-architects
• source-notes/abell-freud-for-architects
• Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday (Yoka & Paschalidis eds. 2015) — the Introduction's verdict that Husserl "stopped short of unmooring the everyday from the fallacies [of] common sense" and so failed to validate it as the active basis for a critique of rationalism; the editors read Vaneigem and Lefebvre as radicalizing Husserl's "return to the things [them]selves" into a return to human praxis.
• Thing-Shapes (Dubbeldam 2002/2006) — the generative-architectural reception of The Origin of Geometry (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989, pp. 177–9, quoted twice): all things "necessarily [have] to have a bodily character"; "thing-shapes" as spatiotemporal shapes with "material" qualities whose surfaces are "more or less 'smooth,' more or less perfect"; "horizon-exposition" as free variation running "through the conceivable possibilities of the life-world" (quoted p. 97); and phoronomic shapes as the figure of a generative architecture. Dubbeldam's Husserl is the methodological Husserl — variation as design algorithm — an afterlife of the founder's texts in digital design (see thing-shapes, life-world).
• Design studio through the subtle revelations of phenomenology (Smith 2018) — the perceptual-doctrinal reception: Husserl's theory of adumbrations (Abschattungen) as the studio concept — "facets of an object in space as it presents itself to you; they are often multilayered and multisensory. Husserl considered adumbrations as 'conditional,' in that our perception of an object is conditioned on how we approach it or what it offers us" — with the "conditionals"/"relations of 'motivation'" gloss from Cerbone's Understanding Phenomenology (2006, p. 102, quoted in Smith's note 6): "Embedded in our perceptual experience is an elaborate network of conditionals that record possible, but not currently actual, perceptual experiences." Smith's Husserl is the perceptual Husserl — adumbrations as the mechanism a design studio can train (see perception, subtle-revelation).
• Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration (Macken 2018) — the temporal-doctrinal reception: Husserl's "thickened present" as the preserved interior's durational quality — "refers to this spatial, durational quality, in which past events are retained as traces in the present" — applied to the Brett Whiteley Studio, where "the visitor experiences two presents: the ongoing present of the spatial document (the moment of the artist's inhabitation preserved) and the current present (the moment experienced by the visitor)," glossed through Stephen Kern ("the present is a continuous unrolling field of consciousness, thickened with retentions and protentions," p. 84) and Ricoeur ("a passed past that nevertheless remains preserved in its vestiges," p. 120). Macken's Husserl is the temporal Husserl — retentions and protentions as the structure a preserved room makes architecturally visible (see thickened-present, temporality).