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This chapter describes a polygraphic historiographic method aimed at uncovering how architectural phenomenology gained coherence. By foregrounding the social and generational struggles, it seeks to reclaim a space for individual agency in the history of postmodern architecture’s intellectual development. It focuses on the discursive heat created by the frictions between protagonists and how it changed the state of what was considered legitimate intellectual work in architecture. The chapter also expands the chronology of the intellectual history of postmodern architecture back to the postwar period when it began to cohere into a recognizably new way of approaching the questions of history and theory.

This chapter presents some final thoughts concerning architectural phenomenology. It argues that architectural phenomenology produced new architectural standards of intellectual, aesthetic, and historiographical competency. Through its objective and discursive mechanisms, it organized the attention of architects toward what mattered (aesthetic experience, history, and theory) and structured the functional relationships between these matters. Today, architectural phenomenology undergirds the sensualist neomodernist fantasy of an essential experiential origin to architecture.

This chapter focuses on Charles Moore (1925–1993) and his contribution to architectural discourse, which has been interpreted as turning the attention of architects toward decoration and playful superficiality, instead of the structure of the building. His interest in decoration was a function of his fascination with interiors and ultimately with the inner world of human experience. His “superficiality” was rooted in an obsession with achieving profound experiences. To properly situate Moore in the intellectual history of postmodern architecture is to distinguish between his intellectual work and his architectural aesthetics, even if Moore himself insisted on conflating the two.

This chapter focuses on Kenneth Frampton, who believed that making buildings where people could pursue aesthetic experiences was an ethical commitment dependent on, and appropriate to, progressive social politics. Despite his enormous influence in architectural culture around the world, the experiential core of Frampton’s theory of critical regionalism remains unexamined. A deep comprehension of how Frampton understood aesthetic experience is needed so as not to minimize its political thrust and import in architecture.

This chapter focuses on Christian Norberg-Schulz, one of the most influential architecture theorists of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a key interpreter of phenomenology in general and of Martin Heidegger in particular for architectural audiences. Through his carefully staged photo-essays, Norberg-Schulz theorized the history of architecture as the recurrence of visual patterns. The chapter argues that his photo[historio]graphy was fundamentally antihistorical; it attempted to ward off critical reflection by concealing its own historical construction. Norberg-Schulz passed off his photographs as universally valid visions of a timeless natural order that modern architects were invited to return to, in order to escape history.

This chapter focuses on Jean Labatut, who was known among his contemporaries as one of the most influential teachers of the mid-twentieth century in America. Labatut’s teachings helped shape postmodern architecture and promoted the view that the best way to understand this new architecture was to experience it. His success as a teacher rested on the clarity of his message: before architects could create modern buildings, they had to first be able to experience buildings in a modern way. His pedagogy aimed to define this modern experience as a bodily communion with architecture, which was immediately meaningful and did not require intellectual reflection. The chapter argues that architectural phenomenology was formed against the background of Labatut’s teachings.