The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) never wrote a book about architecture, not even a chapter or an essay. In fact, despite his frequent references to the everyday situations of ‘lived experience’, nowhere in his work is there any kind of systematic treatment of buildings, spaces or cities. Therefore, one is clearly entitled to ask at this point: what is there in Merleau-Ponty for architects?
To begin with, he did produce a powerful argument for what he sometimes called the ‘primacy of perception’; the idea that perception as an act of the whole body is central to our experience and understanding of the world. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, building on the early twentieth-century tradition of phenomenology, established by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and his student Martin Heidegger, focused on the central fact that we are, as human beings, inescapably embodied entities. For Merleau-Ponty, therefore, even more so than for his two illustrious predecessors, the body serves as our first means of access to the world: in other words, before we can even begin to philosophize, we first have to come to terms with the embodied reality of our ‘concrete situation’. He also described how, through our constantly evolving repertoire of bodily skills and patterns of behaviour, we learn to ‘come to grips’ with this world through a process of exploration and discovery. Our initial understanding of a space is based on its practical possibilities – we grasp it as a structured arena for action, inviting us to use it in a particular way. This idea of experience as an ongoing interplay between perception and action has vital implications for how we think about space in architecture today, and more importantly, for how we set about designing places that people find engaging, stimulating and meaningful.
Another reason for architects to look more carefully at Merleau-Ponty’s work is that he did write several lengthy and significant articles on other forms of creative expression, most notably on painting and literature. More recently, these essays have been collected and republished as The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (Johnson and Smith 1993), suggesting that there is plenty here to interest people well beyond the confines of philosophy. More important for architects is Merleau-Ponty’s lifelong study of what he called the ‘phenomenology of perception’: the typically taken-for-granted miracle of everyday experience that results from the ongoing interactions of brain, body and world. Through a persistent and often inspiring evocation of what he referred to as the body’s ‘primordial encounter’ with the everyday world, he described how sense is actually inherent in bodily experience, and how the body acts as the vital pivot between the inner world of the individual and the outer world of social and cultural forces.
One of the commonly repeated misconceptions in many architectural accounts is that phenomenology appears to support the traditional notion of the individual self as an isolated rational ‘subject’, the idea being that the individual is some kind of sovereign creator of meaning, able to magically constitute the world independently as a product of conscious thought (Hensel et al. 2009: 145). One of the key aims of this book is to set out a radically alternative view, to suggest that Merleau-Ponty should, in fact, be seen as a ‘proto-posthumanist’ thinker: someone who believes in a fluid definition of the individual self, or subject, as both dependent on and inseparable from its natural and cultural surroundings. Merleau-Ponty also supports the idea of the Umwelt, developed by the biologist Jakob von UexkĂŒll, which shows how all organisms effectively ‘produce’ their own environment by selecting just those features of the world with which they are equipped to interact. In other words, it is our ability to perceive a particular quality (the colour green, for example) that allows it to ‘show up’ as a characteristic of ‘our’ particular world. It is here, at the point of contact between bodily behaviour and environmental opportunity, that an organism begins to make sense of its existence and ultimately – and likewise over an evolutionary timescale – to emerge into a state of consciousness (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 167; 1983: 159). Merleau-Ponty described this mutual interdependence between the self and its surroundings by saying that ‘the world is inseparable from the subject, but a subject who is nothing but a project of the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 454).

Merleau-Ponty should, in fact, be seen as a ‘proto-posthumanist’ thinker: someone who believes in a fluid definition of the individual self, both dependent on and inseparable from its surroundings.

Phenomenology and architecture

A further reason for the continued architectural relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s work is the key contribution it made to the growth and influence of the larger phenomenological ‘movement’. As one of the major schools of twentieth-century philosophy, phenomenology has had a significant impact in architecture and many other fields concerned with the relations between intellectual ideas and material things. Inaugurated by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in 1900, with the publication of his Logical Investigations, phenomenology in its modern form set out to challenge some of the most basic principles in the history of Western philosophy, including the long-standing split between the mind and the body that had been prevalent since the time of Plato. This effort was even more evident in the work of Husserl’s most illustrious student, Martin Heidegger, whose ideas drew almost as much from the few surviving fragments of so-called Pre-Socratic philosophy as they did from the 2,000 years of writing that came after. While Husserl’s own writings have not been as directly influential in architecture, Heidegger’s ideas have been taken up by a number of architectural historians, theorists and designers (Sharr 2007).
Much of the most important work in phenomenology was produced in the 1940s and 1950s, but it took until the 1960s before these ideas had a real impact in architecture, particularly in the English-speaking world. This was partly due to the time lag between original publication and translation; two of the most significant single works, Heidegger’s Being and Time and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception both first appeared in English only in 1962. An important early link between phenomenology and architectural theory came through the work of Christian Norberg-Schulz, although his earliest writings, such as the book Intentions in Architecture (Norberg-Schulz 1966), were, as with Merleau-Ponty’s early work, more strongly influenced by Gestalt psychology. This is a school of thought developed in the early 1900s, based on the idea that we perceive the world only insofar as it appears to us immediately in ‘structured wholes’ or meaningful patterns, as opposed to random sequences of incoming sensory ‘data’, which the perceiving subject then has to ‘decode’ and interpret. Norberg-Schulz’s later work borrowed more directly from Heidegger, particularly his 1951 essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, which inspired the idea of the ‘spirit of place’ as emerging gradually through the dynamic and active processes of dwelling in a particular environment (Norberg-Schulz 1985). By accepting the limited natural resources provided by the site and working in harmony with the local climate and traditional building patterns, it was claimed that this spirit could be preserved and reinterpreted, and thus extended into the future.
In this emphasis on tradition in both dwelling patterns and technologies, the phenomenological approach in architecture soon became associated with conservatism and nostalgia. On the other hand, a number of more recent architectural writers such as Kenneth Frampton and Juhani Pallasmaa have also tried to emphasize the potentially liberating power of a return to the fundamental principles of form, space and materiality. These possibilities are perhaps best evidenced in the buildings of phenomenologically inspired designers such as Peter Zumthor and Steven Holl and also the early work of the Swiss practice Herzog and de Meuron. By focusing on the central role of the moving body in the perception of architectural space, the sensory qualities of light, sound, temperature and materiality can be thought of in Merleau-Ponty’s terms as a kind of ‘primordial language’, often only experienced unconsciously by building users as part of the background to their everyday activities.
Ultimately, phenomenology in architecture is less of a design method and more a form of discourse, offering a powerful way of describing, discussing and ‘deciding about’ architecture, from the perspective of our lived experience as embodied building users. It provides a set of tools to help us both design and dwell more rewardingly within our buildings, by heightening our awareness of the teeming richness of the world that is constantly unfolding around us. As Merleau-Ponty himself suggests, phenomenology as a ‘way of seeing’ could be compared with poetry and painting, as he considers it
as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, ValĂ©ry, or CĂ©zanne – through the same kind of attention and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to grasp the sense of the world or of history in its nascent state.
(Merleau-Ponty 2012: lxxxv)

Ultimately, phenomenology in architecture is less of a design method and more a form of discourse, offering a powerful way of describing, discussing and deciding.

Merleau-Ponty and architecture

The major implications of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas for architects can be described under the broad headings of Ethics and Aesthetics, and both of these areas will be addressed in detail in the four main chapters to follow. On the one hand, his famously complex concept of ‘flesh’ suggests an underlying continuity between the body and the world, providing a powerful philosophical grounding for what we might call an ‘ethical ecology’ – a reminder that we should all be much more mindful of our ultimate dependence on our surroundings. On the other hand, his work also offers a way of addressing our often unconscious aesthetic preferences, by showing how our perception of the world around us necessarily begins with a process of bodily engagement, before it can be processed in intellectual terms and chopped up into concepts. His profound meditation on the primacy of embodied perception suggests that the body serves ultimately as both a framework and a model for everything we can come to know about ourselves and the world.
There has also been a recent revival of interest in Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodied perception across a number of related research areas, including philosophy of mind, cognitive science, artificial intelligence and neuroscience, where the central role of the body has now become well established (Gibbs 2005; Clark 2008; Clarke and Hansen 2009; Shapiro 2011). I have tried to give a sense of this burgeoning interest by drawing on literature from across a range of fields, especially where new evidence is helping to refine and substantiate claims that were perhaps only vaguely formulated by Merleau-Ponty himself. My other aim is to show the relevance of his work across a broader range of architectural issues, beyond the more obvious application to questions of materiality and sensory experience.
Of course, gaps remain in Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment: the role of gender being perhaps the most significant, despite his occasional reference to the writing of his friend Simone de Beauvoir. His work certainly allows room to incorporate sexual difference, as later writers like Iris Marion Young and Elizabeth Grosz have already convincingly shown (Young 1980; Grosz 1994; Olkowski and Weiss 2006). What they highlight is the potential in Merleau-Ponty’s approach to account for the implications of different forms of embodiment, beyond the simple binary opposition of male and female: ‘there is a particular style of bodily comportment that is typical of feminine existence, and this style consists of particular modalities of the structures and conditions of the body’s existence in the world’ (Young 1980: 141).


 [there is] the potential in Merleau-Ponty’s approach to account for the implications of different forms of embodiment, beyond the simple binary opposition of male and female.

As it is almost impossible to present Merleau-Ponty’s ideas in any kind of straightforward linear sequence, this book is organized according to broad architectural themes, following a cyclical and iterative pattern. Each chapter therefore deals in different ways with many of the same ideas. Building on the brief outline provided in this introduction, later chapters will attempt to flesh out a progressively more detailed picture. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 develop the key elements of Merleau-Ponty’s work in relation to questions of space, form and materiality in architecture, while Chapter 5 highlights the more radical and creative implications for design of what he described as the gradual emergence of reason out of bodily experience.

Who was Maurice Merleau-Ponty?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born on 14 ...