From the things themselves : architecture and phenomenology / edited by Benoît Jacquet and Vincent Giraud.

"This book is a selection of edited papers and keynote lectures presented during the second international conference on architecture and phenomenology held in Kyoto in June 2009"--Page [vi].

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Why the mood in a room and the mood of a room should be important to architects / Hubert L. Dreyfus -- Aural architecture and its phenomenological roots / Sylvain De Bleeckere -- The Zen garden of Shōden-ji as a Kōan of perception / Gilad Ronnen -- Inhabiting nothingness: Heidegger on building / Vincent Giraud -- The talismanic presence of architecture and ornament in Heidegger's Hütte / Ross Anderson -- Light, stone, and flesh: Bernard of Clairvaux and the wall of the church / Jason Crow -- Weather phenomena and immortality: the well-adjusted construction in ancient Greek poetics / Phoebe Giannisi -- Architecture and technology: questions about representations / Joanna Wlaszyn -- Now and here, I am there: the theory of body and space in Merleau-Ponty and Nishida Kitarō / Kakuni Takashi -- Expressing embodiment: architectural representation as carnal echo / Rachel McCann -- House and organ: Hugo Häring and prosthetic architecture / Fernando Quesada -- Thinking bodies / Karan August -- Shaped space, embodied space: Borromini's Baroque architecture / Lena Hopsch -- Homage to Michelangelo: Tange's encounter with Heidegger / Fujimori Terunobu -- Reduction to Japan-ness? Katsura Villa as a discursive phenomenon / Benoît Jacquet and Dermott Walsh -- Performing poetry-music: on Confucians' garden dwelling / Zhuang Yue -- Refutation, revelation and reconstruction: on architecture and the settlement of memory / Adam Sharr -- Building metaphors: notes towards a hermeneutics of arthitecture / Santiago de Orduña -- The gift of architecture and embodied consciousness / Alberto Pérez-Gómez -- Architecture as a way of thinking / Takeyama Kiyoshi Sey -- Longing for Ithaca: on the need for a post-Copernican geocentrism / Karsten Harries.

Thinking architecture requires a revealing of the bond that links it to the full spectrum of phenomena. This means to replace architecture on its own phenomenological ground, from which it has too often been severed. It will thus become manifest that the work of architects -- and architectural practice itself -- does not solely deal with things, but primarily emerges from the things themselves. In 21 texts, From the Things Themselves presents approaches relating architecture to phenomenology, and vice-versa. The philosophies of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty are revisited and experienced through a large array of architectural realizations: from the virtual world of Second Life, the poetical and spiritual worlds of Greek temples, Cistercian or Baroque churches, Chinese and Japanese gardens, to the work of contemporary architects. This book, made in Kyoto, is grounded in a particular cultural landscape, where local and foreign traditions have blurred into modern realities. To the philosopher, it provides a precise analysis of concrete cases, thus permitting a testing of the relevance and effectiveness of salient concepts, both aesthetical and ethical. The architect, on the other hand, is presented with a reflexive gaze on everyday work, as well as the tools with which to rethink the reality of architectural practice.