The Creation of Sense of Place: Negotiating the Divide Between Nature and Culture Through Phenomenological Architecture

The project I am proposing seeks to explore phenomenological architecture as a medium between culture and nature in order for humans to regain a sense of place in the natural world. While recent trends in architecture, namely sustainability, seek to emphasize environmental consciousness, the subjective relationship to the environment – how it affects our senses – remains the one we know least about. The process of designing and constructing buildings in the natural world must respond to conditions of nature in terms of site, material, purpose and form, to answer the demands of the human-nature condition. At the same time the architecture must accommodate specific human-cultural needs and criteria. This project seeks a balance between these two diverging ideologies