ABSTRACT
Inspired in Mitra, an architectural work conceived by the Portuguese architect Vitor Figueiredo (1929–2004), we approach the constitution of space by the body – phenomenological architecture. We explore a dwelling incarnated in the object, a corporeal phenomenon – pure experience. In other words, a communication between object and subject, and in that way ask for a Pure Architecture.
In the first section we analyse the architect’s attitude as a phenomenological movement, based on the notions of ‘absolute givenness’ and ‘pure phenomena’, from Husserl (1859–1938) and the contributions of others philosophers as Merleau-Ponty (1901–1961), and Lyotard (1924–1998), aiming to achieve in the [architectural] object an immanent knowledge through the experience it. In the second section, drawing from the idea of experience by dwelling in the world and with the contributions of Merleau-Ponty on ‘perception’ and the ‘body’, and the insight of the theoretical architect Juhani Pallasmaa (1936–), we explore the embodied experience of the body by being in the world and the body as an expression of the world, in order to reveal a corporeal dwelling founded by the nature of being with the world, in other words, the dwelling in experience [Intentionality]. In experiencing Mitra, we found a new kind of dwelling and of making Architecture. The work is believed to reveal the incarnate habit that the architect-author himself lived (experienced/felt), that is, the corporeal value under the symbolic value, materialized in the work by the architect and inhabited in the experience of the user subject.
