ABSTRACT
In this essay Vesely consolidates years of research, opening speculation on new understandings whilst returning to original sources in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Patočka. The topic of the latent world, first introduced in his book, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, concerns the conditions already-there for recovery of orientation to the universality of the shared world. Taking his point of departure from the Husserlian lebenswelt (life world), Vesely develops an insight from Patočka that we are already integrated in the world by virtue of our corporeity and ultimately by the claim of the Husserlian ‘earth which does not move’. This allows Vesely to move beyond Heidegger and to speculate on the nature of culture as embodiment of the lebenswelt and the ‘primary cosmic conditions of creativity’. Showing how architectural understanding has, since the eighteenth century, abandoned the received cosmological inheritance for interpretations based on history and then on theory, Vesely considers the conditions under which the phenomenology of the life world might be the basis for recovering orientation. An appendix from the same period of Vesely's research looks at other aspects of embodiment, in particular the tension between mathematical or logical identity and the depth of shared meaning. This leads to a reconsideration of the contemporary city as a vehicle of potential renewal of understanding.
