ABSTRACT
There needs to be an incentive to create a harmonious human environment, consciously and intentionally. This chapter offers some observations on the design of the human environment from a philosophical perspective. It identifies the basic factors that combine to provide the matrix that is embodied in any environmental setting. These include its aesthetic conditions, for these are fundamental to all experience. The chapter also identifies several contrasting conceptions of the relation of a building to its site. It joins ideas about the building–site relation with others about experience to develop some suggestions for guiding the design of environment from the standpoint of a phenomenology of environmental experience. It is necessary to join a model of building with an understanding of environmental experience that does not place the two together as the sum of separate factors but regards them as a primal unity, primitive in the sense of being primary, a seamless whole that antecedes any division.
