Recordings i made during the Call to Papers "Architecture and Phenomenology" held at the Kyoto Seika University. With permission of the Organising Committee, I make them available publicly. I have to apologise for the quality of the recordings as it was done with a voice recorder on my desk. The call for papers was the following:

Architecture and Phenomenology Second International Conference, Kyoto Seika University, Japan June 26, 2009 (Friday) to June 29, 2009 (Monday)

In continuation of the First Architecture and Phenomenology Conference, which was held in Haifa, Israel during May 2007, the Second Architecture and Phenomenology Conference explores diverse relationships between phenomenology and architecture. The committee members of the Conference invite papers on the relation between architecture and phenomenology, and on phenomenological interpretations of architecture at various levels. Phenomenology has been one of the most productive and inspirational arenas of thinking in the discourse of contemporary architecture since the 1960s. Despite criticisms made by other schools of philosophy such as neo-Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post- colonialism and so forth, phenomenological lessons on life-world, language, perception, body, creation and ethics inspired consistently leading architects and writers in architecture. This Second International Conference on Architecture and Phenomenology seeks to open a new chapter in the history of phenomenological scholarship and practice in architecture. The Conference will revisit how phenomenology has been understood and employed in the scholarship and practice of architecture and urbanism. It will explore architectural and urban lessons of recent development in phenomenology itself such as the ideas of ‘being given’ and ‘saturated phenomenon’ by Jean Luc-Marion and ‘generative phenomenology’ by Anthony Steinbock. Lastly, the Conference will engage with the contemporary situation in which discourses on materiality, sustainability, and digital design and fabrication claim to have opened new arenas in the manner that we apprehend and design environments. The Conference investigates how phenomenology offers itself as a valuable lens through which the openings and limits of these discourses can be evaluated.

Another unique aspect of the Second Architecture and Phenomenology Conference consists in the fact that it is held in an East Asian country. This venue is particularly meaningful in that phenomenology in the West has shown a great affinity to the traditional and modern East Asian thinking. Most of the phenomenology-based studies in architecture have employed as their references the philosophies of Western thinkers such as Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), and so forth. Despite the fact that, in the area of philosophy, East Asian tradition has been studied by many Asian and Western intellectuals, it still remains an uncharted territory of intellectual potential for the discipline of architecture. Accordingly, this Conference will set up a momentous stage not only to balance this tendency, but also to explore the phenomenological tradition of East Asia represented by the Kyoto Philosophical School and its view of nothingness, horizon, body, perception, creation, and art and architecture. Some of the keynote speeches and general paper sessions of the Conference will be devoted to this cross-cultural relationship in phenomenological thinking at the level of both philosophy and architecture.

If you are interested more in this lectures I recommend the following book: https://www.amazon.com/Things-Themselves-Architecture-Phenomenology/dp/487698235X

Architecture and Phenomenology, Kyoto 2009

June 29 (2:00-3:15pm) 2009

Abstract: 
   Our spatiality is constructed with an up and a down, a left and a right, an in front and a behind, a near and a far. When nothing arrests our gaze, it carries a very long way. But if it meets with nothing, it sees nothing. space therefore arrests our gaze, it is also the substance, the obstacle, whether bricks or a "vanishing point". Plato understood this very well. In his famous dialogue Timaeus, chora is characterised as both space and primordial substance, and conceived as a mode of reality through which the things of the world (ideas embodied in concrete things) actually appear to our experience. Properly understood, human space is limits, most clearly when it makes an angle, when it stops. There is nothing ghostly about space; it has edges. Human space is in fact all that is needed for the parallel lines of the straight road to meet well short of infinity: it is not Cartesian space.
   And yet, our mobile and digitally ubiquitous civilization, avid consumer of seductive images, can easily believe that true space is Cartesian space, that the photograph depicts "real" space. It can be further swayed by the argument that speed and instantaneity changes something basic in the primary given structure. We can all agree with Paul Virilio's observation that machines, ranging from television to the automobile, transform our visual relationship to the environing world, proposing their own space/time and as a consequence have an effect on our perceptions.
   When we ask questions about architectural design, this new condition is often described and taken for granted. My contention is that in order to understand the site of contemporary architecture and avoid problematic confusions this situation must be unpacked with care. In this paper I intend to offer some observations to this effect.

Architecture + Phenomenology - Kyoto

A+P | Alberto Pérez-Gómez - The Gift of Architecture and Embodied Consciousness

The Imperial villa of Katsura (1615-1662) is considered as one of the most refined examples of Japanese residential architecture. Since the thirties and Bruno TAUT's sojourn in Japan, the literature on Katsura villa has flourished and since the end of the Second World War, Katsura villa has been at the center of discourses of the Japanese tradition and "Japanese-ness." Considering the architectural discourses of thre generations of architects: KISHIDA Hideto (1929), Bruno TAUT (1936), HORIGUCHI Sutemi (1952), TANGE Kenzo and Walter GROPIUS (1960), ISOZAKI Arata (1983), we will focus on the presentation of Katsura villa as a model of Japanese architecture.

Why, in architectural discourses, Katsura villa does represent "Japanese-ness"? How has the complex architecture of Katsura villa been reduced to a representation of the essence of Japan, its tradition and modernity? From both the perspectives of modern history and philosophy, this paper will try to answer the issue of the 'Japanese-ness" of Katsura villa.

The construction of a discourse on “Japanese-ness" is the result of a crossed history (created by both Japanese and Foreign architects) since the the when architects have tried to define what is Japanese architecture. The need to define Japanese architecture was prompted by the importation of Japanese modern architecture. From the thirties, and moreover in the forties, the debate within Japanese architecture centred in the relation to Occidentalism and the desire to overcome the western modernity. After the war, during the controversy on Tradition, Katsura villa was eventually promoted as a model for the creation of Modern Japanese architecture.

Phenomenological approaches to Japanese architecture have insisted on the specific relation to nature—especially in the case of religious (Buddhist and Shinto) architecture—and the thought of WATSUJI Tetsurô and NISHIDA Kitaro have been advocated for the analysis of the Japanese architectural culture. However in HUSSERL's philosophy, the starting point of his Phenomenology is the Transcendental Reduction. The Reduction "brackets" all ideas tha are unrelated to our perception of the object as it is in itself. Thus the Reduction is a precondition for the fundamental purpose of phenomenology, that of a study of the essence of objects as they appear to consciousness.

By investigating the idea of Transcendental Reduction, what it means both within HUSSERL's philosophy and how it relates to the discourse on Katsura villa, we can see how the 'Japanese-ness" which has often been taken to be an "essence" of that particular building, is in fact a misrepresentation of the term "essence" and just another example of the "natural attitude," which phenomenology must attempt to avoid. The discourse of 'Japanese-ness" mirrors HUSSERL's concept of "sedimentation": the addition of layers of meaning beyond the originary vision of the object.

A+P | Benoit Jacquet - Reduction to Japanese-ness: Discourses on Katsura Villa

csxlab.org is Francisco Vasconcelos, self-taught photographer born in Portugal and currently based in Berlin. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture, and has worked for architecture offices such has Kyiokazu Arai Kyoto & Sou Fujimoto Architects Tokyo.

Amateur photographer since the age of 12 (1990), carrying the Father Zeiss Voigtländer Icarex 35cs camera until 2006 when the arrival of the Digital allowed me to photograph almost in a diary like. Together with the Canon EOS 350D I started to carry it with me to everywhere I went, including ... Clubbing.

With time my photos started to get some appreciation and i got some works for some clubs, mainly Pitch through 2007, and started with a more professional attitude (not just photographing because i was there) but requested to do the cover of the events, an invitation by 1ªLinha from Portugal; an event producer now based in Brazil.

From 2007 until today, I have been photographing music events such as Goa-Festivals, concerts, clubbing, in many countries in which I lived, Portugal, Germany, Netherlands, Greece, Japan.