Abstract

As a vessel that sustains the continuity of a meaningful life for the society, the built environment has an inevitable symbolic nature beyond its utilitarian and pragmatic aspects. While it emerges socio-historically at the intersection of various modes of cultural production, as the melting pot of a multiplicity of different modes of cultural experience, its concrete presence as a particular spatio-temporal construction poses a question of specificity for our experience and interpretation of our surroundings beyond how we use them. In this paper, I will outline a notion of interpretation of the built environment in terms of the first-person phenomenal experience and argue that an aesthetic modality of lived object experience precedes other layers of our understanding of the built environment as a cultural work.