Phenomenology 2010

Volume 1, 2010

Selected Essays from Asia and Pacific

Lau Kwok-ying
Pages 177-199

Four Forms of Primordial Spatiality Essential to the Understanding of Architecture
A Phenomenological Sketch

This paper contains some preliminary reflections of a phenomenological philosopher on spatiality. They draw our attention to four basic forms of primordial spatiality essential to the understanding of the phenomenological and ontological conditions of activities pertaining to architecture as a discipline serving for the construction of the human habitat, namely: 1) the space of signification inaugurated by writing; 2) cartographic space constitutive of the representation of the world and locality; 3) oriented space and existential spatiality opened up by the living-body; and 4) the Earth as Ground-Ark which is the ultimate space of the human habitat. Drawing textual and theoretical resources from the works of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Derrida and especially of Husserl, these reflections conclude that there exists only one Earth as Ground-Ark on which is built the common human habitat. This is a “primitive truth”—”primitive” in the sense of primordial—a truth understood by the most primitive human civilizations. This is also a truth forgotten by the brilliant successors of Copernicus who, while dreaming of a technologically advanced humanity, contribute in spite of their success to the irrecoverable devastation of the Earth as the only space of our common habitat.