Dear Interested Reader:

The fall 2012 issue of Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology is now available on line at: http://www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/69_12_fall_23_3.pdf.

A major focus of the fall issue is “architectural phenomenology”—its professional and academic past as well as its scholarly future. EAP Editor David Seamon and French architectural historian Benoît Jacquet review architectural theorist Jorge Otero-Pailos’ 2010 Architecture’s Historical Turn, which argues that architectural phenomenology played a key role in establishing American Architecture programs as viable university units of scholarly research. Seamon examines Otero-Pailos’ claims in regard to broader trends in architectural and environmental phenomenology, and Benoît places the book in relation to French academic developments.

The issue also includes architect Reza Shirazi’s essay evaluating the present state of phenomenology and architecture. Shirazi seeks to locate an accurate description of current phenomenological research and concludes that the most precise label is “discourse”—i.e., a mode of study and design initiated mostly by individual researchers and designers who share “some common concerns and intentions” and “interpret the possibilities and results of phenomenological investigation in a wide array of ways, both conceptually and practically.”

The last essay in the fall issue is Australian educator John Cameron’s “eighth letter from Far South,” which considers attention as it relates to place—in this case, Cameron’s rural homestead of Blackstone on Tasmania’s Bruny Island. He writes: “What bearing does attending more closely to the local place vernacular and my subtler bodily responses have on our everyday place-making activities here? What does it really mean to have one’s awareness be part of something so much larger—a place-specific intelligence shared by all the beings that inhabit Blackstone?”

Back issues of EAP, 1990-present, are now available at: www.krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522;.

David Seamon
Architecture Department, Kansas State University
Editor, EAP
www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/
triad@ksu.edu;