| Positioned within current phenomenological and hermeneutical discourse, with its understanding of the body and the environment as situational and as an embodiment of life, it is the objective of this thesis to define the role of architecture in the embodying of life.; Drawing upon Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutical phenomenology and David M. Levin's theory of embodiment, this thesis demonstrates that self-understanding comes from a corporal involvement in the world, as a hermeneutical unfolding of experience through the recollection and articulation of a bodily pre-understanding. Self-consciousness thus becomes a matter of gaining a bodily-felt sense. Building upon Dalibor Vesely's notion of communicative space, what is therefore proposed, is that it is by using the historically and culturally situated body as a reference that architecture can being to link tactile experience to abstract ideas, and consequently, act as a mediator in the embodying of life.; Using the concept of the incarnation as the incarnation of the Word in a human body as a guiding principle, what is proposed is the design of a Cistercian monastery in Saint-Jean-de-Matha Quebec which would help in the embodiment of Christ, by relating the thirty-two imperfect bodies of the monks to the one perfect eternal body of Christ. |
