Architecture as Therapy: A Case Study in the Phenomenology of Design.

My paper is an analysis of the use of the drug LSD as methodological tool to enter the phenomenological lifeworld of schizophrenics and design a place for their treatment. If the user has a completely different lifeworld (individuals with mental or physical disability), then how do we envisage the space they inhabit? It would be useful for the researcher, then, to embody the perception of the schizophrenic to create a space that would, at best, assist in healing and, at worst, not exacerbate their illness. This is like understanding the perceptions of someone from a different culture and, at the same time, reproducing that material culture in a way that would be understandable to individuals of that culture. Schutz, in The Phenomenology of the Social World, argues that an ‘intersubjective understanding’ of an individual's perception is not isolated in individuals but is embedded in their social relations. He argues that ‘we put ourselves in the place of the actor and identify our lived experience with his [sic]’. The researcher would not only have to be schizophrenic but also have to experience the interactions among people and space as a participant in the lifeworld of the schizophrenics. The use of LSD as a chemical technology allowed for ‘sympathetic embodiment’. The bodies of the researchers, on LSD, would act as a bridge between their ‘being’ and their patients’ ‘world’. ‘Osmond and Izumi experienced “space” … not [as] an abstract set of relations within which the lifeworld is structured [but] rather [as] the lived experience of the body-in-space … [i.e.] the primary relation from which all conceptions of space are constructed’ (Dovey 1999, p. 39). Researchers can then view (experience) their surroundings while understanding the institutional setting in which patients are treated and also understand the knowledge used by the patient to understand the ‘institutionally appropriate rules of conduct’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]