The sense of touch or how phenomenology gives live to architecture

Carried by the philosophical mainstream, which had built modernity on the primacy of vision, rationalism, which gradually imposed itself as an academic discourse, soon took architecture on the path of abstraction. This finally proved Marshall McLuhan right, who in 1962 was legitimately going to suspect that such a bias must imply “a distortion of reality.” In this critical context and with globalisation as a backdrop, Kenneth Frampton will try to evaluate the points of resistance on which a dialectical approach could be based that might lead us out of the double dead-end of regionalism and modernism, with the sense of touch playing a crucial part.
In this paper we will briefly consider how this issue was raised and particularly emphasize the prospects that a phenomenology of touch (which, according to the Livre blanc published in 2004 by the Institut de la Cambre does frighten our contemporaries) can offer to architecture and to the teaching thereof.