Standing in humility

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.