Application Research / (Spatial) Domestic Mandala

DOMESTIC MANDALA: Architecture of Lifeworlds in Nepal

Domestic architecture is inhabited space.As much as intentional architects create house w/ meaning (ideal life, social order, auspiciousness and cosmos) their designs and layouts are not coercive in inhabitants' conduct nor the significance they attributed to them. Inhabiting houses itself produces domestic space and meaning. "buildings... do not force people to behave.." 

(a) Dwelling is a practical engagement with things. 

The formative act of dwelling, and building ourselves, is doing things with these entities: 

1. Picking them up
Manipulating them
Using them
Discarding them 

Heidegger's phenomenology of being in the world emphasizes that our primordial relation to the world is praxical rather than theoretical. Instead of seeing practical action in the world as the implementation of knowledge first gained through contemplative introspection and examination of pre-existing objects.
The world is not there for you to exist in; rather the world is only because you exist. (Macaan 1993:74, italics original)

(b) Dwelling is spatial
In doing things with entities, humans bring them into a spatial relationship with the things around them. The use of any thing implicates the use of other things. In the act of using these entities, humans gather them together to build a meaningful world.
"Dwelling involves a lack of distance between people and things..." (Thomas 1993:28) 

(c) Dwelling entails corporeal engagement such that body and enveloping space become two dimensions of a single phenomenon. 

Merleu-Ponty's most important insights mention that human consciousness - seeing, hearing, thinking, desiring, believing, wishing, understanding- is not an operation of the mind that is somehow distinct from the body. (We meet the world before understand what we think about it)
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