Architectural Humanities in Progress Divulging Epistemology, Ethics, and Aesthetics of the Built Environment and Habitation

This monograph brings three branches of philosophy together: epistemology, ethics and aesthetics.  It assesses the built environment as a case study from a phenomenological perspective. Under the notion of phenomenology, this study understands the built environment as the hermeneutical phenomenon of being in the life-world that is experienced by people within the socio-cultural and historical context of habitation. Hermeneutically, the built environment as a phenomenon is contextually interwoven with other phenomena within the socio-cultural, historical, and environmental network. Phenomenologically speaking, the task of the study is to excavate, listen to, unfold, divulge, and reconstruct the socio-culturally, environmentally, and historically constructed relationship between people and their built environment that build, develop, and elaborate the system of knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics. By and large, its nature and findingsare theoretical and interdisciplinary, so it will be of interest not only for philosophers, but also to scholars studying urban development and anthropology.

Introduction.- Part 1: Towards phenomenology of the built environment.- Chapter 1. Theory of the Built Environment: After and beyond Platonism.- Chapter 2. Nietzsche and Anti-Metaphysics: Overturning platonism on aesthetic theory.- Chapter 3. On the phenomenological way of seeing and thinking on the built environment.- Chapter 4. The ontology of making: Being and building.- Chapter 5. The poetics of the built environment.- Part 2. The cases: Sustainability, home, design, ethics and aesthetics.- Chapter 6. Aristotle and the Doctrine of Aitia: A theoretical exploration of environmental design and sustainability.- Chapter 7. The ontology of home: Recollection and retreat.- Chapter 8. The ontology of design: A project of building and dwelling.- Chapter 9. Sustainability and the built environment: The search for ethics based on environmental awareness and social responsibility.- Chapter 10. Kant’s common good: A potential unity of aesthetics and the ethics for a sustainable culture.- Epilogue.

Dr. Bagoes Wiryomartono is an independent Canadian scholar in Toronto Ontario Canada. 

Bagoes earned his Doctorate in architecture and urbanism from the Aachen University of Technology in 1990. Germany. He was a Postdoctoral fellow for architecture at the East-West Centre, Honolulu Hawaii, and Fulbright scholar at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C, U.S.A. The area of specialization of his teaching and research experience is focused on history, theory, and design of urbanism of various cultures and traditions in Southeast Asia and North America. He was a senior lecturer at the Bandung Institute of Technology (1981-3, 1993-2002), and visiting research associate at the Asian Institute, University of Toronto Canada (2003-5). He was an associate professor at the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Built Environment of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (2010 -2013). 

Most recent scholarly books by Bagoes Wiryomartono include Traditions and Transformations of Habitation in Indonesia Power, Architecture, and Urbanism (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2020), Urbanism; Livability and Sustainability (Singapore: Palgrave, 2019), Javanese Culture and the Meanings of Locality, Studies on the arts, urbanism, polity, and society (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), Perspectives on Traditional Settlements and Communities: home, form, and culture in Indonesia (New York-Berlin-Singapore: Springer Business Media 2014). He published his research in various Scopus journals on history and theory of architecture, urbanism, and culture in Southeast Asia as well as philosophical studies within the phenomenological movement.