DALIBOR VESELY was a profound thinker of architecture’s predicament in the modern world. His thought was also the unique product of his personal practice, of a lifetime dedicated to teaching. For forty years, he inspired students in seminars and studios at Essex University (1968–78), the Architectural Association (1973–83), and then at Cambridge University (1978–2002). His book Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (2004), which was eagerly anticipated for many years, is a testament to the depth of his reflection. Yet it presents only a fraction of the vast constellation of problems that he tirelessly and generously addressed with his students.
It was in his long, smoked-filled seminars, often with eyes closed and a thumb pressed to his brow, that he would unfold questions drawn from the tradition of phenomenology that lit his student’s imagination: “How are consciousness and material nature related?” “Where do body movements really start?” “Why do things become constituted and how?” “Where does intentionality come from?” The careful threads of thought that he drew out in pursuit of answers lay at the heart of his teaching.
In a time when the state began to withdraw its patronage for higher education and when universities became increasingly dominated by a managerial culture of assessment, Vesely stood trenchantly for education as a good in itself and for the space of teaching as one dedicated to ethical understanding and the continuity of the humanistic tradition. He believed passionately in a world that lay beyond the grip of instrumental rationality, and the intensity of his belief was grounded in his deep knowledge of the philosophy of his former teacher, Jan Patočka, as well as that of Merleau-Ponty and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Phenomenology gave Vesely the personal and lasting conviction that grounds for ethical orientation in modernity still existed within the continuity of the prereflective dimension of the world as lived, in spite of the dualism and critical doubt that he believed had entered into European thought with Renaissance science and philosophy, and the relativism that has dominated Western society since.
Like Patočka and Merleau-Ponty, Vesely argued that bodily habits and gestures carry within them a moral and ethical drama and that the body’s spontaneous and dynamic movement is only possible because of its relation to a historically continuous ethical field—which includes others, the things of the social world, and the world as a whole.
In many decades of studios, seminars, dissertations, and scholarly travels to European cities, with students, he and colleagues such as Joseph Rykwert, Daniel Libeskind, Mohsen Mostafavi, Eric Parry, Alberto Perez-Gomez, David Leatherbarrow, and Peter Carl undertook the task of investigating the ways in which architecture and the city play their roles in the recognition of the lived world as a fundamental ethical source.
Although Vesely’s career ended abruptly on March 31, 2015, when he succumbed to a heart attack, his teaching remains alive as a major current of architectural pedagogy around the world, dedicated to a continued inquiry into architecture’s proper role and response to the questions raised by phenomenology.
Joseph Bedford is a New York– and London-based architectural designer, writer, historian, and filmmaker, currently completing a PhD at Princeton University.
