David Seamon
David Seamon (PhD, 1977, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts USA) is Professor Emeritus of Environment-Behavior and Place Studies in the Department of Architecture at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, USA. Trained in behavioral geography and environment-behavior research, he is interested in a phenomenological approach to place, architecture, environmental experience, and environmental design as placemaking. His books include DWELLING, PLACE AND ENVIRONMENT: TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERSON AND WORLD (1985); DWELLING, SEEING, AND DESIGNING: TOWARD A PHENOMENOLOGICAL ECOLOGY (1993); GOETHE'S WAY OF SCIENCE: A PHENOMENOLOGY OF NATURE; and A GEOGRAPHY OF THE LIFEWORLD: MOVEMENT, REST AND ENCOUNTER (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979/Routledge Revival series, 2015). His most recent books are LIFE TAKES PLACE: PHENOMENOLOGY, LIFEWORLDS AND PLACE MAKING (2018) and PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON PLACE, LIFEWORLDS, AND LIVED EMPLACEMENT (2023). Both books are published by Routledge.
Supervisors: Anne Buttimer
Address: Architecture Dept
211 Seaton Hall
Kansas State Univ
Manhattan, KS 66506-2901 USA
Supervisors: Anne Buttimer
Address: Architecture Dept
211 Seaton Hall
Kansas State Univ
Manhattan, KS 66506-2901 USA
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Papers by David Seamon
Final copy of an article published in celebration of 50 years of humanistic geography:
This article is a first-person account of my encounter with humanistic and phenomenological geography. I review how I first became involved with geography and my graduate experience at Clark University, which in the 1970s was a major center of humanistic and phenomenological work, mostly because of geographer Anne Buttimer, today recognized as a founder of the humanistic tradition. I consider how phenomenology became central to my research and writing, and how my interest in what came to be called ‘environment-behavior research’ eventually led to my involvement with architecture, planning, and design programs. In the last portion of this article, I overview my recent work investigating place experience and lived emplacement, particularly the theme of how places change processually (Seamon, 2018a, 2023). I end by suggesting that the current disciplinary emphasis on ‘critical theory’ and ‘critical thinking’ might be usefully complemented with ‘empathetic thinking’ and a revitalized humanistic and phenomenological geography.
“Book notes” on Seattle artist Iskra Johnson’s The Water Tower Project, which includes some 20 water-tower prints created during the first year of the Covid pandemic; and philosophers Curtis Hutt and Halla Kim’s Cosmopolitan Husserl, an edited collection that considers the current-day significance of articles on “renewal” that phenomenology founder Edmund Husserl wrote in the 1920s for Kaizō, a Japanese philosophical journal.
Philosopher Jeff Malpas’ “In the Care of Place,” which discusses the Portuguese notion of saudade—a Portuguese words that designates a sense of loss and desire, including the longing for place.
Artist and writer Vicki King’s description of her most recent artistic project—what she calls “Abject Sublime” and describes as a reflection of “the Anthropocene era in which we’re terrifyingly immersed.”
German geographer Axel Prestes Dürrnagel’s examination of peri-urban lifeworlds in Mosambique’s capital city Maputo.
Educator Linden Sturgis’s consideration of how Goethean phenomenology can sensitize experiencers to the world of clouds.
A complete digital EAP archive (1990-2025) is available at: http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522
David Seamon
Editor, Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology
first draft of a paper prepared for a special session, “Humanism and Geography after Yi-Fu Tuan,” International Conference of Historical Geographers, Shanghai, China, July 14-18, 2025
In this chapter, I draw on French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to explore environmental embodiment—the various lived ways, sensorily and motility-wise, that the body in its pre-reflective perceptual presence engages and synchronizes with the world at hand, especially its architectural and environmental aspects. First, I consider Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of perception, which he understands as the immediate givenness of the world founded in bodily sensibility. Second, I consider the architectural and environmental significance of what Merleau-Ponty calls body-subject—pre-reflective corporeal awareness expressed through action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds. I focus on the taken-for-granted sensibility of body-subject to manifest in extended ways over time and space. I ask how routine actions and behaviors of individuals coming together regularly can transform an environment into a place with a unique dynamic and character—a lived situation I term place ballet. For both perception and body-subject, I examine how qualities of the physical and designable world—for example, materiality, form, and spatiality—contribute to the lived body’s engagement with and actions in the world. I end by arguing that Merleau-Ponty offers an essential perspective for understanding the importance of place and lived emplacement in human life, but this perspective must be extended by considering how places change over time via generative processes that enliven or undermine places and lived emplacement.
Key words: body-subject, environmental embodiment, lived body, Merleau-Ponty, perception, phenomenology, place, place ballet
Longer entries begin with independent researcher Stephen Wood, who introduces the possibilities by which aquatic life may have lived connections to the dialectic of darkness and light via such phenomena as water depth and terrestrial location.
Next, Israeli architect Nili Portugali discusses her design efforts to implement the theory of wholeness developed by American architect and architectural theorist Christopher Alexander, whose ideas are featured regularly in EAP. Portugali’s real-world focus is her design of an apartment house in Tel Aviv, Israel (image, right). She considers how her envisioning and building this structure are grounded in and actualizes Alexander’s understanding of making environmental and place wholeness.
Philosopher Ingrid Leman Stefanovic provides a celebratory commentary on 35 years of EAP.
EAP editor David Seamon draws on philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of restoration of meaning” as one thematic means to identify EAP’s major aim over the years.
Geographer Edward Relph considers artificial intelligence as it might be critiqued via the thinking of philosopher Hannah Arendt and her insights on modernity’s invention of totalitarianism.
Philosopher Kenn Maly examines the phenomenon of water via the four qualities of substance, flow, non-duality, and freedom.
Chinese geographers Xu Huang and Zichuan Guo offer an ethnographic picture of Chengdu, China’s He-Ming Teahouse, opened in 1923.
Artist and writer Vicki King considers how the paintings of Canadian-American abstract-expressionist artist Agnes Martin “evoke sensual memories of New Mexico.”
A complete digital EAP archive (1990-2021) is available at: http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7DJS2W75EZFYRMX4INGC/full?target=10.1080/02604027.2024.2330288
Note the considerably longer, original version of this article is available at:
https://www.academia.edu/38048231/Ways_of_Understanding_Wholeness_Place_Christopher_Alexander_and_Synergistic_Relationality_forthcoming_2019_conference_proceedings_
• Cognitive scientist Andrea Hiott reviews psychotherapist Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things;
• Architect Susan Ingham reviews Lisa Heschong’s Visual Delight in Architecture;
• Anthropologist Jenny Quillien reviews architect Howard Davis’s edited collection of Early and Unpublished Writings of Christopher Alexander;
• EAP editor David Seamon reviews Christopher Alexander’s Production of Houses;
• Architect Howard Davis reports on a recent event celebrating Alexander’s Mexicali self-help housing experiment;
• Architect Gary Coates provides the new preface to his recently reprinted Resettling America, originally published in 1981;
• Philosopher Jeff Malpas offers remarks for a memoriam event devoted to the late Bob Mugerauer, a co-founder of EAP;
• Anthropologist Jenny Quillien introduces a phenomenological reformulation of the ideas of early-twentieth-century geographer and environmental determinist Ellen Churchill Semple.
You are welcome to forward the PDF to anyone you think might be interested. A complete digital EAP archive (1990-2022) is available at: http://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/handle/2097/1522.
David Seamon
Editor, Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology
Zoologist Stephen Wood examines jizz—the singular presence of a living being instantly recognizable without the involvement of conscious attention; his focus is the jizz of birds.
Geographer Edward Relph considers aspects of a phenomenology of climate change by examining how the phenomenon is understood and experienced via both everyday and extreme environmental situations and events.
Philosopher Robert Josef Kozljanič overviews the study of genius loci (sense of place), giving particular attention to recent phenomenological research on the topic, including the “New Phenomenology of philosopher Hermann Schmitz.
Artist and place researcher Victoria King recounts her Australian experiences with indigenous women of the Outback and their work in sand painting, giving particular attention to the work of Emily Kngwarreye (c. 1910–1996), an elderly woman artist from Utopia, an area of 16 small Aboriginal communities spread across 2,400 kilometers in Australia’s red, arid interior.
Portions of this essay were originally written for a longer “in memoriam” tribute for Jager and his work; see Seamon, 2016: https://www.academia.edu/22455083/Thinking_Longing_and_Nearness_In_Memoriam_Bernd_Jager_1931_2015_2016_