Although they have built very little, they are interested in the social experience of architecture, in challenging people's ideas about buildings.
Mahon studied for a year at the Sorbonne - "in fact I spent more time in the caffs" - and has gone on to translate Molière, Jaccottet and others, as well as citing French philosopher Gaston Bachelard's study of the lived experience of architecture, The Poetics of Space, as a text that has informed his poetry.
Further questions regarding appreciation concern the relative roles in appreciation of individual experience of architecture, as against the social or the environmental.
Some philosophers working in the Continental tradition have offered accounts of the experience of architecture or its social ramifications; a deficiency is more marked in analytic aesthetics.
Thus, one's experience of architecture en gros is analyzed in the manner of a classic phenomenological account of, say, one's experience of color en gros (Mitias 1999b).
Yet Wolff's conception of perfection was broad enough to include successful adaptation to an intended purpose, and thus in his analysis of our experience of architecture he emphasized our sense of the utility of structures as well as a sensory response to the kind of abstract form that could be considered an object of cognition.
If the exercise of taste indicates values embedded in or pertinent to our experience of architecture, an extension into the moral sphere demands that we cherish and seek to promote beauty and other aesthetic values not merely for ourselves but as well for others.
"A conscious experience of architecture is the result of physical, spatial, temporal, sensorial, and physical presence, rather than a pure inward intellectual act," explains Bermudez in his presentation.
