The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 1961) has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor, as well as informing renowned schools of architectural theory, notably those around Dalibor Vesely at Cambridge, Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow and Alberto Perez-Gomez in North America and Juhani Pallasmaa in Finland. Merleau-Ponty suggested that the value of people s experience of the world gained through their immediate bodily engagement with it remains greater than the value of understanding gleaned through abstract mathematical, scientific...