Images of the Experiential: The Petroleum Roots of the Phenomenology of Religion and Architectural Phenomenology, 1945–1967
Creators: Mohammadi, Banafsheh
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2023

<p>This dissertation, titled “Images of the Experiential: Petroleum Roots of Architectural Phenomenology and the Phenomenology of Religion (1945–1967),” exposes the petrocultural philanthropy that funded imperialist knowledge production and gave rise to the phenomenology of religion and architectural phenomenology. To that end, this dissertation focuses specifically on the post-Second World War era from 1945 to 1967, to re-contextualize the works of two phenomenologists of religion, Romanian Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) and French Henry Corbin (1903–1978), and two scholars of architectural phenomenology, Polish-born British Joseph Rykwert (b. 1926), and U.S citizen Vincent Scully (1920–2017). It considers the way their work intersects with a set of images collected by Dutch amateur artist and art historian Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1988–1962) that circulated during this period across a set of Western countries including most notably the United States, Switzerland, Germany, and Britain. <br>
This dissertation project attends to the clear links that have not yet been drawn between Eliade, Corbin, Rykwert and Scully, who were all funded by the Bollingen Foundation, and the highly influential esoteric study group, Eranos, headed by Fröbe-Kapteyn, who was likewise funded by Bollingen. My central argument is that the genesis of architectural and religious phenomenology was fueled almost exclusively through Bollingen’s petro-dollars and the support of this handful of scholars, whose interconnectivity has not previously been articulated. Working seemingly independently, their work was only made possible by the Bollingen Foundation, and collectively the aforementioned scholars had a notable impact on North American Religious History and Architectural Phenomenology. While religious scholars have moved away from these phenomenological approaches due to the colonial and supremacist foundations of the field of study, architects and architectural scholars have not. In fact, even now, a quarter of a century into the new millennium (2023), architectural phenomenology is still quite popular in North American architecture schools and its design concepts shape some of the current perceptions of Western architectural beauty. This dissertation exposes the ways oil money, in this one instance, has normalized imperialist informed modern aesthetics and the architectural reading of spaces that are the infrastructures that shape daily petrocultural lives in North America, in particular, but also that shape the aspirations of people around the globe. <br>
This project explores the interplay of geo-political power relations and cultural specificities among the Abrahamic traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Specifically, it investigates how these traditions informed each other in the domains of Religious History and Architectural Theory and History in the post-Second World War United States. The research delves into the role of a particular collection of images that were collected and curated by Fröbe-Kapteyn and financed by Bollingen. It demonstrates how it informed and was informed by the thinking and thinkers that became pillars of the discipline of phenomenological theory in shaping knowledge production that is sanctioned by institutions and financed by corporations, all within the framework of petro-capitalist interests. As such, the study has far-reaching implications for global understandings of cultural imperialism and international relations. The dissertation ends with an explicit call to decolonize our thinking and our spaces, as we extract ourselves from modern petrocultural life as a necessary response to climate change. </p>