1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Lived-Experience "Rooms must suggest their use without name. To an architect, a school of architecture would be the most honored commission."—Louis Kahn (1971). I do not find it questionable to describe a building before it is fully occupied, since every architect and designer must anticipate and apply techniques for appreciating their designs before they are actually used. Designing a building is predicting the reaction it will produce in the people who experience it. The real has always been imagined through design. Archimedes—whose name will be forever re- membered for his water-lifting helical screw—is al- so known for his famous "eureka" moment. The mind can connect ideas, but in the gap between thought and matter we are mostly blind. Archimedes stepped into an overfull bath and experienced his body displace the water as it spilled over the lip of the basin; a vivid moment of insight that gave an- swer to his king's puzzle over the volume and the density of a gold crown. Through experience, matter may disclose ideas about the world. Archimedes was open to the affec- tive possibilities in the ordinary act of taking a bath. Each encounter we have with the world is habituated in the narrowest sense and extraordinary in every other. The world connects through our body and we extend our mind into the world through our daily ac- tions; each of these encounters affords us the oppor- tunity to ideate upon, poeticize, and appreciate the vagaries of matter. Like Archimedes' entering his bath, a young architecture student enters a building rich with experiences and speculates on answers to architectural problems therein. The new Center for Architecture and Environmental Design (CAED) building at Kent State University is designed to compel and inspire invention through interaction. Designing a Life-world for Designers: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Weiss/Manfredi's Center for Architecture and Environmental Design Building William T. Willoughby Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA ABSTRACT: Weiss/Manfredi point their works to a set of essential indexical relationships to which architec- ture aspires to exemplify and amplify. Through phenomenological inquiry into the design, documentation and construction of Weiss/Manfredi's new Center for Architecture and Environmental Design (CAED) building, I exposit on this work of architecture designed for designers. Taken on the whole, Weiss/Manfredi's buildings respond to myriad circumstances that influence a design, but these can be reduced to eight experienced rela- tions. These experienced relations include: connecting inside and outside through light and views, articulating the contact between spaces, choreographing connections between people within and around the building, cen- tering the building within a community by forming an active "heart," unifying form and use in a performative relationship, braiding new circulatory flows to preexisting paths, mediating the gap between ground and roof gracefully, and sensitively applying new materials to existing contexts. The essay describes these relation- ships phenomenologically in the new CAED. Weiss/Manfredi has created an overall relational configuration shaped through space, movement, light, and materials. The building aspires to become an arranged universe of affective experiences offering agency to ar- chitectural education. Through perception and experience, space constitutes an affective bridge. By virtue of this insight, Weiss/Manfredi's work is not reducible to forms or images. Instead, it embodies a set of relation- ships that through phenomenological inquiry can be teased apart and isolated as phenomena best described through lived-experience. This essay uncovers the affect-relations that Weiss/Manfredi explore in their work. The new CAED build- ing by Weiss/Manfredi propagates a set of relational interstices that support openness and creative exchange. Architecture takes shape through the thoughtful interplay of social, spatial, and material affects. Phenomenol- ogy, coupled with affect theory, is employed as a method for uncovering these experienced relations.