This presentation will consider the role of staging as an observatory practice that seeks to comprehend the experiential nature of lived space. I will discuss making a scene; the production of gestures and, thereby, spatial comprehension as part of a whole research methodology to which I refer as staging. The value of this work for the field of architecture is arrived at using observation/staging as the primary mode of study. In the engagement of a specific environment, our experience as occupants begins with an impulse to scrutinize everything. In this almost instantaneous assessment, we enter into a dialogue with the humanity of place; an intercourse with time, deep time; and thus, are immersed in the visual and perceptual challenges of the inherited landscape and its cultural inscriptions. The tangible buildup of routine spatial engagements produces what Joan Simon calls a socio-graph , a support system for the metaphysical occupation of its environment. The ordinary quality of this type of material surround yields a deeply reflective engagement that assist in maintaining an ontological wakefulness, or, in the words of Victor Turner, “a quiet celebration of ordinary experience.” The following inquiries are the manifestation of a desire to comprehend the experiential nature of lived space. As phenomenological staging, their content is temporary, incomplete and, thereby, universal. They are an interpretation of a lived experience and thus provoke dialogue. The act of producing such a material survey serves as an agent for anticipating its architectural potential. Like ethnographic studies, their purpose is to unfold a cultural view of the world. As such, each effort is the embodiment of a performance agenda that has to do with authenticating our comprehension of the corresponding items of experience through memory, anecdote and ritual.