This presentation will consider the role of observation in an interdisciplinary practice that seeks to comprehend the experiential nature of place and, thereby, unfold a more acute view of the world. My perspective is anthropological with specific interest in material culture, ritual and vernacular grounds. Like the anthropologist, the architect develops an understanding of the nature of lived space, not by imposing a theory, but by letting the revelation derive from the act of recording observations. An act to which I refer as staging; the assembly of a framework used in reconstructing the nature of place. This process of inquiry is informed by the production of writing, mapping, modeling and drawing culture in effort to define the criteria for making place based propositions. This methodology is the embodiment of an interdisciplinary agenda that has to do with authenticating the architectural essence of lived space and, thereby, produces a more sustainable basis for reconstructing our inherited landscape. This paper will consider two case studies using cartography, art, landscape architecture, and architecture as lenses for exploration. It will reflect on how students see and express their own interpretations of site, landscape and cultural inscriptions. Using processes of observation, students were asked to collaborate in the development of an iterative method to elicit new interpretations of a dormant flood plain and limestone bluff along the Missouri River at the foot of Kansas City’s historic River Market area. To generate awareness of how visual thinking evolves, students were encouraged to use multiple forms of media as tools for visual expression. By employing various exploratory techniques, a conceptual generator based on each student’s experiential comprehension of the landscape and corresponding spatial configurations was developed and informed the trajectory of each effort. The culminating staging resulted in a body of work that expresses the meaning of place and the relationship between the River Market neighborhood and the topographic and phenomenological nature of the latent site. Our coursework sought to establish individual methodologies for synthesizing the criterion with which to reconstruct a landscape and architecture that deepens the relationship between a people and it’s local ecology. In so doing, each student came to recognize an existing socio-geographic configuration that is host to a sensation of something vast and deep and boundless—a condition that is present in the unconscious but not consciously expressed.