  This situation for architecture parallels that for a great many of the social and cultural objects of our everyday experience in what Husserl called the ‘life-world’. As Ingarden emphasizes, a flag, for example, should not be identified with the mere piece of cloth of which it is fashioned, for it has different essential properties, and has an additional foundation in the mental acts of the community that accept it as a flag and endow it with meanings and embed it in norms of action (e.g. we are not to clean pots with it but to use it in rendering military honors). Similarly, a church is not identical with the real building on which it is founded, but rather is created only through acts of consecration and the preservation of appropriate attitudes in the relevant community. In virtue of its secondary dependence on acts of consciousness, the church is endowed with various (social and cultural) properties and functions that a mere ordered heap of building materials cannot have. In this way Ingarden provides the basis for an account of the nature of cultural and social objects that takes neither the reductionist route of identifying them with their physical bases, nor the subjectivist route of treating all objects as mere social constructions. The life-world takes its unique place as the common product of acts of consciousness and an independent real world, and its existence (in quite specific ways) presupposes that of both of those foundations.