Abstract
Over the last few years, the efforts to reveal through neuroscientific lens the relations between the mind, body, and built environment have set a promising direction of using neuroscience for architecture. However, little has been achieved thus far in developing a systematic account that could be employed for interpreting current results and providing a consistent framework for subsequent scientific experimentation. In this context, the enactive perspective is proposed as a guide to studying architectural experience for two key reasons. Firstly, the enactive approach is specifically selected for its capacity to account for the profound connectedness of the organism and the world in an active and dynamic relationship, which is primarily shaped by the features of the body. Thus, particular emphasis is placed on the issues of embodiment and motivational factors as underlying constituents of the body-architecture interactions. Moreover, enactive understanding of the relational coupling between body schema and affordances of architectural spaces singles out the two-way bodily communication between architecture and its inhabitants, which can be also explored in immersive virtual reality settings. Secondly, enactivism has a strong foothold in phenomenological thinking that corresponds to the existing phenomenological discourse in architectural theory and qualitative design approaches. In this way, the enactive approach acknowledges the available common ground between neuroscience and architecture and thus allows a more accurate definition of investigative goals. Accordingly, the outlined model of architectural subject in enactive terms—that is, a model of a human being as embodied, enactive, and situated agent, is proposed as a basis of neuroscientific and phenomenological interpretation of architectural experience.
Highlights
The unique cultural position of architecture as an existential art— an art that scaffolds human life—has been openly advocated ever since the earliest architectural writings surviving from ancient times
By exemplifying how sensorimotor and interoceptive activity can be measured in different experimental Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) setups, including a few architecture-specific studies, we offer several indications how the enactive approach to architectural experience could be tested through IVR paradigms
In regard to the hypothesis that the experience of architectural space is directly structured on account of the interactive interdependency between our embodiment, affective states, and perceived spatial affordances, a recent study could offer a direction for developing appropriate IVR paradigms
Summary
The unique cultural position of architecture as an existential art— an art that scaffolds human life—has been openly advocated ever since the earliest architectural writings surviving from ancient times. The enactive account places emphasis on the situated nature of perceptual experience, which makes the issues of embodiment and relational embeddedness in the world vital to understanding people’s engagement with architectural environments This suggests that the way in which we perceive, experience, and engage with architecture depends on the particular kind of body we have and the possibilities for body-environment interactions that are inscribed in terms of the motor or skillful knowledge as potential for action. Almost a decade ago, Freedberg and Gallese (2007) proposed a theoretical framework for studying aesthetic experience based on the neuroscientific interpretation of the theory of empathy as a corporeal and emotional resonance with an artwork Their starting ground was the notion of empathy as Einfühlung in its original sense of the bodily experience of art and architecture, as developed in the late-nineteenth These findings highlight that it is possible to measure EEG correlates of architectural perception involving the cerebral circuits of sensorimotor integration, spatial navigation, and embodiment
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