Architecture of Sensation

Abstract

Recent social theory that stresses the ‘nonrepresentational’, the ‘more-than visual’, and the relationship between affect and sensation have tended to assume some kind of break or rupture from historical antecedents. Especially since the contributions of Crary and Jay in the 1990s, when it comes to perceiving the built environment the complexities of sensation have been partially obscured by the dominance of a static model of vision as the principal organizing modality. This article returns to some prior historical articulations of the significance of motility in perception, retracing pathways across art history, architectural theory and the history of neuroscience to argue for an alternative model based on the movement of the eye. Along with subsystems that deal with balance and orientation, I offer parallels between spatial motifs of the interior spaces of the body – labyrinths, vestibules, chambers – and those in artefacts and the built environment that contribute to the heightened physicality of the oculomotor subject.

Towards an understanding of quality and inclusivity in human‐environment experiences

“…Affordances also relate to multiple sensory pathways, and their relative importance varies between individuals, especially those with disabilities that impair or enhance certain sensory pathways (Macpherson, 2009). Research which has focused on disabled greenspace users has noted specific needs relating to visual, auditory, or tactile stimuli, which are often understudied in comparison with visual approaches (Chawla & Heft, 2002; Mount & Cavet, 1995; Pallasmaa, 2012; Paterson, 2017). Hussein (2012), for example, applied affordances to rethink nature experiences for disabled children in a sensory garden, showing the importance of the connectivity of different behaviour settings and demonstrating a greater inclination for sensory affordances over traditional visual aesthetic elements.…”

Breathing Spaces: Modelling Exposure in Air Pollution Science

“…For instance, suspension/ deposition highlighted the different scales at which indoor air quality is affected: from the macro-infrastructural factors that influence the physical arrangements of dwellings (inside/outside 2) to the more micro-material processes like cleaning that comprise lived domestic environments (inside/outside 3) (Wakefield-Rann and Fam, 2018). These alternative narratives of toxic agency (Waterton and Yusoff, 2017) were enabled through the decentring of the bounded human body as a site of exposure. Rather than different airs and similar bodies, which underpinned the project's concept of exposure when starting out, the iterative tinkerings to the model simulations rendered visible the way bodies participate in their co-composition, expanding the non-linear and intra-acting agencies that had be accounted for in order to understand and measure health risk.…”