The Enactive Approach to Architectural Experience: A Neurophysiological Perspective on Embodiment, Motivation, and Affordances

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.

Ecological-Enactive Cognition as engaging with a field of relevant affordances

“…By 'affordances' we mean the possibilities for action provided to us by the environment (Gibson 1979;Chemero 2003;Chemero 2009;Michaels 2003;Reed 1996;Costall 1995;Heft 2001; becoming central in various disciplines studying skilled action, including philosophy/phenomenology (Abramova and Slors 2015;Noë 2012;Kiverstein and Miller 2015;Van Dijk and Withagen 2016;Ramstead, Veissière and Kirmayer 2016), sports/ecological psychology (Hristovski, Davids, and Araújo 2009;Chow et al 2011;Withagen, Araújo and De Poel 2017), affective science (Frijda, Ridderinkhof, and Rietveld 2014), and neuroscience (Friston et al 2012;Schilbach et al 2013;Dotov 2014;Dotov et al 2010;Kirchhoff 2015;Jelic 2016;Pezzulo and Cisek 2016). For example, affordance-related states of action readiness are central to understanding both emotions (Frijda, Ridderinkhof, and Rietveld 2014;cf.…”

Interacting with adaptive architecture

“…Recently, a new approach has emerged that complements the phenomenological account of the experience of architecture [2]: the enactive approach to cognition. This approach is particularly well suited to adaptive architecture, as we will see later.…”

Sensory-motor brain dynamics reflect architectural affordances

“…Despite transitions being ubiquitous in architecture, the underlying mechanisms of how transitions affect human perceivers appears to have taken an implicit, overlooked, and close to nonexistent position in architecturaldiscourse, with few exceptions (15, 18–20). Due to the dynamic nature of architecture, an essential part of transitions and experiencing architecture is that of being able to act (21). Traditionally, investigations of architectural experiences are phenomenological - the description of phenomena in how experience gives access to a world of space and time (14, 22–24).…”

“…For long, enactivists have implicated the reciprocal dependency of the living organism, as a self-organized living system, and the embedded body in a world for cognition (26–28). Enactivism is rooted in phenomenology (21, 29), similar to prominent architectural theorists, who put body, action, and cognition central to experience. Active inference closely relates to enactivism, in the sense that we act to perceive, and vice versa.…”