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Andrea Jelić

Department of Architecture and Design, Sapienza University of Rome Rome, Italy.

2 papers in the library · 155 citations · publishing 2016-2025

Papers

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

Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2016 Andrea Jelić, Gaetano Tieri, Federico De Matteis et al. 138 citations

Neuroscientific approaches to architecture have yet to produce a systematic framework for interpreting results and guiding experiments. The enactive perspective is proposed as a guiding approach because it accounts for the active, dynamic connectedness between organism and world, shaped by bodily features. Emphasis is placed on embodiment and motivational factors as constituents of body-architecture interactions. Enactive understanding of the relational coupling between body schema and affordances of spaces highlights two-way bodily communication, explorable in immersive virtual reality. Enactivism also aligns with phenomenological thinking in architectural theory, offering common ground between neuroscience and architecture. A model of the human as embodied, enactive, and situated agent is proposed as a basis for neuroscientific and phenomenological interpretation of architectural experience.

Designing “pre-reflective” architecture

Ambiances January 13, 2025 Andrea Jelić 17 citations

A neurophenomenological approach to architecture places human experience at the center of design, recognizing the phenomenal body as the genuine architectural subject. By merging neuroscience with phenomenological tradition, it interprets how embodiment shapes our relationship with built spaces. The concept of "pre-reflective" architecture highlights the embodied, largely pre-conscious interdependence between spaces and perception. This perspective argues that purely conceptual engagement with architecture is a misconception, and it reveals a discordance between design tools based on physical-mathematical space and the lived spatiality of the phenomenal world. The goal is to identify conditions for embodied architectural experience.