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.