Volume 1, Issue 2

Dance projects exploring and interpreting architecture through choreography have become increasingly popular over the past two decades. This article takes a similar but theoretical approach, using the concept of choreography as a lens to look at the underlying scripts that shape the ways in which subjects move in, and are being moved by, architecture. Typically associated with the field of dance, choreography refers to spatial ordering principles, evoking highly political questions of authorship and authority, interpretation, improvisation, appropriation, accessibility, inclusion, and exclusion. Applying historical and comparative analysis, this article focuses on seminal examples from the fields of 20th-century Western dance and architecture. By mapping out evolving concepts and constellations of architecture and/as choreography, it aims to help create awareness of the spatial politics of architecture and their historical situatedness.

An architect trying to predict the spatial effect of their design on its inhabitants often faces a dilemma. Their professional experience and personal feeling allows them to intuit its effect. Such intuition, however, might lack legitimacy in the dominant design practice. For over a century, the question of the felt space in architecture has been a topic of theoretical discussion, which led to the insight that the answer might lay not so much in studying the architectural structures, but rather in studying the bodies that inhabit them. And still the dominant architectural practice follows the outdated dualistic (mis-)understanding of the felt space. Another historical development took place in dance. Here, since the 1960s,the traditionally formalistic and objectifying understanding of dance has been strongly influenced by techniques of bodily sensitization, stemming from the field of somatics. In themselves rather diverse, these techniques have been institutionally delineated through the principles of somatic movement education. One of their characteristics is that somatic techniques are constantly re-emerging - not from a priori knowledge but from the study of one’s own body and its interactions with the environment. This article envisages how such principles might be applied to architectural design practice and give rise to new embodied design practices - which might foster architects’ sensory expertise and thus legitimize the felt knowledge in professional contexts.

This research is motivated by our belief that artistic practices have a great potential for exchange and so can promote innovations in the creative processes. In particular, we are interested in how the corporeal lived experience can be integrated into the design process and used as a conceptual basis for an architectural design. Within this article, we propose an interdisciplinary approach to architectural design that includes somatic exercises taken from dance, and associated with a phenomenological recollection of the experiences in space. At the same time, in teaching, we recognize the challenge of bringing the design process closer to the secondsemester architecture students of the Coburg University of Applied Sciences and Arts. The research was carried out as part of a studio project which focused on the design of a kindergarten. We found that the corporeal approach to design helped the students to immerse themselves in the role of the different users, and so relate to the design in an intimate way. Consequently, the designs were surprisingly imaginative and showed a considerable variation in typology.

All buildings move under the effect of physical forces of the earth. It is unperceivable, but they move. Some of them are also designed to move to perform their functions. However, most of them look absolutely still. Nevertheless, architects, critics, and historians of architecture often borrowed terms from scientific disciplines to describe a building or parts of it as if it is actually moving. Since antiquity, artistic literature has been full of »dynamized« descriptions of artwork virtually set in motion to enhance the narrative quality of the communication, but in architecture this happens only from the end of the 18th century onward. Since the end of the 19th century, a sequence of scholars and architects Heinrich Wölfflin, Colin Rowe, Peter Eisenman, and Greg Lynn have been developing a series of analytical and design tools that were used to introduce (or to query) time and motion in architecture, whose different forms are here presented, classified, and discussed.

This article illustrates how the isomorphism between bodily form and emotional expression is manifest in architectural experience through applying research findings in the fields of cognitive science, phenomenology, and psychology to practical examples in the work of Aldo van Eyck, Alvar Aalto, Rosan Bosch, Herman Hertzberger, Steen Eiler-Rasmussen, and Gaston Bachelard. Beginning with the micro-scale movement in facial expressions to larger scale patterns of collective movement and mood, this work understands architecture in its activeverbal form, as a patterning force capable of modulating rhythms and resonances at individual and societal scales of interaction.

This contribution presents the proceedings from a series of transversal university projects, addressing bodily forms of knowledge concerning the perception, inquiry, and conception of architecture. It retraces the phases of different manners of investigation over a threesemester teaching cycle, addressing perceptions and experiences of architectural spaces. The proceedings of, and results from the seminar cycle are documented and framed with an introduction to the applied methods and ways of working as well as their reflection and evaluation. These varying approaches all center around the questions of how to bring body-based and incorporated knowledge concerning architectural space to awareness and how attention to sensual and corporeal ways of perception can be increased. Thus, it investigates how the spectrum of design methods in architecture can be extended in order to actively include bodily forms of knowledge in the anticipation of spatial experience in the design process. The article introduces a concept of »Architecture Imagery« as a way to include bodily ways of knowing and body-based practices in the perception and memory of lived experience and the process of architectural design.

Environmental relationships need to be understood as crucial in contemporary social research. This article explores relating with nature in urban contexts and its diverse temporalities. How do people relate to the more-than-human natural environments in the city? How does urban nature appear through sensory memories and perceptions? To answer these questions, this research analyzes sensobiographic walks conducted with young (15-30 years of age) and old (70+ years of age) city dwellers in Turku, southwest Finland. Via transgenerational sensobiographic walks (Järviluoma 2021), less controlled urban green spaces such as parks, riversides, margins, and pathways are discovered as weedy landscapes, where encounters between the human and the non-human take place. These weedy landscapes allow the sharing of sensory experiences and memories of transformation, following that sensing itself can be grasped as a collective endeavor. This article asserts that urban biodiverse sites maintain their interrelations with other forms of life. The multi-sensorial atmospheres they provide - smells, sounds, silences, views, moisture, shadow, feeling - could be cherished as sensory commons. The findings presented in this article contribute to current discussions in several research fields from urban planning to mobile ethnography, landscape architecture, spatial design, and the anthropology of the senses.

This contribution elaborates upon the appropriation of urban space in spatiotemporal and procedural interventions in the example of the city of Kharkiv, as well as the impact of urban space on the process of how various groups rediscover and use various parts of the city. Being moved during collective actions - in the sense of feeling urged to move along - goes beyond routine practices by influencing the city and its perception. It seems that these general processions, celebrations, and festive activities of the residents are their contributions to the process of »urban renaissance« - the rebirth of interest in the urban way of life. Since public spaces reflect the historical inheritance of local communities, joint transformative actions such as, »appropriation «, »production«, and »governance« of urban spaces are considered. This article advocates for the practice of domestication of urban space by the local community, as well as the need for the existence of »urban lagoons« - free (unregulated) areas of the city used as resources for urban development and interaction of citizens.

The research presented in this article is embedded in the context of the on-going doctoral thesis titled The Mantua-Peschiera Railway: A Case Study for the Historical Analysis and Design Methodology of a Regeneration Project. The research focuses on the decommissioned railway that once connected the city of Mantua to Peschiera del Garda in the north of Italy and questions its possible future. Nowadays, the railway is not perceived as it was, because, without any specific or recognizable appearence, its few remains, such as the passenger stations, are in ruins. The historical data helped to reshape the original project of the line and its deep interdependence with its environment showing peculiar and original characters as a branch line. The author’s research aims to create a possible scenario in which the former railway guarantees a continuous connection between the object and its territory within its new function as a Cultural Route.