1 The Memory in Bodily and Architectural Making:

2 Reflections from Embodied Cognitive Science

3 Andrea Jelić 1, Aleksandar Staničić 2

4
5 1. Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg
6 University, Aalborg, Denmark, anje@create.aau.dk
7 2. Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
8 Cambridge, MA, USA, stanicic@mit.edu
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10 Abstract:
11 Following a recent “experiential and embodied” turn in architectural discourse, a
12 new field of research inspired by embodied cognitive science has started
13 illuminating brain and bodily mechanisms behind architecture’s ability to affect our
14 perception, memory, and imagination—and in extension, how architects’ (can)
15 embrace the conditions of human embodiment to create meaningful environments.
16 Accordingly, this growing body of knowledge can offer new insights on why and
17 how the design strategy behind “affective architecture”—i.e., invoking in the visitor
18 intense emotional and bodily experiences through particular spatial scenarios and
19 atmospheres—is effective in making meaningful and memorable places.
20 Starting from the perspective of enactive-embodied approach to cognition and the
21 understanding of architectural experience as originating in the pre-reflective
22 architecture-body communication, we propose that the fundamental pre-condition
23 of memory- and meaning making in (memorial) architecture resides in the embodied
24 spatial experiences.
25 Specifically, the aim of this chapter is threefold. First, (1) to sketch from the
26 enactive cognition perspective the brain-body mechanisms underpinning human
27 interaction with space, with a particular emphasis on the role of affect and
28 affordances in the experience of architecture and creation of memories. Second, (2) to
29 provide guidelines for thinking about memorial spaces and architectural heritage as
30 intrinsically connected to the sense of individual and social self through our
31 embodied responsiveness to architectural cues and spatial affordances, where the
32 latter are understood as materialization of the sociocultural patterns, practices, and
33 meanings. Thirdly, (3) to underline the importance of considering the politics of
34 affect and embodiment in architectural design, and hence the architects’ role (and
35 limits) in creating affective heritage. Accordingly, we argue for thinking about the
36 embodied experience of architecture as an open-ended playground, whose power of
37 triggering emotional responses is both a source of understanding the scripted
38 (designed) narrative as well as a place for reinvention and necessary flexibility of
39 heritage architecture in the fast-changing times.

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40 Keywords: pre-reflective architectural experience, enactive-embodied cognition, affectivity,
41 memory, memorial spaces, narrative, affective architecture, affective heritage, politics of
42 atmospheres

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43 The Memory in Bodily and Architectural Making:
44 Reflections from Embodied Cognitive Science
45
46 1. Introduction: The role of architecture in meaning and place making
47 Architecture is often defined as an existential art because of its role in creating
48 meaning in people’s lives by providing a structured framework for making sense of
49 oneself and the world. On the one hand, architecture provides a shelter for biological
50 living body and a setting for situations of life, while on the other, it houses our world
51 of ideas and memories by being inextricably linked—through our embodied
52 existence—to the way we think and behave. This idea was explicitly taken and
53 elaborated within the discourse of architectural phenomenology, first emerging in
54 the 1960s and influenced by works of phenomenological philosophers like Martin
55 Heidegger (2001). Architectural phenomenologists—prominent scholars such as
56 Christian Norberg-Schulz, Dalibor Vesely, Juhani Pallasmaa, to name only a few—
57 have emphasized this capacity of built spaces to mediate between the world and our
58 consciousness in order to create places for dwelling and belonging (Norberg-Schulz
59 1971; Pérez-Gómez 2016; Pallasmaa 2011; Vesely 2004; Zumthor 1999). Over the last
60 two decades, these voices have gained additional strength in the context of the
61 “experiential and embodied turn”—occurring in both architectural theory and
62 practice, and which advocates for placing the human experiencing and perceiving
63 body as a central concern of architectural design (Mallgrave 2018, 2013; Jelić 2015).
64 Hence, inspired in particular by phenomenology of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty
65 1962) with the rediscovery of multi-sensoriality and materiality, a number of
66 architects and scholars have argued that architecture acts as a meaningful
67 scaffolding for human life by articulating the lived existential space into a system of
68 externalized order, hierarchy, and memory (Pallasmaa 2013; Holl, Pallasmaa, and
69 Pérez-Gómez 2006). In other words, architectural spaces as constructed settings give
70 material expression to layering of time and culture.
71 What is particularly novel in these ideas in the last few years is the increasing
72 recognition that our cognitive and experiential worlds as a whole—and thus
73 including meaningful encounters with architectural spaces—are shaped through our
74 bodily interactions with the (built) environment. The influx of ideas from cognitive
75 science, especially on embodied cognition (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991;
76 Gallagher 2017), prompted a new field of research attempting to reveal the brain and
77 bodily mechanisms behind architecture’s ability to affect our memory and
78 imagination. Insights from fields as diverse as embodied cognitive science,
79 phenomenological philosophy, environmental psychology, as well as a young
80 discipline of neuroscience for architecture, have reinforced the conception of
81 architectural experience as fundamentally embodied and emotional. Moreover, this
82 growing body of knowledge is illuminating how built spaces contribute to shaping
83 of our cognitive lives and have a profound impact on our overall psychosomatic
84 health and behavior (Robinson and Pallasmaa 2015; Mallgrave 2013). Therefore,

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 85 according to this new perspective, architects’ design intentions are to be understood
86 as a way of embracing the conditions of human embodiment to provide not only a
87 solution to functional requirements, but also to create meaningful settings in which
88 we can experience a psychosomatic completeness and sense of attunement with the
89 world.
90 While architecture of the everyday is primarily intended to be a silent background
91 to life practices, architectural history is filled with instances of remarkable, landmark
92 buildings where this existential attunement is more explicitly (and often
93 intentionally) articulated and experienced. In fact, in contemporary practice of
94 designing memorial spaces and understanding of architectural heritage, the common
95 approach to establishing collective memory and projected narratives is by creating
96 instances of distinctly memorable experiences of places (Sumartojo 2016; Micieli-
97 Voutsinas 2016; Waterton and Dittmer 2014; Sumartojo and Graves 2018). To achieve
98 this goal, these architectural settings follow a common design strategy—translating
99 architecture’s capacity to structure our experience of being-in-the-world by creating
100 particular atmospheres and spatial scenarios that invoke in the visitor intense
101 emotional and bodily experiences. Accordingly, the desired effect of these
102 orchestrated embodied experiences is to create a trigger condition for meaning to
103 emerge.
104 Such experience-centered and embodied approach to designing memorial and
105 heritage architecture is also in line with the recent scholarship on affective and more-
106 than-representational theories of understanding places of memory and
107 memorialization. Concretely, they share the idea that meaning and memorial
108 narrative is produced and communicated as a feeling through affective experiences
109 and embodied encounters with and within the spaces of heritage. Namely, more-
110 than-representational heritage studies emphasize the significance of affect,
111 atmosphere, visceral responses, and materiality in shaping visitors’ experience of
112 place, space, and time in memorials and museums as an act of remembering in the
113 present (see for example Micieli-Voutsinas 2016; Waterton 2014; Sumartojo 2016;
114 Sumartojo and Graves 2018). This idea is complementary to recent critiques within
115 architectural circles of the primacy of vision in contemporary professional practice
116 (Pallasmaa 2005; Vesely 2004). Hence, instead of producing aestheticized and
117 intellectualized designs, there is a call for appreciation of more than just visual
118 appearance and architectural imagery (Pallasmaa 2011). Thus, there is a clear
119 consensus in various fields of research on the value of “affective architecture”
120 strategy, especially in the context of building spaces for memory.
121 However, while there is substantial literature on describing this strategy and its
122 effects, what is currently missing is an in-depth understanding why and how this
123 strategy works—at the level of the body. More precisely, the question is how memory
124 and meaning is created through our bodies and spatial experiences, in synchrony
125 with deliberate and carefully considered architects’ design acts. Accordingly, our
126 aim in this chapter is to start filling this gap by proposing a framework that will link

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127 the notion of “affective architecture” and the state-of-the-art knowledge from
128 embodied cognitive science.
129 Starting from the perspective of enactive-embodied approach to cognition (Varela,
130 Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Gallagher 2017; Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014) and the
131 understanding of architectural experience as originating in the pre-reflective
132 architecture-body communication (Jelić et al. 2016), we hypothesize that the
133 fundamental pre-condition of memory- and meaning making in (memorial)
134 architecture resides in the embodied spatial experiences.
135 Specifically, the aim of this chapter is threefold. First, (1) to sketch from the
136 enactive cognition perspective the brain-body mechanisms underpinning human
137 interactions with space, with a particular emphasis on the role of affect and
138 affordances in the experience of architecture and creation of memories. Second, (2) to
139 provide guidelines for thinking about memorial spaces and architectural heritage as
140 intrinsically connected to the sense of individual and social self through our
141 embodied responsiveness to architectural cues and spatial affordances, where the
142 latter are understood as materialization of the sociocultural patterns, practices, and
143 meanings. Thirdly, (3) to underline the importance of considering the politics of
144 affect and embodiment in architectural design, and hence the architects’ role (and
145 limits) in creating affective heritage.
146 The argument unfolds as follows. We start by outlining key ideas of the enactive-
147 embodied theory of cognition and its implications for conceptualizing architectural
148 experience. Concretely, we discuss how conceiving cognition as enactive, embodied,
149 and affective translates into understanding of architecture-body communication as
150 originating in body-environment interactions, which are fundamentally meaningful
151 because of the central role of affectivity and emotional responses in shaping these
152 engagements. Next, we discuss the notion of the encultured human being and how our
153 material environments including architecture, are always imbued with social,
154 political, cultural meanings—highlighting that accordingly, architectural affordances
155 are essentially cultural affordances. Thus, in line with ideas of cognition as situated and
156 distributed/extended, we propose how architectural spaces as sociocultural
157 scaffoldings—through embodied experiences—can influence our emotions, moods,
158 behaviors, as well as our memories and identities. Finally, we exemplify how spatial
159 cues can be used to modulate people’s attention, bodily and affective experiences,
160 and how this triggering has to be understood as both being a form of power, as well
161 as a point where architects’ intentions translate into visitors’ bodily agency through
162 the act of remembering-in-the-now.
163
164 2. Meaning and memory in the body: The enactive-embodied view
165 The question we want to address in this section is how the enactive-embodied view
166 of cognition influences how we think and conceive of architectural experience, and
167 hence, the related phenomena of interest—meaning- and memory making.
168 Therefore, we will focus on three aspects of the enactive-embodied approach and
169 their implications for architecture. These are: (1) cognition is enactive and embodied
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170 i.e., body-environment interactions as the foundation of experience; (2) cognition is
171 affective i.e., the role of affectivity in engagement with the world and thus, the built
172 environment; and (3) cognition is situated and distributed/extended i.e., how
173 architectural spaces have an essential scaffolding role in co-constructing memories
174 and meanings through history of body-environment interaction patterns and
175 practices.
176 Embodied theories of cognition—of which the here discussed enactive-embodied
177 approach is one of the prominent strands—initially appeared in the early 1990s as a
178 critique of the neurocentric and disembodied understanding of how human brain
179 works and of the disregard for the lived experience in the scientific studies of the
180 mind (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Thompson 2007; Lakoff and Johnson
181 1999). Essentially, these approaches intended to redefine the Cartesian splits (mind-
182 body as well as brain-body) pervading major cognitive theories by arguing for the
183 conception of cognition beyond the neural events in the head and acknowledging
184 the relevance of first-person experiential perspective for explorations of
185 consciousness and cognitive phenomena. In a sense, their efforts parallel the
186 “experiential” and “multi-sensory” turn within architectural circles—they both
187 emphasize the centrality of the body, understood as a biological and phenomenal
188 whole, for the experience of the world and architectural space. Today, these
189 embodied cognitive models are known as the 4E or 4EA approaches to cognition—
190 they all share an understanding that cognitive processes are enactive, embodied,
191 embedded, extended (4E) and affective (4EA) (Ward and Stapleton 2012; Newen, De
192 Bruin, and Gallagher 2018).
193 Specifically, the main idea of the enactive-embodied approach is that our ability to
194 experience and cognize is grounded in bodily interactions with the environment
195 (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Gallagher 2017). As Shaun Gallagher puts it
196 clearly: “an organism is not a cognitive agent before coupling to an environment
197 [because] the environment is an essential, constitutive element in making the
198 organism what it is” (Gallagher 2017, 1:60). Hence, to say that cognition is enactive is
199 to say that the mind is enacted or brought forth through continuous reciprocal
200 interactions of the brain, body, and the world. In the enactivist vocabulary, this is
201 termed as a process of sense making, which transforms the world into a place of
202 meaning for the living being (Thompson and Stapleton 2009; Colombetti 2010).
203 Cognition is also embodied: it is not just something that happens in the head, but
204 instead—the body has a fundamental role in constituting the way we enact, perceive,
205 and understand the world (Thompson 2007; Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014).
206 Accordingly, this means that all these possibilities for body-environment interactions
207 are determined and guided by the conditions of our embodiment i.e., the kind of
208 body we have with its shape, skills, abilities, affective and motivational states etc.
209 In the context of architecture, the implications of the enactive-embodied
210 perspective on experience and meaning are twofold. Firstly, architecture and the
211 body are dynamically interconnected in a two-way dependency: architecture
212 expresses and is shaped upon man’s conditions of embodiment, while the way
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213 spaces are built influences human mind and behavior. Accordingly, an idea of pre-
214 reflective architecture-body communication has been proposed as a way to emphasize
215 this interdependency between embodiment and designers’ articulation of built
216 spaces as architectural affordances (Jelić et al. 2016; Jelić 2015). The significant aspect
217 of this notion is the emphasis on largely pre-conscious and unconscious nature of
218 people’s architectural experiences. Secondly, because cognition is understood as
219 emerging from the processes of “skillful know-how” i.e., situated and embodied
220 actions based on body-environment coupling, one of the fundamental postulates of
221 the enactivist thinking is the notion that perceiving is a way of acting; perception is
222 not something that happens to us—it is something we do (Noë 2004). In the same
223 manner, we propose that the foundational nucleus of architectural meaning is
224 something that is created—and always reenacted anew—in the interaction between
225 the body and the spatial setting. Thus, the meaning of a situation and architectural
226 space at hand is fundamentally embodied precisely because it emerges from the
227 embodied action of a body in space.
228 Before returning to a more detailed discussion of this hypothesis in the next
229 section, it is valuable to introduce two other aspects of cognition—as affective and
230 situated—in order to examine the relationship between affectivity, memory, and
231 experience of architecture.
232 Namely, in the enactive-embodied theory, affectivity stands as an inherent
233 constituent in the perception-action cycle, because it motivates and animates all
234 organism-world interactions (Colombetti 2014; Colombetti and Thompson 2008).
235 Accordingly, it is considered as a key factor in the process of sense making, by
236 giving salience, meaning, and value to the events, actions, and the organism’s
237 environment as a whole. As Giovanna Colombetti argues (2014), we have a
238 fundamental lack of indifference toward the world—and it is the reason why this
239 basic, foundational affectivity permeates everything we are and do. Understood in
240 this sense, affectivity (or affect) encompasses several related phenomena such as
241 emotions, feelings, moods; moreover, it grounds them and makes them possible.
242 Therefore, according to the enactivist view, all bodily systems are essential for being
243 a cognitive and sentient agent—including not only the neural and sensorimotor
244 system, but also all body’s fundamental homeostatic activity e.g., all physiological,
245 hormonal, and chemical self-regulatory processes (Colombetti 2014; Gallagher 2017).
246 Importantly, many of these processes pertain to the unconscious level, of which we
247 are not and cannot be aware of, but they are influencing our way of being and acting
248 upon the world. In that sense, it is posited that affect comprehensively permeates
249 our perceptual openness to the world and it acts as a transparent background that
250 constrains and informs the features of the environment which show up for a
251 perceiver at any moment in time (Bower and Gallagher 2013; Ratcliffe 2010). Thus,
252 such pervasive integration of affective phenomena in one’s perceptual and cognitive
253 experiences, allows for the shifts of attention, which are instances of one’s focus
254 being drawn in one direction or another by the “affective ebb and flow” of what a
255 person is experiencing (Bower and Gallagher 2013; Gallagher 2017).
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256 In short, what this means for architecture is that our experience of spaces is
257 inherently affective, and that accordingly, all our perceptions, actions, behaviors
258 within built spaces depends on the workings of our emotional system, which in turn
259 is influenced by and continuously adjusting to changes within the environment. As
260 noted by scholars writing on atmospheres as well as affective heritage, such nature
261 of our affective system has been used by architects throughout architectural history
262 in order to create different and often powerful spatial atmospheres (Böhme et al.
263 2014; Edensor and Sumartojo 2015; Zumthor 2006; Mallgrave 2013). Taking the
264 enactivist perspective, this idea is further enriched by making affectivity reach even
265 deeper: by emphasizing the central role of affect and emotional responses for giving
266 meaning and value to bodily engagements with the world, it is implied that all
267 architecture-body communication is inherently embodied and affective—and thus,
268 meaningful.
269 The third aspect of embodied cognition that has important implications for
270 understanding the link between memory, meaning, and architecture is the notion of
271 situated (or embedded) and distributed (extended) cognition. In short, to say that
272 cognition is situated means cognitive processes depend fundamentally on one’s
273 spatial and temporal context, while cognition is extended because cognitive processes
274 take advantage of the social and material environments (Ward and Stapleton 2012;
275 Mengel 2017). Specifically, our aim here is to use these notions to highlight the role
276 of the environment as a whole—and especially architectural spaces—in the process
277 of constructing memories. According to the enactive-embodied view, remembering
278 and memory making should be considered as a kind of doing; it is a fundamentally
279 creative, imaginative, and dynamic process, which can be understood as the activity
280 of enactively constructing memories using biological, environmental, and social
281 resources (Hutto and Peeters 2018; Mengel 2017). What is more, enactivists hold that
282 memories come into being “on the spot” by reenacting embodied procedures, often
283 prompted and supported by external phenomena (Hutto and Peeters 2018).
284 The complex system of remembering is argued to be essential to who we are as it
285 includes a range of our memory capacities, such as procedural memory (i.e., the
286 skillful and habitual know-how), episodic memory (for specific personal events and
287 experiences), autobiographical memory (containing one’s self-narratives). Most
288 importantly for the purpose of this chapter, current research suggests that
289 architectural environments could be pinpointed as having an important, if not even
290 essential role in the processes underlying these memory systems. For example,
291 recent studies indicate that spatial context serves as a scaffold for episodic memory
292 and imagination (Robin 2018). In other words, spatial context can support memory-
293 making processes in the brain—and what is more, the context of an event influences
294 memory’s quality. In a similar fashion, it is evidenced that memories of emotional
295 events have a persistence and vividness that other memories seem to lack (Brosch et
296 al. 2013). Role of environments can also been implicated in the construction of
297 autobiographic memories (Hutto and Peeters 2018), where the more non-
298 representational character of evocative objects has been shown to give more freedom
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299 for imagination and defining of our own identities (Heersmink 2018). What this
300 implies is that one of the reasons why spatial scenarios in “affective architecture” can
301 be such effective design strategy is due to this link between memory, space, and
302 affectivity. Hence, in alignment with arguments made by scholars of affective
303 heritage and architectural phenomenology among others (Sumartojo and Graves
304 2018; Pallasmaa 2011; Waterton and Dittmer 2014; Vergeront 2002), intensive
305 emotional experiences of spaces can result in “more” memorability, while memorial
306 narrative shared via some other mediums (like in the exhibition) can be made “to
307 stick” to visitors’ minds precisely thanks to the particularity—memorability—of a
308 spatial setting and atmosphere.
309 In addition, one of the most important implications of understanding cognition as
310 situated and extended—is the link between embodiment, culture, and affordances,
311 where the latter are defined as possibilities for action provided to us by the
312 environment (Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014; van Dijk and Rietveld 2017). Namely, a
313 notion of the “encultured human being” has been proposed following the
314 conception of cognition as being enacted through bodily interactions with material,
315 social, and cultural environments (Thompson 2007), which are interpreted in
316 enactive terms as being available to us as the “landscape of affordances” pertaining
317 to the human form of life (Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014). Defined in such way,
318 affordances become central to the enactive view by implying that the organism and
319 the world are co-constituted precisely because there is a viable coupling between
320 organism’s perceptual and practical capacities and what the world affords.
321 Importantly, any specific affordance available to a particular individual at any
322 moment in time will depend on his/hers (bodily) abilities, needs, and preferences
323 (Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014).
324 At the same time, because our world is always social, material, and cultural,
325 affordances are best understood as cultural affordances—they provide us with the
326 sociocultural scaffolding for embodied experiences, and significantly, they can both
327 encode and reinforce patterned (sociocultural) practices, as well as solicit certain
328 shared expectations and direct attention (especially in case of constructed human
329 environments) (Ramstead, Veissière, and Kirmayer 2016; Rietveld et al. 2015). Such
330 tight connection between our embodiment and culture has given rise to the idea of
331 (collective) body memory, where the body is understood as a carrier of cultural
332 tradition and practices through embodied skills and habits—but which are always
333 codetermined and enacted through dense histories of embodied engagement with
334 the material affordances and other bodies (Fuchs 2017; Mengel 2017). It is beyond the
335 scope of this paper to provide in-depth discussion of the similarities of these
336 enactivist-based views and the previous extensive scholarship on how habitual
337 activities and interactions with the built environment create the social scaffolding for
338 collective remembering and identity (Halbwachs 1980; for discussion see Fuchs 2017;
339 Mengel 2017). However, we wish to highlight that architecture exists at the
340 boundary between the cultural/collective memory and the collective body memory
341 because it has both a supportive and contingent role in memory making. On the one
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342 hand, architecture is a constructed, materialized expression of the culture as a whole,
343 which implicitly shapes people’s patterns of (bodily) interaction and behavior, while
344 on the other, it acts as a scaffolding for all our memories and embodied narratives
345 that constitute our sense of self and collective identities. In the next section, we
346 pursue this idea further and discuss how the above-described character of cognition,
347 memory, and meaning as embodied has been translated into design strategies for
348 affecting visitors’ bodily and emotional experiences in order to create memorable
349 and meaningful spaces.
350
351 3. Embodied meaning and memory in architectural making
352 Despite its historical role in being a medium of symbolic representation of various
353 societal, political, and cultural conditions—as it is the case as well in the scripted
354 memorial narratives—the task of architecture is also to offer both individuals and
355 societies a place for existential orientation and understanding of one’s place in the
356 world. As argued by Alberto Pérez-Gómez (2006), architecture aims to communicate
357 not a particular meaning, but rather a possibility of recognizing ourselves as complete
358 and as having an existential foothold in space and time. In line with the enactive
359 understanding of architectural experience, meaning, and embodied memory
360 making, it is this idea of “recognition”—allowing people to both confirm and
361 reinvent their sense of self—that we wish to explore here. Specifically, our
362 hypothesis is that the “affective architecture” design strategy—influencing bodily
363 and emotional responses of visitors through specific spatial affordances, attentional
364 architectural cues, atmospheric elements like light, materials, sound, etc.—is
365 successful in creating meaningful spaces because it accesses one’s self, memory, and
366 identity in a fundamentally embodied way.
367 As captured in the notion of the pre-reflective architecture-body communication, an
368 important characteristic of architectural experience is its pre-reflective dimension,
369 and it is this possibility of being available to consciousness and conscious reflection
370 in certain instances in which our capacity to link experience, places, memories, and
371 meanings lie. As discussed in more details elsewhere (Jelić et al. 2016), the
372 mechanism of body schema is one of the crucial elements in this process of becoming
373 aware. Its relevance for architecture resides in its double task of being (1) responsible
374 for continuous tracing of bodily states and positions as we move through space, and
375 (2) providing us with the a capacity to have a pre-reflective bodily awareness of
376 ourselves as experiencing subjects and embodied agents (the so-called minimal sense
377 of self) (Gallagher 2005; Berlucchi and Aglioti 2010; Gallese and Sinigaglia 2010). In
378 the context of architecture, this capacity to have a pre-reflective bodily awareness of
379 oneself and of a situation at hand can be hypothesized to provide architects with a
380 playground for making moments of directed attention in response to intentionally
381 designed spatial cues. In such instances, the attention is first moved to the body and
382 then to the environment/architectural setting, as a way of immersing the person into
383 a present moment. What is more, this capacity of becoming aware also underpins the

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384 methods of auto-ethnography, which is often used in scholarship on atmospheres
385 and affective heritage (Waterton and Dittmer 2014; Yanow 1998).
386 A good illustration of this pre-reflective architecture-body communication
387 through body schema can be found in the design of Daniel Libeskind’s Garden of
388 Exile in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. This space is designed as an allusion to a
389 garden with 49 tall and thick concrete columns, which appear to be leaning and
390 being out of balance because they are placed on a sloped floor. Additionally, only
391 connection to the outside world is a view upwards, towards the sky. This particular
392 design with the tilted floor surface acts as a direct and powerful corporeal
393 suggestion of instability and insecurity: because the space influences our body
394 schema by disturbing our sense of balance and normal upright orientation, we are
395 able to experience these changes as feelings of discomfort and disturbance, and
396 hence, to potentially understand in a memorable way the design intention of
397 creating the atmosphere of existential fears. Accordingly, architectural meaning is
398 created as embodied and embedded in space-visitor interaction through deliberate
399 and careful architects’ design acts. Naturally, the richness of architectural expression
400 allows for a myriad of ways for creating such attention-directing cues by affecting
401 body’s sensory systems (Edensor and Sumartojo 2015).
402 Moreover, this capacity to affect the body to notice the world could also be
403 proposed as a designers’ tool to link the individual experience with the collective
404 memory. A hypothesis could be put forward that moments of intense architectural
405 experiences, as in memorial affective spaces, can modulate and shape the dynamical
406 structure of self-patterns—including the self-constituents such as the minimal
407 (bodily), social, affective, narrative self (Gallagher and Daly 2018). Recent studies
408 and theoretical models of the self suggest that multisensory manipulations, such is a
409 change of posture, can update even more abstract narrative representations of one’s
410 self (Tsakiris 2017). In that sense, the experience of memorial narrative and scripted
411 meaning, which are built into the architectural structure itself, could become tightly
412 interwoven with one’s sense of self and own identity—by way of embodied
413 (multisensory) experiences. At the same time, because these spatial settings present
414 themselves to the visitors as cultural affordances—that moreover, direct their
415 attention with spatial cues (such as sloped floor and leaning columns in the Garden
416 of Exile), they also modulate their affective states and openness to the possible
417 engagements with spaces, exhibits, and other visitors; thus, a condition for shared
418 intentionality is built. According to Ramstead et al. (2016), it is these feedback
419 relations between shared attention and shared intentionality that is essential for
420 acquiring responsiveness to cultural affordances. While this area of research linking
421 the self, (collective) memory, (collective) identity, and architecture as cognitive
422 scaffolding is essentially unexplored as of yet, we will not attempt to address these
423 important questions here and should be understood as proposed directions for
424 future research.
425 In addition, it should be underlined that it is not expected that the entire
426 complexity of the museum’s narrative is understood by the visitor through bodily
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427 engagement and specific atmosphere alone – they are just the trigger, a baseline for
428 making people more receptive to the narrative and by virtue of effects of emotional
429 arousal on consolidation of memories in the brain, for hoping that this museum visit
430 leaves a more profound and memorable experience. As scholars discussing affective
431 atmospheres have argued elsewhere, such places and events always involve
432 anticipation which is built via different mediums, of which architecture is one
433 example (Sumartojo 2016; Edensor 2012). Accordingly, it has been proposed that
434 such atmospheres at/of memorial spaces present a mix of narrative, sensory, and
435 affective elements tied into powerful combinations with political implications
436 (Sumartojo 2016; Micieli-Voutsinas 2016). For this reason, in the next section, we will
437 address the politics of atmospheres in the light of embodied cognition theory, and
438 the relevant implications for design and understanding of memorial and heritage
439 architecture.
440
441 4. “Affective architecture” and the politics of atmospheres and embodiment
442 As discussed above, recent works in the field of enactive-embodied cognition have
443 emphasized that we are encultured human beings i.e., enactive and embodied agents
444 living and interacting with sociomaterial environments. Such interconnectedness
445 also means that our experiences and identities are intrinsically shaped—and thus can
446 be influenced—through the kinds of environments in which we live in. However,
447 this notion of enculturation and the idea of architectural affordances as cultural also
448 bring forward another perspective—that this influence is indivisibly linked to
449 politics and power. The very fact that the notions of collective memory and heritage
450 or patrimony became parts of the conceptual apparatus of both the nation-state and
451 architecture emphasize their political connotations. Accordingly, it has been
452 proposed that the design of architectural atmospheres is a form of soft power,
453 because of the primarily implicit, unconscious way in which they modulate and
454 guide people’s behaviors, desires, and experiences (Borch 2014; Edensor and
455 Sumartojo 2015). This power of atmospheres has been largely exploited as a way of
456 influencing consumers based on the ideas of the “experience economy” (Klingmann
457 2007). Similarly, the emerging discourse of “affective urbanism” supports the idea of
458 mobilizing temporary events and intense encounters with material structures in
459 urban spaces devised by city-makers, in order to influence dwellers’ embodied,
460 affective experience of the city (Ernwein and Matthey 2018). As captured in the
461 notion of the political affect, there is a critical link between the somatic and the social
462 (Protevi 2009)—and it can be mediated through the built spaces and their designed
463 atmospheres. Closer to the enactivist perspective, it has been argued that
464 embodiment can be considered from two sides (Wehrle 2017): on the one hand, the
465 body is a vehicle of being-in-the-world—it allows us to interact with our
466 environment, to have and acquire skills, abilities, habits; the body is an agent of
467 change as it can affect the world. At the same time, the body has been considered as
468 used, formed, or even produced by dominant cultural norms and technologies of

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469 power; in other words, the body is affected and disciplined (Wehrle 2017; Fuchs
470 2017).
471 For this reason, in the context of memorial architecture and designing of “affective
472 architecture” there is a need to put a word of caution to the implicit meanings and
473 feelings that could be intentionally—or perhaps, worse—unintentionally, created by
474 architects. While there is a growing scholarship on the connection between the
475 politics of atmospheres and affective spaces (Borch 2014; Sumartojo 2016; Micieli-
476 Voutsinas 2016; Waterton 2014), there is more work to be done to understand the
477 bodily mechanisms behind the politics of affective design. However, what we wish
478 to highlight here is that even though all body-environment interactions are always
479 inherently political, they can never be fully determined. This is because of the
480 dynamic and enactive nature of architecture-body communication; it is always an
481 open-ended process, bringing new possibilities and meanings with each new
482 encounter with architectural settings. This is why we can speak of the memory- and
483 meaning making in architecture as being remembering-in-the-now. Therefore, it can be
484 argued that using the strategy of “affective architecture” can never result in the
485 definitive disciplining of bodies—but instead, it is a “continuous labor of directing
486 attention” (Ernwein and Matthey 2018, 15).
487 The importance of this is especially evident in the ongoing redefinitions of
488 understanding and designing heritage architecture. In fact, the way of how desired
489 political messages of monuments and heritage architecture were conveyed and
490 visualized, changed drastically in the last century or so. Early explorations in
491 memorial architecture borrowed its monumentality directly from classic
492 architectural styles, while narrative was pretty straightforward and served mainly
493 for glorification of a nation and/or its sovereign. Modern times brought
494 diversification and abstraction of architectural forms, and consequently changed the
495 nature of interpretation of (architectural) heritage. Moreover, it became evident that
496 original interpretations are susceptible to changes of cultural affordances with use
497 (phenomenon probably most evident in the Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the
498 Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin), and over time with political and social changes,
499 of which socialist monuments in Yugoslavia are the most extreme example (Staničić
500 2016). Those uncertainties regarding the “true reading” of memorials and
501 architectural heritage essentially revealed the limitations of architectural design—
502 what architects can or cannot do in the demanding task of “sending the message.”
503 Solution was found in adaptable nature of spatial form and accompanying
504 interpretations. Narratives became more interactive, with proposals like “hardcore
505 heritage” (Rietveld and Rietveld 2017), which reinvented the purpose and way of
506 engaging with narratives, typically by placing the body with all its capacities for
507 making embodied and emotional meanings and memories at the center, as a driving
508 force. The most successful designs try to incorporate the element of (desired) social
509 change and/or reconciliation, with proposals like the National Memorial for Peace
510 and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. In this building, the central position is the
511 memorial square with steel rectangles, the size and shape of coffins, hanging over
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512 the heads of visitors, and representing each of the counties in the United States
513 where a documented lynching took place. Outside of the central piece, laid in rows
514 are corresponding steel columns identical to the ones hanging in the Memorial.
515 These columns are intended to be temporary - Equal Justice Initiative is asking
516 representatives of each of the counties to come and claim their monument and
517 establish a memorial on home ground. The goal, therefore, is that social and historic
518 reconciliation become visible in the landscape surrounding the monument.
519 An important conclusion to draw from this is that embodied experience and
520 embodied meaning is only a pre-condition, only one aspect of the entire story of what
521 makes a memorial architecture. Undoubtedly, as exemplified in previous section, the
522 strong emotional and bodily experiences can be crucial triggers and essential
523 elements in telling the story. However, as evidenced through the history of heritage
524 architecture, this should be understood as an advantage—because it is the nature of
525 architectural meaning and memory as being linked to the body’s capacities of
526 experience-from-interaction and the remembering-in-the-now, that ensures that
527 architectural design and visitors’ engagement with memorial spaces remain a
528 playground for imagination and reinvention.
529
530 5. Conclusion
531 In this paper, we have outlined a framework based on the enactive-embodied
532 approach to cognition how to think about memory- and meaning making in
533 architecture as originating in embodied spatial experiences. Accordingly, our aim in
534 this chapter was to discuss the implications of conceiving cognition as enactive,
535 embodied, affective, situated, and extended in three ways.
536 Firstly, that architectural experience always becomes meaningful “from within”
537 i.e., through our bodily interactions with the environment and it is inherently
538 affective. In that sense, it is possible to argue that architectural meaning and
539 memorial narrative is always understood in an open-ended, remembering-in-the-
540 now, process. Secondly, that design strategy like “affective architecture” by
541 influencing visitors’ bodily and emotional responses through a variety of spatial
542 cues and directing of attention, can also affect one’s sense of self, as well as
543 individual and collective memories and identities—which are all interlinked by
544 virtue of human embodiment. Thirdly, because architectural environments provide
545 us with cultural affordances, there is a need to be cautious in the design of emphasis
546 on embodied experience and atmospheres, in the light of implicit political, social,
547 economic narratives imbuing the built spaces.
548 Therefore, with the enactive-embodied perspective in mind, we argue for thinking
549 about the embodied experience of architecture as an open-ended playground, whose
550 power of triggering emotional responses is both a source of understanding the
551 scripted (designed) narrative as well as a place for reinvention and necessary
552 flexibility of heritage architecture in the fast-changing times.

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