In Quest of Attuned Architectural 
Atmospheres
/
Contributions of Enactive Cognitive 
Theory and Neurophenomenology
Alberto Pérez-Gómez

Correspondences
In a recent book I unpacked the centrality of the concept of atmo-
sphere for architectural meaning and its historical roots.
1
 I explained 
the relevance of our growing concern with attuned places, at odds 
with the dominant concept of architecture as a geometric, aesthet-
ic object. I showed the association of Stimmung, the unique German 
term implying both atmosphere and mood, with the traditional aims 
of architectural meaning since Vitruvius, encompassed by terms such 
as harmony and temperance, explaining how architecture had tradition-
ally sought psychosomatic health, framing lived experience with order 
and stability congruent with local cultural values. Stimmung became a 
central concern for artistic expression in view of the adverse cultural 
conditions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and was engaged 
by practices of resistance against the dominant formalistic and tech-
nological assumptions of mainstream modern planning and building 
production. In order to fully grasp the possibilities of Stimmung and 
its implementation nowadays, creating life-enhancing atmospheres 
responsive to human action and to place in the fullest sense (as both 
natural and cultural context), a proper understanding of conscious-
ness and perception beyond Cartesian misunderstandings is absolutely 
indispensable. To this aim, the correspondences between the insights of 
20th. Century phenomenology and neuroscientific findings, sometimes 
known by the compound term “neurophenomenology, ” and the prop-
ositions of recent “enactive” cognitive theory are immensely valuable.
Contrary to Aristotle, for whom mind and the living body were 
always united – since “soul” is the capacity of the organism to act in 
manifold ways from vegetative nourishment, sentience, motion and 
volition, to intellectual conceptualization
2
 – Descartes must be held 
responsible for imagining and promoting the separation of consciousness 
and life, transforming the former into an inner experience accessible 
to the intellect, the ego cogitans, based exclusively in the soul (today’s 
brain). In his “Second Meditation” he goes as far as to doubt the very 
existence of the body’s sentience; indeed, he can even doubt about 
having a body. The power of the imagination belongs to his thinking 
and therefore “it seems” to him that he sees or touches.
3
 This, he con-
cludes, cannot be false (regardless of the origins of the sensation in fact 
1   
Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Attunement, 
Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of 
Modern Science (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 
2016).
2   
Aristotle tried to explain his concept with a 
fascinating analogy: “if the eye was a living 
creature, sight would be its soul,” De Anima II, 
I, 412b 19. Cited by Evan Thompson, Mind in 
Life, Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences 
of Mind (Cambridge MA: Harvard University 
Press, 2007), 226.
3   
René Descartes, Meditations of First 
Philosophy, trans. J. Cottingham (Cambridge 
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 19.

39 / In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
In a recent book I unpacked the centrality of the concept of atmo-
sphere for architectural meaning and its historical roots.
1
 I explained 
the relevance of our growing concern with attuned places, at odds 
with the dominant concept of architecture as a geometric, aesthet-
ic object. I showed the association of Stimmung, the unique German 
term implying both atmosphere and mood, with the traditional aims 
of architectural meaning since Vitruvius, encompassed by terms such 
as harmony and temperance, explaining how architecture had tradition-
ally sought psychosomatic health, framing lived experience with order 
and stability congruent with local cultural values. Stimmung became a 
central concern for artistic expression in view of the adverse cultural 
conditions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and was engaged 
by practices of resistance against the dominant formalistic and tech-
nological assumptions of mainstream modern planning and building 
production. In order to fully grasp the possibilities of Stimmung and 
its implementation nowadays, creating life-enhancing atmospheres 
responsive to human action and to place in the fullest sense (as both 
natural and cultural context), a proper understanding of conscious-
ness and perception beyond Cartesian misunderstandings is absolutely 
indispensable. To this aim, the correspondences between the insights of 
20th. Century phenomenology and neuroscientific findings, sometimes 
known by the compound term “neurophenomenology, ” and the prop-
ositions of recent “enactive” cognitive theory are immensely valuable.
Contrary to Aristotle, for whom mind and the living body were 
always united – since “soul” is the capacity of the organism to act in 
manifold ways from vegetative nourishment, sentience, motion and 
volition, to intellectual conceptualization
2
 – Descartes must be held 
responsible for imagining and promoting the separation of consciousness 
and life, transforming the former into an inner experience accessible 
to the intellect, the ego cogitans, based exclusively in the soul (today’s 
brain). In his “Second Meditation” he goes as far as to doubt the very 
existence of the body’s sentience; indeed, he can even doubt about 
having a body. The power of the imagination belongs to his thinking 
and therefore “it seems” to him that he sees or touches.
3
 This, he con-
cludes, cannot be false (regardless of the origins of the sensation in fact 
1   
Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Attunement, 
Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of 
Modern Science (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 
2016).
2   
Aristotle tried to explain his concept with a 
fascinating analogy: “if the eye was a living 
creature, sight would be its soul,” De Anima II, 
I, 412b 19. Cited by Evan Thompson, Mind in 
Life, Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences 
of Mind (Cambridge MA: Harvard University 
Press, 2007), 226.
3   
René Descartes, Meditations of First 
Philosophy, trans. J. Cottingham (Cambridge 
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 19.

Correspondences
or delusion); but sensing, in this particular way, is simply a “thinking. ” 
The Cartesian understanding of mind and perception first appeared 
in architectural theory toward the end of the 17th Century in the writings 
of Claude Perrault.
4
 Perrault took for granted that architecture commu-
nicates its meanings to a disembodied mind, thoroughly bypassing the 
body with its complex feelings and emotions. He assumed perception 
to be passive and meaning to be merely the result of the association of 
concepts and images in the brain. Like Descartes, Perrault believed that 
human consciousness was enabled by the pineal gland at the back of the 
head, conceived as a geometric and monocular point of contact between 
the measurable, intelligible world – res extensa – and the disembodied, 
rational soul – res cogitans. This consciousness was capable of perspectiv-
al visual perception, manifested as a picture composed with precise lines, 
like a copper-plate engraving; it assured the human capacity to grasp 
the immutable geometric and mathematical truth of the external world, 
closing the divide between the two heterogeneous elements of reality. 
Thus Perrault could question, for the first time ever in the history of 
architectural theory, the bodily experience of “harmony” applicable to all 
the senses in action, embedded in kinesthesia. This life-enhancing phe-
nomenon had always been taken for granted since Classical antiquity and 
believed to constitute the primary quality to be observed in architectural 
design – the ineluctable foundation of all architectural meanings. For 
Perrault, sight and hearing were autonomous and segregated receptors, 
and therefore the inveterate experience of “musical” harmony expressed 
in architectural settings appeared to be a fallacy. Consequently, the quali-
ty of desire (venustas) to be conveyed by the architectural object in order 
to generate harmonious (meaningful) place was substituted by abstract 
aesthetic composition producing a dispassionate beauty through the able 
manipulation of the proportions of the classical orders, reduced to a sim-
ple, precise and exclusively visual method for instrumental applications.
5
Today many Cartesian assumptions remain unquestioned by virtue 
of the extraordinary successes of the instrumental sciences, down to 
so-called artificial intelligence. The ego cogito or “soul, ” which Des-
cartes still believed shared its rational cognitive capacities with God, 
was eventually identified with an organic “brain” by behaviorism and 
early 20th Century neuroscientists and cognitive theorists; the materi-
al brain came to be understood as the exclusive seat of consciousness 
and conceptualized as an information processor and dualism remained 
unquestioned. The broader philosophical reasons for its pervasiveness 
are complex and beyond the scope of this essay. The fact is that our 
organic basis can be easily forgotten, particularly in healthy functioning 
individuals. 
6
 Buildings evidently acquire meanings by virtue of their 
4   
Claude Perrault, Ordonnance for the Five 
Kinds of Columns after the Method of the 
Ancients and my own introductory study, 
trans. I.K. McEwen of the 1683 first edition, 
The Getty Center, Santa Monica, CA., 1993, 
and C. Perrault, Les dix livres d’architecture de 
Vitruve, Paris, 1684.
5   
This is indeed, the fundamental purpose of his 
Ordonnance, a radical departure from pervious 
treatises in the European tradition. Op. cit. 
“Introduction,” 33-38.
6   
Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago IL: 
University of Chicago Press, 1990), 69.

41 / In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
or delusion); but sensing, in this particular way, is simply a “thinking. ” 
The Cartesian understanding of mind and perception first appeared 
in architectural theory toward the end of the 17th Century in the writings 
of Claude Perrault.
4
 Perrault took for granted that architecture commu-
nicates its meanings to a disembodied mind, thoroughly bypassing the 
body with its complex feelings and emotions. He assumed perception 
to be passive and meaning to be merely the result of the association of 
concepts and images in the brain. Like Descartes, Perrault believed that 
human consciousness was enabled by the pineal gland at the back of the 
head, conceived as a geometric and monocular point of contact between 
the measurable, intelligible world – res extensa – and the disembodied, 
rational soul – res cogitans. This consciousness was capable of perspectiv-
al visual perception, manifested as a picture composed with precise lines, 
like a copper-plate engraving; it assured the human capacity to grasp 
the immutable geometric and mathematical truth of the external world, 
closing the divide between the two heterogeneous elements of reality. 
Thus Perrault could question, for the first time ever in the history of 
architectural theory, the bodily experience of “harmony” applicable to all 
the senses in action, embedded in kinesthesia. This life-enhancing phe-
nomenon had always been taken for granted since Classical antiquity and 
believed to constitute the primary quality to be observed in architectural 
design – the ineluctable foundation of all architectural meanings. For 
Perrault, sight and hearing were autonomous and segregated receptors, 
and therefore the inveterate experience of “musical” harmony expressed 
in architectural settings appeared to be a fallacy. Consequently, the quali-
ty of desire (venustas) to be conveyed by the architectural object in order 
to generate harmonious (meaningful) place was substituted by abstract 
aesthetic composition producing a dispassionate beauty through the able 
manipulation of the proportions of the classical orders, reduced to a sim-
ple, precise and exclusively visual method for instrumental applications.
5
Today many Cartesian assumptions remain unquestioned by virtue 
of the extraordinary successes of the instrumental sciences, down to 
so-called artificial intelligence. The ego cogito or “soul, ” which Des-
cartes still believed shared its rational cognitive capacities with God, 
was eventually identified with an organic “brain” by behaviorism and 
early 20th Century neuroscientists and cognitive theorists; the materi-
al brain came to be understood as the exclusive seat of consciousness 
and conceptualized as an information processor and dualism remained 
unquestioned. The broader philosophical reasons for its pervasiveness 
are complex and beyond the scope of this essay. The fact is that our 
organic basis can be easily forgotten, particularly in healthy functioning 
individuals. 
6
 Buildings evidently acquire meanings by virtue of their 
4   
Claude Perrault, Ordonnance for the Five 
Kinds of Columns after the Method of the 
Ancients and my own introductory study, 
trans. I.K. McEwen of the 1683 first edition, 
The Getty Center, Santa Monica, CA., 1993, 
and C. Perrault, Les dix livres d’architecture de 
Vitruve, Paris, 1684.
5   
This is indeed, the fundamental purpose of his 
Ordonnance, a radical departure from pervious 
treatises in the European tradition. Op. cit. 
“Introduction,” 33-38.
6   
Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago IL: 
University of Chicago Press, 1990), 69.

Correspondences
mere existence, and these are easily identified with “information, ” salient 
when it is communicated by novel and unusual forms so that little else 
seems to matter, leading to a significant disregard for more primary 
sensory meanings offered to a fully embodied consciousness by their 
materiality. Avant-garde architects obsessed with complexity for its own 
sake, such as Greg Lynn, have even celebrated architecture’s “liberation” 
from gravity, assuming architectural meanings are possible ignoring 
the living body’s fundamental condition as earth-bound and placed.
7
 
While Cartesian epistemology eventually became dominant in 
European culture, the issue of feeling or sentiment as a crucial dimen-
sion of artistic expression could not be easily dismissed. Writers on 
art, like the celebrated Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos, started to argue that 
artistic judgment pertained to feelings, perceived by a “sixth sense. ”
8
 
Yet, during the 18th Century aesthetic feelings (taste) could easily 
become reasonable rules; convertibility was argued often, facilitated 
by Descartes’ epistemology, and supposedly generated inductively, in 
emulation of rational Nature. French philosopher Marie-François-
Pierre Maine de Biran (1766-1824), however, did start to recognize the 
limitations of Descartes’ epistemology and tried to grasp the source of 
the personal “I” in a “feeling of existence, ” meaning the bodily experi-
ence of exercising effort in movement.
9
 This concept was taken up and 
developed in the writings of Romantic philosophers such as Schelling 
and Novalis and became a precursor of the late 19th Century Amer-
ican pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, and of the early 
and mid-20th Century phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Mau-
rice Merleau-Ponty. It thus lay at the root of later developments in 
American philosophy, like the contemporary work of Mark Johnson, 
of contemporary American and European existential phenomenolo-
gists, and also of the recent revolution in the cognitive sciences that has 
reconciled this discipline with the previously mentioned philosophical 
positions, particularly in the works of Evan Thompson and Alva Noë. 
While the differences among all these positions are complex, they 
are united by a fundamental questioning of Cartesian dualism and by an 
awareness of the deep continuities between mind and life. These develop-
ments also reiterate the fact that phenomenology is not “anti-scientific, ” 
as it has been regrettably misunderstood. Indeed, recent approaches in 
cognitive science have given up depending on analytic philosophy and 
computer brain models and started acknowledging the relations between 
cognitive processes and the real world. “Embodied dynamicism, ” a very 
recent position in cognitive science that arose in the 1990’s, called into 
question the conception of cognition as a disembodied and abstract men-
tal representation, adopting a critical stance towards the extrapolation of 
7   
Greg Lynn, Michel Maltzan and Alessandro 
Poli, Other Space Odysseys, Exhibition 
Catalogue (Baden SW: Lars Müller/ CCA, 
2010).
8   
Jean Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur 
la poésie et la peinture, 2 vols., (Paris, 1719).
9   
Thompson, Mind in Life, 228.

43 / In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
mere existence, and these are easily identified with “information, ” salient 
when it is communicated by novel and unusual forms so that little else 
seems to matter, leading to a significant disregard for more primary 
sensory meanings offered to a fully embodied consciousness by their 
materiality. Avant-garde architects obsessed with complexity for its own 
sake, such as Greg Lynn, have even celebrated architecture’s “liberation” 
from gravity, assuming architectural meanings are possible ignoring 
the living body’s fundamental condition as earth-bound and placed.
7
 
While Cartesian epistemology eventually became dominant in 
European culture, the issue of feeling or sentiment as a crucial dimen-
sion of artistic expression could not be easily dismissed. Writers on 
art, like the celebrated Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos, started to argue that 
artistic judgment pertained to feelings, perceived by a “sixth sense. ”
8
 
Yet, during the 18th Century aesthetic feelings (taste) could easily 
become reasonable rules; convertibility was argued often, facilitated 
by Descartes’ epistemology, and supposedly generated inductively, in 
emulation of rational Nature. French philosopher Marie-François-
Pierre Maine de Biran (1766-1824), however, did start to recognize the 
limitations of Descartes’ epistemology and tried to grasp the source of 
the personal “I” in a “feeling of existence, ” meaning the bodily experi-
ence of exercising effort in movement.
9
 This concept was taken up and 
developed in the writings of Romantic philosophers such as Schelling 
and Novalis and became a precursor of the late 19th Century Amer-
ican pragmatism of William James and John Dewey, and of the early 
and mid-20th Century phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Mau-
rice Merleau-Ponty. It thus lay at the root of later developments in 
American philosophy, like the contemporary work of Mark Johnson, 
of contemporary American and European existential phenomenolo-
gists, and also of the recent revolution in the cognitive sciences that has 
reconciled this discipline with the previously mentioned philosophical 
positions, particularly in the works of Evan Thompson and Alva Noë. 
While the differences among all these positions are complex, they 
are united by a fundamental questioning of Cartesian dualism and by an 
awareness of the deep continuities between mind and life. These develop-
ments also reiterate the fact that phenomenology is not “anti-scientific, ” 
as it has been regrettably misunderstood. Indeed, recent approaches in 
cognitive science have given up depending on analytic philosophy and 
computer brain models and started acknowledging the relations between 
cognitive processes and the real world. “Embodied dynamicism, ” a very 
recent position in cognitive science that arose in the 1990’s, called into 
question the conception of cognition as a disembodied and abstract men-
tal representation, adopting a critical stance towards the extrapolation of 
7   
Greg Lynn, Michel Maltzan and Alessandro 
Poli, Other Space Odysseys, Exhibition 
Catalogue (Baden SW: Lars Müller/ CCA, 
2010).
8   
Jean Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur 
la poésie et la peinture, 2 vols., (Paris, 1719).
9   
Thompson, Mind in Life, 228.

Correspondences
all manner of computer models and its processes to explain the mind.
10
 
The mind and the world are simply not separate and independent of each 
other; nor is the mind merely a neural network in the head. Rather, the 
mind is an embodied dynamic system in the world. For Francisco Varela, 
Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rauch, who coined the term neurophenom-
enology in The Embodied Mind (1991), cognition is the exercise of skillful 
know-how in embodied and situated action, and cannot be reduced to 
pre-specified problem solving. In other words, the perceiver (subject), 
the perception (invariably affective and cognitive), and the thing per-
ceived (object) could never be said to exist independently, they are always 
codependent and co-emergent.
11
 In the same book they introduced the 
concept of cognition as “enaction, ” linking biological autopoiesis – the 
attribute of living beings as autonomous agents that actively generate and 
maintain themselves – with the emergence of cognitive domains. In this 
view the nervous system of any living being does not process information 
like a computer; rather it creates meaning, i.e., the perception of purpose in 
life, whose articulation becomes more sophisticated with the acquisition 
of language in higher animals, culminating in humanity’s symbolic com-
munication.
12
 Indeed, in the human world the relationship of purposeful 
action to biological imperatives, such as primary homeostasis, is always 
opaque, since human actions are part of complex symbolic economies.
13
The “life-world” in this model is not a pre-specified external realm 
represented objectively by the brain, but a relational domain enacted 
by a being’s particular mode of coupling with the environment, be-
yond distinctions between nature and culture, and one in which cities 
and architecture play a prominent role. Let me emphasize the obvious: 
architecture is part of the life-world, not of some objective, material 
nature. For humans, the life-world is linguistic and symbolic, a set-
ting of “perceived situation-work, ” beyond the “perception-action” of 
most animals and life in general.
14
 If only for this reason, the questions 
of architectural meaning and relevance can never be reduced to concepts 
such as sustainability, physical or psychological comfort and optimiza-
tion. Embodied experience in this approach is not a secondary issue 
(as it was after Descartes), but becomes central to the understanding of 
the mind itself. Though the nature of mind remains a contested issue 
in neuroscience, neurophenomenology recognizes that it is irreduc-
ible to the physical brain. The “I” as a bodily subjectivity radically does 
away with Cartesian dualism.
15
 Being-in-the-world is thus beyond any 
subject-object dichotomy; it is neither first-personal (subjective) nor 
third-personal (objective), it is an existential structure that remains 
prior to all abstractions. While neurophenomenology calls upon both 
first person accounts and third person, scientific narratives to fully grasp 
10   
Thompson, Mind in Life, 10.
11   
This insight is present in the Buddhist 
teachings of Nagarjuna from the 2nd. Century, 
titled Stanzas of the Middle Way. Cited in 
Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor 
Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA: 
MIT Press, 1991), 220-1.
12   
See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 
Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston IL: 
Northwestern University Press, 2001).
13   
Nick Crossley, The Social Body: Habit, identity 
and desire (London UK: Sage, 2001), 70.
14   
Ibid., 76-7.
15   
Ibid., 245-7. See also Evan Thompson, Waking, 
Dreaming, Being; Self and Consciousness 
in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy 
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 
for a recent study of the nature of “self” that 
takes into consideration Hindu and Tibetan 
Buddhist insights and tests them through 
neurophenomenology. 

45 / In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
all manner of computer models and its processes to explain the mind.
10
 
The mind and the world are simply not separate and independent of each 
other; nor is the mind merely a neural network in the head. Rather, the 
mind is an embodied dynamic system in the world. For Francisco Varela, 
Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rauch, who coined the term neurophenom-
enology in The Embodied Mind (1991), cognition is the exercise of skillful 
know-how in embodied and situated action, and cannot be reduced to 
pre-specified problem solving. In other words, the perceiver (subject), 
the perception (invariably affective and cognitive), and the thing per-
ceived (object) could never be said to exist independently, they are always 
codependent and co-emergent.
11
 In the same book they introduced the 
concept of cognition as “enaction, ” linking biological autopoiesis – the 
attribute of living beings as autonomous agents that actively generate and 
maintain themselves – with the emergence of cognitive domains. In this 
view the nervous system of any living being does not process information 
like a computer; rather it creates meaning, i.e., the perception of purpose in 
life, whose articulation becomes more sophisticated with the acquisition 
of language in higher animals, culminating in humanity’s symbolic com-
munication.
12
 Indeed, in the human world the relationship of purposeful 
action to biological imperatives, such as primary homeostasis, is always 
opaque, since human actions are part of complex symbolic economies.
13
The “life-world” in this model is not a pre-specified external realm 
represented objectively by the brain, but a relational domain enacted 
by a being’s particular mode of coupling with the environment, be-
yond distinctions between nature and culture, and one in which cities 
and architecture play a prominent role. Let me emphasize the obvious: 
architecture is part of the life-world, not of some objective, material 
nature. For humans, the life-world is linguistic and symbolic, a set-
ting of “perceived situation-work, ” beyond the “perception-action” of 
most animals and life in general.
14
 If only for this reason, the questions 
of architectural meaning and relevance can never be reduced to concepts 
such as sustainability, physical or psychological comfort and optimiza-
tion. Embodied experience in this approach is not a secondary issue 
(as it was after Descartes), but becomes central to the understanding of 
the mind itself. Though the nature of mind remains a contested issue 
in neuroscience, neurophenomenology recognizes that it is irreduc-
ible to the physical brain. The “I” as a bodily subjectivity radically does 
away with Cartesian dualism.
15
 Being-in-the-world is thus beyond any 
subject-object dichotomy; it is neither first-personal (subjective) nor 
third-personal (objective), it is an existential structure that remains 
prior to all abstractions. While neurophenomenology calls upon both 
first person accounts and third person, scientific narratives to fully grasp 
10   
Thompson, Mind in Life, 10.
11   
This insight is present in the Buddhist 
teachings of Nagarjuna from the 2nd. Century, 
titled Stanzas of the Middle Way. Cited in 
Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor 
Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA: 
MIT Press, 1991), 220-1.
12   
See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 
Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston IL: 
Northwestern University Press, 2001).
13   
Nick Crossley, The Social Body: Habit, identity 
and desire (London UK: Sage, 2001), 70.
14   
Ibid., 76-7.
15   
Ibid., 245-7. See also Evan Thompson, Waking, 
Dreaming, Being; Self and Consciousness 
in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy 
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 
for a recent study of the nature of “self” that 
takes into consideration Hindu and Tibetan 
Buddhist insights and tests them through 
neurophenomenology. 

Correspondences
the nature of mind, it rejects the possibility of biometrics becoming an 
instrumental tool directed to the optimization of existential meanings, 
as in the case of urban design and so-called “intelligent” architecture. 
In his 1907 lectures, Edmund Husserl recognized that every visual 
or tactile perception was accompanied and intrinsically linked to the 
sensing of one’s body movements: in watching a train go by, for exam-
ple, the train is given in conjunction with my sensing of head and eye 
movements. Husserl believed that kinesthesis was therefore a constitu-
tive condition of ordinary perception, and this became a central point 
of departure for Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. In this 
seminal book, Merleau-Ponty rejected the explanations of associationism 
and behavioral psychology, and the idea of perception as the mere sum 
of stimuli conveyed by independent senses, simply communicating data 
to a brain where a synthesis of some kind might take place. Perception is 
not the later stage of sensation, with the sensory receptors as the starting 
point of any analysis. Rather, both perception and emotion are dependent 
aspects of intentional action: our engaged bodily, sensorimotor know-
ing of the world. Merleau-Ponty argued for the primacy of embodied 
perception at the roots of being and understanding, grounding other 
modalities of intellectual cognition, following Husserl’s explanation of 
the limitations of hypothetical thought: we first know through our sen-
sorimotor awareness that the earth does not move, for example. This is 
a primary certainty for our bodies that only secondly enables humans to 
construct an endless number of scientific or mythical explanations of the 
universe that may be more or less credible as we “prove” them through 
instrumental means. But the first phenomenological truth is a precondi-
tion for all others, expressed everyday when we speak, in every possible 
language, of the rising or the setting sun, and model our lives and our 
architecture according to ensuing rhythms and enabling metaphors. 
The ideas developed by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty continue to 
be renewed today. Alva Noë (2009) has lucidly explained the enactive 
understanding of perception and cognition, emphasizing particularly 
that in order to understand consciousness in humans and animals we 
must look not inward, but rather to the ways in which a whole animal 
goes on living in and responds to their world.
16
 Consciousness is al-
ways of something; it is always of things other than itself. Conscious-
ness is not merely contained in the brain, bounded by the skull. This 
absence of limits has to do with complexity, the distributed nature of 
mental processes, and the involvement of the body in consciousness. 
Neurologist Frank Wilson wrote already in 1999 about the possibly 
insurmountable difficulties in understanding the workings of the hu-
man brain, pointing out that the concept of brain functional centers 
16   
Alva Noë, Out of our Heads: Why you are not 
your Brain and other Lessons from the biology 
of consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 
2009).

47 / In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
the nature of mind, it rejects the possibility of biometrics becoming an 
instrumental tool directed to the optimization of existential meanings, 
as in the case of urban design and so-called “intelligent” architecture. 
In his 1907 lectures, Edmund Husserl recognized that every visual 
or tactile perception was accompanied and intrinsically linked to the 
sensing of one’s body movements: in watching a train go by, for exam-
ple, the train is given in conjunction with my sensing of head and eye 
movements. Husserl believed that kinesthesis was therefore a constitu-
tive condition of ordinary perception, and this became a central point 
of departure for Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. In this 
seminal book, Merleau-Ponty rejected the explanations of associationism 
and behavioral psychology, and the idea of perception as the mere sum 
of stimuli conveyed by independent senses, simply communicating data 
to a brain where a synthesis of some kind might take place. Perception is 
not the later stage of sensation, with the sensory receptors as the starting 
point of any analysis. Rather, both perception and emotion are dependent 
aspects of intentional action: our engaged bodily, sensorimotor know-
ing of the world. Merleau-Ponty argued for the primacy of embodied 
perception at the roots of being and understanding, grounding other 
modalities of intellectual cognition, following Husserl’s explanation of 
the limitations of hypothetical thought: we first know through our sen-
sorimotor awareness that the earth does not move, for example. This is 
a primary certainty for our bodies that only secondly enables humans to 
construct an endless number of scientific or mythical explanations of the 
universe that may be more or less credible as we “prove” them through 
instrumental means. But the first phenomenological truth is a precondi-
tion for all others, expressed everyday when we speak, in every possible 
language, of the rising or the setting sun, and model our lives and our 
architecture according to ensuing rhythms and enabling metaphors. 
The ideas developed by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty continue to 
be renewed today. Alva Noë (2009) has lucidly explained the enactive 
understanding of perception and cognition, emphasizing particularly 
that in order to understand consciousness in humans and animals we 
must look not inward, but rather to the ways in which a whole animal 
goes on living in and responds to their world.
16
 Consciousness is al-
ways of something; it is always of things other than itself. Conscious-
ness is not merely contained in the brain, bounded by the skull. This 
absence of limits has to do with complexity, the distributed nature of 
mental processes, and the involvement of the body in consciousness. 
Neurologist Frank Wilson wrote already in 1999 about the possibly 
insurmountable difficulties in understanding the workings of the hu-
man brain, pointing out that the concept of brain functional centers 
16   
Alva Noë, Out of our Heads: Why you are not 
your Brain and other Lessons from the biology 
of consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 
2009).

Correspondences
was tantamount to simplistic scientific reductionism, a position cor-
roborated by recent findings in neuroplasticity. “The brain does not 
live inside the head, even though that is its formal habitat. It reaches 
out to the body and the body reaches out to the world. We can say that 
the brain ‘ends’ at the spinal chord, and that the spinal chord ‘ends’ at 
the peripheral nerves, ” but “brain is hand and hand is brain, and their 
interdependence includes everything else right down to the quarks. ”
17
 
It is precisely due to the extended nature of consciousness, that 
architecture cannot simply emulate mimetic of animal shelters, howev-
er clever, functional or rational they may appear to us. Since the en-
vironment and the mind, human or animal, are deeply entwined, and 
specific bodily morphologies and environments shape their respective 
minds, there is a radical limitation to our “objectification” of the animal 
worlds, in the direction of biomimetism, for instance.
18
 Human archi-
tecture cannot be assumed as simply driven by material or hedonistic 
factors, associated to psychotropic processes, and our human biological 
homeostasis (equilibrium) necessarily involves cultural issues, like our 
culturally framed-sexuality and our awareness and openness to death.
If, as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and recent cognitive science suggest, 
perception is something we do, not something that happens to us (like 
other autonomous internal physiological processes such as digestion), 
it is obvious that our intellectual and motor skills are fundamental to 
cognition.
19
 By the same token the external world, the city and architec-
ture, truly matters. All living organisms are not only reactive but also 
proactive in both perception and action; their environments are partic-
ular, not “objective. ”
20
 There is circularity in all organisms’ relationship 
with their environments; our behavior is both affected by the environ-
ment and affects it. We could therefore not merely give up our intersub-
jective, emotionally charged spaces of communication, the necessarily 
bitter-sweet space of mortal human desire, for the comfortable, psycho-
tropic visual space behind our computer screens, as some might think 
naively, without also giving up a fundamental dimension of our human 
consciousness. Neither do we relate to our symbolic environment as if 
it were a text in need of interpretation to be conveyed to the brain as 
“information”: interpretation comes after we have the world in hand. 
Thus architecture affects us, along the full range of awareness, from 
pre-reflective habits to reflective wonder. We are “already” in a shared 
social context, our subjectivity is intersubjective; we are “in the “game, ” 
like we might participate in a sports match, depending primarily upon 
prereflective, non-representational motor skills for our perceptions 
and actions. Each maneuver undertaken by the player modifies the 
perceived character of the field.
21
 Human consciousness, understood 
17   
Frank Wilson, The Hand (New York: Vintage, 
1999), 302-7.
18   
See Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain, How  
Body and Environment Shape Animal and 
Human Minds (Princeton NJ: Princeton 
University Press, 2011).
19   
Noë, Out of our Heads, 7.
20   
Crossley, The Social Body, 70-3. See also 
Louise Barret, Beyond the Brain, How Body 
and Environment Shape Animal and Human 
Minds (Princeton NJ: Princeton University 
Press, 2011)
21   
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception 
(1963) cited by Thompson, Mind in Life, 80.

49 / In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
was tantamount to simplistic scientific reductionism, a position cor-
roborated by recent findings in neuroplasticity. “The brain does not 
live inside the head, even though that is its formal habitat. It reaches 
out to the body and the body reaches out to the world. We can say that 
the brain ‘ends’ at the spinal chord, and that the spinal chord ‘ends’ at 
the peripheral nerves, ” but “brain is hand and hand is brain, and their 
interdependence includes everything else right down to the quarks. ”
17
 
It is precisely due to the extended nature of consciousness, that 
architecture cannot simply emulate mimetic of animal shelters, howev-
er clever, functional or rational they may appear to us. Since the en-
vironment and the mind, human or animal, are deeply entwined, and 
specific bodily morphologies and environments shape their respective 
minds, there is a radical limitation to our “objectification” of the animal 
worlds, in the direction of biomimetism, for instance.
18
 Human archi-
tecture cannot be assumed as simply driven by material or hedonistic 
factors, associated to psychotropic processes, and our human biological 
homeostasis (equilibrium) necessarily involves cultural issues, like our 
culturally framed-sexuality and our awareness and openness to death.
If, as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and recent cognitive science suggest, 
perception is something we do, not something that happens to us (like 
other autonomous internal physiological processes such as digestion), 
it is obvious that our intellectual and motor skills are fundamental to 
cognition.
19
 By the same token the external world, the city and architec-
ture, truly matters. All living organisms are not only reactive but also 
proactive in both perception and action; their environments are partic-
ular, not “objective. ”
20
 There is circularity in all organisms’ relationship 
with their environments; our behavior is both affected by the environ-
ment and affects it. We could therefore not merely give up our intersub-
jective, emotionally charged spaces of communication, the necessarily 
bitter-sweet space of mortal human desire, for the comfortable, psycho-
tropic visual space behind our computer screens, as some might think 
naively, without also giving up a fundamental dimension of our human 
consciousness. Neither do we relate to our symbolic environment as if 
it were a text in need of interpretation to be conveyed to the brain as 
“information”: interpretation comes after we have the world in hand. 
Thus architecture affects us, along the full range of awareness, from 
pre-reflective habits to reflective wonder. We are “already” in a shared 
social context, our subjectivity is intersubjective; we are “in the “game, ” 
like we might participate in a sports match, depending primarily upon 
prereflective, non-representational motor skills for our perceptions 
and actions. Each maneuver undertaken by the player modifies the 
perceived character of the field.
21
 Human consciousness, understood 
17   
Frank Wilson, The Hand (New York: Vintage, 
1999), 302-7.
18   
See Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain, How  
Body and Environment Shape Animal and 
Human Minds (Princeton NJ: Princeton 
University Press, 2011).
19   
Noë, Out of our Heads, 7.
20   
Crossley, The Social Body, 70-3. See also 
Louise Barret, Beyond the Brain, How Body 
and Environment Shape Animal and Human 
Minds (Princeton NJ: Princeton University 
Press, 2011)
21   
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception 
(1963) cited by Thompson, Mind in Life, 80.

Correspondences
as action in this playing field, is by definition a skillful attunement to 
the environment. For humans the playing field is symbolic– the archi-
tecture of the city– framing focal actions and habits, enabling some 
and curtailing others, setting limits and thus making possible human 
freedom; it does not appear primarily as an object, it becomes “present 
as the practical end” of the inhabitant’s intentions. This complex entan-
glement is a primary reason why the issue for architecture will always 
be meaning and not the mere optimization of pleasurable sensations.
Thompson clearly explains how reflective self-awareness is not 
the only kind of self-awareness.
22
 This is a crucial point to under -
stand the nature of architectural meaning. Experience also compris-
es a pre-reflective self-awareness that is not unconscious, one also 
present in dreams and even in deep sleep. Neurobiological evidence 
now vindicates this position, though Thompson’s conclusions may 
be contested. Indeed, it has now become evident that the present 
temporality inhabited by the conscious living body is not merely a 
non-existing point between past and future, but a looped network 
of immediate and mediate memories and projections. Thus, signifi-
cantly, present experience includes the pre-reflective bodily self-con-
sciousness profoundly affected by the environment (architecture) that 
may be passive (involuntary) and intransitive (not object-directed). 
It is thus possible to affirm with Thompson and Merleau-Ponty that 
this sort of pre-reflective self-awareness animates skillful coping.
23
 At a 
primary level, our acting body knows, this is a body inhabited by motility 
and desire, the motion of life itself, the body whose foundational knowl-
edge becomes stabilized through habits. Habits entail far greater personal 
agency than conditioned reflexes as understood by behaviourism, and 
yet they are habitual actions and thus challenge any over-intellectual-
ized conception of the agent rooted in propositional mental acts.
24
 
The pre-reflective body is fundamentally our sexual body, closest to 
our animal reality, and also arguably to our sense of the sacred. Our body 
recognizes its location in our surroundings without “paying attention, ” 
through “motor intentionality. ” This is the body capable of unspeakable 
athletic feats when threatened, and the body that knows another person 
or a place long before exchanging a word with the stranger or reading 
a travel guide. It is also the body in action housed by architecture – 
not necessarily a subject that contemplates it as an aesthetic object. 
Thus we can grasp the fallacies involved in assuming that archi-
tectural meaning is what appears in the more or less striking pictures 
of buildings on a glossy magazine, in 2-D or 3-D images on the com-
puter screen, or in comprehensive sets of precise working drawings. 
The most significant architecture is not necessarily photogenic. In fact, 
22   
In addition, he elaborates on how self-
consciousness (in various modalities) is 
present in dreams and even in dreamless deep 
sleep, an ancient position found in Hindu and 
Buddhist thought that can now be ascertained 
through neuroscience. See Thompson, Waking, 
Dreaming, Being, 1-20; 356-366.
23   
Thompson, Mind in Life, 315-6.
24   
Crossley, The Social Body, 54-6. 

51 / In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
as action in this playing field, is by definition a skillful attunement to 
the environment. For humans the playing field is symbolic– the archi-
tecture of the city– framing focal actions and habits, enabling some 
and curtailing others, setting limits and thus making possible human 
freedom; it does not appear primarily as an object, it becomes “present 
as the practical end” of the inhabitant’s intentions. This complex entan-
glement is a primary reason why the issue for architecture will always 
be meaning and not the mere optimization of pleasurable sensations.
Thompson clearly explains how reflective self-awareness is not 
the only kind of self-awareness.
22
 This is a crucial point to under -
stand the nature of architectural meaning. Experience also compris-
es a pre-reflective self-awareness that is not unconscious, one also 
present in dreams and even in deep sleep. Neurobiological evidence 
now vindicates this position, though Thompson’s conclusions may 
be contested. Indeed, it has now become evident that the present 
temporality inhabited by the conscious living body is not merely a 
non-existing point between past and future, but a looped network 
of immediate and mediate memories and projections. Thus, signifi-
cantly, present experience includes the pre-reflective bodily self-con-
sciousness profoundly affected by the environment (architecture) that 
may be passive (involuntary) and intransitive (not object-directed). 
It is thus possible to affirm with Thompson and Merleau-Ponty that 
this sort of pre-reflective self-awareness animates skillful coping.
23
 At a 
primary level, our acting body knows, this is a body inhabited by motility 
and desire, the motion of life itself, the body whose foundational knowl-
edge becomes stabilized through habits. Habits entail far greater personal 
agency than conditioned reflexes as understood by behaviourism, and 
yet they are habitual actions and thus challenge any over-intellectual-
ized conception of the agent rooted in propositional mental acts.
24
 
The pre-reflective body is fundamentally our sexual body, closest to 
our animal reality, and also arguably to our sense of the sacred. Our body 
recognizes its location in our surroundings without “paying attention, ” 
through “motor intentionality. ” This is the body capable of unspeakable 
athletic feats when threatened, and the body that knows another person 
or a place long before exchanging a word with the stranger or reading 
a travel guide. It is also the body in action housed by architecture – 
not necessarily a subject that contemplates it as an aesthetic object. 
Thus we can grasp the fallacies involved in assuming that archi-
tectural meaning is what appears in the more or less striking pictures 
of buildings on a glossy magazine, in 2-D or 3-D images on the com-
puter screen, or in comprehensive sets of precise working drawings. 
The most significant architecture is not necessarily photogenic. In fact, 
22   
In addition, he elaborates on how self-
consciousness (in various modalities) is 
present in dreams and even in dreamless deep 
sleep, an ancient position found in Hindu and 
Buddhist thought that can now be ascertained 
through neuroscience. See Thompson, Waking, 
Dreaming, Being, 1-20; 356-366.
23   
Thompson, Mind in Life, 315-6.
24   
Crossley, The Social Body, 54-6. 

Correspondences
often the opposite is true. Its meanings are conveyed through sound 
and eloquent silence, the tactility and poetic resonance of materials, 
smell and the sense of humidity, among many other factors that appear 
through the motility of embodied perception and are given across the 
senses. Furthermore, because good architecture fundamentally offers 
a possibility of attunement, atmospheres appropriate to focal actions 
that allow for dwelling in the world, it is very problematic to reduce 
its effect (and critical import) to the aesthetic experience of an object, 
as is often customary. Strictly speaking, architecture first conveys its 
meanings as a situation or event; it partakes of the ephemeral quality of 
music, for example, as it addresses the living body, and only secondly 
does it become an object for tourist visits or expert critical judgments.
Indeed, a better understanding of embodied cognition leads us to 
question the commonly accepted idea that visual perception is like a 
picture. Contrary to Descartes’ beliefs, we know today that sight is not 
simply a representation in the brain. As Merleau-Ponty put it: “It is by 
means of the perceived world and its proper structures that one can ex-
plain the spatial values assigned to a point of the visual field in each par-
ticular case. ”
25
 Sight is integrated with the other senses in order for us to 
“make sense” of our experience of the world. This is what Merleau-Ponty 
demonstrates in Phenomenology of Perception: “The senses translate each 
other without any need of an interpreter, they are mutually comprehen-
sible without the intervention of any idea. ” Emphasizing the primor-
dial temporality of experience, he stated: “The lived perspective, that 
which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one. ”
26
 
Evan Thompson and Alva Noë have further explained how vision is 
all-important, yet our experience is not picture-like.
27
 The optical image 
is fragile at best: this was presumed in the call for optical correction in 
pre-modern architectural theories, acknowledging the limitations of 
human vision in order to enable the lived, tactile experience of perfect-
ly adjusted and harmonious buildings. Merleau-Ponty and Noë use the 
well-known experiments with inverting glasses to prove the precari-
ousness of the retinal image. Noë further explains how it is that seeing 
is not a process that starts from a retinal picture, for there are in fact 
no retinal pictures. The image at the back of the eye is incredibly im-
precise and hardly a rendition in “high definition” of the world around 
us. Thus, seeing itself is not pictorial, its “high definition” quality is a 
result of our primary motor and sensory skills.
28
 One may recognize 
the building in the picture or the drawing, it “shows up, ” but it is also 
obviously not present in the same way as the building might be in real 
embodied experience. The building in the picture is present as absent.
This is of course a major issue when it comes to questions of 
25   
Cited by Martin Jay, “Sartre, Merleau-Ponty 
and the Search for a New Ontology of 
Sight,” in David M. Levin, Modernity and the 
Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley CA: University 
of California Press, 1993), 164.
26   
Merleau-Ponty (1963), 235.
27   
Thompson, Mind in Life, 278-9; Alva Noë, 
Varieties of Presence (Cambridge MA: Harvard 
University Press, 2012) 82 f. and Noë, Out of 
our Heads, 35 f. 
28   
Thompson, Mind in Life, 276-7 cites O’Regan 
(1992): “Despite the poor quality of the visual 
apparatus, we have the subjective experience 
of great richness and “presence” of the visual 
world. But this richness and presence are 
actually an illusion.” 

53 / In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
often the opposite is true. Its meanings are conveyed through sound 
and eloquent silence, the tactility and poetic resonance of materials, 
smell and the sense of humidity, among many other factors that appear 
through the motility of embodied perception and are given across the 
senses. Furthermore, because good architecture fundamentally offers 
a possibility of attunement, atmospheres appropriate to focal actions 
that allow for dwelling in the world, it is very problematic to reduce 
its effect (and critical import) to the aesthetic experience of an object, 
as is often customary. Strictly speaking, architecture first conveys its 
meanings as a situation or event; it partakes of the ephemeral quality of 
music, for example, as it addresses the living body, and only secondly 
does it become an object for tourist visits or expert critical judgments.
Indeed, a better understanding of embodied cognition leads us to 
question the commonly accepted idea that visual perception is like a 
picture. Contrary to Descartes’ beliefs, we know today that sight is not 
simply a representation in the brain. As Merleau-Ponty put it: “It is by 
means of the perceived world and its proper structures that one can ex-
plain the spatial values assigned to a point of the visual field in each par-
ticular case. ”
25
 Sight is integrated with the other senses in order for us to 
“make sense” of our experience of the world. This is what Merleau-Ponty 
demonstrates in Phenomenology of Perception: “The senses translate each 
other without any need of an interpreter, they are mutually comprehen-
sible without the intervention of any idea. ” Emphasizing the primor-
dial temporality of experience, he stated: “The lived perspective, that 
which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one. ”
26
 
Evan Thompson and Alva Noë have further explained how vision is 
all-important, yet our experience is not picture-like.
27
 The optical image 
is fragile at best: this was presumed in the call for optical correction in 
pre-modern architectural theories, acknowledging the limitations of 
human vision in order to enable the lived, tactile experience of perfect-
ly adjusted and harmonious buildings. Merleau-Ponty and Noë use the 
well-known experiments with inverting glasses to prove the precari-
ousness of the retinal image. Noë further explains how it is that seeing 
is not a process that starts from a retinal picture, for there are in fact 
no retinal pictures. The image at the back of the eye is incredibly im-
precise and hardly a rendition in “high definition” of the world around 
us. Thus, seeing itself is not pictorial, its “high definition” quality is a 
result of our primary motor and sensory skills.
28
 One may recognize 
the building in the picture or the drawing, it “shows up, ” but it is also 
obviously not present in the same way as the building might be in real 
embodied experience. The building in the picture is present as absent.
This is of course a major issue when it comes to questions of 
25   
Cited by Martin Jay, “Sartre, Merleau-Ponty 
and the Search for a New Ontology of 
Sight,” in David M. Levin, Modernity and the 
Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley CA: University 
of California Press, 1993), 164.
26   
Merleau-Ponty (1963), 235.
27   
Thompson, Mind in Life, 278-9; Alva Noë, 
Varieties of Presence (Cambridge MA: Harvard 
University Press, 2012) 82 f. and Noë, Out of 
our Heads, 35 f. 
28   
Thompson, Mind in Life, 276-7 cites O’Regan 
(1992): “Despite the poor quality of the visual 
apparatus, we have the subjective experience 
of great richness and “presence” of the visual 
world. But this richness and presence are 
actually an illusion.” 

Correspondences
architectural representation in design, dependent as it often is on the 
assumption of the identity between represented visual form and space in 
a computer model, for example, and the experienced reality in buildings. 
Thompson carefully analyses and rejects the assumptions of perceptual 
experience as pictorial, especially in the photographic sense assumed 
by many theorists.
29
 He concludes that in fact we visualize an object or a 
scene by mentally enacting or entertaining a possible perceptual experience 
of that scene: note that discursive language plays a crucial role. This is a 
fundamental observation for architectural design that I have elaborated 
in my writings, seldom considered by architects, especially after the 19th. 
C., when the issues of architecture became generally reduced to the effi-
cient solution of material needs or to the production of formal syntaxes.
 Given that temporality and spatiality are intertwined in our primary 
embodied cognition of place, grasping the true nature of time-conscious-
ness for a living body is also crucial. This is a complex problem that I 
can only sketch here. In the phenomenological tradition, the point of 
departure is Edmund Husserl’s observation that it would be impossible 
to experience “temporal objects, ” like a piece of music, if our conscious-
ness of the present moment were the experience of a punctum, of an 
instantaneous “now” that is in fact never “here. ”
30
 William James has 
also suggested that “the practically cognized present is no knife’s edge, ” 
but rather operates like a block, a temporal expanse with a “bow and 
a stern. ”
31
 Husserl’s central contribution was to disclose the structure 
of the “thick” present moment given to experience. According to him, 
time-consciousness has a three-fold structure, including primal impres-
sion, protention (looking forward) and retention (looking back); these 
work together and cannot operate on their own; their unified operation 
underlies our experience of the present moment as having “temporal 
width. ” Husserl further distinguishes between retention as “primary 
memory” and recollection or “secondary memory;” between protention 
or “primary anticipation” and expectation or “secondary anticipation. ” 
While “primary” protention and retention are “present, ” the secondary 
types of temporality are re-presentational: they are properly speaking 
memory (ultimately history, orienting reflective action) and foresight: 
our capacity to promise that becomes an architectural project.
32
According to Thompson, Husserl’s description of the absolute 
flow or “standing-streaming” of the living present corresponds pre-
cisely to pre-reflective self-awareness (which as we have noted is any-
thing but “unconscious”), an argument now vindicated by some neu-
roscientists interested in the temporal dynamics of consciousness.
33
 
In the living experience of architecture, while working or engaged 
in focal actions, place is first given in this mode. The contents of the 
29   
Thompson Mind in Life, 278-9.
30   
Husserl discusses this problem in multiple 
writings, starting with the “Lectures on the 
Consciousness of Internal Time from the 
year 1905,” in On the Phenomenology of 
the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-
1917), trans. J.B. Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer 
Academic Publishers, 1991). The discussion 
and commentary on the topic is abundant and 
often highly technical. Thompson (2007), 317-
28, offers a very lucid summary of Husserl’s 
analysis. 
31   
Cited by Thompson (2007), 318. 
32   
Ibid., 326.
33  
Ibid., 328-9 f.

55 / In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
architectural representation in design, dependent as it often is on the 
assumption of the identity between represented visual form and space in 
a computer model, for example, and the experienced reality in buildings. 
Thompson carefully analyses and rejects the assumptions of perceptual 
experience as pictorial, especially in the photographic sense assumed 
by many theorists.
29
 He concludes that in fact we visualize an object or a 
scene by mentally enacting or entertaining a possible perceptual experience 
of that scene: note that discursive language plays a crucial role. This is a 
fundamental observation for architectural design that I have elaborated 
in my writings, seldom considered by architects, especially after the 19th. 
C., when the issues of architecture became generally reduced to the effi-
cient solution of material needs or to the production of formal syntaxes.
 Given that temporality and spatiality are intertwined in our primary 
embodied cognition of place, grasping the true nature of time-conscious-
ness for a living body is also crucial. This is a complex problem that I 
can only sketch here. In the phenomenological tradition, the point of 
departure is Edmund Husserl’s observation that it would be impossible 
to experience “temporal objects, ” like a piece of music, if our conscious-
ness of the present moment were the experience of a punctum, of an 
instantaneous “now” that is in fact never “here. ”
30
 William James has 
also suggested that “the practically cognized present is no knife’s edge, ” 
but rather operates like a block, a temporal expanse with a “bow and 
a stern. ”
31
 Husserl’s central contribution was to disclose the structure 
of the “thick” present moment given to experience. According to him, 
time-consciousness has a three-fold structure, including primal impres-
sion, protention (looking forward) and retention (looking back); these 
work together and cannot operate on their own; their unified operation 
underlies our experience of the present moment as having “temporal 
width. ” Husserl further distinguishes between retention as “primary 
memory” and recollection or “secondary memory;” between protention 
or “primary anticipation” and expectation or “secondary anticipation. ” 
While “primary” protention and retention are “present, ” the secondary 
types of temporality are re-presentational: they are properly speaking 
memory (ultimately history, orienting reflective action) and foresight: 
our capacity to promise that becomes an architectural project.
32
According to Thompson, Husserl’s description of the absolute 
flow or “standing-streaming” of the living present corresponds pre-
cisely to pre-reflective self-awareness (which as we have noted is any-
thing but “unconscious”), an argument now vindicated by some neu-
roscientists interested in the temporal dynamics of consciousness.
33
 
In the living experience of architecture, while working or engaged 
in focal actions, place is first given in this mode. The contents of the 
29   
Thompson Mind in Life, 278-9.
30   
Husserl discusses this problem in multiple 
writings, starting with the “Lectures on the 
Consciousness of Internal Time from the 
year 1905,” in On the Phenomenology of 
the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-
1917), trans. J.B. Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer 
Academic Publishers, 1991). The discussion 
and commentary on the topic is abundant and 
often highly technical. Thompson (2007), 317-
28, offers a very lucid summary of Husserl’s 
analysis. 
31   
Cited by Thompson (2007), 318. 
32   
Ibid., 326.
33  
Ibid., 328-9 f.

Correspondences
present moment arise and perish at different rates, depending on the 
nature of things; some have more permanence while others are in-
herently ephemeral. Buildings themselves are relatively permanent 
objects, stabilizing cultural memories; they can be judged through 
rational and even scientific criteria. The proper, primary temporali-
ty of architectural atmospheres, however, is not of this order. Rather 
it is effectively kindred to music, addressing the primary pre-reflec-
tive and engaged bodily consciousness, framing actions, like ritual or 
work, potentially articulated by the architect in a narrative program. 
It is important to clarify how this differs from the temporality as-
sumed by modern aesthetics, starting in the 18th Century, when archi-
tecture became more firmly associated with the “Fine Arts. ” Buildings 
became “objects” to be experienced “out of time” as dispassionate, beauti-
ful “compositions, ” or at best in the linear time of voyeuristic criticism or 
tourism, as keenly reported by visitors to ancient ruins during the 1700’s; 
experience became identified with aesthetic “judgment, ” connecting to 
emotions as mental associations, effectively bypassing the kinesthetic 
bodily senses and explaining its effects through Cartesian psychology. 
This understanding of architectural meaning came to fruition in the 
parcours used at the École de Beaux-Arts in the early 19th Century to 
judge the value of projects and adjudicate prices, a precedent for the well-
known devices used by modernist architects in the early 20th Century, 
and still often implemented in contemporary building design. Today the 
concept of scientific time is at the root of the popular “fly-through” com-
puter-generated presentations of building projects, and of the misplaced 
claims of the “dynamic” and “flowing” experiments in parametric design 
that freeze a frame from an algorithmically generated “changing” form, 
similarly to Edward Muybridge’s famous stop-motion photography of 
the 19th Century. These are merely “re-presentations” of time that don’t 
acknowledge the true nature of the living present as described above. 
These cinematic representations and “flowing” buildings may therefore 
provide surprising experiences and “neat” effects, but not much else.
In view of this we can speculate that architectural meaning, offered 
to our presence, unfolds in two different temporalities; one pertaining to 
the building as object, obviously imbued with relative permanence, and 
the other the temporality of the event, more elusive, yet primary. Form 
embodied in the materials composing buildings matters immensely in 
architecture. It matters at the level of re-presentation, as it becomes mem-
ory and contributes a poetic image, as I have explained in some of my 
writings.
34
 While contributing to the configuration of atmospheres for fo-
cal actions, however, material form matters in a different, arguably more 
fundamental way: it creates a stage whose properties, available to the 
34   
See also Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Built upon 
Love, Architectural Longing after Ethics and 
Aesthetics (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006), 
69-73 f.

57 / In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
present moment arise and perish at different rates, depending on the 
nature of things; some have more permanence while others are in-
herently ephemeral. Buildings themselves are relatively permanent 
objects, stabilizing cultural memories; they can be judged through 
rational and even scientific criteria. The proper, primary temporali-
ty of architectural atmospheres, however, is not of this order. Rather 
it is effectively kindred to music, addressing the primary pre-reflec-
tive and engaged bodily consciousness, framing actions, like ritual or 
work, potentially articulated by the architect in a narrative program. 
It is important to clarify how this differs from the temporality as-
sumed by modern aesthetics, starting in the 18th Century, when archi-
tecture became more firmly associated with the “Fine Arts. ” Buildings 
became “objects” to be experienced “out of time” as dispassionate, beauti-
ful “compositions, ” or at best in the linear time of voyeuristic criticism or 
tourism, as keenly reported by visitors to ancient ruins during the 1700’s; 
experience became identified with aesthetic “judgment, ” connecting to 
emotions as mental associations, effectively bypassing the kinesthetic 
bodily senses and explaining its effects through Cartesian psychology. 
This understanding of architectural meaning came to fruition in the 
parcours used at the École de Beaux-Arts in the early 19th Century to 
judge the value of projects and adjudicate prices, a precedent for the well-
known devices used by modernist architects in the early 20th Century, 
and still often implemented in contemporary building design. Today the 
concept of scientific time is at the root of the popular “fly-through” com-
puter-generated presentations of building projects, and of the misplaced 
claims of the “dynamic” and “flowing” experiments in parametric design 
that freeze a frame from an algorithmically generated “changing” form, 
similarly to Edward Muybridge’s famous stop-motion photography of 
the 19th Century. These are merely “re-presentations” of time that don’t 
acknowledge the true nature of the living present as described above. 
These cinematic representations and “flowing” buildings may therefore 
provide surprising experiences and “neat” effects, but not much else.
In view of this we can speculate that architectural meaning, offered 
to our presence, unfolds in two different temporalities; one pertaining to 
the building as object, obviously imbued with relative permanence, and 
the other the temporality of the event, more elusive, yet primary. Form 
embodied in the materials composing buildings matters immensely in 
architecture. It matters at the level of re-presentation, as it becomes mem-
ory and contributes a poetic image, as I have explained in some of my 
writings.
34
 While contributing to the configuration of atmospheres for fo-
cal actions, however, material form matters in a different, arguably more 
fundamental way: it creates a stage whose properties, available to the 
34   
See also Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Built upon 
Love, Architectural Longing after Ethics and 
Aesthetics (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006), 
69-73 f.

Correspondences
inhabitants, both limit and make possible their actions and habits. While 
these communicative functions of architecture have been traditionally in-
tegrated, the reflection offered here becomes particularly relevant in our 
times of “divided representation, ”
35
 where symbolic representations of 
“world” are simply unattainable for a fragmented, cosmopolitan society. 
Elaborating on Husserl’s understanding of lived temporality, 
enactive cognitive science has identified the importance of emotions 
in relation to protention: protention is manifested as desire, always 
unfulfilled in the living present, motivated by emotions in the environ-
ment. A lived world without affective valence, one merely comfortable, 
mute, neutral or sedated, and this concerns particularly the so-called 
intelligent urban environments and architecture often presumed as 
optimal for 21st Century humanity, would significantly curtail a sense 
of purpose in human action. “ Affection” as the allure or pull of archi-
tecture does not refer to a causal stimulus-response relation, but to 
an intentional “relation of motivation” that must account for cultural 
habits. To repeat: the role of architecture is not optimization or prob-
lem-solving, but more properly, to reveal the space of desire: venustas.
As I have suggested, individual subjectivity is from the outset 
intersubjectivity, as a result of the communally handed down norms, 
conventions, symbolic artifacts and cultural traditions in which an 
individual is already embedded.
36
 While emerging from the world of 
perception, linguistic, polysemic symbols – also termed natural lan-
guage – create a break with sensorimotor representations.
37
 This is the 
world of architectural communication, the real “context” of architec-
tural endeavors, one that cannot be understood as being neatly divid-
ed into culture and nature, and presuming its objectivity for scientific 
analysis. Human mentality arises from developmental processes of 
enculturation, beyond the dichotomy of “nature versus nurture. ”
38
 
Sensorimotor knowledge stabilizes primarily as habits. Habits 
eventually result in stable gestalts: mostly acquired flexible skills and 
competences, established yet always open to change.
39
 All human actions 
share in the habitual. Habit is a trace left by actions. Present actions 
are shaped by habits because previous actions have given rise to habits. 
Such actions are never deterministic but always situated in place and 
motivated by purpose and meaning.
40
 Habits are not like mechanical 
reflexes; habits and agency imply plasticity for humans. Alva Noë adds: 
“Habits are basic and foundational aspects of our mental lives. Without 
habit there is no calculation, no speech, no thought, no recognition, no 
game playing. Only a creature with habits like ours could have a mind 
like ours. ”
41
 They are a form of practical understanding or know-how 
that manifests as competent and purposive action and attaches to the 
35   
This is a term coined by Dalibor Vesely to 
designate the profound dilemmas facing 
modern and contemporary practice. See 
Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of 
Divided Representation (Cambridge MA: MIT 
Press, 2004). 
36   
Thompson, Mind in Life, 403. See also 
Crossley, The Social Body, a remarkably lucid 
treatment of the issue of intersubjectivity 
through Merleau-Ponty, and its consequences 
for the understanding of the social body. 
37   
Ibid., 409-10.
38   
Ibid., 403.
39   
Ibid., 73.
40   
Ibid., 121
41   
Noë, Varieties of Presence, 125.

59 / In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
inhabitants, both limit and make possible their actions and habits. While 
these communicative functions of architecture have been traditionally in-
tegrated, the reflection offered here becomes particularly relevant in our 
times of “divided representation, ”
35
 where symbolic representations of 
“world” are simply unattainable for a fragmented, cosmopolitan society. 
Elaborating on Husserl’s understanding of lived temporality, 
enactive cognitive science has identified the importance of emotions 
in relation to protention: protention is manifested as desire, always 
unfulfilled in the living present, motivated by emotions in the environ-
ment. A lived world without affective valence, one merely comfortable, 
mute, neutral or sedated, and this concerns particularly the so-called 
intelligent urban environments and architecture often presumed as 
optimal for 21st Century humanity, would significantly curtail a sense 
of purpose in human action. “ Affection” as the allure or pull of archi-
tecture does not refer to a causal stimulus-response relation, but to 
an intentional “relation of motivation” that must account for cultural 
habits. To repeat: the role of architecture is not optimization or prob-
lem-solving, but more properly, to reveal the space of desire: venustas.
As I have suggested, individual subjectivity is from the outset 
intersubjectivity, as a result of the communally handed down norms, 
conventions, symbolic artifacts and cultural traditions in which an 
individual is already embedded.
36
 While emerging from the world of 
perception, linguistic, polysemic symbols – also termed natural lan-
guage – create a break with sensorimotor representations.
37
 This is the 
world of architectural communication, the real “context” of architec-
tural endeavors, one that cannot be understood as being neatly divid-
ed into culture and nature, and presuming its objectivity for scientific 
analysis. Human mentality arises from developmental processes of 
enculturation, beyond the dichotomy of “nature versus nurture. ”
38
 
Sensorimotor knowledge stabilizes primarily as habits. Habits 
eventually result in stable gestalts: mostly acquired flexible skills and 
competences, established yet always open to change.
39
 All human actions 
share in the habitual. Habit is a trace left by actions. Present actions 
are shaped by habits because previous actions have given rise to habits. 
Such actions are never deterministic but always situated in place and 
motivated by purpose and meaning.
40
 Habits are not like mechanical 
reflexes; habits and agency imply plasticity for humans. Alva Noë adds: 
“Habits are basic and foundational aspects of our mental lives. Without 
habit there is no calculation, no speech, no thought, no recognition, no 
game playing. Only a creature with habits like ours could have a mind 
like ours. ”
41
 They are a form of practical understanding or know-how 
that manifests as competent and purposive action and attaches to the 
35   
This is a term coined by Dalibor Vesely to 
designate the profound dilemmas facing 
modern and contemporary practice. See 
Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of 
Divided Representation (Cambridge MA: MIT 
Press, 2004). 
36   
Thompson, Mind in Life, 403. See also 
Crossley, The Social Body, a remarkably lucid 
treatment of the issue of intersubjectivity 
through Merleau-Ponty, and its consequences 
for the understanding of the social body. 
37   
Ibid., 409-10.
38   
Ibid., 403.
39   
Ibid., 73.
40   
Ibid., 121
41   
Noë, Varieties of Presence, 125.

Correspondences
world by way of the meaning it discerns therein. The importance of 
the environment in general and of architecture in particular is obvi-
ous in this regard, as are the stakes involved in significant formal “in-
novation. ” Noë suggests that we could think of the city, paraphrasing 
Goethe, as “frozen habit. ” Habits are neither intellectual knowledge nor 
involuntary action: they are knowledge that is forthcoming through 
the body’s motricity and effort.
42
 The comprehensibility of architecture 
depends on acknowledging habits and framing them in new settings with 
appropriate atmospheres that may reveal limits and remain open to the 
ineffable. Rather than seeking some unattainable radical novelty, good 
architecture might thus offer humanity authentic “situated” freedom.
Just like the lived, emotionally charged environment cannot be 
reduced to parameters, there is no way that one individual, architect or 
planner can subsume culture. This is a crucial aspect of our contempo-
rary architectural crisis that has been brilliantly explained by Dalibor 
Vesely.
43
 There are real limitations to the concept of the architect as 
“creator, ” imagining that his or her formal talent and skills may compen-
sate for the flatness of our technological world. When habits sediment 
into environments that convey negative or hostile emotions, however, 
what is the architect to do? It is not enough to seek more comfortable 
or behaviorally adequate environments. With a clear understanding 
of the stakes, the architect must act seeking instead culturally-spe-
cific poetic images, perhaps taking clues from expressive moments 
in relevant art and literature, accepting the “experimental” nature of 
formal search and perhaps even shock to defamiliarize a complacent 
society. And yet again, this cannot amount to mere search for novel-
ty. A consideration of viable tools of representation for an architect to 
create appropriate moods and atmospheres is central to this concern.
While this topic is beyond the scope of my essay, let me conclude 
by suggesting, as I have done elsewhere, the importance of narrative 
language, the language of fiction which is the potential of architec-
ture. The reflective subject emerges from the pre-reflective realm; it is 
a function of speech, of natural language.
44
 Emergent speech breaks the 
silence of the perceptual world and spreads further layers of signifi-
cance over it; it brings the subject into relationship with itself. Speech 
cannot be planned without speaking, it is originally a pre-reflective 
act that brings the subject and object of speech, the speaking subject, 
into being: an embodied activity, a body technique which Alva Noë 
suggests may be closer to the grooming of chimpanzees than to the 
indicative character of semantics in reasoned discourse.
45
 Languages 
are in fact gestural habits, the debris or sediments of the past commu-
nicative acts of a community, stored within the corporeal schemas of 
42   
Crossley, 127.
43   
Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of 
Divided Representation (Cambridge MA: MIT 
Press, 2004).
44   
Ibid., 79. 
45   
Noë, Out of our Heads,107.

61 / In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
world by way of the meaning it discerns therein. The importance of 
the environment in general and of architecture in particular is obvi-
ous in this regard, as are the stakes involved in significant formal “in-
novation. ” Noë suggests that we could think of the city, paraphrasing 
Goethe, as “frozen habit. ” Habits are neither intellectual knowledge nor 
involuntary action: they are knowledge that is forthcoming through 
the body’s motricity and effort.
42
 The comprehensibility of architecture 
depends on acknowledging habits and framing them in new settings with 
appropriate atmospheres that may reveal limits and remain open to the 
ineffable. Rather than seeking some unattainable radical novelty, good 
architecture might thus offer humanity authentic “situated” freedom.
Just like the lived, emotionally charged environment cannot be 
reduced to parameters, there is no way that one individual, architect or 
planner can subsume culture. This is a crucial aspect of our contempo-
rary architectural crisis that has been brilliantly explained by Dalibor 
Vesely.
43
 There are real limitations to the concept of the architect as 
“creator, ” imagining that his or her formal talent and skills may compen-
sate for the flatness of our technological world. When habits sediment 
into environments that convey negative or hostile emotions, however, 
what is the architect to do? It is not enough to seek more comfortable 
or behaviorally adequate environments. With a clear understanding 
of the stakes, the architect must act seeking instead culturally-spe-
cific poetic images, perhaps taking clues from expressive moments 
in relevant art and literature, accepting the “experimental” nature of 
formal search and perhaps even shock to defamiliarize a complacent 
society. And yet again, this cannot amount to mere search for novel-
ty. A consideration of viable tools of representation for an architect to 
create appropriate moods and atmospheres is central to this concern.
While this topic is beyond the scope of my essay, let me conclude 
by suggesting, as I have done elsewhere, the importance of narrative 
language, the language of fiction which is the potential of architec-
ture. The reflective subject emerges from the pre-reflective realm; it is 
a function of speech, of natural language.
44
 Emergent speech breaks the 
silence of the perceptual world and spreads further layers of signifi-
cance over it; it brings the subject into relationship with itself. Speech 
cannot be planned without speaking, it is originally a pre-reflective 
act that brings the subject and object of speech, the speaking subject, 
into being: an embodied activity, a body technique which Alva Noë 
suggests may be closer to the grooming of chimpanzees than to the 
indicative character of semantics in reasoned discourse.
45
 Languages 
are in fact gestural habits, the debris or sediments of the past commu-
nicative acts of a community, stored within the corporeal schemas of 
42   
Crossley, 127.
43   
Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of 
Divided Representation (Cambridge MA: MIT 
Press, 2004).
44   
Ibid., 79. 
45   
Noë, Out of our Heads,107.

Correspondences
the contemporary population.
46
 Language embodies the shared prac-
tical sense of a society; it gives durable form to habits of perception, 
conception and reflection that have formed within the group.
47
 Yet , 
speech is the medium of reflective thought.
48
 Natural language is thus 
the appropriate way to negotiate enactive knowledge towards further 
action; it is therefore indispensable to drive the architectural project.
Speech and orality are primary.
49
 This is language understood in a 
sense very different from that of conventional poststructuralist linguis-
tics. It is rather the emerging breath (air) that breaks the silence of the 
perceptual world and is capable of first giving shape to an atmosphere, 
spreading a further layer of significance over the world of perception. It is 
language as Vitruvius evokes it, as primary expression at the dawn of cul-
ture, emerging at the origins of architecture in that momentous occasion 
when humans, brought together by the need to keep a fire going, first 
assembled and spoke, contemplated the heavens, imitated its regularity 
and then built their first dwellings.
50
 Emerging language brings a subject 
into relationship with its self through an articulated story, which is a life 
lived; it allows for the recognition of the ethical self that finds herself as 
invariable and distinct every morning (after about the age of 4), despite 
the constant mutations in an individual’s lived experience. It enables the 
“me” that is constructed in the web of narrative discourse and imagi-
native representation and which is distinct from the “I” that embodies 
and repeats its history in the form of habits.
51
 This is the language that 
enables one to negotiate enactive knowledge towards further action, 
the language of history providing ethical orientation for action and the 
language of the architectural program, properly understood as a fiction-
al projection of potential human life: the language of promises, such as 
architecture. In avoiding natural language as a fundamental component 
of the design process, modernist practices, from early functionalism to 
contemporary design through algorithms are doomed to failure. Indeed, 
if Giorgio Agamben is correct, the aim of architecture, attuned atmo-
spheres or Stimmung, lies precisely at the point of articulation between 
embodiment – in the form of habits – and language, which brings 
them to awareness and reveals their full affective and cognitive value.
46   
Ibid. 
47   
Ibid., 133.
48   
Crossley, 80.
49   
See Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy The 
Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 
1972).
50   
Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. 
I.D. Rowland and T.N. Howe (Cambridge UK: 
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 34.
51   
Crossley, 148.

63 / In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres
the contemporary population.
46
 Language embodies the shared prac-
tical sense of a society; it gives durable form to habits of perception, 
conception and reflection that have formed within the group.
47
 Yet , 
speech is the medium of reflective thought.
48
 Natural language is thus 
the appropriate way to negotiate enactive knowledge towards further 
action; it is therefore indispensable to drive the architectural project.
Speech and orality are primary.
49
 This is language understood in a 
sense very different from that of conventional poststructuralist linguis-
tics. It is rather the emerging breath (air) that breaks the silence of the 
perceptual world and is capable of first giving shape to an atmosphere, 
spreading a further layer of significance over the world of perception. It is 
language as Vitruvius evokes it, as primary expression at the dawn of cul-
ture, emerging at the origins of architecture in that momentous occasion 
when humans, brought together by the need to keep a fire going, first 
assembled and spoke, contemplated the heavens, imitated its regularity 
and then built their first dwellings.
50
 Emerging language brings a subject 
into relationship with its self through an articulated story, which is a life 
lived; it allows for the recognition of the ethical self that finds herself as 
invariable and distinct every morning (after about the age of 4), despite 
the constant mutations in an individual’s lived experience. It enables the 
“me” that is constructed in the web of narrative discourse and imagi-
native representation and which is distinct from the “I” that embodies 
and repeats its history in the form of habits.
51
 This is the language that 
enables one to negotiate enactive knowledge towards further action, 
the language of history providing ethical orientation for action and the 
language of the architectural program, properly understood as a fiction-
al projection of potential human life: the language of promises, such as 
architecture. In avoiding natural language as a fundamental component 
of the design process, modernist practices, from early functionalism to 
contemporary design through algorithms are doomed to failure. Indeed, 
if Giorgio Agamben is correct, the aim of architecture, attuned atmo-
spheres or Stimmung, lies precisely at the point of articulation between 
embodiment – in the form of habits – and language, which brings 
them to awareness and reveals their full affective and cognitive value.
46   
Ibid. 
47   
Ibid., 133.
48   
Crossley, 80.
49   
See Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy The 
Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 
1972).
50   
Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. 
I.D. Rowland and T.N. Howe (Cambridge UK: 
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 34.
51   
Crossley, 148.