How to Cite: Ariza Parrado, Lucas, Camilo Isaak and Ana Mombiedro. "Architecture as Embodied Experience: Dialogues Between Phenomenology, Gesture, and Neuroscience". Dearq 44 (2026): 4-11. https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq44.2026.01
How to Cite: Ariza Parrado, Lucas, Camilo Isaak and Ana Mombiedro. "Architecture as Embodied Experience: Dialogues Between Phenomenology, Gesture, and Neuroscience". Dearq 44 (2026): 4-11. https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq44.2026.01
Lucas Ariza Parrado
Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Camilo Isaak
Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Ana Mombiedro
Universidad de Alicante, España
This article explores the continuity between phenomenology and neuroarchitecture, two emerging disciplines that place the body at the center of spatial experience. It analyzes how perception, gesture, and atmosphere shape modes of inhabiting that transcend purely functional or technical dimensions. Architecture is understood as an embodied experience in which air, matter, and movement intertwine across aesthetic, ethical, and existential registers. Neuroscience offers tools to assess the impact of space on individuals without abandoning the qualitative richness of the phenomenological tradition. Sensitivity and scientific evidence are integrated to guide design toward more humane, conscious, and ethically responsible environments.
Keywords: Atmosphere, perception, cognition, neuroscience, phenomenology, neuroarchitecture, gesture.
In 1994, Japan's A+U magazine published "Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture," in which Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez examined the role of human perception and phenomenological experience in architecture. The publication became a seminal work that profoundly influenced architectural theory, education, and practice.
Phenomenology is a philosophical movement that focuses on the study of conscious experience from the perspective of those who live it. Its primary aim is to describe phenomena as they present themselves to consciousness, without interpreting or explaining them through external theories. It advocates a return to direct experience, free from prejudice or preconception. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty expanded this approach, applying it to questions of being, the body, and perception. Phenomenology seeks to uncover the essential structures of experience that remain constant across different encounters with the same phenomenon. It refers to vivid experience not as an external fact, but as something felt and perceived internally (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1993).
Throughout history, human beings have maintained a constant and ancestral association between architecture and the body. Buildings have been conceived in relation to the human form, using its scale and proportions as a fundamental point of reference. These associations were established analogically and through metaphors that understand architecture itself as a "body." Architecture has shaped the world we inhabit through the interplay between symbolic, magical, religious, and philosophical visions, as well as our bodily perception of space.
Spatial relationships have largely determined how people interact, how they see and hear one another, and, above all, how they perceive the world and the space around them through their senses—a concern that leads us to a phenomenological problem. Its application in architecture can be approached through four fundamental principles:
As it will be discussed below, these four fundamentals form the foundation of an emerging discipline, neuroarchitecture, which measures the impact of space on human beings. Although avant-garde in nature, this discipline necessarily draws on this body of knowledge, as it provides the very rationale for its existence as a field of research.
A clear example can be found in "Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture" (Holl, Pallasmaa, and Pérez-Gómez 1994). The authors recover a phenomenological focus by emphasizing the sensory and bodily experience of architectural space, in contrast to the more technical or visual approaches that dominated the twentieth century. They critique modern architecture's prioritization of function, efficiency, and visual aesthetics, arguing that it has lost its symbolic and poetic depth by becoming excessively rational, technical, and detached from human experience. In response, they propose an architecture that is lived, felt, and remembered. Phenomenology in architecture thus refers to an approach that seeks to understand and design built spaces through lived bodily experience and human perception. Rather than focusing solely on form, function, or style, they share a perspective centered on how a space feels, is inhabited, and is experienced.
Steven Holl translates phenomenology into tangible architectural forms in which light, material, and movement generate a sensory experience. From his first manifesto, Anchoring (1989), he advocated what he called "the universal in the specific" and defended the uniqueness of each site, circumstance, and design:
Architecture and site should have an experiential connection, a metaphysical link, a poetic link […] and if we consider the order (the idea) to be the outer perception and phenomena (the experience) to be the inner perception, then in a physical construction, the outer perception and the inner perception are intertwined (Holl, 1989, 9-12).
Architecture is not a static form; on the contrary, it is an experience that unfolds over time. The movement of the body through space, along with the changing light, sounds, and textures, are all elements that shape perception. Holl employs natural light to create atmospheres that shift throughout the day, generating a vibrant and dynamic architecture. Materials can be felt: their texture, weight, and temperature connect the human body to space, translating abstract yet universal and singular ideas such as porosity and liquid connection into tangible form.1
The human body perceives and remembers space. Sensory perception involves not only the traditional senses but also the sense of balance (vestibular), the sense of movement (kinesthesia), and bodily memory. Modern architecture has often privileged image over experience, producing cold, dehumanized spaces disconnected from the body—a condition that Pallasmaa (2006) calls ocularcentrism—thereby neglecting the other senses. Our skin is the threshold between the body and the world; architecture, therefore, is something we feel. Through the skin and the sense of movement, architecture reconnects us with the body, returning us to a human, intimate, and poetic form of space in which the body becomes the primary instrument of perception. Architecture invites the body to "move consciously."2
Architecture remembers, for the body possesses both sensory and affective memory. Spaces leave emotional imprints upon us. Architecture is not merely technical or aesthetic; it is a way of making sense of human existence in the world, ethical and poetic at the same time. It connects us with the invisible and the symbolic, speaking to us both as an act of construction and as a form of existential communication. Pérez-Gómez (1994, 7-24) reminds us that architecture must be understood as an embodied dialogue between human beings and the world, one that involves the body, language, memory, culture, and imagination. He calls for a renewed understanding of design as a practice capable of bridging the visible and the invisible, the physical and the spiritual. It is an architecture that, beyond being observed, is lived, that tells stories, evokes meanings, and connects cultural traditions, serving as a mediator between the human being, the body, and the world.
The introduction of phenomenology into architecture (and, above all, the renewed attention to perception) reinstated the central role of the body in architectural thinking. The body becomes the measure of space and the axis of design, encompassing elements such as light, sound, touch, movement, and smell, as well as the capacity of architecture to evoke memory and emotion. Understanding the body not as something observed from the outside but as a lived experience invites us to explore how people have felt, inhabited, and experienced space. This shift calls for moving beyond the notion of the body as a mere object of external study and toward an appreciation of bodily subjectivity, that is, the body as lived from within, where emotion itself takes form (a key concern of neuroarchitecture). By embracing this perspective, we open the possibility of creating architecture that is richer, more humane, and more attuned to the sensitivities of human experience.
Continuing this phenomenological approach, we seek to define architecture as a constellation of relationships, tensions, and encounters that emerge from the interaction of different bodies. On one hand, the constructed body, matter with its own order and rhythm, yet open to rhythms that come from the outside. On the other hand, the air, both inside and outside the built space, a subtle and singular body, invisible yet perceptible, and above all essential to survival. Finally, there are the bodies of living beings, human and non-human alike, whose spirit animates and energizes both the everyday and extraordinary situations.
It is pertinent to reflect on how these relationships unfold, how they are characterized, how some become unforgettable, while others pass unnoticed. The aim is not to determine which element is more important,3 but rather to dwell on the interplay among these bodies, whose interactions are essential for inhabited architecture to possess qualities that move us, stirring emotion through its atmospheric conditions.
Focusing on the human body, we wish to delve into two aspects. First, gesturality, what it entails and how it can deepen our understanding of the body.4 Second, the physical limits of the body, to consider its contact with the air that fills space. The boundaries that the skin's surface appears to define—separating inside from outside, begin to blur when we question, beyond matter itself, the notion of body image and its reach. These limits expand, and new possibilities emerge. As Didi-Huberman observes, "A cane, a hat, and any kind of clothing become part of the body image. Body image adds objects or extends into space"5 (Didi-Huberman 2017, 28).
Speaking of body image inevitably leads us to gesture, as it invites us to consider not only the instruments or objects linked to the body, but also movement itself. In gesture, everything is in motion. What it reveals and values is precisely that which is not fixed—that which escapes any attempt at conceptualization or clear definition (Ariza Parrado 2018, 95). Gesture unfolds on the surface; it is fleeting, residing in what folds and unfolds. There it holds the traces of something that transcends time and space, without a clear origin or destination.
From architecture, we can approach these subtleties of the body by understanding gestures as fossils that reveal what we have been. "Our gestures possess an antiquity that we ourselves cannot but ignore" (Didi-Huberman 2017, 43). In gestures, we may find a thread to pull—one that allows us to recognize aspects of ourselves that elude readings confined to fixed, material evidence of who we are. The objects and spaces we create "are more or less successful attempts to adapt to the inevitable characteristics of these gestures" (Calasso 2021, 18).
In this search for what endures—even within what is superficial and transitory—gesture is fundamental. It shapes perception and the senses while simultaneously being shaped by them. Although the gesture expresses, its primary purpose is not communication, but rather to reveal a way of doing, a mode of action that ultimately characterizes and identifies the one who performs it, where not only what is done matters, but how it is done. As Flusser writes, "The more information a gesture contains, the more difficult it apparently is for a receiver to read it. The more information, the less communication. Therefore, the less a gesture informs (the better it communicates), the more empty it is, and so the more pleasant and 'pretty'" it becomes (1994, 16-17).
Although our repertoire of gestures is limited, despite appearance in this text we wish to pause and place special emphasis on those that emerge from the face. Eyebrows that rise in search of understanding, furrows that deepen with worry, wrinkles that mark the graceful passage of time, mouths that open in astonishment, signs without words, social agreements that make the face, as they say, the mirror of the soul. Facial gestures are unique because of the intense presence of the senses in this part of the body, the configuration of openings that connect the interior with the exterior, and the expressive resources that the body concentrates in the face.
The relationship we establish with the world through the face culminates in the mouth. "The complicated organs in and around the mouth, such as tongue, gums, and lips, move so as to cause the surrounding air to oscillate in ways that have been codified into systems called 'language'" (Flusser 1994, 41). Much of what allows us to live unfolds within the mouth—breathing and speaking, for instance. Through breath, the world enters us, and part of us flows back into the world in a rhythmic exchange. The mouth thus becomes a threshold. Breath evokes a bodily movement that involves no displacement yet is fundamental: "My body is a space animated inwardly by an indefatigable alternation of breaths and inspirations, crossed by circulations that connect it to the clouds" (Bessé 2020, 248). In speech, "the word emerges from its pure 'enunciative' state to become something like a gesture that involves the entire body—a gesture of creative air, of meanings and signifiers, but also of flows, intensities, suspensions, atmospheres, and impalpable events that are, nevertheless, embodied" (Didi-Huberman 2017, 22). To speak and to breathe: actions that place rhythm at the very center of our existence.
In this exchange, the relational nature of our mode of inhabiting becomes evident—a constant interplay. As the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002) aptly notes, as we enter a space, space also enters us. We inhabit by spatializing, by shaping the space in which we live and in which our body dwells. "It is the motor and mobility of the body that literally manufacture the spatiality of habitation" (Bessé 2020, 158). By inhabiting, our body gives form to space through gestures and movements that are more than merely efficient or functional. These are actions performed without clear justification or purpose: the silent gestures of the mouth that point, the inevitable movements of the hands that sometimes speak more than words, the eyes that wish to devour the world. Within these gestures lies the relational condition essential for space to emerge, allowing us to understand it not as something given, but as something continually arising.
In the creation of space, air is the fundamental matter that makes it possible—and that both affects and is affected by us. What is built becomes a kind of mold that gives form to the air it contains, as well as to the air that surrounds it. "Surfaces are never separated from the air that folds and unfolds them, just as bodies are never without the soul that moves and animates them" (Didi-Huberman 2017, 70). Thus, over time and through use, built forms acquire a patina—a visible trace of the life they have sheltered.
Perhaps air is the most extraordinary matter with which our bodies relate—precisely because of the mutual affectation that arises through constant exchange. "The air is what links my body and the world. [...] Thanks to the air I breathe, I inhabit the world as much as the world inhabits me" (Bessé 2020, 248-249). We can recognize this in what we experienced just a few years ago, during the pandemic, when air became both dangerous and indispensable. In fact, this subject is so particular that we often become aware of it only when it grows scarce: "This is what happens with air—when we move freely, we no longer see or feel it. We never sense it more vividly as matter, medium, and necessity than when impurity reigns and breathing is cut short— when we need it" (Didi-Huberman 2017, 12).
In this journey through gesture, air, and the built, it becomes clear that space is not a given entity but a condition that emerges from the encounter between matter, movement, and perception. Gestures reveal a deep and silent dimension of inhabitation, where the ephemeral and the invisible—like air—take center stage in shaping meaningful atmospheres. This phenomenological perspective invites us to think of architecture not merely as a constructed form, but as an embodied experience. From here, new possibilities open to explore how these relationships can be understood, expanded, and transformed through other scientific approaches. Neuroarchitecture is one of them, as it delves into how these experiences can be measured, interpreted, and projected in order to design environments that not only respond to human needs but also enhance them. This integration between the sensitive and the measurable, between the ancestral dimension of gesture and the emergent knowledge of neuroscience, opens a fertile horizon for imagining a more conscious, ethical, and profoundly human architecture.
At the intersection of body, perception, and movement, neuroarchitecture opens onto a horizon where scientific and technological advances compel us to rethink how we understand built space. It is no longer sufficient to recognize that architecture conditions the mind; we must also acknowledge that space is an extension of the brain. This connection is reciprocal and ever-changing. The question, then, is how to transform the discipline so that, while accompanying the human being, it also amplifies their capabilities.
Research over recent decades has shown that spatial perception is not an isolated phenomenon confined to the visual cortex, as posited by Gestalt theory, but rather a complex integration of sensory, motor, and emotional systems (Gallagher 2005; Pallasmaa 2006). Phenomenology had already anticipated this insight, reminding us that "the body is our general means of having a world" (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1993). Contemporary neuroscience, however, has begun to map with unprecedented precision how the body shapes cognition and well-being. The relationship between habitation and corporeality unfolds as a choreography in which each gesture is interwoven with an environment that both responds to and shapes experience.
Projecting the future of neuroarchitecture research requires recognizing the body as an active generator of spatial and socio-emotional meaning. This perspective invites us to consider movement as a primary design variable: architecture is no longer conceived as a static container, but as a living tissue that transforms in response to the bodily trajectories that traverse it.
In the field of health, the practical applications of this perspective are both manifold and urgent. Evidence from hospital environments shows that natural light, access to views of the landscape, air quality, and acoustic control directly influence patients' physical and emotional recovery (Ulrich 1984). Future research, however, must also integrate the kinesthetic dimension—how the body moves through these spaces, what forms of resistance it encounters, what rhythms it generates. An intensive care unit that incorporates sensory transition zones or enhances spatial orientation for both professionals and patients could help reduce postoperative stress and facilitate rehabilitation (Cambra-Rufino, Bedoya-Frutos, and Paniagua-Caparros 2020).
Education represents another fertile ground for the application of neuroarchitecture to the built environment. Traditional classrooms, designed for immobility, overlook the essential connection between movement and learning. Future research should explore how spatial configurations can stimulate curiosity, memory, and collaboration through postural variability and freedom of movement. In this context, architecture becomes a pedagogical agent, engaging directly with the neuroplasticity of children and young people.
In the workplace, the future points toward offices capable of reading employees' stress and fatigue levels in real time through non-invasive biometric sensors. Such systems would enable the adjustment of environmental parameters—temperature, humidity, light spectrum, and spatial layout—to optimize performance while preserving well-being.
The urban environment, for its part, will become an open-air laboratory for these investigations. Future cities, faced with the challenges of climate change and the mental health crisis, must offer public spaces that are not only safe and accessible but also emotionally restorative: squares or plazas that soften noise and visual pollution, streets that incorporate rhythmic patterns to guide movement and ease anxiety, green corridors that foster social interaction without imposing it. Urban movement, such as walking, cycling, and pausing, will emerge as a measurable and optimizable parameter that links physical health with cognitive and emotional well-being.
As a result of all the above, the ethical dimension becomes inescapable. A design capable of modulating emotional or cognitive states inevitably raises questions about autonomy and manipulation (Mombiedro 2024). The goal must be to expand the possibilities for meaningful interaction between people and space. It will therefore be essential to establish regulatory frameworks and practical protocols that ensure these interventions remain oriented toward well-being rather than control.
Disciplinary integration is essential. Neuroscientists, architects, engineers, artists, occupational therapists, and philosophers must collaborate on projects that address empirical evidence and lived experience in tandem. In this context, phenomenology will remain a vital point of reference (not in opposition to science, but as its complement) preserving the qualitative richness of perception.
As a result of these reflections, a central question emerges: will we be able to design spaces that, beyond being physically and cognitively healthy, also foster a more conscious and ethical relationship with our environment? By placing the body at the center, neuroarchitecture holds the potential to reconfigure the way we inhabit the world. It is not only about optimizing well-being, but about cultivating a mode of dwelling that is more attentive, more open, and more profoundly human.
This need to advance in unison poses challenges of synchronization and standardization. Technologies evolve at a breakneck pace, while methodological development—more closely tied to theoretical frameworks and epistemological consensus—often unfolds more slowly. How can we prevent tools from becoming obsolete before robust methods for their application are fully developed? One possible path lies in designing open and modular technological platforms capable of integrating new sensors or algorithms without altering the fundamental structure of data collection and analysis. Likewise, methodological protocols should function as flexible frameworks, able to adapt to technological innovation while maintaining consistency in validity and reliability criteria.
This development will also require transversal technological and methodological literacy, an effort already underway at some universities (for example, in the Master's in Neuroarchitecture at the Universidad de Alicante). Architects will need to become familiar with basic concepts of neuroscience and data analysis, while neuroscientists must understand the processes and constraints of architectural design. This exchange is not optional: without common language and mutual understanding, interdisciplinary collaboration risks fragmenting into parallel dialogues with no real impact on the built environment. The answer lies in our collective ability as researchers to maintain, at every step, a synchronized pulse between the questions we ask and the tools with which we seek to answer them.
1 This translation of concepts into space is materialized in projects such as the St. Ignatius Chapel in Seattle, where natural light embodies the "light of faith;" the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, where space becomes an interplay of light and movement between old and new, underground and open; and the Linked Hybrid complex in Beijing, where habitable bridges create a continuous and fluid spatial experience.
2 At Le Corbusier's Ville Savoye, visitors experience space as something that opens and closes, rises and flows—a fluid architectural journey of ramps and stairs. In the Termas de Vals, Peter Zumthor (2006) guides the visitors through narrow passages and chambers that alternately expand and contract, enveloping the body in shifting sensations of temperature, light, and texture. In the Jewish Museum in Berlin, bodily movement becomes part of an emotional narrative: Daniel Libeskind induces physical discomforts that evoke the trauma of the Holocaust—sharp angles, sloping corridors, darkness, dead ends, and floors that, when walked upon, echo with the sound of chains.
3 The French philosopher and historian Jean-Marc Bessé writes: "In inhabited space, I do not know which comes first—the glass or the hand that takes it, the object or the intention" (2020, 158).
4 "A gesture is a movement of the body or of a tool connected to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation" (Flusser 1994, 8).
5 Translations of quotations from Didi-Huberman and Bessé are by the author. Quotations from Flusser, Holl, Calasso, and Merleau-Ponty are taken from the published English editions of their works.