Affect in- and through- the life of architecture

This work purposefully sought to elucidate opportunities for interventions at the intersection of affect and architectural practice. In closing, two considerations pertaining to that goal are now offered: the first concerns increased geographical and architectural discourse linkage; the second concerns the perceived missing linkage between ethics and the designing of spaces, and a proposal to healing that void.

Perhaps but an academic concern, architectural scholars (architects and theorists) and architectural geographers, as well as cultural and human geographers, would do well to engage in further multidisciplinary discourse. Recent debates in geography have shifted away from perceiving architecture purely as an object of process and practice.²⁴ This perspective allows us to regard architecture as contingent, involving ‘different kinds of embodied engagements ... and sensory apprehensions of buildings, as well as different modes of dwelling and inhabiting, and different perspectives on architectural spaces.’²⁵ In this sense, architecture is equally the material matter of buildings and the experiences connected with particular contingencies relational to a building’s design process and occupation which in turn generate varying atmospheres and affects.²⁶ Accounting for such affective registers allows us to go beyond the realms of an architect’s design aspirations to touch upon affective and embodied aspects of the design process and practice. The research found through a broad, but not exhaustive, literature inquiry that the cross-over between these disciplines is rather light, at times nonexistent.²⁷ It is into this sparsely populated context that this book presents itself, exampling and calling forth much needed discussion of geography’s role in architectural practice scholarship. In so doing, it is suggested that further research would do well to elaborate on the links between affective experience, as attended to by geographers, and the affective experience of the final space. As research for architectural practice, this points towards opportunities for pragmatic interventions at the intersection of affect, architectural practice, and geography.

The explorations documented within this book do not attend to questions regarding the ethical interplay of affects arising from architectural practices. However, this engagement of affect and ethics is being undertaken by scholars such as Ahmed. For example, in her text ‘This Other and Other Others,’ Ahmed (following Emmanuel Levinas) suggests that ‘the concern with ‘the other’ [i]s the promise of the future.’²⁸ Given this, she discusses an approach to ethics involving encounters with ‘the other’ through affective touch and communication. An ethics of touch, Ahmed writes, can come through the ‘violence of the grasp, the shake or the beating’ but also can communicate such things as love.²⁹ While Ahmed’s position is grounded on feminist perspectives, it is of interest to this work as her model of ethics places importance on collective encounters. Hence ethics should be of significant concern to design practices as it deals with people, intimately. This raises a question: what is the good, or indeed bad, that affect does through architecture and its practice? The sticky metaphor of affect alludes to a path towards an ethical interpretation of affect. If affect can draw bodies together, or equally, repel them - drawing communities or bodies together for the common good - does this not open affects to ethical inquiry? What forms of affects might these be, and how might they be, how have they been, ‘deployed’? Historically? In the future? These are critical questions if the proposition of their identification and interventionist use is actualised. Which engages a further, rather pragmatic, discipline - marketing. Ethics is thus highly discursive and outside the core scope of this work, despite is significant import. Hence it is flagged here for others to pursue; for affects challenging the ethics of architectural becomings are many faceted, including joy and hope but also misunderstandings and bitterness. It can lead to promotion or acceptance of a project or disadvantageous withdrawal from the design process. In this sense, the engagement with others - and with others’ desires - is a collective struggle: or, for Ahmed, it is through the ‘willingness to struggle with and for others’³⁰ that we can embrace a ‘we.’ The ethical influence of affect, and by extension, the ethical influences of affective practices, is crucial in bringing bodies together to form appropriate attachments - the ethics being in identifying, questioning, appropriateness. Thus discussions of significance and import are requisite to our understandings surrounding the ethics of affect, especially in relation to the design process. This engagement between ethics and affect has been taken up most recently by Ben Anderson in his work Encountering Affect³¹ - specifically his first chapter, ‘Affective Life’: furthering the call to architectural scholars to engage in the works of geographers; a path, perhaps, to a more informed ethical architectural conduct.

While the study of affect is broad, as this book has shown, the recent affective turn looks to go beyond the privileging of affect’s autonomy, fostering instead attendance on affect’s materiality and generative valance. Placed as one such contribution to this call, this work argues that a theory of affect should be evaluated on its ability to establish how affects are localisable, material, and effecting. An argument developed through documenting the means by which affect and architecture are theoretically and processually connected - a melding of discourse and design practice. To this end, the book has explored architectural practices which focus primarily on the sticky particularities of affective interplays - including images, processes, and objects. Importantly, the theory of affect adopted highlights the dynamic nature of relationships between different bodies, human or otherwise, partaking in - and through - the life of architecture and its design process. And so it is offered as an extended model for the study of how affect plays itself out in different happenings, relations, and temporal stutterings: a model inviting further application and investigations.