Embodiment and meaning-making: interdisciplinary perspectives on heritage architecture

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue — ‘Embodiment and Meaning-making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Heritage Architecture’ — which aims to incite a dialogue across different disciplinary approaches to understanding how heritage architecture is experienced, registered, and produced. Here, heritage architecture is investigated by taking an interdisciplinary lens to questions of meaning-making, place, memory, and culture. The article explores how these are shaped at the intersection of spatial design, human embodiment, and modes of cultural production. First, it situates the special issue’s theme by introducing the notions of affect, atmosphere, embodiment, affordances, and politics of meaning-making. This positioning comes through an overview of the three influential yet still separate strands of scholarship — affective and more-than-representational approaches to heritage; the politics and agency in meaning-making in places of memory; and the emerging embodied and experiential turn in architectural scholarship driven by the knowledge from embodied cognitive science. The second part outlines the special issue contributions and explores the common threads in how collected papers have addressed the relationship between embodiment, meaning-making, and political agency in the context of heritage architecture. Finally, in this introductory article, we discuss the emerging perspectives and research agenda for interdisciplinary investigations on how heritage architecture is produced, registered, and experienced.