1st Edition
Neuro-Affective Architecture Designing for Presence and Embodied Attunement
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Introduction
Encountering Presence
What This Book Is About
The Disembodied Phenomena
Presence as Counter-Practice
Environmental Psychology, Neuroscience, and Atmosphere
Affective Practice in Architecture
Why Presence, Why Now
Overview
Part 1 - The Significance of Presence
Chapter 1 – Production of Presence in Architecture
Architectural Consequences of Disembodiment
The Notion of Presence
How Architectural Experience Is Felt from the Inside
Why First-Person Experience Matters
Redefining Architecture as Body-Space Perceptual Relationship
Chapter 2 – Challenges of Affective Practice
What Constitutes "Good Architecture"?
Affect and Atmosphere
Embodied Cognition
Challenges of Affective Practice
Part II – The Anatomy of Presence
Chapter 3 – Nascence of Presence
Inquiry 1: Portals into Presence
What the Portals Teach
Inquiry 2: Affective Communication in Architecture
Notating Presence: Gestural and Temporal Languages
What the Notations Teach
Sensory Notation as a Poetic Language in Architectural Design Practice
Chapter 4 – Transdisciplinary Insights
Inquiry 3: Why Are We Naturally Drawn to a Space or to Avoid It?
Transdisciplinary Insights: From Rhythm to Neuro-Affective Meaning
What Neuropsychology Teach
The Culminating Implication: Affective Attunement
Chapter 5 – A Neuro-Affective Framework
A Neuro-Affective Way of Perceiving
Affective Attunement as the Goal
A Working Vocabulary of Presence and Its Operation
Sensory Notation: Portal and Data-Collection Tool
A Neuro-Affective Reference System for Reading and Composing Experience
Levels of Attunement: Criteria for Evaluation and Iteration
Prospective Therapeutic Implications
Part III – Experience of Presence
Chapter 6 - Embodied Architectural Encounters
Models of Engaging with the Built Environment
Embodiment Protocol
Interpretation and Evaluative Structure
Salk Institute
Garden of Fine Arts, Kyoto
Great Bamboo Wall
Len Lye Centre
Themes That Emerged from the Case Studies
Epilogue: Designing for Presence
Where Presence Begins
Composing Presence
From Framework to Practice: A Design Workflow
Presence and Productivity in the Age of AI
Where the Path Continues
Index
Biography
Wei‑An Chen is an architectural designer, educator, and researcher based in New Zealand. She holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Auckland and has taught architectural design in New Zealand. Bringing together extensive experience in architectural practice with sustained research into presence, embodiment, and the affective experience of space, her work explores how built environments shape attention, bodily awareness, and potential well-being. Treating architecture as a multisensory medium, she investigates how spatial atmospheres can invite non-verbal, pre-reflective forms of experience already available to the body. Her work focuses on presence, embodied attunement, and the restorative potential of architectural experience.
Partaking in a genealogy of recent scholarship that reasserts the primacy of embodied presence over formalistic and fashionable novelty, this ambitious and wise book makes affective attunement both legible and workable in architectural practice. With a poetic yet experimental rigour, it braids phenomenological insight with neuropsychological tools to articulate a neuroaffective framework for design: a working vocabulary and perceptual reference for reading how environments cue bodily state, attention, and movement. Acknowledging the irreducible qualitative nature of attuned atmospheres, it nonetheless shows how their rhythms can be analysed, calibrated, and designed for—opening new possibilities for present and future architectural practice.
Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Saidye Bronfman Professor Emeritus in Architecture, McGill University.
It is widely acknowledged that architectural experience is more affective and corporeal than purely cognitive. This book, however, takes a decisive step forward by deepening the idea that architectural “presence” functions as an experiential index of attunement—of aliveness and immediacy—made possible through affective communication and the bodily resonance it generates. Rather than relying on vague notions, Wei-An Chen convincingly frames architectural experience as affective and largely prereflective, drawing on innovative heuristic–somatic approaches such as Polyvagal Theory and the Kestenberg Movement Profile, insights from dance phenomenology, and concrete architectural examples. The book thus has a dual merit: exploring the practical applications of the theories it adopts while proposing a powerful and timely counter-practice to objectified, technologically saturated design.
Tonino Griffero, Professor of Aesthetics, Tor Vergata University of Rome.
This book is a timely addition to the recent shift in architectural attention towards the condition of human embodiment and how it frames our experiences of the world. If architecture is intended to serve human beings, then its development will surely depend on better understanding of ourselves. In carrying studies of how our built surroundings affect our mood and emotions beyond anecdotal speculation and into the realm of neuroscience, Wei-An Chen makes an original and very welcome contribution to the psychology of architecture.
Kevin Nute, Professor of Architecture, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
This fascinating book is the result of rigorous interdisciplinary research aligning architectural design with innovative influences from the world of embodiment through the lenses of Polyvagal theory and the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP). The book is well-written, insightful, as well as inspirational, bridging physical space with human feelings, moods, and activities. Not only does this book weave together multiple theoretical approaches from architectural and embodied disciplines, it offers very practical terminology and a simple notation system to replicate human affect expression for the purpose of attunement between physical space and human interaction within it. The book proposes that space may provide a supportive “holding environment” for the oscillations of human affect and requirements for human activity. Useful charts, tables, photos of sample environments, and case examples are found throughout the book to engage the reader. A truly cross-disciplinary, provoking, and accessible read.
Susan Loman, Professor Emerita, Antioch University New England, Keene, NH.
A masterful, brilliant, and expansive interweaving of the Kestenberg Movement Profile and Polyvagal Theory, applying these frameworks to architectural design in a way that profoundly supports embodied attention, affective attunement, and lived body presence.
Suzanne Hastie, MA, BC-DMT, NCC, LPC, Certified KMP Analyst.
