A neurophenomenological approach to architecture places human experience at the center of design, recognizing the phenomenal body as the genuine architectural subject. By merging neuroscience with phenomenological tradition, it interprets how embodiment shapes our relationship with built spaces. The concept of "pre-reflective" architecture highlights the embodied, largely pre-conscious interdependence between spaces and perception. This perspective argues that purely conceptual engagement with architecture is a misconception, and it reveals a discordance between design tools based on physical-mathematical space and the lived spatiality of the phenomenal world. The goal is to identify conditions for embodied architectural experience.
By examining the experience of atmospheres through micro-phenomenology, this article offers a new perspective on Alfred N. Whitehead's process philosophy. Both Whitehead's thought and micro-phenomenology focus on what occurs before something becomes a perceivable quality, but from different angles. Atmospheres, which exist at the edge of awareness, are treated as a field of possible experiences that emerge when the perception of objects is replaced by processes. Exploring sensual experience and meaning-making through atmospheric media helps situate new conceptual approaches to human-environment relationships. The author suggests that atmospheric awareness enables critical reflection and acceptance of difference, and that this perspective provides fruitful connections to contemporary research on experience and meaning-making.
The article develops a fundamental conception of atmospheres integrated into a phenomenology of the felt body [Leib]. It critiques the ancient split of the world into a private inner realm of experience and emotions versus an external world separated from it. The felt body is conceived as space without area—what one can sense as belonging to oneself without the five senses. Atmospheres are another category of spaces without area, regarded as a total or partial occupation of such space in the sphere experienced as present. A distinction is made between atmospheres of the felt body, atmospheres of emotion, and atmospheres that are not emotions. The example of dwelling clarifies how people achieve their own space of emotion from the atmospheres of emotion available at places.