In this interview article, we present a unique marriage of architecture heritage design and fundamental philosophy exemplified in the built works by Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances (RAAAF), a studio that works at the intersection of visual art, experimental architecture, and philosophy based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The conversation with Prix de Rome laureate Ronald Rietveld and Socrates Professor in Philosophy Erik Rietveld took place during the field visit to three RAAAF’s projects — Bunker 599 (2013), Deltawerk // (2018), and Still Life (2019) — where we examine the potential of affordance-based approach for rethinking and creating built heritage as (re)activation of past, present, and future.@en

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.@en

This chapter explores how, following a recent experiential and embodied turn in architecture, a new field of research inspired by embodied cognitive science has started illuminating brain and bodily mechanisms behind architecture's ability to affect our perception, emotions, memory, and imagination—and in extension, how design strategies like ‘affective architecture’ can be effective in creating meaningful and memorable places. The aim is threefold. Starting from the enactive-embodied cognition perspective, we propose that the fundamental pre-condition of memory- and meaning-making in memorial architecture resides in the embodied and affective experiences of spatial settings. Secondly, memorial spaces and architectural heritage are intrinsically connected to the sense of individual and social self through our embodied responsiveness to architectural cues and spatial affordances, where the latter are understood as materialization of the sociocultural patterns, practices, and meanings. Thirdly, we underline the changeability of the politics of affect and embodiment in architectural design, and consequently the architects’ role and limits in creating affective heritage. Therefore, the embodied experience of architecture is conceptualized as an open-ended playground, whose power of triggering emotional responses is both a source of understanding the scripted, designed narrative as well as a place for reinvention and necessary flexibility of heritage architecture in the fast-changing times.@en