Abstract
This essay examines how buildings shape human bodies, subjectivities, and realities, positing that built environments affect us in ways that go beyond symbolic or functional dimensions. Drawing on affect theory and phenomenology, I argue that buildings "make" us by influencing our sensory experiences, social interactions, and personal and political perceptions. Through three ethnographic case studies—Catherine Fennell’s work on 'project heat' in Chicago, Yael Navaro-Yashin’s research on melancholy in post-conflict Cyprus, and Mateusz Laszczkowski’s analysis of affective resonances in Astana’s architecture—I illustrate how buildings generate affective responses that deeply shape bodily dispositions, individual subjectivities, and conceptions of political and social reality. By exploring how buildings evoke embodied responses and transmit affective charges, I highlight the co-constitutive relationship between people and the built environment, challenging the dichotomy between physical structures and human agency. This analysis underscores that our built surroundings are not merely passive backdrops but active agents in the construction of human experience and social life.
Introduction
Much has been written about the relationship that people have with buildings. Academics have discussed that humans construct material environments which mediate social relations (Levi-Strauss 1987), reproduce symbolic and normative orders (Bourdieu 1977), or variously shape, appropriate and exercise agency over the spaces we inhabit (Miller 1987, 1988, 2001). This essay conversely seeks to argue the perspective that buildings make us, through their ability to produce affects that shape our bodies, subjectivities, and everyday realities.
I will first discuss the concept of affect through a phenomenological frame to return attention to an embodied understanding of the effect that buildings have on people. I argue that built environments have the ability to change bodily dispositions and sensory attachments; shape the subjectivities of those who inhabit them; and actively contribute to the construction of political and social realities. I will draw on three ethnographic examples: Catherine Fennel’s ethnography of Chicago public housing (2015), Yael Navaro-Yashin’s research in Northern Cyprus (2009, 2012), and Mateusz Laszczkowski’s analysis of Astana’s architectural transformations (2015). In asserting the primacy of affects that emerge from material structures we live in, we are, unquestionably, “made” by buildings and our spatial surrounds.
Affective buildings
Following the “affective turn” (Clough and Halley 2007) in critical theory, the concept of affect has proven useful for anthropologists to analyse the dynamics between feelings, emotions, sensations, bodies, objects, and the social. I assert that affect theory thus is a powerful theoretical framework to analyse how we make and are made by our built environment.
Differing theorisations on affect exist. An early vector of affect theory adopts a psychobiological conceptualisation of affect as neuro-cognitive emotions within the interior world of the human subject, while a second, more prominent vector in opposition to the first, frames affect as external to the human subject, operating as forces that circulate between bodies. The latter model of affect follows a philosophical genealogy by philosophers Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which defines affect as pre-individual bodily forces that exceed language and disavow subjectivity (Massumi 2002, Clough 2008, Gregg and Seigworth 2010). While endeavouring to disrupt the dualistic constructs of subject and object, body and mind, it nevertheless reasserts a bifurcative separation between “autonomous” affect as nondiscursive intensity registered in the body, and the conscious, cognitive level of emotions registered in the mind. In contrast to this, I would like to draw on critiques that instead take a phenomenological frame to focus on the role of embodied experience in affect. Sara Ahmed’s expansion of affect theory which attends to affect as a mode of bodily intentionality is significant here.
Connected to the “messiness of the experiential”, Ahmed articulates that affect is a form of “evaluation” where bodies turn towards things and enact implicit judgements of objects or situations (2010, 30). Affect thus emerges from material objects and becomes qualified evaluatively—for example, we orient ourselves towards certain objects that evoke happiness, and in being affected by the object, we give value to them, in turn shaping them. Additionally, she introduces the idea of “stickiness” in theorizing affect, that which “sticks…, sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (2010, 29). Affect thus is bound up with the material world, emphasising a distinctly phenomenological frame to understand the intimate intertwining of “passive” affect and “active” sense-making in embodied experience. Following Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach of a whole-body cognition of the world ([1945] 1962), a notion of encounter is thus central to a conception of affect, where a body orients to its world and establishes the affectable surface through which it makes contact with that world.
Taken together, this approach collapses distinctions between interiority and exteriority, and highlights the relevance of spatiality in an understanding of affect as the connective medium through which humans relate to the materiality of their environments. Having established this framing of affect, I will discuss the three ethnographic studies to examine the affective reverberations that buildings have on people.
Shaping Bodies and Psyches
Firstly, I argue that the material conditions of buildings which people inhabit, orientate their bodies towards, and have affective encounters with, have the ability to change bodily dispositions and sensory attachments. A phenomenological-affective approach, as outlined earlier, understands the integration of body and mind as embodied cognition to an experience of space. In Fennell’s ethnography Last Project Standing (2015), she applies such an approach to understand how “sensory impressions and bodily intensities” influenced her interlocutors’ experience of racial and economic difference as they were moved out of the Chicago public housing estate, Horner, to the mixed-income community of Westhaven.
In the third chapter, Fennell argues that the intense heating conditions experienced by Horner residents deeply affected not only their physical dispositions to heat, but also their emotions, memories, desires, and sensitivities to what they called ‘project heat’. Imbricated in ‘project heat’ are complexities of economic inequality and racial politics—details of which are beyond the scope of this essay—but I will focus on Fennell’s analysis of how the building affectively impacted the transitioning Horner residents and irrevocably shaped them.
Fennell describes how ‘project heat’ transformed the residents’ orientations to space and time. As the heat was perpetually switched on at high levels, a result of complex political pressures exerted between the operators, users, and the heating infrastructure, it put their bodies at odds with seasonal rhythms and prompted “year-round outdoor socialising”. Although it was unbearable and even harmful at times, the intense heat was included in their rent, and thus provided the lower-income residents with a sense of “basic physical security” and seen as a collective benefit with “indulgent, even luxurious undertones” (2015, 117).
Following housing reforms, when the residents were moved to Westhaven and lost access to free and effective heating, they expressed a longing for ‘project heat’ as they faced physical discomfort and financial insecurity. Fennell argues that the residents’ desire to “reproduce the feeling of project heat in their new homes” (2015, 119, emphasis in original)—but inability to do so due to institutional discrimination, neglect, and abandonment—was not just rooted in a physical inflexibility of the body “made haywire” by heat addiction (2015, 127-128). It also derived from a “sensory politics” that produced bodily attachments and tastes connected to affective feelings of physical and social well-being. Lastly, it was an effect that intractably transformed the residents. The building’s ambient conditions both physically and affectively oriented the residents towards blazing heat, such that it was “deeply ingrained” and “pressed into flesh and nerves that could not be undone, even under the most forceful conditions” (2015, 130), consequently causing them to struggle to adapt in their new environments.
Such an example clearly demonstrates the ability of buildings and ambient worlds, through their material conditions, to trigger sensory and affective impacts on the bodies and psyches of the people who live in them. It is clear that the impacts of ‘project heat’ went beyond the physical effects—it permanently changed the residents’ relationship to heat, where its loss in subsequent colder environments, associated with financial and physical struggle, transformed memories of extreme, unbearable heat to feelings of comfort, stability and longing.
Shaping Subjectivities
Secondly, I consider how environments and buildings have the ability to discharge affect onto their inhabitants whose subjectivities shape and are shaped by them. Through their encounter and active interaction with material interfaces, the “atmosphere” of such affective geographies leaves an impression that is “sticky” (Ahmed 2010, 36), saturating the subjectivities of individuals who encounter and subsequently interpret, politicise, and understand them.
Here, I draw on Navaro-Yashin’s long-term fieldwork in Northern Cyprus. It focuses on the aftermath of the 1974 partition of Cyprus: following the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus, Greek-Cypriots were displaced to the south and Turkish-Cypriots to the north, dividing the island into two ethnically-defined communities. Navaro-Yashin’s research studies the relationship between Turkish-Cypriot refugees and the houses (and belongings) they appropriated that had belonged to “the enemy” (2009, 2). Examining the subjectivity and emotions of Turkish-Cypriots who, “out of will, circumstance or coercion”, had to recreate their lives using what was perceived as “looted” property or objects, she argues that an affect of “melancholy” was generated by the dwellings and environments, which was then internalised in conjunction with existing experiences of loss and mourning (2009, 16-17). Following my previous discussion of the dualistic distinction between interiority and exteriority in affect theory, Navaro-Yashin similarly argues for a continuum of affect and subjectivity and the co-constitution of human beings and their environments, suggestively expressed in the term “affective geography” (2012, 27).
In her ethnography, Navaro-Yashin harnesses the metaphor of ‘ruination’ to describe the way that the affect of melancholy operates in Northern Cyprus. Ruins here refer not only to the “material remains or artefacts of destruction and violation”, but also to “subjectivities and residual affects that linger... in the aftermath of war and violence” (2009, 5). On one hand, “immense melancholy” emanated from the destroyed landscapes—burnt up and unkempt dry plains, as opposed to well-kept, lush fields. On the other hand, its affective charge derived not only from its material ruin, but by the fact that it was illegally looted Greek-owned land—its lack of rightful ownership exuded a “sense of impropriety, haunting, or an act of violation” (2009, 11).
Furthermore, through their inhabitation of appropriated houses and living with plundered furniture, kitchenware and clothing, her informants expressed that the dwellings produced “maraz” in them—a state of melancholy, sadness and depression inflicted by their environment (2009, 4). The spectral presence of both the lives that the Turkish-Cypriots left behind, as well as the phantoms of the Greek-Cypriots materialised in the appropriated objects, manifested in enduring affects in these environments.
Notably, Navaro-Yashin returns such environmental affects to her informants’ subjectivities as they actively politicise, interpret, remember, forget, or symbolise the ruins. As such, affect also needs to “be situated within the contingencies and historicity of those specific interactions between spatial materialities and human beings that change through time” (2012, 159). Thus, spatial environments have the ability to discharge powerful affects which simultaneously shape their inhabitants but is also mediated through linguistic and discursive means.
Shaping Realities
Thirdly, I argue that buildings, through our encounters with them, can generate affective intensities which also animate our understanding of the world. In particular, our affective encounters with ideologically-charged built environments can produce divergent meanings and constructions of what is perceived to be an understanding of our everyday reality.
Laszczkowski, in his analysis of architectural transformations of Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, focuses attention on the reception of the new buildings by citizens of Astana, rather than the inscription of ideological meaning onto the buildings (2015). He interrogates the direct affects generated by their material encounters with these buildings, positioning them not just as epiphenomenal by-products of “state-building”, but as “constitutive of the political” and “[construct] political reality” (2015, 150). Thus, affect and emotions play a crucial role in the formation of ‘the state’, through which political fields, imaginaries, subjects, and objects are structured (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2017). The definition of ‘reality’ here follows Laszczkowski’s line of reasoning that moves away from an ontological notion of reality (an opposition of the ‘real’ and ‘representation’) to account for the significant role of ‘fictional’ narratives and ‘virtual’ constructions in creating their own “reality-effects” to be navigated in daily life (2015, 160). ‘Reality’ is thus constructed not just in the “effect of rules, routines and rational discourses” but also via the animation of narratives made visceral through affect (ibid).
Laszczkowski raises three examples of his interlocutors’ encounters with affective resonances of Astana’s new built environment. Firstly, he describes how the futuristic and eclectic nature of new buildings along Astana’s ‘Left Bank’ induced affects of sacredness, uniqueness, and novelty in some residents, which when subsequently qualified by official propaganda, served to generate feelings of patriotic identification with an image of the state that was tangible and visceral (2015, 153-156). Secondly, contradictory affects of emptiness and artificiality evoked by the spatial organisation and unfamiliar designs of the built environment were mediated through cultural clichés to speak to an “eerie counter-imagination” of the city (2015, 156-157), resulting in feelings of alienation and anxiety expressed by other residents. Thirdly, affects of instability, anxiety and suspicion triggered by the physical defects and incomplete renovation of the buildings were further qualified by local gossip and rumours, generating narratives of the state as corrupt and duplicitous, and sparking imaginations about catastrophe and disaster (2015, 157-160).
Here, I focus on Laszczkowski’s assertion that “the direct affects evoked by residents’ material encounters with buildings… are active elements in the processes through which the state becomes ‘real’” (2015, 150). In other words, the contradictory yet compelling affects of the ideologically-charged built environments, as experienced by the residents, directly construct the political and social reality of ‘the state’. At the same time, affect is not merely passively received by people, but actively take on meaning through discursive qualification and mediation. Affect thus plays a powerful role in “making ‘the state’ a more plausible ‘reality’ in everyday life” in performatively producing the political (2015, 153). The materiality of built environments and their discharge of affect, along with their mediation and qualification by people, hence have a powerful potential to give shape to the ways in which they construct their everyday political and social realities.
Conclusion: Subjective Affects
In this essay, I have observed how the material interfaces of built environments are suffused with “structures of feeling” (Williams 1977). Whether that manifests in sensory and atmospheric conditions, emotional and embodied charges, or sentiments which contribute to the narratives and realities of our everyday, I have shown how the compelling and powerful affects of buildings can shape and ‘make’ us as inhabitants and users. However, it is important not to disavow the agency of the individual even as we consider the power of affect transmitted from our built environment. Thinking through Ahmed’s theorisation of affect as a bodily orientation, one’s experience of affect is dependent on one’s “angle of arrival”—that is, one’s pre-existing affective situation or state, as well as prevailing historical, cultural, and political alignments, might affect how affect is received (Ahmed 2010, 36-37).
This angle is also reflected in the three ethnographies discussed. Fennell’s ethnography of the sensory politics and affective impacts of heating is accompanied by extensive discussions of the myriad reflections, arguments, and actions taken by her interlocutors in ‘project heat’s’ aftermath (2015). Navaro-Yashin’s research observes how her informants actively situate and shape the lingering melancholic affects, some imbuing it with political interpretations, others attributing it to personal bodily afflictions (2012, xvi), yet others choosing to speak or keep silent about the ruins (2009, 172). Laszczkowski’s work shows that affects discharged from built environments are then further mediated, qualified, and actively given meanings that can be contradictory and subjective (2015). Ultimately, the divergent contingencies of subjective experiences remain crucial considerations in an analysis of how buildings shape us.
This essay was written in response to the question: "Do we make our buildings or/and do our buildings make us?" as part of MA in Material and Visual Culture (Anthropology) at UCL.
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