Experiencing Symmetry

Nowadays buildings are increasingly thought of as a counterbalance to the experiences of the digital. Architecture today is often about creating unique experiences, which are connected to specific sites and their particular local qualities and narratives. It is the spatial experience, the bodily engagement and the direct appeal to users which is in the focus. What matters is, what kind of relationship buildings establish and incorporate to the environment, to people, to their spatial setting etc. It is the social and spatial ›object relations‹ of buildings that are of growing interest to architects. These interests meet with a growing attentiveness to things and materialities in the social sciences since the 1990s. Especially Bruno Latours Actor-Network Theory is now often referred to by contemporary architects as the material, the bodily, the sensual, the affective no longer appear as subordinate to human action, but come into view as fundamentally intertwined with human practice.

In my paper I will present the results of a research conducted in Germany in 2022 and 2024 which investigated the spatial experience, bodily engagement and direct appeal of users in buildings that were explicitly linked to Bruno Latour’s social theory. We have conducted several go-along interviews with users in these buildings in order to investigate their experience. We were especially interested in the question if the buildings created an experience of ›symmetry‹ with nature, material, atmosphere etc. as Bruno Latour’s theory would imply.