









































The user’s space is lived—not represented (or 
conceived). [Henri Lefebvre]1

Introduction
A recurring theme in the history of architectural 

and urban theory is the shaping role the built 
environment plays in the everyday lives of its users. 
Perhaps most famously illustrated by Winston 
Churchill’s statement “We shape our buildings, and 
afterwards they shape us,” both theorists as well as 
designers have frequently considered the designed 
environment as playing an active part in society 
and examined the relation between plans on the 
drawing table and their impact on people’s lives 
in reality.2 Although divergent in their outcomes, 
the ambitions of modernists like Le Corbusier, 
structuralists like Herman Hertzberger, and current 
architects who advocate the participation of end-
users in their design processes converge in the belief 
that design can contribute to the production of a 
certain ideal society. 

These same ambitions, however, have also led 
to projects in which people behaved differently 
or even completely opposite to the intentions of 
the designers. The efficiency and functionality 
that were at the basis of early twentieth century 
modernism were later part of the criticism on the 
living-conditions in buildings like Pruitt-Igoe 
in Saint-Louis or the Bijlmer-neighbourhood 
in Amsterdam.3 Alison Smithson expressed her 
disillusionment about the way residents behaved in 
Robin Hood gardens after she and her husband had 
designed it completely around their vision on an 
ideal collective society.4 In less extreme cases as well, 

What Architecture Does. 
An Embodied Approach towards 
the Impact of the Built Environment

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it seems the impact of the built environment is limited. Hope for creating 
an ideal social situation, such as strong communities shaped by collective 
spaces or gardens, often seems vain in retrospect and serve primarily as 
a good story to “sell” the design rather than a proper solution in reality. 
Luckily, the same principle applies vice-versa: even in poorly designed 
buildings, people seem to be quite flexible in making their environments 
work for whatever it is they want to do.

This observation has led some to observe, that the built environment is 
not as influential as designers themselves might like to think. According 
to architect and behavioural researcher Richard Buday for example, 
“environmental determinism’s failure showed leading architecture … 
does not shape behaviour any better than secondary architecture,” and 
therefore one might even wonder if the architect’s profession is at all that 
relevant.5 The belief in this power of the built environment can even be 
dangerous according to Buday, as it neglects to acknowledge the impact of 
people’s own choices.

Regardless of how much or how little impact design has on people, 
we can nevertheless agree that one environment can be experienced as 
more pleasant, lively, beautiful or practical than another, even when such 
judgements might not be universal. Underestimating such impact might 
be just as dangerous as overestimating its power. Instead of trying to 
measure the share that can be ascribed to environmental design, this article 
therefore proposes an alternative route: instead of asking the quantitative 
question of how much impact the environment has on its users, it asks the 
generative question of how such impact arises. The first part of the article 
explores possible answers to this question. The second discusses issues that 
complicate the implementation of this knowledge into the design practice.     

The theories of   such philosophers as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger 
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in the wake of recent developments in the 
fields of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, and more specifically 
the research program of embodied embedded cognition, provide insights 
into the strong and dependent relations between the mind, the body and 
the environment.6 Supported by extensive scientific research over the last 
few decades, these insights dismiss a Cartesian view in which an immaterial 
and independent mind can think rationally about the physical world.7      

As many architectural theorists, such as Harry Mallgrave, have shown, 
these insights offer strong potential for understanding architectural 
experience as well.8 Instead of considering subjects as relatively independent 
from the built environment they perceive, we can now understand how 
architectural experience is a physical consequence of the impact a building 
has on its users. To make this assertion clear, we will have a look at what is 



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called the enactive approach to perception, a theory 
that is part of the broader embodied embedded 
cognition movement. As Andrea Jelić, et al. have 
argued, this enactive view provides a particularly 
useful guide to studying architectural experience.9      
Of particular interest is a paper by Evan Thompson 
and Francisco Varela, in which the connections 
between mind, body and world are explained 
as three “dimensions of embodiment,” or three 
different cycles of operation that integrate these 
three components: 

1.  Cycles of organismic regulation of the entire 
body.

2. Cycles of sensorimotor coupling between 
organism and environment.

3. Cycles of intersubjective interaction, involving 
the recognition of the intentional meaning of 
actions and linguistic communication.10

Although it falls beyond the scope of this 
article to describe these kinds of cycles in all their 
biological detail, they do provide an interesting 
framework with which we can explore the ways 
in which architecture influences its users. They 
describe the three levels at which body, brain and 
world are integrated with each other and therefore 
how connections between them are made, which 
provides an overview of how architecture has 
“access” to a human being. 

In the latter part of the article, I will therefore 
consider each dimension separately and explore 
how it relates to the built environment to arrive at 
a tool with which the impact in specific cases can 
be analyzed. Besides this theoretical exploration, a 
specific case-study will be used in order to illustrate 
the theory and relate it to building practice. The 
chosen case-study is the plenary meeting hall of 
the Dutch Parliament, a design that holds a special 
relation to themes of publicity and power. Seating 
the 150 elected members of Parliament, it forms 
the physical realization of Dutch democracy and 
despite being an indoor space, the hall is arguably 



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one of the most public spaces in the country. In the first instance, both 
literally and physically public access to meetings in the hall is ensured at all 
times, overcoming complex issues such as security and wheelchair access.      
But access is ensured virtually as well, as the debates taking place in the 
room are shared through various media on a daily basis. Programmatically 
similar to the British House of Commons Chamber Churchill referred 
to in his famous statement, the impact of the hall’s design is particularly 
relevant, since it may possibly influence policies that concern the entire 
country. It results in interesting relationships between the roles that are 
accommodated and how they have become physical in the design of 
the space, the furniture and other facilities. Drawings of this design will 
provide an illustration of the impact that can be discovered in each cycle.

ORGANISMIC REGULATION
Under organismic regulation we understand those unconscious 

processes that regulate the state of the organism. As Thompson and      
Varela explain, the “main basis is the autonomic nervous system, in 
which sensors and effectors to and from the body link neural processes to 
basic homeodynamic processes of the internal organs and viscera.”11 The 
purpose of these cycles is to translate information about the environment 
to reactions within the body in order to keep the organism safe and 
healthy. Often, they remain unnoticed, as they occur unconsciously and 
more instinctively than intentional perception and action. 

Fig.1: PI de Bruijn/
Architectencie, 
Assembly Hall of 
the Dutch Parlia-
ment, The hague 
1992, an overview 
of the roles in the 
plenary hall and 
their position



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Emotional states are the outcome of an interaction 
between, for instance, the central nervous system and 
visceromotor systems that regulate the organs. These 
emotional states can be understood as a first “gut 
feeling” about what is experienced. As Thompson 
and Varela explain “organismic regulation, because 
of its links with basic emotional operating systems 
… has a pervasive affective dimension that manifests 
in the range of affective behaviours and feelings.”12 
In other words, when we experience architecture, 
organismic regulation controls our first reaction to 
a building.13     

The autonomic nervous system, which is divided 
into the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous 
system, responds to these emotional states.14 The 
sympathetic nervous system has an activating role, 
as it accelerates the heart rate in response to certain 
circumstances. Therewith it regulates our “fight-
or-flight” response, as it can prepare the body for 
intense physical activity. The parasympathetic 
nervous system, however, calms the body. When 
circumstances suggest that the organism is safe, this 
system brings it to a state in which it can rest. 

Here, we can draw a parallel to what Edmund 
Burke has called the Sublime and Beautiful as 
categories of aesthetic enjoyment.15 The former 
is based on a tensioning of the body, when for 
example we stand on the edge of a cliff, the latter is 
based on a relaxation when we observe something 
serene and controlled. From this we can understand 
organismic regulation as the process that on the 
one hand makes us say “wow” when for example 
observing imposing or monumental architecture, 
and on the other makes us feel comfortable when a 
space is small and shielded.16      

This observation becomes more concrete when 
we consider the design of the Dutch plenary 
meeting hall. The hall is part of a building designed 
by Pi de Bruijn and realized in 1992, located at 
the Binnenhof in The Hague. It holds the plenary 
meetings of the parliament or the “Tweede Kamer” 

These 
emotional 

states can be 
understood 

as a first 
“gut feeling” 

about what is 
experienced.

“

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Fig.2: Possible emotional states evoked by the 
general layout of the Plenary Meeting Hall

Fig.3: Possible emotional states 
evoked in the center of the hall



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(second chamber), which has a comparable role 
to the House of Representatives in the U.S. or the 
House of Commons in Great Britain. The 150 
members of parliament are seated in six segments, 
facing their Chair(wo)man and clerks on one side 
and the government (cabinet) on the other. [Fig. 1] 

 When entering, walking through and resting in 
the arena-scaled hall, different emotional states will 
probably arise, related to different parts of the space. 
[Fig. 2-6] In the centre of the hall for example, one 
is in the middle of a large space, with a high ceiling 
in which all other users of the room are facing you 
due to the orientation of their seats. These elements 
seem intended to evoke a reaction of alertness. In 
contrast, in the small hallway below the public 
stands, users are mostly shielded from the large 
room, because the lower ceiling provides a space 
that feels much more soothing. It is no coincidence 
that most actual compromises are made here, where 
politicians that might be enemies in the “arena,” can 
feel at ease and come together.17     

When you are in the centre of the hall  users face a 
collection of large natural stone walls that rise from 
behind the Chair(wo)man to which comments are 
addressed. These solid walls might very well evoke 
a sense of awe and are clearly meant to impress 
via their monumentality. At the same time the 
furnishings of the meeting hall are designed in 
such a way that people are often shielded from each 
other. “Vak K,” the part in which the Cabinet is 
seated, is completely surrounded by a low wooden 
wall, which makes them in a way protected from 
the rest of the people. The interruption barrier (for 
members who respond to or question members of 
the cabinet) is comparable, with the exception that 
in this case the wall starts at about 20 cm above the 
ground, so that the member’s feet remain visible. 

SENSORIMOTOR COUPLING
The second category of ways in which body 

and the world are interwoven concerns more 



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Fig.4: Possible emotional states 
evoked by the lectern for speaking 
Members of Parliament

Fig.6: Possible emotional states 
evoked by the lectern for members 
of the Cabinet

Fig.5: Possible emotional states 
evoked by the desks and seats of 
Members of Parliament



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elaborate actions and movements through the 
environment. These movements are made possible 
by our so-called motor system, which is much 
more connected to perception than has previously 
been presupposed. As Susan Hurley explains in 
Consciousness in Action, following up on for example 
the work by Ulric Neisser, the generally assumed 
divide between the body and the mind has resulted 
in an input-output picture of perception.18 In that 
picture, perception forms the input from the world 
to the mind and action forms the output. The 
mind mediates between these two states: through 
thought it links the right input to the right output. 
However, discarding the Cartesian divide leads to 
the conclusion that perception and action are much 
more interwoven with each other than traditional 
views have acknowledged. Building on, amongst 
other theories, what has been called the reafference 
principle, Thompson and Varela explain, “situated 
activity takes the form of cycles of sensorimotor 
coupling with the environment. What the organism 
senses is a function of how it moves, and how it 
moves is a function of what it senses.”19     

This point was already developed in the 1970s 
by James Gibson in his theory of affordances.20 He 
argued that humans (and other animals) perceive 
the world through the actions that are possible 
within it. We encounter the affordances present in 
the environment, rather than perceiving the world 
through something like a photograph, in which all 
details are grasped at once. What the environment 
affords is what it offers, provides or furnishes an 
animal to do in it. A flat surface, for example, is seen 
as walk-on-able, a surface about 40 cm above the 
ground is sit-on-able, and round objects that can 
be grasped in the hand are throw-able and catch-
able. Such affordances are different for each animal 
or person, related to  their individual capabilities. 

The theory of affordances means that the 
designed environment of architecture is perceived 
in the same way, through the actions that it affords. 



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Fig.7: Actions of speaking afforded in 
the center of the hall

Fig.8: Actions of speaking afforded by the 
lectern for speaking Members of Parliament



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In the description of a relatively simple process 
of getting milk from a store nearby, architectural 
theorist Sarah William Goldhagen shows how 
these processes continually take place, mostly 
unconsciously, leaving room for thoughts about 
plans for the weekend.21 It shows how the built 
environment is continuously used as a means to 
something else, rather than being observed as a 
neutral object.

Stairs are perceived as providing the possibility 
to ascend, arcades are perceived for the possibility 
of walking through, and windows invite you to 
look outside. They do not determine the user to 
undertake any of these actions, but through the 
processes by which we perceive the environment 
and instrumentalize it for our actions, they do      
provide us with countless invitations which we do 
or do not act upon. The impact of an affordance 
therefore does not lie in the determination of a 
person’s actions (so I agree with Buday, the idea of 
“environmental determinism,” is problematic), but 
in the invitation it offers.22 

Furthermore, although the environment cannot 
determine what actions a user will undertake, it 
does often constrain the way in which actions can 
be performed.23 Stairs do not determine you to 
ascend, but they dictate where you will enter the 
next floor if you do. Arcades do not determine you 
to walk through them, but they do influence which 
rooms are the most accessible. And a window does 
not determine you to look through it, but it does 
influence what you will see if you do. 

In case of the plenary meeting hall, the 
affordances offered by the design are effectively 
endless, continuously inviting the users in the 
room to undertake certain actions. On a most basic 
level the room therefore both expresses and invites 
the activities it is designed for: a composition of 
seats, desks and microphones shows the purpose 
of using the room for Plenary meetings by the 
parliament. [Fig. 7-11] Some of these affordances 

Stairs do not 
determine 

the user to 
undertake 

any actions, 
but ... they   

do  provide us 
with countless 

invitations 
which we do 

or do not 
act upon. 

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Fig.9: Actions of observing afforded by 
the seats of Members of Parliament

Fig.10: Actions of walking afforded 
by the center of the hall



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have clear consequences for how the debates usually 
take place. Consider for example the position of 
lecterns relative to each other: they determine how 
the different users are facing one another when 
they speak. Members of Cabinet always face the 
Members of Parliament that respond to them using 
the interruption microphone, but they are standing 
parallel to the ones that are presenting a longer story. 
Furthermore, the lecterns often presuppose their 
users to be standing up, otherwise the microphone 
cannot be reached. This same microphone makes 
sure its users are facing the centre of the meeting 
hall, as they are positioned in a certain way. The 
Chair(wo)man can control who is allowed to speak, 
as he or she can turn microphones on and off. 

The arrangement of seats in the room forms the 
basis for how members of parliament are sitting 
in relation to the Cabinet and the Chair(wo)man 
during the plenary meetings. The seats provide room 
for 150 Members of Parliament, who are divided 
into six segments of 25 members. Some of these 
members are therefore closer to the debate than 
others, and might be quicker to use the interruption 
microphones than the so-called “backbenchers” 
behind them.24 The different parties are spread 
among the segments, so that members of a party are 
not necessarily sitting together in one group, and 
often mix with other parties. Walking paths between 
the segments make it possible to walk to the centre 
of the room or the hallway under the public stands, 
but they also provide space for members to discuss 
matters with each other between different debates. 
These are just a few examples of the long list of 
affordances offered by the meeting hall, that show 
what kind of impact they might have on the way in 
which daily activities take place. 

 
INTERSUBJECTIVE INTERACTION
The third category of “cycles of operation” 

concerns things that are active in social cognition 
and help humans understand each other. These 



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cycles make it possible to interpret others, and reason about their 
intentions, their desires and their emotions. Intersubjective interaction 
involves both structures that are also important to emotion as well as 
sensorimotor coupling and more specifically the use of mirror-neuron 
systems. In the 1990s a team of scientists discovered so-called mirror 
neurons that fire not only when we perform particular activities, but also 
when we see someone else performing that activity.25 This discovery has 
led scientists to believe that these neurons play a role in the understanding 
of emotions, actions and intentions of others (when these are already part 
of our own repertoire).26 For example, when we see someone else feeling 
sad, we virtually mirror this expression (although we do not carry out the 
actual movement) and by “observing” our own feelings arising from this 
expression, we understand the other is sad. So, we use ourselves as a kind of 

Fig.11: Actions of walking afforded between 
seats of Members of Parliament



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simulator, mirroring others, in order to make sense 
of the world. 

This process is generally known as empathy. 
According to Vittorio Gallese, one of the discoverers 
of mirror neurons, we use this process constantly.27 

Mirror neurons are active not only when we perceive 
other human beings, but also in the observation of 
inanimate objects. Recent fMRI studies have shown 
that neurons activated when we are being touched, 
fire when we perceive someone else being touched, 
but also when we perceive objects touching one 
another, such as when we see raindrops falling on 
the leaves of a plant.28 We not only use ourselves 
to simulate the actions and emotions of other 
people, but also to simulate our environment. This 
has led Gallese to replace the word “empathy” with 
“embodied simulation,” and argue that “the sense 
we attribute to our lived experience of the world 
is grounded in the affect-laden relational quality of 
our body’s action potentialities, enabled by the way 
they are mapped in our brains.”29    

Remarkably enough, when the first theories of 
empathy originated at the end of the nineteenth 
century, they were part of a philosophical theory 
on aesthetics, not of how we socially engage with 
other people. The German theorist Robert Vischer 
published On the Optical Sense of Form, in which 
he distinguished between Sehen as a relatively 
passive form of visual perception, and Schauen as 
a more active one.30 Aesthetic experience, with 
which reality is “grasped,” is based on the latter 
kind. During this aesthetic experience, we go 
through a process of Einfühlung, by which we “feel 
ourselves into” or simulate what we encounter. 
The environment is “reflected in certain vibrations 
and—who knows what—neural modifications” that 
make the experience possible.31 Vischer’s theories 
were followed by Theodor Lipps, whose Ästhetik, 
published at the start of the nineteenth century, 
explored the analysis of empathy in aesthetic 
experience further.32 He argued that everything we 

Remarkably 
enough, when the 

first theories 
of empathy 

originated at 
the end of the 

nineteenth 
century, they 

were part of a 
philosophical 

theory on 
aesthetics, not of      

how we socially 
engage with 

other people.

“

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experience is permeated by our own life. The experienced object is the 
result of both what has been given by the environment and the activity 
of the observer. For Lipps, aesthetic experience arose from the feeling or 
movement that an object evokes in us. For example, a great hall evokes a 
movement of expansion, and from that we understand its greatness. In 
the case of the Dutch parliament, which is itself a great hall, the aesthetic 
experience could include this same greatness both in the height of the 
ceiling as well as in the large tapestries on the wall. It can also include 
the appreciation of the clean shapes of pearwood in the furniture or the 
craftsmanship that must have been involved making it, although this 
interpretation of Einfühlung involves much more elaborate systems than 
simply mirror-neurons.33      

Furthermore, it has been suggested that mirror systems play an important 
role in language as well. Neuroscientist Michael Arbib hypothesizes that 
the ability to recognize manual actions in others provided a bridge via 
pantomime and imitation for the human capacity for both sign and 
spoken language.34 Following this, intersubjective interaction enables us to 
interpret and make sense of our environment. So, it is through this system 
and its integration with other systems that we can talk about concepts or 
messages that are communicated by architecture, based on their physical 
composition and the actions, both practical and emotional, that they make 
possible. 

Following Giacomo Rizzolatti and Michael Arbib in linking our mirror 
system to the highly evolved neural and social systems that enable us to use 
language and other forms of symbolic abstraction, it is through this last 
cycle that we understand the symbolic meaning provided by architecture. 
In the case of the Dutch Parliament, one can interpret the coat of arms 
printed on the seats of Members of Parliament as referring to the Dutch 
nation. Furthermore, we might interpret the hierarchy of different roles 
played in the debates through the differences in how luxuriously each seat 
is designed, through subtle height differences and through accents in the 
composition of desks such as the higher one or the Chair(wo)man. 

It is also through this cycle that we might interpret the green carpet, 
the grey ceiling and the tulip-shaped seats as representations of the Dutch 
landscape, as explained in a brochure on the “meaning” of de Bruijn’s 
design.35 Users however need quite some information to understand this 
connection. While people who have foreknowledge might indeed associate 
these symbols with what they represent, others not armed with such 
cultural apparati will be unlikely to understand it that way. 

As stated above, Thompson and Varela mention the involvement of 
processes of the first and second cycles in the third.36 Processes important 



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to emotions are also part of recognizing emotions 
in others, and mirror neurons are themselves part 
of sensorimotor systems. And the intertwining goes 
still further: evoked emotional states are probably 
also dependent on the affordances and messages one 
recognizes, and the perceived affordances are related 
to a person’s mood or their interpretation of the 
function of the room. The purpose of the framework 
is therefore not so much to separate each kind of 
impact but rather to show the elaborate range of 
impacts that are possible within one design. 

The implication of the theories as laid out 
above is that, without impact to the form of some 
physical change in the body there is no experience. 
Architectural experience therefore only exists through 
this impact. Still, such impact does not determine the 
behaviour of a building’s users. The two following 
remarks offer partial explanation in this regard.  

A NETWORK OF ACTORS
Firstly, this impact is spread throughout an 

endless network of little impacts that each play 
their own small yet significant role. The three 
kinds of cycles of operation reveal an elaborate and 
complicated range of endless modes of exchange 
between the world and the body, as the case-study 
has shown as well. Relations originate at different 
levels and in different ways at the same time and 
are therefore hardly ever observable as a one-to-
one relationship between a design decision and a 
(behavioural) change. 

How this works has previously been laid out by 
the so-called ‘Actor-Network-Theory’, conceived 
by sociologists and philosophers, of which Bruno 
Latour, John Law and Michel Callon are the best-
known examples.37 One of their basic claims is that 
in social processes, objects can play a role similar to 
that of human beings. Both animate and inanimate 
objects participate in our social lives significantly, 
together forming a large network of countless 
“actors” that each play a role. One design decision 



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Fig.12: Possible messages conveyed through 
the arrangement of seats in segments

Fig.13: Possible messages conveyed through 
the furniture of the Chair(wo)man



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can be seen as a drop in an ocean of actors, only 
some of them related to the designed physical 
environment. Pedestrians’ experience of a street, for 
example, can be seen as the sum of decisions like 
the general proportions, the plasticity of facades or 
the position of windows, etc., forming only a piece 
in a larger network of other determining factors, 
like recent events in the pedestrian’s life or her his 
general mood that day.  

Some attempts have been made to show 
determinant relations between design decisions and 
their effect on users. Take, for instance, research 
on the layout of hospital rooms in relation to the 
healing process, or educational environments in 
relation to learning processes.38 Or, closer to our 
case-study, consider how research in 2018 showed a 
relation between the voting behaviour of parliament 
members and their position relative to each other 
in the room.39 However useful such studies may 
be, they should always be interpreted with regard 
to the specificity of the case-studies on which they 
were based. In another situation the conditions 
might very well be different, so that the same design 
decisions could lead to different results. 

DETERMINISM AND FREE WILL
Secondly, it is worth considering the compatibilist 

view of philosopher Daniel Dennett, who argues 
that a deterministic universe does not rule out free 
will.40 He distinguishes between things in what he 
calls the scientific image on the one hand and the 
manifest image on the other. The first group consists 
of things like neurons, atoms and DNA, things 
that we know mostly from scientific research. The 
second group consists of things that we encounter 
in our everyday lives: colours, euros and promises, 
etc. These things have no location or substance and 
scientifically speaking they are not what people 
generally consider them to be. Free will is part of 
this latter group, so according to Dennett, free will 
is just as real as the colours, euros and promises that 



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play a significant role in everyday life. Scientifically speaking, one fact 
necessarily leads to another, however the endless number of causes and 
effects are impossible to sort-out in the lived-world of manifest images. 

We can apply this way of thinking to what we have encountered in this 
article: at a scientific level, the impact of the built environment on the user is 
a prerequisite for any environmental experience and this impact is part of a 
large network of different actors. In the practical world of manifest images, 
however, this network cannot possibly be understood in its entirety and 
therefore the effect of design decisions remains unpredictable to a certain 
extent. This means that in the lived-world of any subject experiencing the 
environment, the shaping role of design can only be more or less present 
and recognizable. Furthermore, the design process itself largely takes place 
at this practical level too, which makes it unlikely for a designer to foresee 
all the consequences of the countless design decisions he/she must make, 
either consciously or unconsciously.

EMPATHY
From the first part of this article we could conclude that claiming 

design decisions have no impact is problematic. From the second part we 
can add that claiming causality between design decision x and result y 
is equally problematic, as the full breadth of the network in which this 
impact is integrated cannot be understood from the practical level of our 
lived world and the design process. To conclude, I would like to draw 
attention to the skill of empathy being employed by the architect during 
the design process, which is of special relevance in this regard. During this 
process, in which the designer imagines himself or herself to be part of the 
environment he or she is designing, it is possible to assess many aspects 
at once, instead of focussing on the “drop in the ocean” of a single design 
decision. It offers the possibility to be receptive to what the environment 
has to offer instead of considering it solely in light of the conceptual ideas 
it was built on. 

Furthermore, we can see empathy as a skill that can be enriched: the 
aforementioned studies on healing environments, for instance, may 
be too specific to be implemented directly into other designs, but they 
provide insights that can be integrated into empathic processes, as do the 
theories on cognitive science of architectural experience. Moreover, these 
processes can be further enhanced in light of the plurality of identities 
of the future users. Knowledge of the identity of different end-users, or 
participatory processes in which contact between the designer and the 
end-user is established, improve the possibility of the designers’ capacity to 
understand the experience of other identities. 



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In this way, the skill of empathy can enrich 
the designers’ understanding of the effects their 
designs are likely to have and then to help align 
their decisions with their renovated understanding 
of users’ experiences. Empathy can contribute to 
an environment that finds a balance between its 
facilitating role in our lived-world daily processes 
while being receptive both to the plurality and the 
freedom of its users.

 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With special thanks to the reviewers and Michael 

Arbib for their helpful comments on an earlier 
version of this article.

ILLUSTRATIONS
The drawings and analyses are based on the 

following literature: 

Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal. The House 
of Representatives at work. August 2015. https://
www.houseofrepresentatives.nl/how-parliament-
works/house-representatives-work. 

ProDemos. Politics in the Netherlands (The 
Hague: ProDemos, 2013)

Herman Tjeenk Willink, ‘Verval van de 
democratische rechtsstaat en de rol van de pers.’ 
Het Expertisecentrum Journalistiek. 21 September 
2015. http://www.expertisecentrumjournalistiek.
nl/slot-toespraak-herman-tjeenk-willink-verval-
van-de-democratische-rechtsstaat-en-de-rol-van-
de-pers/. 

Joris Luyendijk, Je hebt het niet van mij, maar...: 
Een maand aan het Binnenhof (Amsterdam: 
Podium, 2010)

The drawings are also based on the following two 
interviews: 

we can 
see empathy 

as a skill 
that can be 

enriched.

“
”



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Alexander Pechtold, interviewed by the author. An interview on the role 
of the interior design of the Second Chamber in the debating culture (7 
September 2016)

Herman Tjeenk Willink, interviewed by the author. An interview on 
possible strategies for the Dutch political system (28 October 2016)

Complemented with research conducted in the architectural archive of 
The New Institute, Rotterdam and the personal archive of Pi de Bruijn.

ENDNOTES
1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Hoboken: Wiley, 1992), 362
2. Simon Richards, Architect Knows Best: Environmental Determinism in 

Architecture Culture from 1956 to the Present (Milton Park, Oxfordshire: 
Routledge, 2012).

3. See for example the introduction in Charles Jencks, The Language of 
Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1991), 23; 
Marlies Buurman, ‘Stadsgezichten: Kleiburg en de Bijlmer.’ Het Parool, 
(21 January 2011).

4. Alison Smithson, ‘The Violent Consumer, or Waiting For the Goodies’ 
Architectural Design, No.5 (1974).

5. Richard Buday, ‘We Shape Buildings, But Do Buildings Really Shape 
Us?’ Common Edge (April 13, 2017) https://commonedge.org/we-
shape-buildings-but-do-buildings-really-shape-us/ (Accessed October 
18, 2021); Note also the counterreaction to this article by Robert Lamb 
Hart: Robert Lamb Hart, ‘How Buildings Shape Us.’ Common Edge 
(September 21, 2020) https://commonedge.org/how-buildings-shape-
us/ (Accessed August 23, 2022).

6. Robert A.Wilson, and Lucia Foglia. ‘Embodied Cognition.’ The Stanford 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016), http://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/win2016/entries/embodied-cognition.

7. For a discussion on this, see note 6. On the other hand, some important 
research has tended to stress both the anti-dualist elements in Descartes 
himself, and the uptake of those elements in some twentieth-century 
phenomenology, especially by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. See for 
example Sara Heinämaa, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s dialogue with Descartes: 
The living body and its position in metaphysics.’ In: Dan Zahavi, Sara 
Heinämaa and Hans Ruin (eds.) Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: 
Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries, by (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 
23-48.

8. Harry Francis Mallgrave, Architecture and Embodiment, the Implications 



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of the New Sciences and Humanities for Design 
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 111.

9. Andrea Jelić, Gaetano Tieri, Federico De 
Matteis, Fabio Babiloni and Giovanni Vecchiato. 
‘The Enactive Approach to Architectural 
Experience: A Neurophysiological Perspective 
on Embodiment, Motivation, and Affordances.’ 
Frontiers in Psychology, No.7 (2016), 481.

10. Evan Thompson and Francisco J. Varela. 
‘Radical embodiment: neural dynamics and 
conciousness.’ TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 
Vol.5, No.10 (2001), 418-425.

11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 425.
13. Mallgrave, Architecture and Embodiment, 111
14. Laurie Kelly McCorry, ‘Physiology of the 

Autonomic Nervous System,’ American Journal 
of Pharmaceutical Education, Vol.71, No.4 
(2007), 78.

15. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry in-
to the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and 
Beautiful. (1757). An interesting study in this 
regard can be found in the dissertation of Dmitri 
Kormanov,      which shows evidence that the 
sympathetic nervous system is indeed activated 
when experiencing sublime landscapes. Dmitri 
Kormanov, Feeling the landscape: Six Psychological 
Studies into Landscape Experience (Wageningen: 
Wageningen University, 2009).

16. Mallgrave, Architecture and Embodiment, 112-
113.

17. Joris Luyendijk, Je hebt het niet van mij, maar...: 
Een maand aan het Binnenhof (Amsterdam: 
Podium, 2010).

18.  Susan L. Hurley, Consciousness in Action (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); 
Ulric Neisser, Cognition and reality: Principles 
and Implications of Cognitive Psychology (San 
Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1976).

19. Thompson and Varela, 418-425; The reafference 
principle has been coined by Erich von Holst 



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and Horst Mittelstaedt, ‘Das Reafferenzprinzip.’ Naturwissenschaften, 
No.37 (1951), 464-476.      

20. James Jerome Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. 
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). The key idea of affordances was 
already present in Jakob Uexküll, Umwelten: “A stroll through the 
worlds of animals and men: a picture book of invisible worlds.” In: Clair 
H. Schiller, Instinctive Behavior: the Development of a Modern Concept 
(New York: International Universities Press, 1957), also in Semiotica, 
No.89, 319-391. Originally appeared as Jakob von Uexküll Streifzüge 
durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen (Berlin: Springer, 1934).

21. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to your world. How the Built 
Environment Shapes Our Lives (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 
2017), 52-54.

22. Buday ‘We Shape Buildings, But Do Buildings Really Shape Us?’ 
(Accessed October 18, 2021).

23. As Gibson notes in a later essay, “affordances do not cause behaviour 
but constrain or control it”. James Gibson, Reasons for Realism (edited 
by  Edward Reed and Rebecca Jones) (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum 
Publishers, 1982), 411.

24. Luyendijk, Je hebt het niet van mij, 53.
25. G. di Pellegrino, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti, 

‘Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study,’ Exp 
Brain Res, Vol.91, No.1 (1992), 176-180; See also Giacomo Rizzolatti, 
Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese, ‘Mirrors in the Mind.’ Scientific 
American, Vol.295, no.5(2006), 54-61.

26. For a discussion of this, see Michael Arbib, When Brains Meet Buildings: 
A Conversation between Neuroscience and Architecture (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 2021), 306-311.

27. Vittorio Gallese,‘Embodied Simulation: From Neurons to Phenomenal 
Experience.’ Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Vol.4 (2005),  
23-48.

28. S.J. Ebisch, M.G. Perrucci, A. Ferretti, C. Del Gratta, G.L. Romani, 
and V. Gallase, ‘The Sense of Touch: Embodied Simulation in a 
Visuotactile Mirroring Mechanism for Observed Animate or Inanimate 
Touch.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol.20, no.9 (2008).

29. Vittorio Gallese, Alessandro Gattara, ‘Embodied Simulation, Aesthetics, 
and Architecture: an Experimental Aesthetic Approach.’ In: Sarah 
Robinson, Juhani Pallasmaa (eds.), Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, 
Embodiment, and the Future of Design, (Cambridge, Massachussetts: 
The MIT Press, 2015), 161-179; For a further discussion on this, see 
Arbib, When Brains Meet Buildings, 330-335.



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30. Robert Vischer et.al, Empathy, Form and Space: 
Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, 
Harry F. Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou 
(Introduction and Translation), (Santa Monica/
Chicago: The Getty Center for the History of 
Art and the Humanities, 1994), 89-123. 

31. Ibid., 90.
32. Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik; psychologie des schönen 

und der kunst (Hamburg: Voss Verlag, 1903).
33. For a discussion of the process of empathy 

in appreciating craftsmanship see Gallese and 
Gattara, Embodied Simulation, Aesthetics, 
and Architecture: an Experimental Aesthetic 
Approach,’ 161-179. For a further discussion 
on the primacy of mirror neurons in aesthetic 
experience, see Arbib, When Brains Meet 
Buildings, 336-349.

34. Michael Arbib, How the Brain Got Language: 
The Mirror System Hypothesis (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 2012).

35. Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, ‘Tweede 
Kamer in Beeld,’ Tweede Kamer (November 2013), 
https://www.tweedekamer.nl/sites/default/-files/
field_uploads/Tweede%20Kamer%20in%20
Beeld_tcm181-210466_0.pdf.

36. Thompson and Varela, ‘Radical embodiment’ 
418-425.

37. See for example: Bruno Latour, ‘Where Are 
the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few 
Mundane Artifacts,’ in: Wiebe E. Bijker and 
John Law (eds.), Shaping Technology / Building 
Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change 
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 225-
258; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An 
Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 2005); John Law,. 
‘Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: 
Ordering, Strategy and Heterogeneity.’ Systems 
Practice, No.5 (1992), 379-393; Michel Callon, 
‘Techno-economic networks and irreversibility,’ 
In: John Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays 



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on Power, Technology and Domination, London: Routledge, 1991), 132-
165.

38. Goldhagen, Welcome to your world.
39. Alessandro Saia, ‘Random interactions in the Chamber: Legislators’ 

Behavior and Political Distance.’ Journal of Public Economics, (2018), 
225-240.

40. Daniel Dennett, ‘Free Will is as Real as Colors, Promises and Euros.’ 
Lecture at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, March 
12, 2016.

 

   


