Embodied Culture

Recent architectural discourse has been dominated by attempts to quantify material impact—embodied carbon, embodied energy, life-cycle metrics. While essential in addressing the climate crisis, this quantitative turn often renders architecture mute in relation to culture, history, and politics. Embodied culture is proposed here as a complement, and as a challenge: a critical and generative framework for rethinking what buildings are, what they mean, and how they come into being.

Embodied culture shifts the focus from matter as resource to matter as relation. It posits that materials are never neutral or inert. They carry within them unique histories of extraction, labour, governance, resistance, and situated knowledge. Embodied culture therefore calls for a reorientation of architectural inquiry—one that foregrounds relations over objects, processes over products, and embedded knowledges over abstract metrics. A wall is not just a structure—it is a sedimentation of norms, techniques, weathering, regulations, desires, exclusions. Landscapes are not just backdrops; they afford and resist. Regulations are not external constraints; they actively shape what is buildable. Labour is not a footnote; it is formative, even though often erased.

Drawing from feminist theory and new materialism, particularly the concept of intra-action (Barad), this symposium takes seriously the idea that buildings emerge not through linear causality, but through entangled co-production between humans, non-humans, tools, systems, and environments. In this, it resonates with Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Tim Ingold’s thinking on making and material flows, and Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as a site of embodied knowledge.

At the same time, embodied culture connects with scholarship that grounds these theoretical perspectives in the histories and practices of building: studies of labour and worker agency (Wall, Clarke, Jounin), regulation and technical codes (Lloyd Thomas, Picon), reuse and heritage (Ross, Arlotta, Ghyoot, Harrison), material traces and value regimes (Otero-Pailos, Lending, Forty, Arrhenius, Plevoets, Edensor), the circulation of materials across landscapes (Hutton, Moe, Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative), and the shifting temporalities of architecture (Abramson, Tischleder & Wasserman, DeSilvey).

Together, these perspectives open up a field where embodied culture can serve both as a critical lens, questioning existing narratives of building, reuse, and heritage, and as a tool for revaluation, opening new ways to see, work with, and care for the built world.

We invite contributions that interrogate the values, exclusions, aesthetics, and social formations embedded in the built environment. The symposium seeks historical and theoretical reflections, case-based investigations, and design research that advance this agenda—whether in the form of scientific papers or alternative formats. Contributions may relate to one or more of the seven thematic lenses outlined in the full Call for Abstracts.