This article explores the relationship between the bodily presence of other humans in the lived urban world and the experience of everyday architecture. We suggest, from the perspectives of phenomenology and architecture, that being in the company of others changes the way the built environment appears to subjects, and that this enables us to perform simple daily tasks while still attending to the built environment. Our analysis shows that in mundane urban settings attending to the environment involves a unique attentional (...) mode, which does not rely on concentrating on, or appreciating the architectural objects, but rather on social attention and on the subject’s kinesthesis in relation to the built environment. (shrink)

Being in the bodily presence of others facilitates important perceptual, social, and informational advantages. For example, it enables direct access to other subjects’ embodied perspectives, motivates intersubjective engagements, and is involved in the construction of shared experiences and joint actions. These advantages are based on and gained through attending to and with others, i.e. they rely on social attention. It is no surprise, therefore, that a growing body of empirical data indicates that social attention is a special attentional state that (...) involves specific behavioral and neural-cognitive properties. Another important feature of the human capacity for social attention, which is highlighted in this article is that in everyday environments social attention considerably extends and enriches the subject’s attentional field. This idea draws on phenomenological considerations and on findings from cognitive science research that suggest that subjects can attend to more than in the center of their attention and that under normal conditions we can gain more features and more situations when attending to the movements, gestures, and facial expressions of others. The influence of others on the structure of our attentional field is evident from situations where others are absent from our daily surroundings. In these circumstances our attentional field narrows and the world transforms into an unfamiliar and sometimes uncanny place. Intriguingly, the same most likely occurs in social pathologies such as BPD and SAD, in which the bodily presence of others does not generate the emotional response we see in healthy humans even though the subject’s basic capacity for social attention is intact. (shrink)

Living with others is a key factor shaping our urban life. Their bodily presence scaffolds our social world and is involved in the way the built environment appears to us. In this article we highlight the influence of the embodied presence of other human beings on the constitution of a special type of urban architecture — the extraordinary architectural space. Our analysis, which lies at the intersection between architecture, phenomenology and cognitive science, suggests that being in the direct presence of (...) others constitutes this extraordinary architectural space in the sense that it transforms the built setting into a negotiated place and reveals for the subject some of its extraordinary properties. The architectural examples we discuss show that these intersubjective advantages are often embedded in and encouraged by the design of such built objects. (shrink)

Oblak et al. portray perceptual presence as an individually driven reflective operation. I question their account and suggest that PP involves a socially induced pre-reflective awareness of ….