ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the possibility of effects of form on the ways we live in urban space and we appropriate it bodily, through our gestures and actions with others. The possibility that architecture might have effects beyond the visual leads to a search for new connections between it and our experiences. The idea that architecture as a built object might be able to produce effects is less discussed than it should be in architectural theory and urban studies – particularly in contexts of the progressive replacement of the urban fabric and reduced diversity of buildings, with implications that are potentially very serious. Fixation on the aesthetic dimension of architecture always brings us back to the surface of the form, and imposes a kind of eternal return to visuality and the 'compositional' as merely visual composition. This fixation ties the individual to the architectural object by a single thread: the rarefied thread of vision.
