ABSTRACT
‘Affect’ has appeared as a builder of bridges that connect otherwise seemingly incompatible scholarship domains. Affect has challenged and continues to challenge textual and representational-based research, offering, as geographer Hayden Lorimer observes, exciting new ways to understand ‘our self-evidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multi-sensual worlds.’ In contrast to the transient, indeterminable nature of affect as the unexpected, and the multiplicity of the unstructured bodies it produces, architecture’s purpose has often implied a sense of permanence and stability, tolerating only a human order that is bounded and predictable, ignoring the vulnerable and contingent. In countering such a position, the chapter turns to affect and contends that through affect, bodies, human and non-human, interpenetrate space and unite with other bodies through virtual relations, that is, through their potentialities. The chapter begins by introducing the Spinoza-Nietzsche-Guattarian-Deleuzian historical lineage of affect before providing a concise discussion on how the affective discourse may be extended to examine the creative architectural practice and the design process itself. It argues not only how the incorporation of affect is a significant element in the design of spaces for emergent practices of architecture, but also, and more importantly, how architectural practice may extend theories of affect.
