ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some critical thoughts on the effectiveness of researching affect through architectural practices, processes, and projects. It asks the questions: Where is affect at its most affective? Is affect at its most affective in the particular places within the architectural explorations presented, where the world opens up as excessive vitality? Or is it a gift without required return? That is: is affect most valuable when not personalised or objectified as a problem of knowledge or practice reduced to a manipulable singularity for use by us humans, a path that loses sight of its constant becoming? The chapter offers a discussion on the potential to take affect into real-world situations and particularly attends to the usefulness of affect to be applied to the field of architectural practice by drawing both architectural and theoretical relations between architecture, affect and architectural practice together. Concurrently, it argues how architecture, and particularly architectural practice as active, temporal, embodied, and material processes, provides fertile ground for developing theories of affect. Extending these discussions, the chapter concludes by presenting practices as rich research platforms for manipulating and exploring affective registers and responses through the design and production of architectural becomings.
