This section brings together a selection of projects that understand architecture, landscape, and the city as situated, relational, and political practices. Rather than focusing primarily on the finished object, these projects foreground the processes, actors, temporalities, and multispecies relationships that sustain urban life. The projects presented here engage directly with the conceptual framework of the Decentered City: Multispecies Design by questioning the anthropocentric paradigms that have historically shaped the production of space while also exploring alternative forms of cohabitation among humans, other species, and natural systems.
This article proposes decentered, multispecies urban design as an ethical, project-based response to the ecological crisis. It argues that urban disciplines must redistribute agency and question human centrality, understanding the city as a rhizomatic system: open, non-hierarchical, and interdependent, shaped by relations between humans and non-humans. The multispecies approach introduces a political and material dimension that recognizes non-humans and infrastructures as agents, while incorporating uncertainty as a structural condition of design. Based on a curated atlas of more than one hundred interventions across the Global South—primarily in Bogotá and Mexico City—the analysis reveals a field in transition, marked by advances in social and multidisciplinary integration, but also by limitations in infrastructural coordination and a regulatory framework that remains insufficient.
This paper examines the role of Cenostigma pluviosum (locally known in Medellín as acacia amarilla, or yellow acacia) as a non-human agent in the production of urban space in the Provenza neighborhood of Medellín. Drawing on an analysis of its establishment, the article explores how this species participates in an assemblage that brings together ecological, affective, normative, and technological processes. It concludes that, although the yellow acacia has fostered urban regimes of interspecies cohabitation, the tourism-driven commercial model promoted by the District threatens its persistence, thereby revealing tensions between plant agency, habitat conservation, and extractive economies in urban Global South contexts.
This article examines the Indigenous Nasa-Páez tull in Toribío, Cauca, as a model of multispecies and decolonial architectural design. Drawing on situated ethnographic methodologies, including interviews with community leaders and educators and participant observation, it studies the communal tull as an agricultural, architectural, symbolic, and ontological space that articulates memory, spirituality, and ecosystem benefits. The findings show that the tull integrates practices of care and ecological justice and offers a replicable model for regenerative design in the Global South. The article concludes that the tull can guide multispecies architectures by placing reciprocity and territorial pedagogy at the center.
Spaces designed for a single individual have historically embodied introspection, privacy, and inner dialogue. This article examines how such spaces have gradually lost relevance within contemporary architecture, even as they have been the subject of deeper inquiry in the field of art. The abrupt disappearance of telephone booths, for example, cannot be explained solely by the rise of mobile telephony; with their decline, a genealogy of spaces etymologically linked to the notion of the booth as an individual refuge also fades. The analysis presented in this article considers how the configuration of such proximate environments continues to shape the individual's sensory experience and thus retains significance today, positioning proxemics as one of the most productive and meaningful areas for contemporary architectural development.
The body, as the primary site of dwelling, is a fabric in which the different dimensions of human experience converge: the organic (postures), the biomechanical (movements), and the symbolic (gestures). Perception, acting as a mediator, unites these layers and gives them meaning. From a hermeneutic perspective, architecture emerges as a dynamic and meaningful extension of corporeality—distinct from the body itself—where postures, movements, and gestures both reflect and reshape the relationship between space and time. Habitability, beyond the mere act of dwelling, is an interpretive and transformative process: the inhabitant and their environment coexist, continually redefining one another, and both projecting mean-ing. This approach invites reflection on corporeality and habitability, situating them at the core of spatiotemporal creation, where they become both language and action.
This article explores the continuity between phenomenology and neuroarchitecture, two emerging disciplines that place the body at the center of spatial experience. It analyzes how perception, gesture, and atmosphere shape modes of inhabiting that transcend purely functional or technical dimensions. Architecture is understood as an embodied experience in which air, matter, and movement intertwine across aesthetic, ethical, and existential registers. Neuroscience offers tools to assess the impact of space on individuals without abandoning the qualitative richness of the phenomenological tradition. Sensitivity and scientific evidence are integrated to guide design toward more humane, conscious, and ethically responsible environments.
This section of the journal presents a selection of six projects that go beyond theoretical analysis to position the body, perception, and movement as core principles of the design process. Through a comparative reading of proposals at various scales—from fragrance design to territorial interventions—the collection explores how design practice functions as a process of active research. The works presented demonstrate how the interaction among these three concepts not only qualifies space, but redefines the ways we inhabit it, turning movement and sensory experience into essential tools for the creation of architectural memory and meaning.
This article examines the relationship between body, architecture, and cinematic narrative in domestic space, using an interdisciplinary approach that combines bodily phenomenology, atmospheric analysis, and cinema as an interpretive tool. Through microgestural analysis and spatiotemporal cartography of the films Roma (Cuarón 2018) and Luz silenciosa (Reygadas 2007), specific bodily dynamics are identified that configure domestic territories and dwelling choreographies. The findings establish architectural design criteria grounded in the embodied experience of dwelling and propose cinematographic analysis methodologies applicable to contemporary design.
Between 1949 and 1952, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Marcel Duchamp were photographed, respectively, drawing in the air with a small electric light, painting from all sides of a canvas, and descending a flight of stairs. These photographic records reveal a capacity of expression through bodily movement that corresponds directly to artistic action. In 1977, twenty-five years later, Gordon Matta-Clark was filmed in a large-scale intervention, creating a three-dimensional ladder within which new possibilities of spatial modification could be explored. This review and comparison of these experiments demonstrates how the perception and interaction of body, space, and architecture converged to open new avenues for architectural transformation.
This article presents a research-creation process that explores the intersection of architecture and contemporary dance through the architectural artifacts Choreographic Labyrinth and Exicosahedron, placing kinesthetic experience as its core. This perspective engages both the tangible and intangible dimensions of design, with the body serving as the primary medium of exploration and formal expression. Grounded in a conceptual framework and an experimental methodology—including drawing, choreography, model-making, and performative instruments—the geometries and materialization of the artifacts are analyzed, composed, constructed, and interpreted as an interactive, temporary architecture that fosters bodily and spatial awareness.
The Weather Project is the installation that catapulted Olafur Eliasson to international recognition and stands as a paradigmatic example of the relationship between architecture and contemporary art. This study examines the installation as a device for perceptual transformation, analyzing recurrent variables in contemporary immersive installations such as affect, simulacra, atmospheres, scripts, and anthropocentrism. It argues that visitors' behavior—far from being autonomous—is induced by a lighting scenography that alters the environment and guides bodily movement. The methodology combines critical theory, visual analysis, and planimetric development to demonstrate how hyperreal experiences and atmospheres are produced to exert control over sensory experience.
This paper argues for the importance of somatic embodiment in architecture and presents a workshop protocol employed at the 2024 summer school Moving Boundaries: Architecture and the Human Sciences in Stockholm. The workshop introduced somatic practices for architects and designers, and we share the protocol as a resource for educators and practitioners. Positive participant feedback highlights the value of teaching somatic methods in design, supporting the need for further research on integrating body awareness, movement, and well-being into architectural pedagogy and practices.
This article examines the relationship between body, architecture, and cinematic narrative in domestic space, using an interdisciplinary approach that combines bodily phenomenology, atmospheric analysis, and cinema as an interpretive tool. Through microgestural analysis and spatiotemporal cartography of the films Roma (Cuar & oacute;n 2018) and Luz silenciosa (Reygadas 2007), specific bodily dynamics are identified that configure domestic territories and dwelling choreographies. The findings establish architectural design criteria grounded in the embodied experience of dwelling and propose cinematographic analysis methodologies applicable to contemporary design.
This article presents a research-creation process that explores the intersection of architecture and contemporary dance through the architectural artifacts Choreographic Labyrinth and Exicosahedron, placing kinesthetic experience as its core. This perspective engages both the tangible and intangible dimensions of design, with the body serving as the primary medium of exploration and formal expression. Grounded in a conceptual framework and an experimental methodology -including drawing, choreography, model-making, and performative instruments -the geometries and materialization of the artifacts are analyzed, composed, constructed, and interpreted as an interactive, temporary architecture that fosters bodily and spatial awareness.
The Weather Project is the installation that catapulted Olafur Elias-son to international recognition and stands as a paradigmatic example of the relationship between architecture and contemporary art. This study examines the installation as a device for perceptual trans-formation, analyzing recurrent variables in contemporary immersive installations such as affect, simulacra, atmospheres, scripts, and anthropocentrism. It argues that visitors' behavior -far from being autonomous-is induced by a lighting scenography that alters the environment and guides bodily movement. The methodology combines critical theory, visual analysis, and planimetric development to demonstrate how hyperreal experiences and atmospheres are produced to exert control over sensory experience.
This article explores the continuity between phenomenology and neuroarchitecture, two emerging disciplines that place the body at the center of spatial experience. It analyzes how perception, gesture, and atmosphere shape modes of inhabiting that transcend purely functional or technical dimensions. Architecture is understood as an embodied experience in which air, matter, and movement intertwine across aesthetic, ethical, and existential registers. Neuroscience offers tools to assess the impact of space on individuals without abandoning the qualitative richness of the phenomenological tradition. Sensitivity and scientific evidence are integrated to guide design toward more humane, conscious, and ethically responsible environments.
