Architectural embodiment in nature-culture heritage assemblages

Architectural embodiment in nature-culture heritage assemblages<br/>Author: Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen, [email protected]<br/><br/>The paper addresses the embodiment and embeddedness of architecture in nature-culture heritage assemblages. While ecological awareness and relationality between humans and other life and species are prevalent today, there is still a need for developing insight into the roles and capacities of architectural designs intended to embody environmental initiatives towards a shared sustainable development. These relational dimensions of architecture are connected to current developments within the architectural humanities that are influenced by broader philosophical and cultural theoretical turns towards new materialisms and posthumanism, which focus on exploring affective, material, and disciplinary encounters, as well as transversal becoming. <br/> The abilities to affect and being affected defines a body, whether human, animal, or of another mode of relation (e.g. Deleuze: 1988). In this Deleuzian/Spinozist understanding, a body is defined by intensities, desires and affects. As described by Rosi Braidotti, an assemblage is, accordingly, characterised by the relations and exchanges that flow across and displace binaries. The paper takes inspiration from these lines of thought and presents an analysis of two cases of nature-culture heritage architecture in the Netherlands and Denmark (Dorte Mandrup Arch.). The study raises the question of how the architecture of these two buildings become active in engaging the public in the protection of the Wadden Sea World Heritage area. <br/> The paper considers architecture and architectural becoming as part of heterogenous assemblages and shows how landscape architecture, the building architecture, and the interior exhibition design have the potential of creating new transdisciplinary modes of expression or cultural narratives with local communities and actors, volunteers, natural scientists, the tide, the dikes, seals and birds. The paper is an invitation to critically consider how architecture affects and is affected in the complex relationality of heritage assemblages when it becomes a mediator of nature-culture relations and hierarchies, as well as of discourses and desires.<br/>