How can one speak of the sensory and affective qualities of experiencing an object within the built environment? Further, is there a language that attempts to articulate such qualities in the design process? What are the techniques and technologies of evoking particular felt qualities, or managing certain sensibilities? And importantly, how can we answer these questions without recourse to a standardised phenomenological terminology that returns us continually to humanistic territory? In terms of the engineering of material-spatial experience, what terminology or lexicon ‘fits’, has purchase? After briefly revisiting the phenomenological architectural literature, I seek to explore a more abstract architectural sensorium, initially through Massumi’s ‘biograms’, and discuss some of the limitations in the literature for speaking about the somatic (bodily) senses within spatial encounters, including kinaesthesia, proprioception, and the vestibular sense.

Furthermore, new qualitative methodological approaches are emerging that foreground embodiment through attention to these corporeal performances. Crang highlights the dearth of truly “haptic knowledges” (2003:499), of learning through the immediacy of bodily responses and situations. Insofar as methodological approaches engage with the senses they remain largely ocularcentric or visually-based (e.g. Rose 2000). Similarly, while Imrie (2003) has explored conceptions of the human body within the architectural design stage, few have studied how embodied responses are conceptualised and anticipated by users or practitioners alike. Attempting to rethink the confluence of material design, corporeality, affects and sensations in the experience of a building entails developing haptic knowledges in literally ‘concrete’ contexts. Theoretical and empirical axes will be drawn together by means of a filmic walkthrough of a building in downtown Sydney.