More-than Mumbo-Jumbo
When we experience architecture, something profound happens that resists easy description. We might photograph a building, sketch its plan, or write about its historical significance - but none of these representations fully capture the experience of being there.
The term “more-than” emerges from cultural geography and non-representational theory, particularly through the work of Nigel Thrift, Hayden Lorimer, and Tim Ingold. It signals a shift away from approaches that treat the world primarily as text to be read, symbol to be decoded, or representation to be interpreted. Instead, it engages with the dynamic, transient, and often unpredictable aspects of lived experience - the emotions, sensations, and everyday practices that slip through the nets of conventional analysis. As Lorimer described it, this approach attends to
“how life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions.”
For architecture, this matters profoundly. We don’t experience buildings through our eyes alone, passively receiving visual information like a camera. Rather, we experience space through the entangled complexity of brain, body, and environment - each touching and being touched (moved, affected) by the other. Your body orients itself within a room, your nervous system responds to its acoustic properties, your prior experiences colour your emotional response, whilst the materiality of the space simultaneously shapes what actions feel possible or impossible. None of these elements operate independently; they’re caught up in a continuous and immiscible ebb and flow of affective atmospheres.
This “more-than” perspective aligns closely with phenomenology’s emphasis on embodied experience, but pushes further. It acknowledges non-human actors - the agency of materials themselves, the influence of atmospheric conditions, and increasingly, the role of smart technologies and AI in shaping our spatial encounters. It recognises that architecture possesses its own forms of agency: a weathered façade that bears the traces of time, a doorway whose proportions subtly encourage or discourage passage, an atmosphere that emerges from the complex interplay of light, sound, temperature, and materiality. These aren’t merely passive backdrops to human action but active participants in the ongoing constitution of experience.
In an age where we can generate architectural imagery with AI in seconds, where extended reality (XR) technologies blur the boundaries between physical and digital space, and where our understanding of cognition itself is being radically revised through 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) frameworks, the “more-than” approach offers a way to grapple with architecture’s contemporary condition. It asks us to attend to what exceeds representation even as we’re surrounded by ever more sophisticated forms of representation.
This is the intellectual territory More-than a Feeling explores: not abandoning rigorous analysis, but expanding it to encompass the full complexity of how we inhabit, perceive, and are shaped by the spaces around us. It’s an approach that feels urgent precisely because contemporary architecture - and contemporary life - increasingly demands it.