Museum architectures for embodied experience

In recent years, museums have become increasingly engaged with embodied, sensory and emotive forms of knowledge, with personal experience paramount. The question addressed by this paper is: how does the experiential and ‘sensory turn’ in displays affect museum space? Against the theoretical background of ‘embodied understanding’ and its relation to museums, and based on in-situ study, this paper analyses museum settings where meaning lies in the lived experience of visitors. This approach brings to light the common dominance of spaces that emphasize enclosure, invite occupation rather than movement, and focus perception. The paper shows first how these spaces offer spatial affordances for the juxtaposition of discrete immersive experiences. It then studies how they are used as modes of nonverbal communication, together with the sensory qualities of architecture and imaginative implementation of technologies, to create an embodied, affective narrative. These phenomena suggest that the ‘sensory turn’ is stimulating developments in the spatial typology of museums.