Weather as medium: exploring bodily experience in the heritage space under light, air and temperature conditions

Abstract

This article engages with the weather as medium, and focuses on lived experience in the affective, embodied, and, most importantly, weathered space of the Forbidden City, Beijing. The term ‘weather as medium’ focuses on the interrelationship between the weather, physical body, and process of translation, whereby the (in)capacity of the body reflects its overall experience towards the cultural and weathered space. Specifically, the article aims to explore how ethnographic attention to the differently abled body can intervene in normative and dominant narrations of heritage spaces. Bringing qualities of weather and light to the foreground in narrations of heritage space, this article sheds new light on tactility in architectural phenomenology by situating the significance of the non-normative insight of the differently abled body as a form of affective engagement. The study creates a new critical framework based on multiplicity, bringing together embodiment, (dis)ability, and the mediation of weather. Under this framework, there is a correlation between awareness of the cultural identities of the body and its positioning in the weathered heritage environment. The co-produced atmosphere, which characterises the built space, is (dis)ability specific in terms of haptic experience involving differently abled bodies realising and experiencing themselves in multiplicity.