Constructing Performativity: Architecture from the Users’ Point of View

What matters about architecture, as an immersive and usable art, is not only how buildings are designed by architects but also how people perform or carry out activities in and around them, and the extent to which architecture itself performs or produces meaningful effects on users. This panel analyzes how people participate in an extended performative dialogue with architecture, in three examples from late medieval Italy, twelfth-century China, and nineteenth-century France.