This article introduces the special issue — ‘Embodiment and Meaning-making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Heritage Architecture’ — which aims to incite a dialogue across different disciplinary approaches to understanding how heritage architecture is experienced, registered, and produced. Here, heritage architecture is investigated by taking an interdisciplinary lens to questions of meaning-making, place, memory, and culture. The article explores how these are shaped at the intersection of spatial design, human embodiment, and modes of cultural production. First, it situates the special issue’s theme by introducing the notions of affect, atmosphere, embodiment, affordances, and politics of meaning-making. This positioning comes through an overview of the three influential yet still separate strands of scholarship — affective and more-than-representational approaches to heritage; the politics and agency in meaning-making in places of memory; and the emerging embodied and experiential turn in architectural scholarship driven by the knowledge from embodied cognitive science. The second part outlines the special issue contributions and explores the common threads in how collected papers have addressed the relationship between embodiment, meaning-making, and political agency in the context of heritage architecture. Finally, in this introductory article, we discuss the emerging perspectives and research agenda for interdisciplinary investigations on how heritage architecture is produced, registered, and experienced.

Two events marked the turn of the millennium in what remained of former Socialist Yugoslavia: the NATO bombing of Serbia, and to a smaller extent Montenegro, in 1999 and the fall of Slobodan Milošević’s regime in 2000. This was the infamous epilogue of the turbulent 1990s, a decade of successive violent conflicts that torn the federal state apart, destroyed its heterogeneous culture, divided its territory along ethnic borders, and definitively rejected socialism to embrace an unhinged variant of neoliberal capitalism. Serbia played a complex role in those events, both as an aggressor accused and convicted for war crimes, and as the target of an asymmetric conflict with NATO that led to the separation of its southern province of Kosovo, and left deep scars in its urban environment. The effort to reconstruct these damaged buildings, therefore, poses deeper questions about understanding the past, facing unpleasant truths, and setting the course for an uncertain future. This article will illuminate those multifarious processes by examining the role of media propaganda and public dialogue in the reconstruction of two structures in Belgrade that were damaged during the 1999 NATO bombing. Both buildings, the Avala Tower and the television headquarters on Aberdareva Street, were in use by the Radio Television of Serbia (RTS). In a fragmented society that is still struggling to make sense of these difficult issues, I argue that state-controlled media has a decisive influence on steering public debate, creating the false image of social consensus, and weighing in on architectural design, while downplaying the role of architects.

During the past five decades, the neoliberal market economy has become one of the most influential forces in the process of spatial production, transforming cities worldwide by subjecting them to the rationale of global finance. In a world where religions and ideologies continue to lose their influence, financial supremacy has turned into an adequate substitute. The global nature and overarching impact of neoliberalism has made it the research focus of a vast cohort of urban and architectural scholars, historians, theoreticians, geographers, and economists, leading to a significant body of literature that discusses the relationship between the market economy and the built environment on all scales. This “globality” of neoliberalism is recently being disputed by its widely-accepted depiction as a western phenomenon with varied local implementations. Post-socialist neoliberalism, we argue, is not an isolated occurrence but rather an extreme case that accentuates the distinct features of neoliberal spatial transformations, making its characteristics more evident and traceable. This thematic issue challenges the notion of neoliberalism as solely a post-Fordist Keynesian phenomenon, proposing a new theoretical framework that redefines the neoliberalization of the built environment as a global spectacle with diverse, yet analogous, localized expressions across various spatial scales.

This editorial is an introduction to the issue of Footprint 34, ‘Narrating Shared Futures’. The issue is dedicated to a transdisciplinary encounter between literature and cultural heritage, namely, here we seek to understand how literature can help us unpack complex meanings of places of heritage, and use that knowledge to imagine, design and produce shared and inclusive futures. We elaborate on three notions that appear in the title of the issue – ‘narrating’, ‘shared’ and ‘futures’ – and then we explain how each of the articles featured in this volume contributes to the proposed framing. We conclude with a brief discussion of ways in which the past, present and future are constantly being made in-the-now through both literary and design techniques.

This visual essay features students’ projects from the MSc2 design studio ‘Transdiciplinary Encounters: Narrating Shared Futures’ offered at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture in Spring of 2022, which served as an inspiration for this issue of Footprint. Designed and taught by the issue editors, Aleksandar Staničić and Angeliki Sioli, the course combined cultural heritage and literary narratives to ask students: How can places of memory be rethought using literary techniques, so that they provide the ground for new meanings to emerge and get shared across different cultures? Seven visionary architectural projects featured in this essay, offered their responses to this pertinent question that is fundamental for narrating, imagining and, ultimately, creating shared futures.

In this interview article, we present a unique marriage of architecture heritage design and fundamental philosophy exemplified in the built works by Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances (RAAAF), a studio that works at the intersection of visual art, experimental architecture, and philosophy based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The conversation with Prix de Rome laureate Ronald Rietveld and Socrates Professor in Philosophy Erik Rietveld took place during the field visit to three RAAAF’s projects — Bunker 599 (2013), Deltawerk // (2018), and Still Life (2019) — where we examine the potential of affordance-based approach for rethinking and creating built heritage as (re)activation of past, present, and future.