145iour, and find ourselves compelled to a performative response.
Architecture can communicate gesturally in ways that are
analogous with our understanding of gesture as expressive
bodily movement. When we attribute communicative behav-
iour to an architectural gesture, it follows that a building is
capable of eliciting comprehension of that gesture, and pos-
sibly an adequate response through our own actions as well.
The architectural gesture induces us to follow a dynamic
impulse through which a constructive-spatial situation pre-
scribes a movement or recommends a posture. Examples of
the impact of architectural gestures are panorama windows,
which encourage the gaze to sweep across, rows of supports
that lead us along, or the impulse to hold ourselves more erect
when stepping from a lower to a higher section of a space.
The gestural power of such configurations gains in force the
more incisively they are perceived as gestalts, and the more
they address our various senses and aim towards specific
moods. An architectural gesture becomes so determinative
that it dominates the articulation and spatial structure of an
entire building. In many cases, an autonomous gesture that
is foundational for the design as a whole replaces traditional
forms of order in architectural Modernism, for example in the
form of extended rhythmic sequences or dynamically curved
volumes.
Generally speaking, the gesture is suggestive of experi-
ential possibilities that are realized only in the actual imagi-
native reconstruction and performance of a gesturally ori-
ented form. Often, we do not perceive gestural suggestions
of movement in exclusively visual terms, but only once we
have performed the movements – whether real or virtual –
that seem to have been prescribed by a given spatial situation.
The result is an entanglement between perceptions of archi-
tectural gesture and our responses to them in such a way that
the built gestalt of the architecture and the occupants’ perfor-
mative > figures of movement enter into a reciprocal relation-
ship, one that ultimately constitutes the gesture’s essence. At