Embodied Spatial Memory as Intangible Heritage: Cross-Cultural Encounters with Traditional Built Environments

Intangible heritage is commonly associated with ritual, craft, performance, and social practice, while embodied ways of sensing, inhabiting, and interpreting built environments remain less explicitly examined within heritage discourse. Existing phenomenological approaches to architecture have long emphasised that spatial perception is shaped through lived bodily experience and culturally internalised forms of spatial memory. However, less attention has been given to how encounters with unfamiliar cultural environments may evoke such embodied spatial memory that is critically perceptible and open to reflection. This paper explores how cross-cultural encounters with traditional built environments can activate awareness of culturally embodied modes of spatial perception through experiences and recognition of spatial differences. The study develops a reflective comparative methodology grounded in phenomenological observation and lived spatial experience within traditional courtyard environments as experiential fields through which embodied spatial memory becomes perceptible and available for analysis. Rather than treating such moments of bodily recognition and perceptual dissonance as personal anecdote, the paper approaches them as moments through which culturally internalised forms of spatial understanding become perceptible and available for analysis. Using Iranian and Chinese courtyard spaces as comparative cases, the study examines how architectural conditions such as thresholds, enclosure, proportion, and movement patterns contribute to culturally specific modes of inhabiting and perceiving space. Through this comparative reading, the paper argues that encounters with spatially unfamiliar built environments can activate critical awareness of embodied spatial memory, revealing how intangible heritage is bodily transmitted, experienced, and reinterpreted through spatial encounter.