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Pallasmaa understands architecture as an interior (human subjective) phenomenon in which experience is an action of everyday life, such as the act of movement when entering a building or the act of looking through a window. These experiences as verbs are the interaction of the engaged occupant with a dynamic world, which in turn provides the basis for a psychological response and mental construction by which one can know both Nature and the nature of being human. Previous mental concepts are considered unnecessary, as are preexisting interpretive systems. Pallasmaa's explication of architectural experience reports how building-in-environment occurs from the view within the body-mind and through the senses of a keen life-long designer and multi-sensory monitor of built environments. He presents, not what a third-person scientific observer sees of an inhabitant's first-person perception, but rather what architecture looks like from the inside first-person view of the first-person human interior.

Thermal Vals Spa is designed from the phenomenological approach that considers the first-person engagement of bathers, the baths exemplify an architecture of multiple senses (Frearson 2016). As the architect explains, "Architecture is experienced by laymen without thinking....I want an emotional reaction (Zumthor 2013).

Experience as neurobiologic response

Neuroscientists and architects have become interested in each other's fields, as evidenced by The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, established in 2003. The goal of this interest is to understand how the brain perceives architecture and conversely, how architecture can be designed to generate particular positive responses. John Eberhard (2009), founding president of the Academy, believes that "the key to understanding how our brains enable our minds to experience architectural settings is consciousness". Although neuroscience does not understand exactly what consciousness is, it quests to scientifically uncover how consciousness emerges from the interactions of sensory systems, the brain, the human body and the world humans inhabit, especially the world of architectural space and its qualities.

For neuroscientists, emotion is fundamental to understanding how humans experience architecture. They distinguish emotion as a biological response to a stimulus, something that is precognitive and immediate, while feeling comes later and invokes cognition. Harry Mallgrave (2013), professor of architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology, frames this as a sequential process in which building experience is initially not conscious or cognitive; rather, it originates with the physical body and its "physiological (emotional) responses to the environment."

Pavilion of the Nordic Nations at the Venice Biennale 1962 is one of architect Sverre Fehn's well-known early works. His approach is considered a prime example of an experience-driven approach (Lindman 2016).

Neuroscience seeks to explain the acknowledged effects of buildings like the Nordic Pavilion on their occupants' body-minds. Neuroscientist Antonio Demasio (2010), often referenced by other architectural writers, describes feelings as "composite perceptions of what happens when the body is emoting". In the brain stem and subcortical brain areas, sensory data is processed to generate felt body states. The idea is that, in response to the environment,