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My own book Places of the Heart (2015) was written to bring to wider attention the fascinating relationships between the design of buildings and interior spaces, and our emotional lives. Mountain, stone, water – building in the stone, building with the stone, into the mountain, building out of the mountain, being inside the mountain – how can the implications and the sensuality of the association of these words be interpreted architecturally?” Peter Zumthor.
Explore the functionality of a building. Look for clues that a building is fulfilling its functions well (or not), such as the amount of ease with which inhabitants seem to find their way through it. The BBC article ‘The Hidden Ways That Architecture Affects How You Feel’ (2017) by Michael Bond provides a great overview of the psychology of urban and architectural design, including interviews with some of the key players in this domain. What can you hear? Spaces ‘speak’ to you mostly by the way that reflected sounds (of footsteps, for example) reverberate and echo. You might try closing your eyes for a few seconds to get a sense of this. What do you notice in the space around you? What features draw your attention? Do fine details draw you in? The contours of the space? Colours?
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Sarah Williams Goldhagen is one of the world’s foremost architecture critics. In her book Welcome to Your World (2017), she turns her attention to the psychology and neuroscience of design, with brilliant effect. This fall, the University of Minnesota Department of English welcomed 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students into its new—and newly revitalized—home in Pillsbury Hall. A nearly two-year renovation by Architecture Advantage transformed 62,500 square feet of obsolete space into contemporary environments designed for multiple modes of learning, alternative workplace, non-laboratory research, and scholarship. Throughout the project, the Architecture Advantage design team balanced rigid adherence to standards for the historic exterior with interior planning focused on flexibility. As an example of this exploratory approach, look at the building called the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. This structure earned a place on many ‘world’s worst architecture’ lists, its appearance derided as ugly and alien. The glass pyramid addition to the Louvre in Paris, designed by I M Pei, was similarly reviled when it was first unveiled in the 1980s. Countless public consultations dealing with proposed new designs encounter protests from stakeholders that a building ‘just doesn’t fit the neighbourhood’. So, at all levels, from giant new urban skyscrapers to more modest new buildings in the suburbs, we are preoccupied with the way a building fits into its setting. The award-winning journalist Emily Anthes’s book The Great Indoors (2020) focuses on the impact that interior environments have on our lives. The book is replete with fascinating examples and important applications of the science of interior design. Another example of a seemingly near-universal principle has to do with the preference for symmetry. Generally, people prefer symmetrical faces on buildings, and this may be related to a biological predisposition to prefer symmetry in human faces or bodies (such symmetry is a somewhat valid indication of health). At first blush, it may not make much sense to think about preferences for faces or bodies as being a factor in architectural preference, yet some research in neuroscience suggests that we have an inbuilt tendency to ‘embody’ the objects that we see, even buildings. You’ve probably noticed, from time to time, that objects can appear to be face-like and that, once seen, the face in such an object is almost impossible to ignore. This phenomenon even has a name: pareidolia.
For this exercise, it would make less sense to learn the ropes in your own home. Unless you live in a large estate or castle, the affordances for movement are probably restricted. Instead, go out into the world and find a place that interests you. A shopping mall, city hall, hotel, museum or any other large architectural space will work. A great way to better appreciate the impact of your surroundings is to experiment with different locations within your home. How do things change when you go from your quiet, happy place to a more dynamic, active location? For many people, the location within the home that sees the most dynamism is the kitchen. What happens when you try the same exercise there? One approach you can use is to go through the spaces of your home systematically and compare them. You could even make an annotated map on paper, jotting down what you sense and how you feel in each room. One measure of the success of a building is surely the enjoyment, awe and appreciation of its design. However, there is an important distinction between the performance of a building as a work of art and its role as a functioning piece of machinery in the fabric of life. A breathtaking library is a thing to admire, but if it is very difficult to find a book or even one’s own way, there is a level at which the building has failed.Move through a building and observe how you react. See how different parts of a building draw you in or push you away. Note any effects of transitions, such as turning a corner or descending a staircase. The designing process includes a variety of elements that are all connected and equally important individually. The way in which the building is approached, the way the light creates ambience, the scale and proportion of the building in relation to its user, and the way it is placed in its context all create a drama to be experienced. Through the use of space, enclosure, and structure, the architecture is explained. Our senses are enhanced by various thresholds and transitions designed to pause us and make us feel the surroundings. The transitions hold an element of curiosity moulded to form platforms, podiums, and spaces for people to observe the building. The narration of the building starts from an ambiguous concept transforming it into a liveable space with required functions and aesthetics.
ArchDaily. 2022. The Therme Vals / Peter Zumthor. [online] Available at:
What about sensations of touch? Even if you aren’t touching anything at the moment, you can have a sense of how something would feel if you were touching it (the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa calls this sense ‘the eyes of the skin’). Look at the textures of the walls and floors. Does it seem as though you are feeling them with your fingers? What does it ‘feel’ like? Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-07-29 15:00:44 Boxid IA40195308 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier What was the building’s approval process like? All buildings need permission and, for larger buildings, the regulatory approval process can be lengthy and complex. Except for very controversial buildings, this can take quite a lot of digging to unearth, but fruitful sources are often the archives of local news media or, if you have a lot of patience and interest, even the minutes of local government meetings.The observation that ‘we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us’, attributed to Winston Churchill, may be threadbare but it is nevertheless profoundly true. The buildings we inhabit help to make us who we are. Yet, in the run of our everyday experiences, it’s easy to become desensitised to their influences. Buildings can seem at times like little more than the containers of human experience, but they are so much more than that. Architecture can function as a vessel of emotion and thought. It can influence the way you feel about yourself and others. As any great art can change who you are, so can a building. It is the art that you live, work and play inside. If you are willing to spend the time to curiously explore buildings both from the inside and the outside, you will be rewarded with a greater sense of the power of place and, with mastery, a more refined ability to use your settings to control your own experience. Allow yourself to move through the space as your desires call to you. Allow yourself to be pushed and pulled by your surroundings. In the mid-20th century, a political movement led by the artist-philosopher Guy Debord advocated exactly this kind of practice, which was called a dérive, or ‘drift’. The legendary Swiss French architect Le Corbusier described what he called the ‘architectural promenade’, which is a similar idea for interiors. He suggested that interiors have itineraries, which are brought to life by our movements as we traverse a space. More generally, architects are preoccupied with transitions – those locations in a building where, as we walk, a surprising vista is suddenly unveiled. Think of the effect of descending a grand staircase or turning a corner to discover an unexpectedly large vault of space, which can cause changes of posture and movement with an attendant effect on our senses, a kind of awakening.
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