Architecture and Emotion

What is the relationship between architecture and emotions? The answer may lie in Winston Churchill’s famous 1943 statement: “we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” But there is more to this relationship than this statement suggests. Researchers who seek to examine this relationship now have access to a large body of scholarship that includes phenomenology, affect theory, emotional geography, and atmospheric experience. The key contribution of this body of scholarship lies in its stress on embodiment and “lived space” of architecture, rather than the physical space. But they largely universalize the body and see the relationship between architecture and emotions through various nature/culture, culture/biology, and reason/emotion divides. They also treat emotions as just another category of (historical) analysis. Histories of emotions (and the senses) have been problematizing these reductive views and ways of analysis since the 1980s. They operate on two main claims: emotions both make history and have history. The word “emotion” itself is a product of the nineteenth century, before which there were “appetites,” “passions,” “affections,” or “sentiments.” These two claims have led to the groundbreaking observation that the relationship between architecture and emotions is not given once and for all; this relationship changes over time and the same building can evoke different emotions in diverse people depending on their gender, age, occupation, ethnicity, previous experiences, and so on. This observation has precedence in the work of feminist scholars of the city, interested in geographies of fear. As early as the 1990s, these scholars emphasized people’s diverse and changing experiences of urban environments. Historians of emotions have expanded upon this scholarship through stressing the temporal and cultural dimensions of emotions, the interrelation between emotions and the senses, and the relationship between architecture and emotions as being biocultural, rather than directional. They endeavor to make the exploration of uncertainties and “feeling differently” an important part of the research practice. It is no longer acceptable to make distinctions between good or bad architecture, between cause and effect, or to argue that we can re-experience the past. The relationship between architecture and emotions is diverse, plural, changing, and laden with feelings of otherwise. An exploration of this changing and unstable relationship should become a scholarly practice that will help us learn more about the buildings as well as the societies they were built in and lived through.