Architecture is never merely shelter or structure. It is a tool that changes how people feel, think, and behave in a space. Contemporary research shows that built environments reliably evoke measurable patterns linked to well-being, such as admiration, consistency, and home-like warmth. Treating emotions as a primary design concern does not make architecture emotional; it clarifies its social value and ethical importance.
Tishk Barzanji
Understanding Emotion and Architecture
A building is an emotional interface between bodies, materials, light, sound, and movement. This field now draws on environmental psychology and neuroaesthetics, which map how spatial qualities shape experience. Classical theory had already implied this role. Vitruvius defined architecture as strength, utility, and beauty; this triad places experiential pleasure alongside structure and function. Today, pleasure can be interpreted as an emotionally readable space.
Designers’ experimental vocabulary is constantly expanding. Research identifies recurring experiential dimensions in both natural and artificial environments. Enchantment, attention, and discovery are related to consistency, legibility, and order; while home warmth is related to comfort and belonging. These dimensions are linked to value and show partial differences between experts and non-experts. This helps explain why architects and the public sometimes perceive spaces differently.
Identifying Emotional Responses in Spatial Experiences
The fundamental dimensions of feeling at home
Large-scale studies suggest three robust categories that regulate daily responses to the environment. They encompass elements such as enchantment, diversity, expectations, and details. They encompass consistency, clarity, rhythm, and comprehensible order. They encompass warmth, texture, and clues that care has been taken. Because they translate subjective conversations into common criteria, they are useful perspectives for briefing and post-use evaluation.
From features to outcomes
Emotional responses alter navigation, social behavior, and memory. The preference for curved contours over sharp ones is observed in architecture and objects; this suggests a connection with approach tendencies, although behavioral outcomes vary depending on context. A 2013 PNAS study extended the effects of curvature to rooms and corridors; subsequent syntheses reported mixed results for approach decisions, cautioning against uniform rules. Use curvature as a parameter within a broader emotional strategy.
Translation exercise
When the lobby is read consistently, arrival stress decreases. When the clinical waiting area inspires mild admiration, perceived waiting times are reduced. When student accommodations reflect home warmth through acoustics and tactility, residents report higher feelings of belonging. These are not style suggestions, but outcome frameworks supported by existing evidence.
Neuroscience and Emotional Architecture
The value added by the brain
Neuroaesthetic research links architectural features to reward and emotion-related networks. Curvature and spaciousness regulate activity in regions associated with valuation and emotion, lending biological plausibility to the experiential reports designers hear from users. This does not eliminate judgment, but provides a basis for it.
Institutions and methods
The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture is accelerating dialogue between researchers and practitioners. The studies encompass laboratory imaging, field experiments, and wearable measurements. Portable EEG and similar tools have begun to capture emotional fluctuations on actual routes and in public spaces. This allows design teams to test their hypotheses before committing to costly details.
Boundaries that deserve respect
The brain is not a template. Expertise matters, culture matters, and purpose matters. Research shows that trained designers sometimes respond differently than non-professionals, so it is necessary to include both groups in the process. Neuroscience has its strongest impact when it enriches the designer’s iterative prototyping and post-use learning process, not when it replaces it.
Historical Perspectives on Emotions in Design
From pleasure to ethics
Vitruvius legitimized emotion as a design goal by placing pleasure on the same level as durability and functionality. Nineteenth-century critics such as John Ruskin associated beauty with moral life and memory, arguing that buildings carry collective values. This historical connection constantly reminds us that emotional weight is not a luxury element but a public attribute.
Human scale and measurement
Le Corbusier’s Modulor sought harmonious proportions based on the human body; it was a program designed to make space comprehensible and responsive to movement. Taking a different approach, Alvar Aalto humanized institutions such as sanatoriums and libraries by combining modern architecture with organic form, light, and the tactility of materials. Both projects treat emotion as a function of scale, rhythm, and the sense of touch.
Modern and contemporary
Although early modernism sometimes restricted expression, debates in the late twentieth century brought atmosphere and meaning back to the forefront. This shift laid the foundation for today’s evidence-based yet sensory practices, where performance criteria and emotional intent are developed together rather than balanced against each other.
Phenomenology, Atmosphere, and Emotion
Atmosphere as a design goal
Peter Zumthor defines atmosphere as the unique intensity and feel of a space created by the combination of materials, light, sound, and details. Atmosphere is not decoration; it is a holistic effect that people feel immediately upon entering. Naming it allows design teams to focus on what ultimately reaches the user.
Haptics and the whole body
Juhani Pallasmaa argues that architecture is perceived not only with the eyes, but also with the skin, muscles, and ears. Texture, temperature, echo, and smell are imprinted on the memory more deeply than images. This expands the palette of emotions beyond form and facade to the harmony of touch and time.
The aesthetics of perceived spaces
Philosopher Gernot Böhme develops atmosphere as a central category of aesthetics, as an intermediate category connecting the subject with the world. In practice, this suggests working with fields and gradients rather than objects: light levels, acoustic envelopes, air movement, and transitions that nurture particular moods. Phenomenology reframes detail as an emotion generator.
How Do Emotions Influence Design Decisions?
Form, Proportion, and Geometric Language
Curves, angles, and symmetry do more than just create a silhouette. They can evoke quick, emotional responses in the viewer, making a space feel inviting or tense. While neuroimaging studies show that curved rooms generally elicit higher beauty scores and distinct visual-cortical responses, long-established findings associate symmetry with aesthetic judgment. These effects are not universal rules, but they explain why plan geometry and height grammar are felt before they are analyzed.
Proportional systems transform cultural ideals into a measurable order. From Vitruvius’s durable triad to Le Corbusier’s Modulor, architects have used human references and numbers to set rhythm, scale, and intervals. Modulor aligned a 1.80-meter figure and the golden ratio to a repeatable scale of dimensions. This reminds us that many proportional theories are aesthetic arguments in numerical form. They should be read not as fixed laws, but as guiding lenses.
Spatial configuration shapes how people move and gather, which in turn determines how a space is perceived. Studies of spatial syntax show that the connections and depth relationships in plans are related to patterns of occupation and encounter. Form has an emotional function not only through its appearance but also through how it organizes touch, perspective, and pause.
Importance, Texture, and Tactility
Architecture is perceived with the whole body. Pallasmaa’s tactile argument is that texture, warmth, and surface details directly affect memory and mood. A wall bearing the traces of time through wear and irregularities feels different from a perfectly smooth surface, even if both are visually similar.
The hand knows this difference, and so does the nervous system.
Physiological studies support the intuitive appeal of natural materials. Touching unprocessed wood can calm frontal lobe activity and shift autonomic balance toward relaxation. Office experiments and studies have shown that environments that visibly incorporate wood into interior design have a stress-reducing effect. What matters is not a style suggestion, but evidence that tactile cues regulate arousal and relaxation levels.
Material selection also carries thermal and acoustic implications. Perceived temperature, density, and roughness are related to measurable properties, enabling teams to think logically from feelings to specifications. A surface that looks warm but produces harsh sounds sends mixed signals; harmonizing texture, thermal behavior, and sound absorption creates a more consistent atmosphere.
Light, Shadow, and Temporal Characteristics
Light is both a visual environment and a biological signal. Current guidelines define light in the eye in terms of its melanopic content and recommend daytime exposure patterns that support circadian alignment. In practice, this reshapes decisions regarding glazing, shading, and interior reflectance ratios throughout the day as choices with emotional and physiological consequences.
Daylight and scenery are linked to the outcomes people experience. Classic hospital studies have associated natural scenery with faster recovery and reduced use of painkillers, while school studies have shown that increased daylight exposure improves student performance. The emotional tone of a room that receives daylight generally reflects these broader effects on stress, alertness, and motivation.
Shadows carry narrative and time. Tanizaki’s thoughts on dimness frame darkness as a positive aesthetic where depth, silence, and patina come to the fore. Contemporary criteria such as spatial daylight autonomy coexist alongside this cultural interpretation, offering designers the opportunity to balance the adequacy of light with the perceived richness that only contrast and transience can provide.
Color, Sound, and Scent Cues
Color is not a neutral element of decoration. Research in the field of psychology shows that certain color tones can change emotions, evaluations, and behaviors depending on the context, task, and learned associations. The same color tone that signals playfulness in one environment can increase alertness in another. Consider color as information that the body perceives quickly.
What we hear reshapes what we see. The soundscape standard defines soundscape not only in terms of decibel levels, but as the perceptual experience of an acoustic environment. Public health guidelines emphasize that chronic environmental noise negatively affects sleep and well-being. Therefore, supportive spectrums for material absorption, masking, and speech intelligibility are technical as well as emotional design moves.
Scent connects a space to memory with extraordinary power. Experimental studies reveal that scents trigger vivid autobiographical memories more easily, while urban scent landscape research shows how aromas managed in streets and indoor spaces shape navigation, attractiveness, and a sense of belonging. Designing for air and scent is part of designing for identity.
Emotional Frames and Theoretical Models
Basic Emotions and Artificial Emotion Theories
Two positions shaping designer thinking
Basic emotion theorists argue that there is a small group of evolved emotions that are partly universal expressions and behavioral tendencies. Paul Ekman’s program argues that emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, surprise, and sometimes contempt are proven by cross-cultural recognition and distinct physiological profiles. This view supports the idea that specific spatial cues can trigger commonly shared emotional programs.
Structuralist counterpoint Structuralist theories pioneered by Lisa Feldman Barrett propose that emotions are not fixed packages. Instead, the brain infers and constructs them from internal sensory signals, concepts, and context. According to this view, people from different cultures may interpret the same facial movement or spatial scene in different ways, cautioning architects against assuming uniform responses to a form or typology.
A dimensional bridge
James A. Russell’s basic affect model frames experience in terms of valence and arousal. This model explains why the same environment can be evaluated as calming or stimulating depending on the task, culture, and memory. Dimensional explanations are useful in situations where projects must balance arousal for alertness with pleasantness for care environments or transportation.
Evaluation Models in Architectural Contexts
Meaning before emotion
Evaluation theory argues that emotions arise from rapid assessments of person-environment interactions. Lazarus and colleagues note that primary assessments related to relevance and threat are made first, followed by secondary assessments related to coping potential. Therefore, writing scenarios for entries, thresholds, and routes is an emotional task, because users constantly question what is happening here, what it means for them, and whether they can cope with it.
Component controls corresponding to design variables
Klaus Scherer’s component process model details evaluative controls including innovation, goal-appropriateness, impact, and norm compliance. These correspond clearly to the architecture. Novelty is addressed through legible wayfinding and visibility; goal-appropriateness through consistent layouts, coping potential, and the clarity of exits and controls; and norm compliance through etiquette in public interiors. Laboratory and observational studies show that such evaluations guide downstream physiology and expression.
From dimensions to criteria
When labels are very distinct, environmental psychologists often define situations in terms of pleasure, excitement, and control. The PAD framework helps teams determine whether a room should be pleasant but exciting, or pleasant but with strong user control, and then select lighting, seating, and acoustic strategies accordingly.
Neuroaesthetics and Brain-Environment Feedback Loops
What the brain reveals about space
Neuroaesthetics demonstrates that aesthetic responses activate valuation and default mode systems, and that this coding can be generalized across visual domains. fMRI studies also reveal that the experience of interior spaces is organized based on consistency, enchantment, and home-like warmth, and that stylistic features are represented in higher-level visual areas. This provides architects with a language that relates details to distributed neural processing.
The cycles between setting and state
The built environment does not merely have a certain appearance; it also regulates arousal, stress, and attention over time. Classic evidence shows that hospital patients with a view of trees recover faster than similar patients facing a wall. The Attention Renewal Theory summarizes how exposure to nature can renew tired focus. These findings explain feedback loops where design choices alter physiology, which in turn changes how users evaluate situations they encounter later in the same place.
Towards experimental architecture
Current studies summarize ways to transform descriptive insights for architectural research into testable protocols, linking laboratory measurements, field assessments, and post-occupancy learning. This emerging method enables teams to replicate atmospheres with the same rigor applied to energy and structure.
Memories, Meaning, and Place Attachment
From space to place
Place attachment defines the emotional bond formed with specific locations. Scannell and Gifford’s triadic framework organizes this into person, psychological process, and place. It explains why the schoolyard, market place, or clinic lobby gain meaning not only through geometry, but also through experience, social connections, and physical cues.
Identity, continuity, and selfhood
Human geography and environmental psychology demonstrate how places establish identity. Yi Fu Tuan defined place as a pause that gives meaning, while Proshansky framed place identity as part of the self shaped by physical environments. Designing for enduring attachment means shaping environments that support routine, recognition, and narrative continuity.
Memory as an ally of design
Empirical studies link attachment to place with well-being and demonstrate how memory nourishes the meanings that connect people to places. This supports design strategies that respect patina, ritual paths, and community markers, as these cues anchor memories and belonging over years of use.
Case Studies: Architecture That Evokes Emotional Resonance
Minimalism and Peace: Quiet Spaces
Designed by Ryue Nishizawa, the Teshima Art Museum demonstrates that almost nothing is sufficient. The slender, column-free concrete shell opens to the sky with two large eyes, allowing wind, sound, and droplets to determine the atmosphere of the interior throughout the day and across the seasons. The result is not an object, but a gentle tool for drawing attention; here, tranquility arises from slowness and continuity with the landscape.
Tadao Ando’s Church of Light achieves a different kind of tranquility through subtraction. A cross-shaped cut in the concrete wall transforms daylight into a symbol, aligning the body and gaze without ornamentation. The small, simple volume demonstrates how emotions can be concentrated into a silent focal point through proportion, shadow, and a single movement of light.
Expressive and Dramatic: Tension in Form
Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin is designed as a walk through a fragmented memory. The zigzagging volume, cut-out windows, and concrete “voids” create a deliberate disorientation and pause, transforming absence into the building’s fundamental content. Circulation through bridges crossing the central void makes the loss palpable and demonstrates how plan, section, and narrative can function as a single dramatic argument.
Peter Zumthor’s work, the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, creates intensity through a material ritual. Wooden frames formed a tent, concrete was poured around them, and then the wood was burned, resulting in a charred, cave-like interior illuminated by a single oculus. The tactile darkness and smell of carbon create an intense, contemplative atmosphere that feels both ancient and experimental.
Human Scale and Authentic Environments
Maggie’s Centers demonstrate how the home environment supports the dignity of healthcare services. Kitchens form the center of social life, gardens extend care services outdoors, and “healthy” materials are chosen for both comfort and performance. This architectural strategy is not merely cosmetic. Research on Maggie’s Centers documents how these places coordinate care services, reduce stress, and support patients and their families.
Alvar Aalto’s work provides a durable template for sincerity. At the Paimio Sanatorium, details such as chair angles and colors were adjusted according to patients’ breathing and resting needs, and empathy was incorporated at every scale. At the Säynätsalo Town Hall, the brick structure gathered around an elevated courtyard balances its public presence with human proportions, inviting daily use rather than inspiring admiration from afar.
Transformative and Experiential Projects
The High Line transforms an industrial ruin into a promenade garden. Its sequential vistas, borrowed cityscapes, and close-planted vegetation create a social promenade that changes the way people live on the West Side. Harmony, movement choreography, and sensory tempo are the real materials here, proving that infrastructure can become a civic emotion machine.
Therme Vals, designed by Peter Zumthor, is like diving into architecture. Stone, water, warmth, and echo are composed like musical notes, so that moving from one bath to another reads like a narrative of light and sound. Designed like a stone quarry buried within the hills, this structure demonstrates how fundamental materials can be transformed with such sensitivity.
As a digital counterpart, teamLab Borderless in Tokyo creates emotions from movement and interaction. Sensitive light and sound rooms evolve with visitors, transforming walls into changing spaces. The museum redefines the concepts of authorship and audience, demonstrating how perception technologies can transform the exhibition space into a constantly changing, shared experience.
In these examples, emotion is not the effect of what comes next. Emotion is fleeting and mediating: minimal shells that slow down perception, loaded forms that contain difficult histories, human scales that evoke a sense of belonging, and compelling sequences that change what we feel every minute. When architecture treats atmosphere, movement, and meaning as its primary principles, spaces become unforgettable because they care about what people carry within them.
Practical Strategies and Ethical Considerations
User-Centered Design and Emotional Mapping
Design not just the building, but the narrative too
To ensure emotional goals are clear from the outset, engage communities in the process using structured participation frameworks. The IAP2 Spectrum clarifies the levels of participation between information and empowerment and establishes a transparent “promise to the public.” Use it to choose when to listen, when to co-create, or when to delegate decision-making authority to users.
Measure emotions using mixed methods
Combine interviews conducted with qualitative walks with simple emotion measurements. Self-Assessment Manikin captures valence, arousal, and dominance in seconds and, when combined with sound walks defined by ISO 12913, can record how the acoustic atmosphere changes the assessment. GSR-based arousal discovery community “bio-mapping” has been used to identify stress and pleasure along daily routes. These tools help translate lived experiences into summarizable criteria.
Complete the cycle with POE and well-being goals
Include Post-Occupancy Evaluation in the project roadmap as recommended by the RIBA Work Plan and track results against clear comfort and well-being goals. Align with WELL’s Mind and Comfort concepts in the design brief and validation to anchor cognitive and emotional well-being.
Inclusive Emotions: Diverse Psychologies and Cultures
Design for Neurodiversity and Sensory Choice
PAS 6463 establishes guidelines for neurodiversity in the built environment and promotes controllable stimuli, predictable sequences, and quiet rest areas. For projects involving autism, Magda Mostafa’s ASPECTSS index translates research into seven design criteria, ranging from acoustic and spatial arrangement to sensory zoning and safety.
Fundamental to dignity is universal accessibility
ISO 21542 defines accessibility and usability requirements for approach, circulation, information, and evacuation. The 7 Principles of Universal Design provide a readable perspective for equal use, perceptible information, and flexibility. Emotional inclusivity begins with these foundations.
Respect cultural meaning and authenticity
When projects relate to heritage or identity, the Authenticity Narrative Document reminds teams that the expression of value and memory varies according to culture. Emotional resonance should support local narratives, not override them.
Balance Function, Budget, and Emotional Ambition
Value the outcomes that people truly experience
Use policy-level frameworks to justify investments in atmosphere and experience. The OECD’s well-being perspective and the UK Treasury’s Green Book guidance on well-being demonstrate how subjective outcomes can be assessed alongside costs. RIBA’s Social Value Toolkit provides practical questions and criteria for linking design actions to societal benefits.
Prioritize high-leverage, low-cost factors
Orientation, daylight control, natural views, and basic acoustic strategy often yield significant emotional gains relative to cost. Evidence that natural views aid recovery continues to serve as a touchstone for arguing that small experiential choices can have a measurable impact.
Delivery through phased commitments
Set clear KPIs for readability, calmness, or alertness in the briefing; relate these to lighting spectra, reverberation times, and layout clarity in the technical design; validate with POE and user-reported effects after delivery. This aligns the objectives with the reality of supply.
Ethics of Manipulation: Emotional Persuasion and Originality
Define acceptable impact
Selection architecture and nudging are real in the physical space. Meta-analysis shows that such interventions can reliably change behaviors. This is highly effective in security, health, or climate contexts. Use them transparently and proportionately, in a way that provides clear benefits to the user.
Setting clear boundaries against coercion and exclusion
“Hostile architecture” that prevents rest or gathering targets vulnerable groups and undermines civil trust. Professional ethics require the opposite approach: AIA rules emphasize human dignity and public health, safety, and welfare as primary obligations.
Preserve the authenticity of the narrative
In culturally significant environments, authenticity requirements apply to the fabric as well as the structure and atmosphere. Use participatory processes and clearly state your persuasive intent so that users can understand why a place feels the way it does.
Sources
- PAS 6463: Design for the Mind
- The Autism ASPECTSS Design Index
- ISO 12913-1 Soundscape
- SAM (Self-Assessment Manikin)
- RIBA Plan of Work 2020 and RIBA POE guidance
- WELL Building Standard v2.
- OECD Built Environment Through a Well-being Lens; HM Treasury Green Book well-being guidance.
- AIA Code of Ethics
- Nara Document on Authenticity
- Mertens et al. 2022, PNAS
- Ulrich 1984
- RIBA Social Value Toolkit for Architecture