Building feeling

If you were told that you were being hypnotised by the design of the space around you every day, you would probably be aghast or laugh in disbelief. Yet the act of design is an act of hypnosis. You are often led, misled and even loaded with the “ideas” instilled in your everyday spaces. These ideas trigger emotions, based on memory, habits, patterns, aspirations and use, that allow you to interpret the space in seemingly individual ways that are in fact similar to the ways most people interpret the space.

The way one feels is obviously based on sensory perception or the brain interpreting sensation. Architecture has the ability to control and manipulate perceptions by anticipating interpretation. How you experience a building or a street, from approach to moving around within it, depends on what is usually a carefully orchestrated series of events.

The Taj Mahal evokes wonder not merely because of its grandeur or history but because of the elements of surprise and perspective. A red sandstone gateway frames the sparkling white Taj, leading visually to its dramatic centre. Yet the Taj itself cannot be reached directly, which makes it “unapproachable”. The central path is divided by pools, which allow visuals only from either side, in evocative perspectives. These vistas reinforce the sense of ethereality.

How you smell and even taste the air of a space, sense its wafts and gusts, results from the lines and shapes that carve the space into volumes and surfaces. How you touch space, through walls, columns, railings, doors and switches, and how the textures reach out and touch you, in colours, paving, ledges, flooring and ceilings, both reaffirm concepts of modernity and the vernacular. Sounds, vibrations, echoes and reverberations form a medley that energises, invites contemplation and meditation, and even induces a sense of a monumental past or a technological future. All of these discordant points join to determine simply whether you like or dislike a space.

Rarely is the impression of a space based on its functionality alone. It usually rests on its ability to suggest ideas and persuade the user to accept them. The prime motivation of architecture is not an argument or a negotiation, as is widely understood, but a suggestion that, once accepted by the user, sets off emotions that allow the user to experience a space. Accepting these ideas amounts to being hypnotised.

The architecture of our buildings and planning of our cities, however, deny emotion, casting it aside as subjective and esoteric, and rely on the physicality of functionality. Terms such as “efficiency” and “use” are used to “rate” buildings and banish “feelings” to the sphere of the artistic.

It is this rating that causes the denial of humanity in the design of our cities and buildings. The excuse is that a design must meet a basic standard for the masses.

Yet most examples from architectural typology reveal a mass, common reaction. Filtered light in a cathedral demands reverence, the smell of books in a library commands silence, gateways indicate entries and exits, lofty arcades intimidate, narrow streets force interaction, orthogonal shapes feel stable, avenues lined by vertical lampposts or trees feel rhythmic, narrow dividers in the middle of fast traffic induce fear, water bodies introduce calm, symmetry gives focus and grandeur, high boundaries are forbidding and open greens inviting.

Why, then, should emotion be treated like a subliminally introduced bit part in the act of design and not the prime protagonist? If “the city is nothing but its people” then our urban design needs to incorporate humanity as the fourth dimension to the objectivity of our cities and create spaces to impart humour, anguish and joy, evoke enthusiasm or exuberance, provoke anger or passivity every day. It is the acceptance of these emotions amplified “by design” that allows the city to hypnotise, and the user to “buy design”.

Suparna Bhalla is a Delhi-based architect