The Emotional Power of Space

The Emotional Power of Space

How does space affect our physical, psychological and emotional state? Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine explore this question through the lively and intimate form of the conversation with twelve renowned architects for whom perception and sensoriality play a central role in their work.

The Emotional Power of Space gathers stories of sensibility which reveal the intuitive and irrational forces at play in our relation to space.

12 conversations:

Tatiana Bilbao, Terunobu Fujimori, Jacques Herzog, Anne Holtrop, Junya Ishigami, Bijoy Jain, Ryue Nishizawa, Juhani Pallasmaa, Boonserm Premthada, Smiljan Radic, Kazuyo Sejima, Álvaro Siza.

Product History

The geography of emotions is, to some extent, irrational, and the difficulty of addressing the topic lies precisely in the risk of subjecting it to the rigidness of rationality. The authors' challenge was to find a language that allowed the necessary mobility of ideas to deal with something so strongly related to instinct and intuition. “Translating into words something you feel is extremely complex. We had to fight against the rationality of language, which is so strong, to find a way of asking questions that would open the field of emotion and memory rather than lead to a cold, conceptual analysis,” they say.

By resorting to the emotions and memories of their interviewees, Ila and Louise aim to explore a geography that is unknown to them, and along the way, they find poetic interpretations about architecture and spaces that sometimes dismiss functionality.