Using my Anxiety to Design.

Author

Ark
November 18, 2024

Crafting Architectural Spaces to Evoke Sensory and Emotional Responses

Spatial Exploration: Designing for Emotional Experience

My friend the other day told me that he’s been so on track with his fitness goals that he’s lost six pounds, but I can’t really say the same. I’ve been having a pretty hard time focusing and keeping my anxieties away. I actually started meditating, which has helped quite a lot. Something else I actually started doing is that I just started designing. I realized I hadn’t really done that in a long time; I just designed something for the fun of it.

Working in architecture, you don’t always get to design cool experiential spaces. Usually, you’re working with a lot of constraints, which is good because the buildings have to get built. But here, I’m just going to put all that aside and just create something that’s purely spatial and conceptual. If there’s one emotion that we can all relate to right now, it’s probably isolation and maybe anxiety. I’m going to create a simple path and a spatial experience based on that one idea. Basically, I’m dividing the path into two separate spaces, and I’m also using a little trick called compression and release to create a sense of anxiety and, once the space opens up again, to create a bit of relief.

First, I’m starting off with some diagrams to create what is called a parti. A parti is the distillation of your concept into a simple diagram. It can be a spatial concept, a material concept, or a combination of all of them.

This is how I’m thinking the circulation’s going to work: you enter into this large space, and as you progress, it gets narrower and narrower. On the other side, you enter into this large space, into this very narrow hall, and it opens up a little bit before you exit.

I’m just sketching out what I want the light conditions to be like. The part where the walls get pretty narrow is going to get pretty dark, and the corners of the room will be quite dark as well. So now I’m just sketching out what I think the space is going to feel like. I think I’ll actually make this a curved wall.

Okay, so now that I have a general idea of what I want the space to feel like, I’m going to try cutting a section through here. The wall will be somewhere around here, and I’m making this wall low because I want people on either side to be able to see and hear each other. And it’s going to get taller as it gets closer to the narrow point. You have a roof and a skylight that’s bringing in a lot of natural light, and it’s hitting this wall. I’m washing this entire space with light. This tall wall is also catching a lot of that light and bringing it in. And actually, I’m going to make this curve so that you can get a nice, even distribution of light.

I’ve just made a quick Rhino model based on the diagrams I just made. You can see the plan here with the dividing wall in the middle, and that’s what the section of space looks like. I’ve decided to put it on a slope so that the space can get narrower in height as well as in width. We have this curved wall that’s catching this nice daylight and diffusing it across the space, and that’s what this tall wall is doing as well. So let me just walk you through the space a little bit. The dividing wall gets taller and taller as the space gets tighter and tighter. Once you pass the narrow point, the wall angles out and gives you a little bit of relief. The wall gets lower here so that people can see and hear each other as they’re passing by. Let’s try to take a look from the other side and see what it looks like.

You have the tall dividing wall that’s capturing all this nice natural light going in, and you’re going from a larger space and walking towards this narrow opening. So, I pulled a couple of renders from the model, and now I’m just going to bring them into Photoshop, which is actually my favorite part of the process. I’ve already applied the materials, texture, and light conditions to the model, so there’s not a ton of post-processing that I have to do. I’m just going to play around with the exposure a little bit and get a person in for scale. You should always add people in your renders, and sometimes I think it can make a difference between a Wow!

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