Introduction: Exploring Architecture and Emotions through Space and Place

Abstract

This special forum section of Emotions: History, Culture, Society moves forward scholarship on the history of the relationship between architecture and emotions. It specifically shows that while, on the face of it, talking about architecture and emotions appears anything but new, we still have a long way to go. In this introduction, I shall first provide a brief overview and critique of works such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Juhani Pallasmaa’s Eyes of the Skin, and Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space, as well as literature on sites of massacres and commemoration, architecture and fear, and women and the city, to argue for an adequate and systematic engagement with the history of emotions and thus orient the reader and set the scene for what follows. I shall then outline this special forum’s contribution.