Architecture, With Emotion: How Memory Shapes Buildings Before Architects Do
There are memories we do not choose. They choose us. They attach themselves quietly, returning years later with the precision of photographs and the weight of stories we did not know were forming. I was six years old—too young to understand architecture, too young even to understand travel—yet I can still recall a single family trip to a European city with startling clarity. It was the year a new Batman film was released. The posters were everywhere, the colors heavy with drama, the atmosphere charged with a cinematic mood that seeped into the streets. I remember none of the architectural details of that city, yet I remember the emotion of being there. I remember the weather. I remember the sense of scale. And, impossibly, I remember the taste of a fresh baguette I tried for the first time. A simple piece of bread, yet the memory of it is suspended in my mind like an architectural artifact.
Years later, while writing about Ludwig II and the emotional world that shaped Neuschwanstein, I finally realized what had been quietly forming through my own recollections: that architecture is not built from materials alone. It is built from emotional residues. From the impressions of childhood. From the desires of owners. From nostalgia, longing, loss, pride, and private mythologies. Architecture is a storage system for emotion, whether the architect acknowledges it or not. In the end, buildings are emotional vessels disguised as physical objects.
This is perhaps why so many structures in modern cities appear puzzling at first glance. You see a sharply pitched gable roof in the desert of Dubai—a climate where rain is rare, snow nonexistent, and thermal comfort has nothing to do with such a roof form. Yet the form persists. It is not a mistake. It is an emotional import, a cultural yearning, a borrowed memory. A gesture from colder geographies transplanted into a hot one. When clients—developers, investors, governments—ask for such shapes, they are rarely asking for performance. They are asking for a feeling.
Much of contemporary Architecture is shaped in this way. Rational decisions are dressed in emotional logic. A mall in Jeddah once attempted to replicate the proportions of Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, down to the curvature of the vaults and the symmetry of its arcades. The intent was never functional. It was nostalgic, aspirational, and symbolic. But architecture, unlike memories, must withstand the forces of economics and urban dynamics. A structure can borrow the emotional geometry of Milan, but it cannot borrow Milan’s footfall, climate, urban density, or retail logic. And so the building—despite the sincere emotional imprint behind it—remained a simulation that could not fully activate its own intent.
This tension between memory and function is not unique to commercial buildings. Consider the stadium in Qatar designed to resemble the traditional “taqiyah” cap. There, the architect was not generating a form; he was executing a memory. A childhood motif elevated into national symbolism. A private emotion transformed into a landmark. The building succeeds precisely because its emotional root was authentic, collective, and shared—an object of cultural intimacy scaled to the size of a global event. The emotional source was stable enough to become spatial.
Cities across the world are filled with similar emotional imprints. Some succeed brilliantly. Others dissolve under the weight of their symbolism. Dubai’s love affair with imported architectural memories is perhaps the clearest example: Venetian canals in the desert, Alpine chalets in 45-degree heat, Manhattan-inspired towers rising from land that has never known winter. We may critique these forms through an urbanist’s logic—climate mismatch, urban incoherence, symbolic excess—but underneath all these choices is a simple human truth: people build what they emotionally recognize, even when it contradicts the land beneath their feet.
This phenomenon is not limited to wealthy clients or iconic structures. Even at the scale of housing—mid-income apartments, suburban villas, compact units—people shape their homes according to the emotional vocabulary stored from childhood. A window height they grew up with. A courtyard inherited from ancestral memory. A threshold step that recalls a grandmother’s house. Research in environmental psychology has repeatedly shown that early spatial exposure imprints itself deeply, influencing how adults respond to scale, lighting, proportion, and even façade composition. Emotional memory becomes architectural programming long before architects enter the process.
In dense urban environments explored on Cities, this emotional preference becomes even more pronounced. Migrant neighborhoods replicate the feeling of “home” through signage, materials, and micro-geometries. Luxury districts import foreign stylistic cues to recreate a lifestyle narrative. Meanwhile, older districts—in Riyadh, Jeddah, Cairo, Istanbul—carry emotional sediment layered through decades of living, trading, praying, walking, arguing, celebrating. Streets accumulate emotional memory the same way buildings do, through repetition and the slow layering of daily life.
What makes this topic even more complex today is the accelerating role of media. People no longer rely solely on childhood memories; they rely on cinematic ones. A villa resembles an Instagram mood board. A tower evokes a fictional skyline. A café borrows the lighting of a Netflix series. A boutique hotel references Osaka, Bali, or Brooklyn depending on the emotion the developer wishes to produce rather than the culture surrounding the site. In your own reflections while writing about the “halo effect” of media on Design, the theme was clear: we do not choose our architectural preferences rationally. They arrive emotionally, often imported from a screen rather than a street.
But the most striking force of all is the emotional narrative of the client. Architecture is rarely the architect’s vision alone. It is a negotiation between professional logic and personal sentiment. Some clients want a building that reminds them of where they came from; others want a building that represents where they hope to go. Some want the proportions of Paris, the stone of Tuscany, the voids of Kyoto, the sparkle of Manhattan. Some want façades that feel safe; others want façades that feel impressive. A great architect recognizes that these emotions are not obstacles—they are entry points. They reveal the deeper desire that the building must serve.
And yet, emotional architecture can also fail when it becomes purely imitative. A memory transplanted without adaptation loses its vitality. Milan’s Galleria cannot be recreated in a mall without the Italian climate, pedestrian culture, and the nineteenth-century urban grid that gave the original its coherence. A gabled roof in Dubai may evoke nostalgia, but without climatic rationale it becomes symbolic fatigue. Emotion enriches architecture only when it is translated, not copied.
This brings us back to the baguette, the Batman posters, the fragments of childhood that shape how we see space even as adults. Architecture is not a discipline of lines and materials; it is a discipline of meaning. Buildings resonate because they evoke something—joy, safety, pride, recognition, longing. When a structure fails to evoke anything, it becomes a container. When it succeeds, it becomes a memory generator.
The greatest buildings are those that bind private memory to public experience—those that carry enough emotion to feel familiar yet enough intelligence to belong to the land they rise from. Emotion is not the enemy of architecture. It is the beginning of it. And perhaps, if we learned to read our emotional histories with greater honesty, the cities we design would feel less like simulations and more like places where memory and landscape finally agree.
✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight
This article takes an evocative, autobiographical approach to architecture, linking early sensory memories—like a childhood trip or the taste of fresh baguette—to lasting emotional imprints carried into adulthood and, later, design practice. It succeeds in revealing how emotional recall can be a valid architectural tool, often more durable than formal education. Still, the narrative leans heavily on nostalgia without anchoring its insights in broader theory or case studies that could universalize the argument. There’s an opportunity missed to connect this intimate lens with frameworks like phenomenology or emotional durability in design. Yet, its raw honesty and sincerity add warmth to a field often criticized for cold formalism. Over time, this type of writing could serve as a rare archive of emotional intelligence in design thinking—and it urges future architects to consider memory and mood as legitimate inputs to the creative process.
