Designing for ghosts (inside the mood, outside the form)

Not all spaces are remembered.

Some pass through us without residue, leaving no image, no echo, no aftertaste. While others, without warning, remain!

They are not always beautiful. They do not need narrative.

But they generate something irreducible. They generate a shift in mood, a dilation of time, a subtle unease and a quiet anchoring.

The question is not what these spaces look like, but how they act.

What if Architecture was read less through its geometry and more through its affective charge?

What if we could design for this charge deliberately, repeatedly and even algorithmically?

The premise sounds improbable. Emotion is not a parameter. Memory is not a module. Atmosphere, that elusive residue of light, proportion, texture and presence, seems to resist quantification by its very nature.

And yet, we know that certain spatial conditions such as a narrowing corridor, a diffuse light from above, a sudden acoustic stillness can shape our internal states with uncanny precision.

These are not subjective accidents. They are architectural effects, even if we rarely name them as such. They emerge not from ornament and symbolism, but from the spatial interface between the body and the built.
From thresholds and shadows, not objects. From rhythm, not repetition.

If we take this seriously: the idea that architecture does not just house emotions but elicits them, then a new a kind of design logic becomes imaginable, one where space is generated from the inside out, not from programmatic ---function--- of formal style, but from an intentional modulation of felt experience.

What would it mean to reverse the order of operations? To begin not with a plan, but with a mood? To map desire instead of circulation? To code a whisper, a pause, a breath?

This question belongs less to Architecture as we conventionally know it, and more to a phenomenology of inhabitation. And as Maurice Merleau Ponty argues in his book: Phenomenology of Perception, written in 1945, perception is not a passive reception of spatial data, but an active negotiation between the body and the world. We do not observe space but we rather move through it, with skin and memory and breath. We sense corners before we see them. We feel the pressure of a ceiling before we know its height.

Gaston Bachelard in his book: The poetics of Space, written in 1958, went further with that, suggesting that architecture is not a collection of forms, but a geography of dreams. He writes not of buildings, but of the intimacy of a drawer, stair, attic and other elements which are not ---function---al volumes but containers of reverie. Architecture, in this sense, is not the art of shelter but the art of interiority, and the way space folds around memory and subjectivity, like a second skin.

To speak of affect, then, is not to drift into metaphor. It is to return Architecture to the realm of the atmospheric, the pre-linguistic and the visceral.

Brian Massumi, in his seminal essay: The Autonomy of Affect, written in 1995, defines affect as a non-conscious experience of intensity and a raw sensation prior to emotion, meaning, representation. A corridor may be narrow, but what it feels like depends on the texture of the floor, the depth of the shadows and the echoes of footsteps and even on memories triggered in that moment.

In cinema, this is known. Filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonini and Bela Tarr do not simply stage action. They sculpt perception. Tarkovsky, in Nostalghia, lets time decay on screen, immersing the viewer in atmosphere. Antonini compositions in L Avventura isolate figures within landscapes, amplifying emotional distance. These are not merely aesthetic choices. They are architectures of affect.

Theater offers another analogue. In mis-en-scene, space is not just a backbut actually an actor. It can be a single chair under hard light, pause that stretches too long, silence that vibrates more than speech. These are examples of how space actually performs in the work of Samuel Beckett, Pina Bausch and others.

And yet, architecture despite its proximity to these disciplines, rarely treats mood as a material. It names light. It calculates scale. It optimizes flow. But it does not speak of shivers, of longing, of comfort that arrives before cognition. The ghost, here, is affect itself, which is present but un---script---ed.

And yet, not entirely absent. A quiet lineage persists. That of architects who have not only drawn space but tuned it, and who understood architecture not as the shaping of matter, but as the orchestration of experience.

In the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra, architecture becomes breath. Light filters through pierced stone like verses whispered into air. Water, not just reflective but auditory, anchors the space in serenity. The muqarnas dissolves ceiling into vapor, unmooring weight into rhythm. This is not spatial mastery. It is spatial tenderness, where geometry becomes mysticism.

The Cistercian monasteries of the 12th century, as well, reduced decoration to let silence resonate through stone. Another example is the Ise Grand Shrine in Japan, rebuilt cyclically for over a thousand years, and which binds time, ritual and void into a living architecture of breath.

Borromini, in San Carlo Alle Quattro Fontane, bends baroque into bodily sensation. His walls do not stand, they sway.

Steven Holl, in his Chapel in St. Ignatius, speaks of the architecture of light, designing space as a time-based gradient of illumination and shadow. His concept of anchoring, through the grounding of perception in sensation, is a vocabulary of mood more than ---function---.

Peter Zumthor builds atmospheres, not structures. In Therme Vals, the stone bath is less a spa than a choreography of thresholds: temperature, sound, darkness. In his seminal essay: Atmospheres, written in 2006, he lists material presence, temperature of space, and levels of intimacy which all form like a phenomenological checklist for emotional precision.

Louis Kahn, in Kimbell Art Museum, allowed daylight to touch the art, diffusing through vaults like a thought arriving slowly.

Tadao Ando Church of the Light is not simply a play of concrete and cross. It is rather a compression chamber for spiritual resonance.

Al-var-Alto interiors ripple with gentle irregularity. His chairs curve like gestures. His buildings breathe.

John Hejduk, the poet of unbuilt melancholy, drew plans like stanzas in poems, like metaphysical structures where space becomes syntax.

Junya Ishigami treats architecture like fog. His House and Restaurant project is a landscape of mood, dissolving form into light, ambiguity and softness.

Lina Bo Bardi s SESC Pompeia is an emotional archaeology: industrial brutalism suffused with play, memory and touch.

These architects, ancient, modern, marginal, all offer glimpses of what it means to build not just for bodies, but for states of being. They remind us that the discipline has always had, buried deep in its foundations, a sensitivity to the invisible.

And yet, despite this long undercurrent of spatial sensitivity, from Alhambra to Ando, much of contemporary architecture has drifted from affect, not by neglect, but by mis---dir---ection.

The rise of parametricism, championed by Patrik Schumacher, promised an architecture of fluidity and complexity. But in practice, it often delivered a theater of curves untethered to experience. Its algorithms generate continuity of surface, not continuity of feeling. What is optimized is performance: airflow, daylighting, cost, density. Rarely is the mood of a corridor considered a variable.

Even more recent systems such as AI-assisted generative design, GAN-based form-finding, procedural architecture in game engines, exhibit a stunning technical fluency, but emotional illiteracy. They know how to blend typologies, interpolate facades, create endless iterations. Bu they do not know how to whisper, pause, ache! They do now know how to hold silence like the Ise Shrine of dissolve weight like Zumthor baths.

The metrics of most generative tools are derived from ---function---alism modernism and computational logic: maximize usability, minimize waste, resolve structure, meet code. The results are undeniably efficient. But atmosphere is not necessarily efficient. A mood cannot be debugged!

There is a quiet violence in how contemporary software approaches space, reducing it to nodes, surfaces, occupiable volumes. In this reduction, the room ceases to be felt and becomes rendered.

Compare this with film. In cinema, space is designed not just for what it contains, but for what it feels like to move through. In the movie In the Mood for Love, by Wong Kar Wai, narrow corridors hold more emotional gravity that entire cities. In Stalker, by Andrei Tarkovsky, the zone is not a location but a metaphysical vibration. These are not CG environments. They are atmospheric programs.

The set designers of classic theater knew this too. Look at Adolphe Appia, who in the early 20th century rejected painted backdrops in favor of spatial light. His stages were not images. They were perceptions waiting to be triggered.

In coding terms, the problem is that architecture has clung to a hardcoded formalism, instead of seeking affective emergence. Imagine that instead of defining geometry first, we defined a psychic field, an emotional target state, and let the space arise from that. This is not science fiction. It s what Tarkovsky did with fog and what Junya Ishigami does with ambiguity, and what Gaston Bachelard described as the material imagination.

The tragedy is that we now have more tools than ever, but fewer instincts. We simulate acoustics, but forget the hush of footsteps. We render in ray-traced fidelity, but cannot revoke the half-light of dusk on stone. We know how to optimize HVAC, but not how to summon stillness.

What, then, might a new architecture engine look like, one that does not simulate space but summons presence? Not a tool for automating plans and optimizing facades, but a system that begins with a feeling. That treats affect not as afterthought, but as input. That does not ask: What should this space do? but: What should this space do to us?

I imagine a new kind of generative model, not built on geometry, but on mood states. A design engine that reads like a score, not a ---script---. That accepts as its starting point not dimensions and materials, but words like: solitude, serenity, dread, tenderness.

From there, the system maps these moods to spatial qualities, drawn not from style, but from centuries of built affect:

-Serenity might imply horizontality, filtered light, stone textures, acoustic dampening, ambient thresholds.

-Dread might arise from compression, asymmetry, surface roughness, low ceilings, deep shadows, echoic resonance.

-Tenderness might require layered transparency, slow circulation, warm light grazing curved surfaces.

These are not metaphors. They can be transposed into parameters: sound absorption coefficients, luminance gradients, material warmth indexes, ceiling to body ratios. But the system does not begin with these. It begins with a mood signature.

Think of this as the beginning of what I propose to call an Affective Design Language, ADL. A term that I coined here not as a theory full formed but as a conceptual scaffold. Imagine ADL as a catalog of spatial traits that correlate with phenomenologist states, a grammar, affect, grounded in perception rather than typology. It does not aim to prescribe emotion but to articulate the conditions in which emotion might emerge through space.

Unlike pattern languages and parametric toolkits, ADL does not begin with problems to solve. It begins with states to evoke.

And from this, a generative engine can emerge:

-one that uses rule-based logic (even machine learning) to compose space based on an affective target.

-One that can output not just 3D geometry, but experiential simulations, like what it might feel like to walk through the result.

-One that learns from cinema, poetry, choreography. The domains where emotion is already the structure.

The core idea is not to reproduce emotion, but to create the conditions for it to arise, to treat design as invitation, not instruction.

This is not anti-technology. It is another technology, one rooted in cognition, sensitivity and memory. A kind of architectural sentience.

This Affective Design Language (ADL) that I propose here, is not an evolution of existing systems. It is a divergence. A repositioning of the very starting point of design logic.

Where pattern languages, as conceived by Christopher Alexander, begin with social problems and offer reusable architectural solutions, ADL begins with non-verbal states. Alexander language is concerned with recurring ---function---s (e.g privacy, access, sociability) and translates them into spatial patterns. ADL, by contrast, is concerned with pre-cognitive atmospheres, with the pulse before the plan. It does not resolve conflicts, it curates sensation.

Where parametric systems work through relational variation, adjusting geometry based on performance metrics, ADL proposes a shift from geometry as output to affect as input.

In parametric design, you tweak parameters to produce optimized forms: airflow, daylight, structural efficiency. In ADL, the parameters are psycho-emotional: tension, safety, openness, melancholy. And the output is not just form, but experience-space, spaces that feel their way into being.

Shape grammars, on the other hand, operate by syntactical rules, composing architectural elements through formal logic and historical style. While their rule-based structure shares surface similarities with my proposed ADL, the intent is inverted. Shape grammars generate style-consistent form. ADL seeks affect-consistent presence. The grammar in ADL is not of arches and pilasters but of thresholds, acoustic softness, light delay, spatial compression, which are ingredients for emotional induction, not formal legibility.

In short:

-Pattern languages are about use
-Parametrics are about performance
-Shape grammars are about form

ADL is about feeling. Not feeling as decoration and aftermath, but as source code.

Imagine designing a space not for ---function---, but for unease.

Not for fear and discomfort, but for that fragile dissonance when something in the atmosphere does not quite align. A spatial uncanniness.

The design would begin with a moodmap: low-level sonic reverberation, slightly asymmetrical alignment, cool surfaces, flickering light delays. The ceiling would compress just enough to narrow breath, sightlines would open slightly off-axis. Doors might be visible but never fully accessible. Materials would desaturate the world, like concrete, stone, untreated wood.

Circulation would meander, not by complexity but by mis --dir--ection. You are never lost, but never certain. Like in the dreamlike offices of Jacques Tati Playtime, institutional ambiguity of Sanaa s New Museum, the weightless hallways of Stalker Zone.

This is not discomfort by error, but by design.

The Architecture does not frighten you. It anticipates you.

Now imagine designing for spiritual gravity.

A mood not of grandeur, but of anchoring, where time slows, and verticality becomes not a structural fact but a psychological pull.

The space would not rise, it would weigh. Light would not enter, it would descend. Walls would thicken. Materials would absorb sound and hold shadow. Circulation would narrow to focus attention, like a procession. Every turn calibrated to delay arrival, to draw presence inward.

There might be water, not to reflect, but to still. Stone, not to endure, but to listen.

Think of Louis Kahn s First Unitarian Church, where voids speak louder than ornamentTadao Ando s Church of Light, where the cross is not added, but carved from absence, the final shot of Dreyer movie Ordet, produced back in 1955, where resurrection is less a miracle than spatial tension released.

In such spaces, faith is not represented. It is engineered through atmosphere.

We design so much, for --function--, vision, code, but rarely for the intangible residue a space leaves behind, long after its image has faded.

What would it mean to design for that residue?

To write architecture not in lines and volumes, but in tones? In delays, tensions, textures?

This is what Affective Design Language dares to imagine: a system not of form, but of feeling formalized.

Not to replace the architect intuition, but to deepen it. Not to automate emotion, but to attend to it, with precision, with reverence, with code.

Because in the end, the buildings we remember are not the ones we merely saw. They are the ones that remembered us back.

And perhaps it is time to design for ghosts.



Mohammad Abdel Qader Alfar


https://jordanarch.wordpress.com/2025/06/12/ghosts/

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