Architectural Form and Affect: A Spatiotemporal Study of Arousal

TL;DR

This study investigates how architectural form and lighting influence emotional arousal, revealing that complex and curved spaces tend to increase arousal levels through analysis of video-based spatial transitions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel spatiotemporal analysis method to quantify how specific architectural features affect emotional arousal over time.

Findings

Curved and complex spaces are associated with increased arousal.

Arousal changes are influenced by transitions between different spatial features.

The study provides initial insights into the relationship between space form and emotional response.

Abstract

How does the form of our surroundings impact the ways we feel? This paper extends the body of research on the effects that space and light have on emotion by focusing on critical features of architectural form and illumination colors and their spatiotemporal impact on arousal. For that purpose, we solicited a corpus of spatial transitions in video form, lasting over 60 minutes, annotated by three participants in terms of arousal in a time-continuous and unbounded fashion. We process the annotation traces of that corpus in a relative fashion, focusing on the direction of arousal changes (increasing or decreasing) as affected by changes between consecutive rooms. Results show that properties of the form such as curved or complex spaces align highly with increased arousal. The analysis presented in this paper sheds some initial light in the relationship between arousal and core spatiotemporal features of form that is of particular importance for the affect-driven design of architectural spaces.