Lines between: emotion and affect in architectural space

The chapter examines ways in which subjective experiences, emotions and affect can be represented through the form of the artists’ book and how in particular the book offers a tactile and performative engagement with space and our journey through it. It creates the opportunity to explore the gaps between drawing, writing and the visual image and, in doing so, the form of the book becomes a site to coalesce multiple representations of the presence of the body in architectural space. The work takes the form of an interdisciplinary conversation between a spatial interior designer and a visual artist with a background in textile practice.

The practice of interior design is a discipline that is discussed and defined through architectural conventions, methods and power structures which are mapped and pictured using line, plan, section and elevation, and are realized through negotiations and discussions based around a particular set of codes that focus on form-making. Largely absent from regulatory processes and drawings are the feelings of present and future users: the affective characteristics of particular spaces and the experience of moving through and being in them. This work investigates how we might draw, write, and rethink ways to represent and engage with space-making through the form of the artists’ book.

Architect and academic Katie Lloyd Thomas states, “the very method we use to develop architectural proposals – orthographic drawing – describes only form, and relegates material to the empty spaces between the lines”. The artists’ book opens out the space between these lines through haptic engagement and material play to develop alternative patterns of practice to question interior design’s containment within architectural language.