We are taking swims in fizzing oceans, mowing lawns fragrant with clippings, eating watermelon slices that exceed our hands. The light feels sharper (aided, perhaps, by the evening’s imbibing), the air feels new and we expect ourselves — as others expect us — to begin again.

I find it hard to return to the working world, having given myself over to the summer breeze, the long evenings, the smell of heat on surfaces. As I anticipate that cycle (writing this in November as I am), I have been thinking about the senses, and how much we trust them to relay back to us what is.

What we look at. What we overlook. What we sense. What we trust we are feeling and what we persuade ourselves to feel. Architecture is deeply entangled with looking.

There are buildings. There are images of buildings. There are books, websites and social media accounts of those images of buildings. And then there is the act of looking at buildings. Standing at a building’s edge and taking it in.

From the very first studio session, surrounded by paper, pencils and ideas, the discipline trains us to ask: What am I looking at? How does this building, this space feel? Where does one find the detail, the rhythm, the tectonic?

Until recently, I assumed that my senses would tell me the truth. Or, perhaps closer is that I hadn’t really thought that much on how I rely on them to reflect the world back to me accurately. I assumed that what I felt was inherently valid. That, if a building made me feel grounded, it was grounded. But it took looking out the window, at the sway of the trees, the buzz of crickets, the release of heat on petals, for me to pause and ask: What does this tell me about the window I am looking through? This large pane of glass — framing and filtering the very world it claims to reveal. But is that confidence earned?

At a recent conference on urban health, a landscape architect presented a compelling case for sensory gardens. She argued that these were the antidote to the excesses of concrete modernity. If architecture had created the deficit of well-being, then landscape was the remedy. She literally said: The architects have created the problems. Concrete is bad. Landscape is good. I felt a selfprotective flare-up in defensiveness. But, later, I found myself lingering on her words: not to disagree but to trouble the supposed ease of her argument. I thought about an image I’d seen of a residential project in a magazine: soft edges, silvery timber, a rhythmic façade. The composition was quiet. Balanced. My own nervous system slowed as I looked. I felt soothed and this was late November, when everything tightens and accelerates in the collective race we have in this country towards the first of December.

I have never been inside this home. I don’t know its shortcomings. I don’t know how it sounds, or smells or lives. But I felt, somehow, the presence of care, of design held by human hands.

And yet a tension surfaces because I do not believe that architecture should be synonymous with private refuge, accessible only to a privileged few.

As architectural phenomenologist Juhani Pallasmaa has warned: when architecture becomes a “retreat for the eye”, we risk reducing space to spectacle.¹ And spectacle, especially in architectural culture, can soothe as easily as it can distract. Its power lies in its subtlety; the more beautiful it is, the harder it becomes to question. A bath framed by trees may signal harmony but it may also signal the luxury of distance.

Still, my nervous system cast a vote. So, which reading do I trust? Which sense is steering in a time of chronic housing insecurity?

More than ever, I’m aware that my senses are not neutral. They are situated, shaped by experience and access, and implicated in systems that extend beyond the personal. Affect theorist Sara Ahmed reminds us that emotions are not merely private responses; they are political inheritances. “What we feel,” she writes, “depends on what we already know.”² Some bodies are culturally supported to feel at ease, while others are systemically refused that comfort.

So, yes, my feelings are data points. But they are not necessarily evidence.

This raises a difficult, and perhaps uncomfortable, question: Are we being soothed or are we being seduced? And, in the process, are we the ones doing the soothing?

Sometimes I wonder whether or not this is the silent tension between architecture and policy. The former speaks to the individual, the latter to the collective. One works in rhythm and proportion, the other in metrics and eligibility. And, still, both shape the ways in which we live. Both decide what is visible. Why should we think on this?

Because maybe architecture teaches us how to look but, in doing so, also teaches us what not to see. But as theorist, writer and social critic bell hooks warns, beauty can pacify when it should provoke. “We must not be seduced,” she writes, “into forgetting that aesthetics are political.”³ Sensuous detail may be a kind of inheritance but it can also be a form of forgetting or of negligence.

Between that conference presentation and that photograph, I realised I no longer trust the clean division between healing landscapes and harmful architecture — or that well-being lives in one place and not another. Space is rarely that obedient. What is comforting for one body can be hostile for another. What is restorative for me might be exclusionary for someone else.

The senses are unreliable narrators. But they do narrate something.

And, if the new year gives us anything, it might be the chance to notice dissonance: between what settles us, and what unsettles others; between what our eyes approve, and what our conscience declines; and between what feels good, and what is just.

We cannot write about what soothes without naming what wounds. We cannot speak of shelter without acknowledging its absence, from local precarity to the devastation in Gaza, where architecture is not a refuge but a target. In such contexts, beauty is not innocent. Nor is sensory comfort.

So, reader, I greet the new year not with clarity, but with contradiction and with the knowledge that, sometimes, what calms me is what allows me to look away. That the aesthetic can be both balm and blindfold. That architecture, in all its detail and seduction, may teach us how to look, but not always where we should.

We can hold that dissonance, reader. We can learn to stay with it. Because, sometimes, the things that soothe us are symptoms, not solutions. And, sometimes, the real issue is what our eyes are yet to learn to see.

References

^{1. Juhani Pallasmaa, 2005, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. John Wiley & Sons.}

^{2. Sara Ahmed, 2004, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press.}

^{3. bell hooks, 1995, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. The New Press.}