About a year ago I asked a professional architect working at one of the biggest firms in the country how to evoke emotion through design, through architecture. He paused, passed the question on to someone else, and another architect simply said, ‘the details’. It’s the details in a design that create an impact on people. It's walking through a space and noticing how the light streams through a window or the smell of the wood as you first enter a building. It’s The feel of the railing on your hand, the sound of your footsteps echoing in a hallway, how the light reflects off a marble floor…or how it doesn’t. The most ‘inconsequential’ or worthless details that most people will miss are what can make or break a space. Spaces that consider all those smallest details are the ones that cause a visitor to stop and think, to gasp, or even to mutter a quiet ‘wow’. Causing someone to leave a building feeling different than the way they felt when they walked in is something only the greatest architects with the greatest attention to detail can achieve. That ability is what differentiates a ‘great architect’ and a ‘good architect’. But, this is only one aspect of how architecture can evoke emotion, the creation of space and the attention to detail is incredibly important, but the use of form by the hand of an architect is equally as important in creating an emotional space, but let’s save that for part two.