Architecture and Guilt
S. Natsis (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
R.R.J. van de Pas – Mentor (TU Delft - History, Form & Aesthetics)
J.A. Kuijper – Mentor (TU Delft - Theory, Territories & Transitions)
G. Karvelas – Mentor (TU Delft - Teachers of Practice / AE+T)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
This research investigates guilt as an underexplored category in architecture and urbanism. Beginning from a personal confrontation with environmental guilt within architectural education, the project asks how guilt is produced, regulated, displaced, or suspended through spatial design. Rather than treating guilt solely as an individual moral emotion, the study approaches it as a historical, psychological, political, and spatial construct. Drawing on Nietzsche’s genealogy of guilt, histories of Western Christian guilt culture, psychoanalytic accounts of repression and fetishization, and theories of collective guilt, the research argues that guilt operates not only through discourse and institutions but also through the built environment.
The central claim is that architecture and urban planning can function as technologies of guilt regulation. Through scale, visibility, concealment, boundaries, hierarchy, atmosphere, and aesthetic coding, spaces can intensify guilt, direct it toward ritualized forms of atonement, contain it, or temporarily neutralize it. To examine this, the research combines theoretical analysis with case studies of architectural typologies and urban situations, including the church, the prison, the monument, the club, sex-work spaces, green architecture, and ascetic architecture. These cases are read not simply as programs but as affective arrangements that shape moral experience.
A second part of the research focuses on Amsterdam as a city with a persistent mythology of sin, tolerance, pleasure, and transgression. Through experiential observations and narrative accounts of places, events, and everyday encounters, the project investigates how guilt is lived, negotiated, and spatialized in the city. Amsterdam serves here as a testing ground in which issues such as sex work, nightlife, tourism, intoxication, queerness, and public disorder reveal how urban space mediates morally charged behaviour. These situated accounts are used not as autobiography for its own sake, but as a method for tracing how architecture and urban atmospheres participate in the management of guilt in lived experience