We talk about cities we love. We “fall for” a house. We say we "feel at home" in certain places, as if they emotionally hold us. But what if that’s not just poetic language?
What if the way we react to great architecture isn’t metaphorically like love, but biochemically, neurologically, viscerally the real deal?
Science Explains “Architectural Chemistry”
Studies in neuroaesthetics have found that viewing beautiful architecture activates the same reward centers in the brain as looking at the face of someone you're in love with. Dopamine floods in. Pleasure. Anticipation. Emotional resonance. Some buildings make your brain light up like a teenage crush.
I knew I was in trouble the moment I walked into the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna. It wasn’t just the riot of colour or the whimsical lines, it was a physical response. My heartbeat changed. My feet slowed. Gaudí’s buildings in Barcelona had the same effect. Every single one. I couldn’t walk past them without stopping like someone who’s just locked eyes with a former lover. Architecture, it turns out, can flirt.
And it's not just dopamine. Oxytocin, our trusty bonding hormone, gets triggered by environments that feel familiar, intimate, safe. That sense of warmth in a well-proportioned room with human-scale elements and natural textures? It’s not just taste. It’s chemistry.
A good example for this is my ongoing love affair with Blackheath London. The traditional village, not changed in the last 200 years and the Heath, a perfect combination of human scale and green expansion. One of the most perfect places to live in London.
Summer stillness on the Heath: Blackheath’s iconic church catches the sun, while Georgian façades quietly supervise the edge of the Heath.
Or when I replaced the carpet on our top floor with ash wooden flooring, something shifted in the air. Suddenly, I wanted to sit on the floor. Breathe deeper. It was more than aesthetics, it was mood-altering.
When I first read Semir Zeki’s research on how beautiful visuals trigger the same brain areas as romantic love, it explained a lot. Like why I literally gasp at the sight of Jugendstil facades. Why I linger near Jugendstil or Art Deco zement tiles and start photographing random doorways. Why my heart rate changes around terrazzo floors and well-aged slate roofs. It’s not a design preference, it’s an emotional reaction.
Endorphins and serotonin chime in too: we feel calmer, happier, even euphoric in spaces that are bathed in natural light, filled with greenery, and designed with biophilic or humanistic elements. Add a touch of curved forms, a hint of ornamentation, some stucco. maybe some tactile stone, and the body sighs with relief.
In a world of white cubicles and soulless glass boxes, great design is a drug. And yes, some buildings get us high.
Signs You’re Architecturally Smitten
You photograph doorknobs or wooden doors (always happens to me in Maastricht). You slow down to touch walls. You start wondering if anyone would notice if you lay down on the floor just to look at the ceiling. In short: your body knows before your brain catches up.
And sometimes, that tingling sense of “yes” is your nervous system whispering: this is good design.
Carved wood, ironwork, and the quiet authority of an entrance that’s seen centuries come and go. Somewhere in Maastricht.
Falling in Love for Places
People don’t just like places. They attach to them. Environmental psychologists even have a term for it: place attachment. It’s the emotional bond between a person and a meaningful environment, one that evokes belonging, identity, even longing.
In this context, calling it love isn’t an exaggeration. People cry when a beloved church burns down (Notre-Dame is an example). They weep with joy at the first glimpse of a childhood home. They speak of cities the way poets speak of lovers, with yearning, frustration, intimacy, and awe.
I’ve fallen in love with Jugendstil houses, with their generous facades, their playful stucco, their terrazzo floors, high ceilings crowned with plaster flourishes. I’ve swooned over handcrafted wooden doors in Paris and Metz, over well-aged slate roofs that seem to carry memory in their layers. And I’ve fallen out of love too: with Bauhaus minimalism, with blank facades that give me the same emotional feedback as a voicemail robot.
In some cases, architects themselves describe the first encounter with a building in romantic terms: love at first sight. A spark. A resonance. A sense of having found something that strikes a cord within yourself.
Resonance: Spaces That Speak
Philosophers have long mused that beauty is a form of truth we feel in the body.
For Alberto Pérez-Gómez, architecture at its best reveals something real through a deeply sensual experience, almost erotic in its intensity. Hartmut Rosa would call it resonance.
Resonance means the world answers back. It’s the opposite of alienation. And that’s what great architecture does: it answers us. It doesn’t just exist; it responds. It meets us with form, light, scale, rhythm. And when it does, we don’t just feel admiration. We feel relationship.
Some environments trigger measurable changes: Semir Zeki’s fMRI studies show that beautiful architecture lights up the same neural pathways as romantic affection. Other research suggests that even short exposure to biophilic design, i.e. natural textures, organic shapes, can reduce cortisol, elevate serotonin, and increase cognitive function.
In short, good design doesn't just look nice. It makes us better humans.
Leon Krier, the late Luxembourgish architectural theorist, would have understood this instinctively. He believed architecture wasn’t just about function, it was about culture, memory, and identity. A fierce critic of modernist urbanism, Krier championed traditional city planning, human-scale design, and the deep emotional logic of classical forms.
For Krier, a beautiful building didn’t just house life, it honoured it. I would have loved to interview him for this blog.
The Takeaway: Love Harder. Design Better.
No, a building won’t bring you soup when you're sick. But it might bring you peace, or meaning, contentment, or that unnameable surge of rightness that makes your chest ache and your eyes glisten. Bliss.
Architecture, like love, is about presence. It’s about care. About showing up with intention, again and again. And when done right, it doesn’t just shelter us. It makes us happy.
Next time you feel those butterflies, trust them. That building might be trying to tell you something about what good design actually means.
Because some buildings don’t just stand. They speak. They stir.
And once in a while, they might love us back.
written by Helen M. Krauss