You Are Where You Are
CATEGORY—Perspective, Design
Words: Natasha Maben
1 min read
The philosopher Gaston Bachelard argued that intimacy is spatial: that identity takes form in the contours of rooms, the shadows of staircases, the corners where we staged entire childhood kingdoms.¹ He meant it precisely. The spaces we move through leave traces. They write us, quietly, before we have the language to notice.
Everyone carries a room like this somewhere. A first apartment. A school corridor. A particular stairwell. These places are mirrors. They keep fragments of who we were, and tell us something about who we still are. I wrote about one of mine in The Room That Made You.
If space shapes identity, every choice of light, material and scale is a decision about how a person will feel inside a place: at home, or on display. Architecture at its best designs for use and for resonance, for the particular quality of experience that makes a space feel made for you.
A brand is an environment too. People move through it in fragments, over time, through different doors, and never see the whole house at once. What they feel was largely decided long before they arrived, in what the brand chose to say and how it holds itself in a room.
Brand identity is the architecture of how people experience an organisation: the structure beneath the story. Get it wrong and people feel it. Get it right and it disappears entirely.
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