Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Design (MDes) in Interior Studies / Adaptive Reuse
Department
Interior Architecture
First Advisor
Jeffrey Katz
Second Advisor
Francesca Liuni
Third Advisor
Can Altay
Abstract
Emotion is the most direct bridge between human experience and architectural space, but design often treats feelings as a side product. This thesis challenges that idea by asking a specific question: can a designer intentionally use spatial qualities to move a person through a defined emotional sequence? And if so, can that process be documented clearly enough to become a repeatable method?
To test this, the project designs a spatial version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland as an immersive theater experience. The narrative is not told through text, performance, or screen, but entirely through the physical qualities of a sequence of rooms: material, light, scale, sound, and smell. Each room corresponds to a moment in Alice’s psychological journey. Visitors move through the space wearing headphones, listening to the story read plainly as they go. The script is literal, and the space carries the emotion the words can only name. The visitor does not watch the story. They walk through it with their own body. Success is measured not by whether visitors recognize the source material, but by whether they report feeling the intended emotional shift at each threshold.
The site is 461 West 14th Street in New York City, a former Rivian showroom located directly below the High Line. The building offers a rare condition: two completely separate entry points at two different elevations. Visitors enter from the High Line above, already elevated and slightly removed from the street. They exit at ground level onto 14th Street, back into the noise and light of the city. This vertical drop between entry and exit mirrors Alice’s fall into Wonderland and her eventual return to reality. The site does not just host the experience. It provides its structural logic.
The thesis argument is this: emotion in architecture is not accidental. It can be designed with the same intentionality as structure or program. By working through Christian Norberg-Schulz’s concept of genius loci, which holds that every place has a distinct character that shapes the people within it, this project attempts to formalize that character as a tool. Each room in the sequence is designed around a single target emotion, and each design decision from ceiling height to floor texture to light temperature is made in service of that emotion. Immersive theater is the ideal testing ground for this because it removes all the usual noise. There is no permanent function to accommodate, no structural constraint beyond what the design needs, and no audience passivity. The visitor is inside the space, moving through it, responding to it in real time. What this thesis proposes is that designing space not around what people will do, but around what they will feel, is a practice worth making visible.
Recommended Citation
Yang, Xuanyu, "FEELING THROUGH SPACE:Designing Emotion in Space Through Alice in Wonderland" (2026). Masters Theses. 1576.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1576
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