• 1 Quoted in Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism, Chicago, IL: Unive (...)

1Commenting on the use of indigenous Moroccan motifs in the official buildings of the colonial government in Morocco in the 1920s, the French architect Joseph Marrast famously stated: “And thus, little by little, we conquer the hearts of the natives and win their affection, as is our duty as colonizers.”1 What did Marrast mean by “affection”? Did his understanding of affection differ from that of his English counterparts or early modern French imperialists? How was winning affection through local architectural motifs filtered through local ways of feeling?

• 2 Lucien Febvre broke the ground in this field in the 1930s, but it then lay fallow for decades. See (...)
• 3 See Thomas Dixon, “‘Emotion’: The History of a Keyword in Crisis,” Emotion Review, vol. 4, no, 4, (...)

2Posing such questions might have been deemed unimportant for architectural historians engaging with the field of imperial architecture twenty or thirty years ago. But the growing body of scholarship within the field of the history of emotions suggests that it is no longer justifiable to use emotions as if their meanings are readily understandable (as though being human is a timeless and universal experience).2 The term “emotion,” as Thomas Dixon shows, only became a “fully fledged theoretical term” in the nineteenth century, slowly replacing such categories as “appetites,” “passions,” “affections,” or “sentiments.”3 This point might be enough to make one wonder about the meaning of “winning affection” through architecture to a twentieth-century French architect. Marrast could not have possibly understood the word affection in the same way as early modern French imperialists. Likewise, it is no longer justifiable to cast emotions aside from historical analysis as mere biological, irrational responses to historical events; they are also their effects and a cause of their changes.

• 4 Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi, Emotion, Mission, Architecture: Building Hospitals in Persia and British (...)
• 5 G. A. Bremner, “Introduction: Architecture, Urbanism, and British Imperial Studies,” in G A. Bremn (...)
• 6 See Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions, op. cit. (note 2), p. 2.

3Over the last five years or so, we have engaged with the field of the history of emotions in our separate research, exploring the place of emotions in the process of architectural research; the relationship between emotions and missionary architecture; objects and emotions; and sites as loci of emotionally potent symbols.4 In this debate article, we wish to pick up on some of the main points of our separate scholarship, considering the history of emotions and architectural historiography of modern European imperialism. Far from seeing the history of emotions as another method or future direction,5 we hope to articulate a call for taking emotions into consideration as part of historiographical practices related to modern European imperial architecture.6 While our examples are limited to a few buildings, constructed mainly by missionaries, administrative officers, and social reformers within the British Empire, our aim is to show that excluding emotions from historical analysis leaves us impoverished. We thus hope to induce architectural historians of modern European imperialism to adopt some of the insights and promises of the history of emotions.

• 7 Margrit Pernau, “Space and Emotion: Building to Feel,” History Compass, vol. 12, no. 7, 2014, p. 5 (...)
• 8 Claudio Minca and Lauren Wagner, Moroccan Dreams, Oriental Myth, Colonial Legacy, London; New York (...)
• 9 Maurice Amutabi, “Buildings as Symbols and Metaphors of Colonial Hegemony: Interrogating Colonial (...)
• 10 G. A. Bremner, “Commentary,” Emotions: History, Culture, Society, no. 6, 2022, p. 169-173; see Rob (...)
• 11 Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen, “Emotions and the Global Politics of Chi (...)
• 12 Rob Boddice, “The Biocultural City: Sense, Emotion and the Problem of Experience,” keynote, Emotio (...)

4While there have been several efforts to consider emotions in the historiography of architecture,7 architectural historians of modern European imperialism have yet to center the emotions in the historical analysis of how buildings are designed, experienced, sensed, and understood. To be sure, Marrast’s statement, highlighted at the beginning of this essay, has been analyzed by several scholars.8 Other scholarly works address how buildings were designed to inculcate “adoration” or inspire “awe.”9 Yet these studies neglect the temporal and cultural variety of emotions. As Alex Bremner and Rob Boddice remark, scholars have “lacked the intellectual tools” to address variations in the relationship between “the management of space and the management of emotions.”10 In this debate piece, we demonstrate that we can gain a better insight into imperial actors’ architectural decisions through historicizing emotions, their management, effects and causes, as well as expanding our understanding of how power worked. Understanding how emotions reflected and helped sustain imperial power relations, where a combination of factors were at play, including race, gender, class, and ethnicity, is an important part of the history of the relationship between emotions and power.11 Engaging with the history of emotions also allows us to recoup some complex—multivalent, changing, and unexpected—experiences of imperial buildings—involving feelings, perceptions, sensations, and common sense12—that otherwise remain inaccessible. Our understanding of such concepts as “contact zones” is deepened, and our grasp of imperial materiality broadens. Complex experiences have the capacity to trigger historical changes, leading to the construction and even innovation of architectural forms, which we hope to demonstrate through specific case studies drawn from our research.

• 13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, [First published as Phénoménologie de la perce (...)
• 14 For criticisms of Affect Theory, see Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique, Chic (...)
• 15 Rob Boddice, “The History of Emotions: Past, Present, Future,” Revista de Estudios Soociales, no.  (...)
• 16 Margrit Pernau, “Space and Emotion: Building to Feel,” op. cit. (note 7).
• 17 Stuart Elden, “There is a Politics of Space because Space is Political: Henri Lefebvre and the Pro (...)
• 18 Rhythmanalysis refers, in general terms, to the analysis of rhythms of bodies and the society, inc (...)
• 19 Stuart Elden, “Introduction,” in Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, Lo (...)
• 20 For a detailed discussion, see Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi, “Introduction: Exploring Architecture and (...)

5Writing about the relationship between architecture and emotions might, in some respect, seem to be anything but new. One might indeed argue that architectural historians have access to a wide and diverse array of scholarship, coming from various disciplinary fields, that already engages with such a relationship. Noteworthy references include phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s Eyes of the Skin, and philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space, as well as literature by architectural and art historians and feminist geographers on aesthetics of ruins, architecture and the sublime, sites of massacres and commemoration, and architecture and affect.13 These works are important and helpful; their emphasis on embodiment and “lived space” of architecture, rather than the physical space, is key. However, a large part of such scholarship still universalizes the body and sees the relationship between architecture and emotions through various nature/culture, culture/biology, reason/emotion divides.14 A “biocultural whole” model, or a mind-body-world dynamic model, offered in more recent years by the historians of emotions, particularly by Rob Boddice,15 on the contrary recognizes that the relationship between architecture and emotions “is neither random, nor is it given once and for all: the connection between an emotion and a particular [architectural] space can change over time, and the same space can trigger vastly divergent emotions in various people.”16 Some might argue that Merleau-Ponty and Lefebvre already made a similar point by viewing perception as “intentional.” Lefebvre emphasized the “historicality” of the experience of time and space. As Stuart Elden writes, “no longer conditions of experience, time and space could be experienced as such, and their experience was directly related to the historical conditions they were experienced within.”17 But these scholars’ emphasis on everyday normativity, and Lefebvre’s proposition of rhythmanalysis, disregard that there might be no rhythm (normativity) as such in specific contexts. Rhythm can also be condemned in certain contexts.18 According to Elden, Lefebvre’s work is useful for “gaining insight into the double sense of the notions of the everyday—a dual meaning found in the English and the French” as experiences that are mundane and routine, and those activities that happen daily.19 If we attend to cultural nuances, we realize that, for example, har ruz, the Farsi equivalent of the word “everyday,” does not have such a double meaning. Thus, we should be careful in drawing on Lefebvre’s notion of everyday to contemplate the experience of architectural space and time in contexts other than those to which the French philosopher referred. Not only do people’s diverse intentions, expectations, and experiences have a role to play, so do the temporal and cultural variety of emotions. On the one hand, it is key to recognize the relationship between architecture and emotions as a biocultural and thus unstable one, and, on the other, to acknowledge that emotions themselves have a history as complex as the history of the buildings in which they are felt and expressed.20

• 21 Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism, op. cit. (note 1), p. 1; Fas (...)
• 22 Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 184 (...)
• 23 For an in-depth discussion, see Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi, “Medical Missionaries and the Invention o (...)

6Let’s return for a moment to the statement by Marrast quoted at the beginning of this essay. His effort to win affection by using indigenous Moroccan motifs has been interpreted by some scholars as “quell[ing] local resistance.”21 An adequate and systematic engagement with the history of emotions can help re-examine such an interpretation. We need to examine both Marrast’s understanding and the diverse and changing emotional meaning of resistance across imperial territories. We can also establish more accurate and precise points of comparison of the various visions and practices of imperial actors, such as those of medical missionaries of various Protestant missionary organizations operating within imperial societies such as British India, Persia, Egypt, and Palestine. As we learned through our own research, Protestant missionary organizations understood winning affection (which they used interchangeably with friendship and trust) in terms of increasing the number of patients (and not in terms of softening resistance). References to building trust and affection in their reports and letters implies a change in the sensory relationship between missionaries and local people. Thus, when the medical missionaries talked about gaining affection and trust through architecture, they referred to architectural strategies for increasing the number of patients. One such strategy was the introduction of family wards, which originated most likely in northwestern British India. Works by historians such as Esme Cleall show that the missionaries often interfered in indigenous family structures. They differentiated the “European” family from the “indigenous” family, considering one to be ideal and benevolent, and the other to be decadent, or even non-existent, thus in need of intervention or construction.22 Conversely, patients, including children, could stay with their family and friends in a family ward. They could also bring their belongings, including cooking utensils and bedding, and thus live in the hospital as they would in their homes, or transform the ward into a “cosy living room.” Family wards disrupted the discursive split between “civilized” and “uncivilized,” or “ideal” and “decadent” family, in missionary writings. Although the CMS missionaries perceived indigenous families with concern, they hoped to bring family members under the locus of their project of intervention in this way.23

• 24 To read about how emotions are gendered, see Ute Frevert, Emotions in History – Lost and Found, op (...)
• 25 Rhonda Anne Sample, Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism and the Victorian Idea of Christian (...)
• 26 Wilhelmina Eger, “The Mission Hospital at Multan,” Mercy and Truth 5, no. 56, 1901, p. 180.
• 27 Ibid.
• 28 Gholamhossein Memarian and Frank Brown, “The Shared Characteristics of Iranian and Arab Courtyard (...)

7Similarly, there were differences in how gaining trust and affection was understood and practiced depending on both the national affiliation of individual missionary organizations and the localities where they worked. Gaining trust did not carry the same imperial connotations for North American missionaries as it did for British medical missionaries. For example, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) medical missionaries in northwestern British India viewed gaining trust, friendship, or affection as a way of altering the feelings of the community itself to look positively on the imperial establishment. This picture is complicated further because gaining trust was construed differently for female missionaries than for male missionaries.24 Although close contact with indigenous communities was relevant to both, it took on extra layers of meaning for female missionaries in the form of “familial connections” or “sisterhood” with (potential) converts.25 Thus, mission hospitals for women played a crucial role in changing the sensory relationships between missionaries and local populations. As a result, medical missionaries innovated a novel hospital design known as the “purdah hospital.” An example of such a health care facility is the Multan hospital, built by the Society for the Promotion of Female Education in the East (FES) and the CMS in the 1890s.26 The hospital was divided between Muslims and Hindus, with each group given their own compound consisting of wards and a courtyard. It also had an inner, walled area and an outer section. The interior space was composed of an entrance block and an inpatient block and the outpatient department, with “operating-room and special surgical and private wards, besides a large hall where the out-patients assemble for Bible teaching”.27 The outer section consisted of rooms, or a caravanserai, for male relatives of the female patients. In other words, like houses in some parts of India, the hospital had an andarūni (inner section) and a birūni (outer section). The only difference was that the hospital’s andarūni was not a family quarter and was here reserved for women.28

• 29 See Jane Lydon, Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy across the British Empire, Cambridge: C (...)

8Family wards and the purdah hospital might be described, borrowing a term coined by historical and cultural anthropologists and historian of emotions Monique Scheer, as “emotional set-ups” that served to change the sensory relationship between missionaries and local people by facilitating certain practices. Patients could move freely in and out of the wards in family wards and in the inner section of the purdah hospital; interact with one another and with their relatives in family wards, exchange news, and cook their food as they would in their homes. If these practices did not arouse the interest of local people in medical missionaries and their work, they at least attracted them to the hospital and encouraged them to remain. The hospital thus became a setting for interaction, and through interaction, for sensation and perception between the missionaries and local people. The missionaries disregarded scientific and sanitary approaches in favor of providing architectural spaces that could feel familiar. These novel hospital designs help us understand how power worked in such institutions; that is, imperial systems did not always rely on physical violence (invasion and conquest) and on disciplining and civilizing bodies as well as minds. They sometimes tried to elicit the interest of the local people—which must not be interpreted as quelling resistance or softening or pacifying—or, as other studies have shown, endeavored to generate a “fellow-feeling” to integrate the “other” or win their heart through “gentleness.”29

• 30 Benno Gammerl, Jan Simon Hutta and Monique Scheer, “Feeling differently: Approaches and their poli (...)
• 31 As Boddice states, “There is no experiental feeling inherent in events, in objects, in relations. (...)
• 32 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, p. 7.
• 33 Saloni Marthur and Kavita Singh (eds.), No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South (...)
• 34 Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “The Production and Reproduction of a Monument: The Many Lives of the Sanchi (...)

9Emotional set-ups can fail, leading to a form of “feeling differently” or “failing to feel correctly.”30 They do not take place against “stable backgrounds” of experiential feelings that exist “out there.” Local people would appropriate—that is, arrange, rearrange, and categorize—buildings and their feeling, and construct experiences.31 Thus, family wards or the purdah hospital could not shape patients’ feelings uniformly. Some patients might have been able to appropriate them practically but, to rephrase Sara Ahmed’s words, in another family ward, purdah hospital, or for some other patients, “we might even have another story”.32 This is a key point that is worth considering further in the framework of our plea to consider emotions in the historiography of imperial architecture. In their introduction to a set of essays on museological practices in India, No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying, Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh point to “the vernacular appropriation of ‘the museum,’ and the considerably more eccentric establishments they represent.”33 Such “vernacular appropriations” persist in the use of architectural references as well, especially in buildings that draw from canonical histories in a way that invites multiple cultural and emotional responses. One particularly notable example is the recurring use of the Buddhist torana, or gateway, in civic and religious architecture of India. Famously housed in museums in England and India, over time, the Buddhist torana came to represent political demands for independence, first as part of a rising Indian nationalism and later as part of the Dalit Buddhist movement which sought to challenge the hegemony of the Hindu majority in India, not to mention its various figurations around the world.34 Instead of being a silent material artifact, the architectural fragment in many cases becomes a potent symbol, representing competing publics, emerging from the emotional worlds of different communities.

• 35 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London; New York, NY: Routl (...)
• 36 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014, p. 5-8.
• 37 Andreas Reckwitz, Affective Spaces: A Praxeological Outlook, op. cit. (note 7), p. 255.
• 38 Margrit Pernau, “Space and Emotions,” op. cit. (note 7), p. 542; Idem, “Mapping Emotions, Construc (...)
• 39 Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen, “Emotions, and the Global Politics of Ch (...)
• 40 Rob Boddice and Mark Smith also emphasize this. Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experi (...)

10In other words, even if imperial actors hoped to teach people certain behaviors through the spatial set-up of buildings, their intention could sometimes have been misplaced. Here we might think of such concepts as Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone,” Anthony King’s “third culture,” or Samir Boulos’s “culturally entangled space.”35 These concepts highlight the zones where “the cultures came into collision” and show that the imposition of imperial order and control occurred primarily at an ideological level, and not necessarily in the domain of lived realities. But is a contact zone always a place of direct mutual influence, and for everyone, when the different ways emotions are felt and understood drive people to different conclusions and change how they experience and build the world around them? In this regard, it is essential to examine how people encountered and evaluated any architectural space,36 because the potential of a space to evoke emotions largely depends on the “specific cultural sensitivity and attentiveness” of the users. “Affects” (with their different set of cultural baggage across times and spaces) only emerge when the users can “practically appropriate” the architectural space.37 Historians of emotions Margrit Pernau, Benno Gammerl, and Philipp Nielsen discuss the role of memory and the culturally and historically specific preconceptions in this regard, arguing that “spaces can be endowed with an emotional valence through practices and experiences repeated over a long time” while contending with the capacity for unanticipated reactions, involving unanticipated sensations, perceptions, judgements, and common sense.38 Therefore, every imperial building might have acted as a contact zone or a culturally entangled space, but only for specific groups of people at specific times. To examine if an imperial building was a contact zone, it is essential to account for “internal variations” across class, gender, age, ethnicity, and occupation39 and thus examine how it felt for every person to be there at a specific time. The task may appear to be difficult, but so be it.40

• 41 Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “The Museum in the Colony: Collecting, Conserving, Classifying,” in Saloni M (...)
• 42 Sumathi Ramaswamy, “Visualising India’s Geo-Body: Globes, Maps, Bodyscapes,” Contributions to Indi (...)

11Competing, changing, and unexpected sensibilities or feelings can drive architectural changes, even leading to new forms and styles. This is particularly evident in buildings with an explicit representative agenda, such as museums. As Tapati Guha-Thakurta writes in her discussion of the Indian Museum founded in 1814 in Kolkata (then Calcutta), the museum embodies colonial desires to see India “as a signaled unified site where [...] her diverse people and, no less, her arts and antiquities could all feature within the same collective constellation, even as each had their own classificatory labels.”41 However, such classification quickly came into conflict with competing sensibilities of both local and international communities. Religious fervor around key items such as the relics of the Buddha, for example, became grounds for challenging colonial authority over the religious remnants and religious sites in the region. This led to a split in the management of recovered archaeological finds. In the case of the Buddha’s relics, the reliquary was housed in European museums and catalogued as a historical antiquity, while the relics were given over to the Maha Bodhi Society and classified as being of religious, but not historical, importance. Over time, this led to the construction of new building types, such as the Dharmarajika Chetiya Vihara on College Square in Kolkata, which functions as a hybrid between a temple and a museum, engaging a larger nationalist fervor to see India as a sacred geography or “divine geo-body.”42

• 43 Abdolhoseyn Sanatizade, Ruzegari ke gozasht [The Gone Years], Tehran: Ebn-e Sina, 1346/1967, p. 20 (...)

13To further justify this plea, we will consider two episodes in the life of the CMS hospital in Kerman (Iran). Built between 1914 and 1927 by Drs. George Dodson and Catherine Ironside, this health care facility was registered as a national heritage by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicraft Organization of Iran in 1996. The first episode concerns Dodson’s death from typhoid fever in Kerman in 1937, an event that led the local community to close the bazaar in mourning for him. Given that daily bazaar life in Iran would only have been suspended to mourn the death of prominent individuals, more notably during Muharram, this event—which was recorded in a local newspaper—may suggest that the people of Kerman greatly respected Dodson.43

• 44 Tehran (Iran), National Library and Archive of Iran, Abolgāsim Rāsikh, 15, 03, 1331, 99/293/9729.

14The second episode occurred in 1954, when the missionaries decided to sell the CMS hospital. This decision faced opposition: Abolghāsim Rāsikh, a former assistant director of the hospital, wrote a letter to the Ministry of Health, arguing that the missionaries should not be allowed to sell the hospital because it belonged to the people of Kerman. To support his argument, Rāsikh pointed out that the people of Kerman had provided the land on which the hospital was built free of charge, had funded the construction of the buildings, and had paid for the installation of electricity and the purchase of an X-ray machine.44

• 45 Abdolhoseyn Sanatizade, Ruzegari ke gozasht, op. cit. (note 44), p. 198. What is the last name and (...)
• 46 Mrinalini Rajagopalan, Building Histories: The Archival and Affective Lives of Five Monuments in M (...)

15Although no parallel can be drawn between them, both episodes might suggest that the local population embraced the CMS hospital as an institution of their own, even if its origin was imperial. Moreover, the fact that today, Kerman hospital is listed as a national heritage building stems not from these two episodes, but rather from a book by Abdolhoseyn Sanatīzādih Kermanī. This well-known writer dedicated a chapter in his autobiography to Dodson, celebrating his “selflessness” and love for the people of Kerman.45 This point supports the historian of India’s built environment Mrinalini Rajagopalan’s argument regarding the affective power of actors other than colonial and postcolonial administrators in appropriating “monuments,” and thus her assertion that histories of buildings are always “contingent and never stable, polyphonous rather than monologic, and temporally dynamic rather than static.”46 Meanwhile, although the hospital is on the national heritage list, the building is entirely unknown to most inhabitants of Kerman. This begs the question of whether this hospital is truly a national heritage. If it is not, does it embody a shared heritage or is it just another British institution? We argue that it can be either or neither to different people, depending on the different associations they carry or emotional ties they have with the building or institution.

• 47 Rob Boddice, “The Biocultural City: Sense, Emotion and the Problem of Experience.” I would like to (...)
• 48 Mark Crinson, “The Powers That Be: Architectural potency and spatialized power,” ABE Journal,no. 4 (...)
• 49 Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publis (...)

16Rob Boddice, a leading scholar in the field of the history of emotions, considers the interrelation of “emotion, sensation, belief, common sense, connections, ideas, concepts, environment,” arguing that these dimensions of experience cannot be separated or isolated.47 There is, thus, a specific urgency to go beyond appearance and layout, as the historiography of imperial architecture has so far been extremely centered on visual perception and spatial experience. Michel Foucault’s studies of the prison, and specifically of the panopticon, placed visibility and control at the heart of large part of the scholarship. Whether we criticize Foucault’s concentration on the technologies of visibility48 or plead for a return to his work on governmentality,49 we cannot ignore the fact that few attempts have been made to discuss the idea that people’s senses and feelings were influenced by conditions other than sight before and after they entered the buildings. In this respect, a closer examination of some of the sensorial aspects of a given structure might further suggest alternative methodologies that in a meaningful way can help architectural historians counter hegemonic readings of buildings as framing or defining the emotional lives or experiences of inhabitants. How were the buildings supposed to smell? How was the furniture meant to feel to their users? These are just some of the essential questions we need to begin asking.

• 50 We borrow the term “unlearning” from Swati Chattopadhyay, Unlearning the City: Infrastructures in (...)
• 51 Paul Ward English, “The Origin and Spread of Qanats in the Old World,” Proceedings of the American (...)

17These questions can even help us “unlearn” habits of thinking about imperial materiality. Looking beyond the mere buildings, we can expand our consideration to aspects of their surroundings or their equipment.50 In the case of the CMS hospital in Kerman, discussed above, this led us to consider the landscape in which it is situated, as well as an infrastructural element. We had initially overlooked their importance, but they were an essential part of how the hospital was experienced. The city of Kerman is surrounded by mountains; to the east are the Kūh payeh Mountains, and on the north are the Darmānū Mountains. These peaks formed the broader landscape of the hospital and could provoke anticipated reactions. The missionaries may have only considered the importance of mountains as an essential source of water, but the landscape held more profound significance for the hospital’s users.51 At the very least, the Kūh payeh and Darmānū mountains may have helped the patients find their way to the hospital. It is also possible that the name of the hospital and the mountains became interchangeable. That is, the hospital was called the Kūh payeh hospital or the Darmānū hospital instead of Christian hospital, in which case the emotional charges of the institution were altered by its users. Moreover, the hospital compound contained a small but significant mechanism called gavgard. Gav means cow in Farsi, and gard means rotating. A gavgard thus consists of a cow harnessed to a mechanism that turns a wooden wheel, drawing water from a well. That there was a cow in the hospital might come as a surprise in itself, but the gavgard water wheel was not somewhere in the corner of the complex; it was situated right in the middle of the site. The distinctive sounds and smells produced by this combination of the mechanical and the animal, and its familiarity to the hospital’s patients, would have loomed just as large in their minds as the dimensions of the health care facilities more familiar to architectural historians. Indeed, the mountains and the gavgard that are specific to the CMS hospital in Kerman invite us to think beyond hygiene, ventilation, light and order embodied by the—often rather generic—typology of an imperial hospital building.

• 52 Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Treans, “Introduction,” in Doing Emotions History, Urbana, IL: Universi (...)

18In this debate piece, we have attempted to demonstrate, drawing both on theoretical literature and case studies from our own research, that the history of emotions as a disciplinary field provides us, as architectural historians, with a powerful set of tools to define emotions in context and expand our understanding of how power worked, while delving into variations regarding the history of the relationship between the management of space and the management of emotions in colonial and imperial contexts. With this in mind, it is important to again ask the question posed at the beginning of this essay: What did the French colonial architect Joseph Marrast mean when he spoke of winning “affections” through new architectural designs in French Morocco in the 1920s? How did winning affection filter through local ways of feeling? Even if we assume that emotions have universal, timeless, hard-wired, readily understandable meanings, or that imperial actors’ behavior and actions “reflected only calculating self-interest” devoid of irrational emotional content, and even if we resist any attempt to question such concepts,52 leaning all the while towards psychological essentialism, we cannot ignore that there is no straightforward relationship between how an architectural space is conceived and how it is experienced. Excluding these variations, we argue, leaves our analysis wanting and our understanding of histories of modern European imperialism incomplete.