ABSTRACT
This chapter examines characteristics of evocative architecture in order to explain how we can encourage the architectural event, and how buildings can be designed to maximise their evocative potential. Architecture in these cases elicits surprise and curiosity, which cannot be achieved through a more deliberate and rationalised engagement with its material features—an engagement that is infused with the expectations and preconceptions of how the environment ought to function. Architectural designs that incorporate tensions through their ambiguous and contradictory features can capture the attention of the imagination, and set in motion its unconscious processes. An evocative architecture is therefore one that impresses upon us the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of its design, with its various tensions of contrasting spaces, materials, and solid forms. Evocative architectural designs do not replicate conventional designs so that we barely notice them; nor are they so radical that we fail to engage with them.
