Nature and nurture hone our taste

Chennai-born, New York-based architect Suchi Reddy often talks about the impact of her childhood home on her practice. She once told me that when she was 10, she had this epiphany that her house, which her parents had commissioned an architect to design, was actually affecting her. She says she felt a certain joy in her home and that notion of feeling a space would eventually conceptualise her practice's foundational principle of "feeling before form" and her interest in neuroaesthetics, a branch of architectural study that explores how visual aesthetics impact the mind. Our first discussions on this subject helped me understand how much I needed to trust my "feeling" for a space.

- Manju Sara Rajan

Many of us can sense it, that instinctual reaction to a home or building and its energy: You like it or you don't. Over the years, I have been particularly interested in how my children perceive spaces. Perhaps I am trying to help them tap into that "feeling" early enough so they can learn to trust their instincts.

We have discussed what sort of house they would like to have in the future. Their home life in Kerala, the nature of my work and writing, and, more recently, the environment of their school have all caused this topic of conversation to come up over and over again. A pair of emotionally-charged Scorpio twins who are entering that last snatch of transition from child to teenager-they have just turned 12-their spatial understanding and aesthetic choices keep evolving, and it's interesting for me to remember where their ideas have come from.

Pull at those threads and they lead back to something somewhere that they have seen or experienced, maybe a hotel, a facet of someone else's house, or something in their own. Inadvertently perhaps, they tabulate perceptions from the spaces they have experienced, stitching those together into plans for their future homes.

Twin I, as the hospital delegated the first-born, told me a few days ago that he would like his future home to have some space where he can "spend time alone writing but also have parts where people can spend time together". He was sure he wanted a courtyard; one that was so integral you would have to cross it to get to the living-dining spaces. This idea came from the design of a friend's home in Mumbai that he visited earlier this year.