The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista

This short novel is really inspiring and it’s hard to imagine that this is published around 50 years ago. I find several ideas quite forward-looking. When we talk about the idea of the ‘affective environment’, at least, it’s hard for me to imagine how to give a building a personality and what will be the output of this emotion. In this book, the embodiment of the emotions of these residences living in this building is the changing shape and color of the room. On one hand, this is quite artistic, if the room can be responsive to my thoughts, it’s great to see the beautiful scenes in my mind and it will undoubtedly improve people’s well-being. On other hand, at the end of the story, the residence nearly gets killed by the room. I think we should be critical towards this ‘affective environment’. We, ourselves, sometimes lose temper as well. In response, we perhaps drink a lot and smash things or traveling to other places to ease these emotions. I am wondering when the environment has negative emotions, how they are going to release them. Would they be transformed into violence or other things that could harm the safety of human beings? We have psychological mentors to help us get rid of these things, shall we do the same thing to the building or not? These are all very interesting questions to think about. But the core difference here is that I think for humans, we control ourselves. But for the building, who is the governor? The authority, the designer on other people? This is a question requiring a clear answer before we move forwards to technically realize all the things.