Building Spirits

[druidevo]

This is a question mostly for you people who work/live/study/etc in and around big buildings, even if you aren't Pagan. Is there any large building that you regularly encounter that you feel has a gender? As an example I'll describe my feelings of the University of Kansas engineering complex

Comments

[blue_estro]

I spend quite a bit of time around big buildings, including big older buildings, and they do have... presence.

I don't think I have ever picked up a sense of gender identity from a building in such a way that I could be sure that it wasn't a romantic projection of mine (palace theaters, for example, always read as "she" to me... but that may be my thinking of them as Grand Old Dames rather than inherent to their nature)

My sense of buildings is that they pick up what people emotionally invest in and around them, both while being built and during use, and through this develop... identity? Quasi-sentience? Older buildings, both through years and years of use and the greater man-hour required to construct generally have a strong presence. Newer buildings tend to have notable presence if they have a special purpose or particularly emotionally evocative design (it is really difficult for people to care about just another steel and glass box). Grade schools are often very endowed, given that children are less controlled with their emotions and spend the better part of five years interacting with the building in a very specific context.