Preserving Meanings, Memories and Emotional Attachments in Vernacular Settings: Employing Neuroscience to Gain Insights from the Traditional Houses in Bahrain

Fatima Hamza Jaffer

Abstract

Rapid urban transformation in Bahrain has led to the gradual erasure of a built vocabulary that once anchored collective identity: the courtyards (hoosh), the wind towers (Badageer), coral stone walls, and the sensory sequences that structured daily life across generations. In this context, this research investigates how traditional Bahraini courtyard houses interact with neurological and cultural processes of memory formation, and what is lost cognitively and culturally when these environments are demolished or replaced. Drawing on neuroarchitecture, phenomenology, and cultural memory theory, this study argues that traditional Bahraini houses function as neurologically rich mnemonic environments whose spatial and sensory qualities actively support the formation and transmission of memory in ways that contemporary standardized houses do not. It employs a qualitative case study methodology, combining semi-structured interviews with twelve participants, direct spatial observations at two sites, and archival analysis using materials from the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities and publicly available digital sources. Interviews revealed unanimous identification of the courtyard as the primary site of spatial memory. Spatial observations demonstrated the immediacy of embodied recall upon re-entering traditional spatial sequences. Archival data unearthed a pattern of incremental material erosion preceding physical demolition. Findings confirm that emotional attachments form through repeated sensory inhabitation over time, and that the courtyard typology uniquely supports collective and transmissible memories across generations in ways that no individual modern house can replicate. The research concludes that preserving traditional Bahraini architecture is not merely an aesthetic or heritage concern, but a neurological and cultural necessity: to lose these environments is to erode the sensory and spatial infrastructure through which collective identity and belonging are formed and sustained.

Keywords:

Architectural memory, Neuroarchitecture, Traditional Bahraini houses, Courtyard, Collective identity, Bahrain.

Access the Full Paper as a PDF

ISVS e-journal is currently indexed in EBSCO, DOAJ & ABCD-Index.

© ISVS e-journal publishes open access articles licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited. Papers can thus be deposited in any other database by the authors too.