Positive space, negative space. They sound like some kind of  New Age terms, when actually, they're one of the oldest and most basic concepts in design. Simply put, positive space represents space that we want, while negative space is what's left over. To draw a simple analogy, imagine cutting out cookies from dough. The cookies represent the positive space, and the pointy scraps left over are the negative space. In architecture and building, as in baking, the idea is to maximize the number of cookies and minimize the leftover scraps. As it happens, maximizing positive space is even more important in architecture than in baking, since you can't ball up the leftover scraps and roll more dough out of them. You've pretty much got to cut things out right the first time. It also happens that architectural forms that are roughly circular ? like cookies ? provide a much stronger sense of comforting enclosure than do those nasty angular scraps left over from cutting them out.  As basic as this principle seems, many houses violate this thinking because acute angles are very dramatic and people go for the drama more often than not.  But there's a price to pay for this. Acute angles inside buildings can't be comfortably inhabited by anything other than gnats and spiders, and it's not too much to say that they also have an unsettling effect on the human psyche. Deep in our primitive brains, converging angles still give us an uneasy sense of walls closing in, of entrapment ? not exactly the ambience you want for your living room. The Chinese design principles known as Feng Shui have long warned against acute angles ? "secret daggers" ? which are thought to generate malevolent forces. It's just another way of saying that sharp angles creep people out.  To be sure, more-or-less circular shapes are one of nature's favorite forms, appearing in practically every living thing from the cell on up. Now, none of this implies that rooms should be literally round ? a pretty impractical idea, what with all our relentlessly linear building materials. But it does suggest that rooms shouldn't contain wall or ceiling angles sharper than 90 degrees, and that they shouldn't be more than half again as long as they are wide. Nor should they have sharp angles intruding into them, or far-flung, dead corners with no through traffic. This applies to outdoor rooms as well, except that here, you can use landscaping to produce a pleasingly positive space for people to inhabit. In short, the closer you come to approximating a circular shape ? whether using architectural features, furniture arrangements, or planting ? the more comfortable your rooms will be. Whether we call the result intimate, auspicious, secure, or just plain cozy ? we all know positive space when we feel it.