Atmosphere as a design focus

Journal of Architectural Education

This chapter, which is based on my book "Atmosphären erleben", Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 1994, was published in "Designing Atmospheres", ed. Jürgen Weidinger, Berlin: Universitätsverlag 2018, 41-54. A German version was published four years earlier.

This visual essay focuses on Pavilion House, Deer Isle, Maine, a built project of the author's own design. The term atmosphere in the title refers to the robust philosophical concept, developed by German philosopher Gernot Böhme and others, that is of value to those engaged in architecture and interior design. The subject of a vigorous discourse in recent decades, atmosphere concerns the feeling-based essence of an object, interior, place, or situation. The question at the heart of the essay is how to best represent interior atmosphere. The combination of text and photographs , which is historically of special importance for describing and documenting the built environment , has the potential to expand critical perceptions and understandings. In " Atmospheres, expressed, " the author writes a series of notes, mirroring the documentary aspect of the photographs , to create a conjoined documentary form that reveals how multiple sense impressions, thoughts, feelings, metaphors, and allusion together comprise atmospheres. The world comes with shapes, colors, atmospheres, texture—a display of self-presenting forms. All things show faces, the world not only a coded signature to be read for meaning, but a physiognomy to be faced. As expressive forms, things speak; they show the shape they are in. They announce themselves, bear witness to their presence: " Look, here we are! " They regard us beyond how we may regard them, our perspectives, what we intend with them, and how we dispose of them. This imaginative claim on attention bespeaks a world ensouled. 1 — James Hillman PAVILION HOUSE, DEER ISLE, MAINE

2020

My attempt in this paper is to illustrate some of the major developments in current phenomenological aesthetic research in the field of Atmospheres, showing how this concept has first consolidated through phenomenological approaches and has then concretized in the context of contemporary architecture. A main issue in this regard is the theoretical-philosophical basis on which the new contexts of this project are based and are therefore marked by a sensitive and perceptive approach toward the inhabited space. Through the concepts of experience, sensitive perception, and predisposition to places I will investigate how Atmospheres today represent an aesthetic way to interpret not only the inhabited space, but also the architectural project in modern and contemporary architecture.

Atmosphere and Aesthetics: A Plural Perspective, 2019

This chapter has two different parts. The editors firstly provide some of the reasons motivating the project of this book, which has been conceived and planned to give an account of the widespread in-terest gained by the ordinary concept of “atmosphere” in the last twenty years. “Atmosphere” has been more and more subsumed by human and social sciences, thereby becoming a technical notion. In this broader context, the editors secondly aim at showing and inquiring the tight relationship between atmosphere and Aesthetics. This discipline is no longer only a theory of art, but has recovered its original vocation: to be a general theory of perception conceived of as an ordinary experience of pre-logical character. In the second part, the editors give a short account of the chapters that compose the book, by which also appears the wide breadth and the scope of applications concerning an atmosphere-based Aesthetics.

Lebenswelt Aesthetics and Philosophy of Experience, 2014

In order for a book to succeed in presenting a theory of architecture, it must address aspects of imagination and creativity as well as the channels one can use to achieve truly significant architectural design. Atmospheres -Poetics of Architecture explores the fundamental theories of Modern and Postmodern design and attempts to reconcile all that is worthwhile in these two movements into a new inclusivist 1 attitude toward architecture.

Visual Communication 14, 2015

In this special issue, we focus on the ways in which atmospheres are designed by a range of affective and sensory engineers. The contributions take the visual as a springboard into considering the relationships between such designed atmospheres and those who are cast into their midst, revealing how they play out differently at public ceremonies, art events, shopping malls, tourist sites and in domestic settings.

International Lexicon of Aesthetics, 2020