Architectural Affordances: The Atmospheric Authority of Spaces

They Are There to Be Perceived: Affordances and Atmospheres. In: Djebbara, Z. (ed.) Affordances in Everyday Life. Springer, Cham, 85-95. https://, 2022

Let's imagine the entrance hall of a major banking institution, with its pretentious decorations and furnishings, fine paintings and sculptures, and an imposing marble staircase in the middle, surrounded by neoclassical columns. This certainly impressive lived space may express (i) an antagonistic atmosphere of power for those who venture there in search of a loan (whence the impulse to move slowly and warily, to leave the center of the room and take refuge in protective nooks and crannies), and (ii) a syntonic atmosphere of proud belonging for an employee who has developed a strong esprit de corps (whence their proud strut in the middle of the hall). This example clarifies, against any projectivistic relativism, that different atmospheric feelings (or, better, moods) are just relatively different felt-bodily filterings and resonances to the same quasi-objective and first-impression atmosphere that I call prototypical. 1 Of course, this is the case as long as-with a closer analogy with qualitative invariants such as James Gibson's affordance (1986) and, before that, Kurt Lewin's Aufforderungscharakter (valence) (1936, 166), Kurt Koffka's 1 Without fully embracing the radical neo-phenomenological campaign of desubjectification of all feelings initiated by Hermann Schmitz in the 1960s (for an introduction to this philosophical stance, see Schmitz, 2019), I prefer to admit (at least since Griffero, 2014, 144) that there are three different types of atmospheres: prototypical atmospheres (objective, external, and unintentional, sometimes lacking a precise name), derivative-relational ones (objective, external, and sometimes intentionally produced as well as dependent on the subject/world relationship), and even some that are spurious because of their relatedness (subjective and projective, that is, also related to single objects and projected by the subject to the outside world).

Atmosphere(s) for Architects: Between Phenomenology and Cognition

This book was born to home the dialogue that the neuroscientist Michael A. Arbib and the philosopher Tonino Griffero started at the end of 2021 about atmospheric experiences, striving to bridge the gap between cognitive science's perspective and the (neo)phenomenological one. This conversation progressed due to Pato Paez's offer to participate in the webinar "Architectural Atmospheres: Phenomenology, Cognition, and Feeling," a roundtable hosted by The Commission Project (TCP) within the Applied Neuroaesthetics initiative. The event ran online on May 20, 2022. Bob Condia moderated the panel discussion between Suchi Reddy, Michael A. Arbib, and Tonino Griffero. The RESONANCES project (Architectural Atmospheres: The Emotional Impact of Ambiances Measured through Conscious, Bodily, and Neural Responses) was responsible for developing the editing and publishing process. It received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 101025132. The content of this book reflects only the authors' view. The European Research Executive Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. For further information, please visit the project website: www.resonances-project.com Disclaimer Every effort has been made to identify copyright holders and secure the necessary permission to reproduce featured images and other visual material. Please direct any inquiries regarding image rights to the editors Cover image

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.

Timely Meditations, vol. 2, 2016

In my book Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (MIT Press, 1984), I described how Western architecture was profoundly affected by the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, revealing a set of intentions that are wholly modern long before the material changes brought about by Industrial Revolution. 1 In relation to perception and cognition, an initial consequence of that momentous transformation in European thinking was the incorporation of René Descartes' dualistic epistemology/psychology into the dominant conception of how architecture communicates. This assumption had farreaching consequences, opening the door for a subsequent understanding of architecture as a "sign"--whose meaning was articulated as the intellectual "judgment" of exclusively visual qualities. This became the primary assumption of many twentieth century poststructuralist and deconstructive philosophers and architects, and one still present, often tacitly, among contemporary theoreticians. The Cartesian understanding of cognition first appeared in architectural theory toward the end of the seventeenth century in the writings of Claude Perrault, the famous architect, medical doctor, biologist and theoretician. 2 He believed that architecture communicates its meanings to a disembodied soul (today often still identified with a brain, understood as the exclusive seat of consciousness), thoroughly bypassing the body with its complex feelings and emotions. 3 Perrault assumed perception to be passive and cognition to be merely the result of the association of concepts and images in the brain. Like Descartes, Perrault believed that human consciousness (enabled by the pineal gland at the back of the head, conceived as a geometric and monocular point of contact between the measurable, intelligible world --res extensa --and the disembodied, rational soul --res Deleted: ¶ Deleted: ¶ Deleted: an understanding Deleted: Deleted: : cogitans) was capable of perspectival visual perception, and that this assured the human capacity to grasp the immutable geometric and mathematical truth of the external world. 4 He could question, for the first time ever in the history of architectural theory, the bodily experience of "harmony" as synesthetic, applicable to both hearing and sight embedded in kinesthesia: a phenomenon that had always been taken for granted since Classical antiquity and that constituted the primary quality of architectural design. For Perrault, sight and hearing were autonomous and segregated receptors, and therefore the inveterate experience of harmony in architecture was a fallacy --or at best the result of misguided associations between self-evident visual qualities and cultural assumptions. While mainstream, technologically-driven planning and architectural practice has remained caught in this framework of understanding until our very own times, around 150 years after Descartes' influential writings another, often unacknowledged revolution in the human sciences took place. Even though it was originally qualified as a mere reaction to positive reason, associated with the arts as they lost their claim to truth, and sometimes taken as a plea for "irrationality," over the last two centuries this transformation has proven to be as important for Western thought as the Galilean revolution. 5 This momentous shift happened at the end of the eighteenth century with the rise of Romantic philosophy. Writers associated with this position questioned the dualism of Cartesian philosophy and argued for the reciprocity and co-emergence of inner and outer realms of human experience. 6 This initial insight allowed thinkers to establish a distance from materialism, establishing a critical position with regards to the technological dogma of their own times, while affirming the importance of imagination and the truth-value of fiction. In his Essais (1795) Friedrich Schelling declares that it is our prerogative to question the times we live in and to contemplate within ourselves eternity with its immutable form. This is the only way to access our most precious certainties, to know "that anything is in the true sense of being, while the rest is only appearance." This intuition appears to us whenever we stop being an object for ourselves… we are not "in" linear time. Rather "time, or pure eternity, is in us." This insight anticipates Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological understanding of time as thick present, 7 an experience which I will argue below, is now corroborated by recent neurobiology. It is important to emphasize that Schelling added an important observation

B@abelonline vol. 6, New Phenomenological Horizons/Nuovi orizzonti fenomenologici, 2020

My paper addresses the founding body emotions of architecture, and in particular it aims at redefining the sublime into phenomenological terms. Starting from Kant, it argues that the phenomenological sublime is a bodily-felt emotion aroused by the excess of sensuousness over conceptuality. But at present, the body metaphor does no longer guarantee order and symbolic meaning. This disruption was brought about by Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's criticism of compossibility and representation, which led, paradoxically enough, to a sublime bodily experience of space. As contemporary architectural space shows, body and space are affectively intertwined, but this co-belonging is characterized by conflicts, tensions, and the suspension of meaning.

Something more. Atmospheres and pathic aesthetics, in T. Griffero/G. Moretti (ed.), Atmosphere/Atmospheres. Testing a new paradigm, Mimesis International, Milan, pp. 75-89, 2018

2021

How do atmospheres ground the subject through embodied experiences of space? This thesis is an argument for embodiment and duration in architectural space, a theory of spatial hospitality that attempts to make some room for the subject as a spatial being. My research has proceeded over two lines of inquiry: on the one hand a dissertation forming a phenomenological study of contemporary atmospheric spatial practices, and on the other a practice-led studio investigation exploring perception, duration and the unfolded embodied experience of atmospheric spaces. By its very nature the concept of atmosphere is vague and diffuse. In these spaces, the felt experience of atmosphere acts upon individuals within their surroundings, which in turn are being co-constituted by that subject. At its core, this dissertation is an ontological study of subjectivity and atmosphere in the perceptual environments and spaces produced by artists Robert Irwin (1928 - ), James Turrell (1943 - ) and Olafur Eli...

SHS Web of Conferences, 2019

The following essay proposes to investigate the perceptual and emotional aspects related to the visualization of architectural images. The field of research is limited to a well-defined category: figurative representations as the photographic and digital images of contemporary architecture. In particular, two types will be analysed: the un-built architecture produced by Studio MIR and Bloomimages compared with the photographed built architecture. Using figurative images as a tool of reading, the aim of this work is to identify and classify three types of affective spaces capable of generating a specific kind of perception, producing a sensorial classification of atmosphere for architecture. The study of the Psychology of Art, as well as Aesthetics and Neuroaesthetics can be a valuable tool in understanding the phenomena of the present, considering the marked pictoriality of these images. The application of the analytic methodology, developed in these disciplines, can suggest a new w...

Choreographing Space, 2021

If we think of architecture as the formation of material and geometry experienced through our bodily sensations, and psychoanalysis as the exploration of the inner psyche, one would wonder what these two disciplines might contribute to one another. The experience of architecture—our built, physical reality—is not limited to our external physical body, just as psychoanalysis is not limited to the inner world of the mind. Instead, there is an ongoing dialogue, where the physical environment—consciously or unconsciously—has an effect on the psyche, which simultaneously affects one’s perception of that physical reality. As such, buildings do not merely provide physical shelter and protection, they also provide a mental mediation between the world and our consciousness, articulating both physical and existential space.

International Lexicon of Aesthetics, 2020