Atmospheres

International Lexicon of Aesthetics, 2020

Reconstructing Urban Ambiance in Smart Public Places, 2020

This chapter reviews the implications of using the words “essences” and “spirit” in urban studies and their link with the concept of affective atmospheres in the realms of architecture. Two assumptions are valid when this matter is addressed. The first is that, despite affective atmospheres being considered as the fifth dimension in architecture, they are not their essence or spirit. The second is that these atmo- spheres impersonate a crucial role in reconstructing different urban environments, which are based on the perceptual dimension. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an informed view bibliographically and conceptually about distinguishing between essence, spirit, and affective atmospheres. The chapter also provides an analysis of the concept of affective atmospheres to verify the hypothesis. The conclusion is latent in the possibility that the expression “affective atmospheres,” instead of “essence” or “spirit,” can be used for referring to people’s emotional impressions in urban environments as a fifth dimension.

Heritage and the City: Values and Beyond, 2022

The aesthetic perception of a spatial atmosphere is related to the sensory experience we have in that space. Although this experience is led by a multisensory understanding, the dominant sense is generally the sense of sight in architectural spaces. This dominance—which is generally connected to the Modernist architects as asserted by, for example, Juhani Pallasmaa (2005)—is related to the speed of the perception, or speed of the transfer of the data amount collected by this sense. What is perceived and evaluated aesthetically via the data provided by the sense of sight comprises the composition of the spatial atmosphere in visual respect. In this visual rendition, composition principles have an important role in affecting the experiencers aesthetically in the evaluation of space by setting objective criteria. Therefore, in this paper, I aim to read and understand the relationships between architectural spaces and composition principles as objective atmosphere generators. I chose rhythm, contrast, and unity in variety as the composition principles frequently used in architectural design. To demonstrate this relationship, I firstly made a literature review to provide a base for the analyses theoretically, and secondly, I made a case study comprising the examples having visual organizations created by the mentioned composition principles. The cases to discuss the visual qualities provided by these principles comprise the Villa Stein (Paris, France, 1927) designed by Le Corbusier, the Barcelona Pavilion designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Georg Kolbe’s sculpture named the Dawn (Alba) (Barcelona, Spain, 1929), and the Brion Cemetery (San Vito d’Altivole, Italy, 1969-77) designed by Carlo Scarpa. Examining the atmospheric design and genii given by the composition principles in these cases may pave the way for understanding the lack we have in the aesthetic qualities of today’s architecture.

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

in P. Tidwell (ed. by), Architecture and Atmosphere, Tapio Wirkkala-Rut Bryk Foundation, Espoo 2014, pp. 15-47

Having in mind a quite fictional primitive man, for Koffka «each thing says what it is and what [we] ought to do with it: a fruit says, "Eat me"; water says, "Drink me"; thunder says, "Fear me", and woman says, "Love me" 1 . This is the so-called "demand character", or "invitation character" and "valence", of our environment, a character that doesn't completely change according to the need or the intention of the actor and exists sometimes even if it is not perceived. But couldn't this be applied more generally, and a fortiori especially in an architectural environment, conceived not as a collection of causes but as an emotional manifold of action possibilities?

SHS Web of Conferences

The concept of “ambiance” has been shaped over the years by questioning the interactions between three attractors: architecture and the city, climatic and sound phenomena, uses and perception. Studied in pairs, each of these attractors refers to very different disciplinary fields; architecture and phenomena concern the physics of the city, architecture and uses interest sociology and uses and phenomena are rather turned to comfort. Studies concerning ambiances are therefore highly interdisciplinary and raise many questions: living spaces, urban renewal and heritage, urban prospective and the city as a stage. For this, many conceptual and technical tools are mobilized: digital tools for simulation and immersion, investigation, surveys and storytelling, prototyping, field action. What may be new in the field of academic studies is the awareness of artistic creation as a resource for the use of digital tools, storytelling and the representation of complexity through original means.

Lebenswelt: Aesthetics and Philosophy of Experience, 2014

The richest experiences happen long before the soul takes notice. And when we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have already been supporters of the invisible for a long time.

2012

Abstract. Building an exhibition means giving shape to an artificial environment in which certain meanings are transmitted. In a dialectical relationship with the visi-‐ tor, objects reclaimed from the context that generated them are ordered and pre-‐ sented, defining situations full of new meanings and dimensions. In this context, atmosphere plays a significant role: objects and public are simultaneously in one place and, to ensure a successful communication, the emotional component takes on strategic importance. Building an architecture exhibition means giving shape to an artificial environment in which the object of the display is absent. Therefore, in some cases, the purpose of the show becomes the issue of making a spatial experi-‐ ence accessible to the public. Some architecture exhibitions do not define their goal as an objective presentation based on technical drawings, models and strangely uninhabited photographs but, on the contrary, they try to reconstruct a certain “some...

Neuroscience has well established that human vision divides into the central and peripheral fields of view. Central vision extends from the point of gaze (where we are looking) out to about 5 • of visual angle (the width of one's fist at arm's length), while peripheral vision is the vast remainder of the visual field. These visual fields project to the parvo and magno ganglion cells, which process distinctly different types of information from the world around us and project that information to the ventral and dorsal visual streams, respectively. Building on the dorsal/ventral stream dichotomy, we can further distinguish between focal processing of central vision, and ambient processing of peripheral vision. Thus, our visual processing of and attention to objects and scenes depends on how and where these stimuli fall on the retina. The built environment is no exception to these dependencies, specifically in terms of how focal object perception and ambient spatial perception create different types of experiences we have with built environments. We argue that these foundational mechanisms of the eye and the visual stream are limiting parameters of architectural experience. We hypothesize that people experience architecture in two basic ways based on these visual limitations; by intellectually assessing architecture consciously through focal object processing and assessing architecture in terms of atmosphere through pre-conscious ambient spatial processing. Furthermore, these separate ways of processing architectural stimuli operate in parallel throughout the visual perceptual system. Thus, a more comprehensive understanding of architecture must take into account that built environments are stimuli that are treated differently by focal and ambient vision, which enable intellectual analysis of architectural experience versus the experience of architectural atmosphere, respectively. We offer this theoretical model to help advance a more precise understanding of the experience of architecture, which can be tested through future experimentation. (298 words)

Over the whole Twentieth century, philosophical theories have dealt with the impossibility for the contemporary society to make authentic experience. Overwhelmed by an excessive amount of stimuli and data, metropolitan individuals become indifferent to the outer world. Amplified by this phenomenon but also by its very nature, architecture is perceived by non-architects in a state of distraction, as the soundtrack in the background of a movie. It seems that until now the only answer architecture gave to this statement was a desperate and uncoordinated request of attention resulted in the iconic and autonomous buildings identically erected from London to Beijing over the last thirty years. Perhaps it is time to reflect on how space affects its users and to find the link between the existing architectural “syntax” and its “semantics”, in order to better understand the meaning and the effect of architectural gestures. This essay aims to bring together these attempts to create a coherent theory on how architectural design influence people’s experience of space.