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Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces

Böhme, Gernot

While atmosphere is used often in discourse, it does not have its place as a term used in aesthetic theory. Instead, the term aura is used to describe a very similar idea of the distance and awe that surrounds artwork (pp.17). Duchamp was successful in creating aura of his ready mades which were everyday items or objects that were declared as being works of art. This echoes the ideas presented in the previous reading, ‘Staging Atmospheres,’ that atmosphere can be created (and similarly manipulated). An important idea that this text expands on is the way that aura, or atmosphere, is experienced. It is said that one ‘breathes’ aura, that aura is something that is experienced by the body.

The new aesthetics is a general theory of perception that strays from the restraints of data and information processing. Instead, perception is valued as being emotionally receptive to, or having bodily presence in one’s surroundings.

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The Affect Theory Reader

Melissa Gregg, and Gregory J. Seigworth

Affect arises from the in-between-ness and resides as a beside-ness (pp.2). It is created from the subtle shifting of intensities and tensions, from the resonances that pass from bodies to bodies, circulating around unnoticed. Affect is the name given to the forces beyond emotion, and “is also synonymous with force or forces of encounter” (pp.2).

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Fractured Atmosphere

Anna Boswell

What we feel when we feel or experience the atmosphere is dependent on our “angle of arrival” (pp.38). Shared experiences can be limited by angles of arrival, as what may be ‘there’ for one person may not be ‘there’ for another (pp.38). On top of this the experience of one person may have a negative impact which creates a broken experience if the other person does not experience the atmosphere the same way (pp.38).

“The distribution of sensible” is a framework discussed by Boswell. It refers to what the senses are capable of perceiving but in the context of a certain situation, that is, how the senses are regulated in this particular context. However in the context of atmosphere, it simply isn’t possible to regulate the way someone perceives atmosphere, meaning that atmosphere (and affect) are not absolute. The way one experiences or perceives atmosphere is determined, or at least influenced, by their historical, cultural, and political background.

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Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation

Massumi, Brian.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual : Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/massey/detail.action?docID=1167818.

“Feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways...” (pp.1).

“Affect is most often used loosely as a synonym for emotion. But one of the clearest lessons of this first story is that emotion and affect— if affect is intensity— follow different logics and pertain to different orders” (pp.27).

“An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal” (pp.28).

“Brain and skin form a resonating vessel. Stimulation turns inward…” (pp.28/29).

“In other words, the half second is missed not because it is empty, but because it is overfull, in excess of the actually-performed action and of its ascribed meaning” (pp.29).

“‘Free,’ ‘higher’ functions, such as volition, are apparently being performed by autonomic, bodily reactions occurring in the brain but outside consciousness, and between brain and finger but prior to action and expression” (pp.29).

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Designing Atmospheres introduction to Special issue

Tim Edensor, Shanti Sumartojo

As in Bohme’s text, this text reiterates the idea that atmosphere cannot be placed, or attributed to the object or environment in which it exists. Instead atmosphere is an “intermediate

phenomena, belonging neither in the world out there nor in the individual person” (pp.251). This is further backed up by another point  brought up in the text, that without a sentient subject, the atmosphere becomes nothing (Bohme, 2008: 2). As atmosphere is thought to be “something which can come over us, into which we are drawn, which takes possession of us like an alien power” (Bohme, 2008: 3), as well as something that resonates with our emotions, if there is no subject within which emotion can resonate this idea makes sense.

The co-production of atmosphere is brought up here. In the previous text it is mentioned that there can be a staged atmosphere, but that often a spontaneous atmosphere arises from the people themselves, which I feel is relevant here. Designers can never be sure as to what kind of spontaneous atmosphere will arise, what kind of emotions, histories, cultures, or politics a particular crowd will bring with them into an environment. Similarly the conditions of the environment can be unpredictable, such as weather, temperature, natural disasters, or even system failures. 

Affect is described in this text as “Certainly affect – defined as ‘a sense of push in the world … a notion of broad tendencies and lines of force” (Thrift, 2004: 60) Affects, sensations, materialities, emotions and meanings are all encapsulated within the definition of atmosphere and while each of these terms might be conceptualized separately, atmospheres are phenomena that blur the boundaries between them (pp.253).

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Sixth Sense: The Meaning of Atmosphere and Mood

Juhani Pallasmaa

Atmosphere comes to us from all around, we sense the mood and atmosphere of a place before we are even conscious of it. The characteristics and atmosphere of a space come to us unconsciously “in an embodied and haptic manner” (pp.130). Emotional reactions are not created by objects, they stem from relationships and states of mind.

The way we read things is from general to specific, form to detail, “multisensory syntheses before individual sensory features, emotive meanings before intellectual explanations” (pp.130). 

It is suggested that this way of reading atmosphere, and the unconscious feelings we get from an environment, stem from the evolutionary process. It is a survival process that humans have adapted to gain an advantage over their environment; Two methods of perception, precise focused perception (conscious perception), and unfocused peripheral scanning (pp.131). These two systems work together. The first, the unconscious peripheral scanning, is said to occur about 20 to 30 milliseconds earlier (than our precise focused perception), and is thought to be our creative mode of perception. 

“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.” — Gabriele d’Annunzio, 1912

Emotions are regarded as unconscious, secondary reactions. However, our emotions stem from the depths of our primal levels of consciousness, from our nervous system, which suggests that in actuality, our emotional response to an environment or atmosphere is the first wave of neural signals (as opposed to the secondary status it is regarded with) (pp.133). On the other hand, vision has been regarded as something factual, something objective and precise. But research suggests that vision is subject to manipulation from our imagination; “a fragmented and discontinuous mosaic that constantly fuses perceptions with memory and imagination” (pp.133).

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Staging atmospheres: Materiality, culture, and the texture of the in-between

Mikkel Bille, Peter Bjerregaard, Tim Flohr Sørensen

Atmosphere occupies the space between physical and spiritual. As something that inhabits the spaces we live in, atmosphere becomes a fundamental experience of the human world and plays an important role in creating identities and defining moments (pp.31).

Atmosphere is very much something (a concept, an idea) in which its existence is hard to place. Its nature is very much in-between (pp.32) subject and object, but is crucial to the “emotional and sensory experience” (pp.32) for places which people interact with. It is precisely this slippery nature of trying to define what atmosphere is that leads to the discussion of atmosphere as a concept of elements as opposed to subjects; “Whereas the object is an entity for subjective perception, elements are dimensions through which perception takes places” (pp.32). This suggests that atmospheres are a sensory experience that utilises perception, constantly transforming and changing as opposed to an unchanging, unmoving object.

Atmosphere exists not just between subject and object, but also between experience and environment (pp.32). Ultimately, atmospheres cannot be determined or placed. It is a phenomenon that crosses boundaries; existing in the inbetween, through unity of subject and object, environment and experience, presence and materiality.

The existence of atmosphere is neither here nor there, but is made perceptible through the perceived quality of a situation, which is made up by the connection between people and objects. As people are always experiencing some kind of emotion, this feeling is influenced by presence and materiality to produce an atmosphere, suggesting that these (presence, materiality, and atmosphere) are therefore tied together and made inseparable (pp.32). 

Whilst atmosphere are thought to be genuine fleeting moments of human life, it is possible to manipulate, shape, or stage such experiences. This can be done through shaping the material environment to elicit an emotional response, although varying degrees of success are expected due to the vastly different values, perception, and cultural views that each individual brings with them into a space; “Atmospheres are susceptible to how the material environment changes, to changing human values and cultural premises” (pp.34).

Such staging of experiences is commonly seen in advertisements which use imagery or sound to create a perceived mood or feeling in connection with the goods being sold.

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Architectural Atmospheres

Reading notes and memorable quotes: (all writing taken directly from the text)

The art of stage-setting became the paradigm for the production of atmospheres.

An atmosphere cannot be an autonomous state; it cannot be in standstill, frozen. Atmospheres are productive, they are active agents. When you introduce atmosphere into a space, it becomes a reality machine.

The words ‘romantic’ and ‘Romanticism’ usually convey a disparaging or sentimental tone, but the era of Romanticism in the nineteenth century produced significant thinking in philosophy, psychology, and aesthetic theories.

This may also be a definition of atmospheres: they are spaces with a mood, or emotionally felt spaces.

Emotions can be on the outside, they can strike you.

Atmospheres are, in a sense, entities – or ‘quasi-things’, as Schmitz termed them. They can creep, swell, and ebb.

“I, for one, believe that certain fundamental architectural experiences are verbs rather than nouns. Architecture suggests or invites activities. In my view, a door is not architecture, whereas passing through a doorway, crossing the threshold between two realms, is a genuine architectural experience. Similarly, a window in itself is not yet architecture; it is the act of looking through the window, or of light falling in, that turns it into a meaningful architectural experience”.

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A3 Constellation Diagram

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Create a second A3 collage that visually maps your emerging understanding of atmosphere in relation to your area of practice. This image is actually a gif. What I was looking for in some of these images was elements of movement despite the form being a still image. I decided to include the gif as I felt its simplicity was impactful.

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'What atmosphere means to me': This is a brief exercise to visually map what you currently know atmosphere to be. Set yourself 30mins to collect and map the various ways you know 'atmosphere'. Use any resource or media at your disposal such as the internet, library, a sketchbook, a camera, your body, a room. Collate your material as an A3 visual collage (this can be physical or digital).

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My initial response to this task was to use my prior and later knowledge to try and actually create an atmosphere. Using my summer school work as a base, I stripped it to simply the house and background and began to build it up.

The narrative for my summer school work was alone but not lonely, I wanted to utilize the Douglas house’s isolated environment but put a different spin on it as all the images I saw gave a rather creepy atmosphere to the house.

In the second Image I came back to it with the desire to add more depth, more shadow (not just light as I did in the first iteration), and texture.

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Atmospheric Relations - Theorising Music and sound as Atmosphere

Friedlind Riedel

Reading notes and memorable quotes: (all writing taken directly from the text)

Music and sound are operative forces for shaping feelings into “something more.

In fact, it seems that wherever music resounds, feelings are likely to unfold as perhaps vague, but nonetheless intrusive and pervasive, spatially extended atmospheres.

Music could provide “unique ways of feeling” as it would generate “waves of feelings” not just in the body but “between bodies”.

“In a recent publication, Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle explored how, in the context of political protests in Britain, popular chart music was employed 'to create a particular ambience or atmosphere, via the induction, modulation and circulation of moods, feelings and intensities, which were felt but, at the same time, belonged to nobody in particular’”.

Musical and sonic events not simply impact on individual listeners, but transform situations and collectives.

“Their arguments, while at times in fierce contradiction regarding how, on whom, why and exactly what it is in music or sound that exerts such transformative power, intersect through the use of a variety of related and sometimes contrasted terms: affect, mood, feeling, rasa, jaww, emotion, ambiance, Stimmung or atmosphere”.

Atmospheric feelings are not an ancillary effect of music-making, but that music (making) is chiefly about atmosphere.

Music and sounds are indeed heard and experienced as atmosphere and not simply as something that produces atmosphere.

Atmospheres are irreducible to the auditory realm: they are multimedial and synaesthetic.

“Music” and “sounds,” “noise” and “silence” seem obsolete when it comes to the capacity to afford or evoke atmospheres.

The notion of ambiance has been explored as a means to comprehend an “environmental quality” of built and inhabited spaces.

“I propose that “atmosphere” or an “atmospheric situation” describes a “feeling” that fundamentally exceeds an individual body or conscious subject, and instead pertains primarily to the overall situation in which a multiplicity of bodies cohere”.

Affect and Atmosphere:

Both affect and atmosphere are relational concepts, and they both concern material and ideational relations.

Affect and atmosphere may be distinguished with regards to the particular kind of relational structure they respectively emphasise.

While “affect” can be said to refer to the ways in which (emerging) bodies relate to each other, “atmosphere” allows for the ways in which a multiplicity of bodies is part of a situation that envelopes it.

In analogy, atmosphere asks how music and sounds impact on the totality of things rather than on individual listening bodies, but nevertheless impact the individual body through the totality.

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The Chameleon Effect : Architecture's Role in Film

Dietmar Froehlich. The Chameleon Effect : Architecture’s Role in Film. Birkhäuser, 2018.

Reading notes and memorable quotes:

Introduction:

Spatial qualities can be achieved with the medium film.

What happens to spatial perception and the reading of space and architecture within film?

“ Architecture is not only important for a film’s narrative, architecture surrounds us, contains us, it is a major part of how we live”.

Architecture and space is experience with all of our senses and “oftentimes the reality of inhabiting a building is complemented by imagination”.

Both film and architecture transform our way of seeing (and experiencing?)

Film holds the ability to be able to discover space beyond the limitations of still imagery. Film also allows for the exploration of a space over the duration of a period of time.

“Architecture manifests itself in the spatial, formal and sensual qualities of the set”.

“ Decades later [1990’s] Gilles Deleuze in his philosophy of cinema, addresses the relation between architectural and filmic imaging by focusing on the ‘beyond’ of the frame, through the concept of the cinematic out-of-field. Acknowledging an unseen “beyond” Deleuze opens up a realm of imaging which goes beyond cinema as such, introducing an immanent conception of imaging in architecture”. While reading this I wondered if this could possibly be similar to the idea of atmosphere being an unseen, hidden, ‘sixth-sense’ element of space.

Film also contains ideas of object design and fashion design as well as architecture.

“Film, the “Moving Image”, creates a space-time construction that goes beyond the mere physical experience of space. It combines emotive and intellectual perceptions to form a compound and complex experience on several simultaneous levels”.

“As film teaches the architect how to edit and how to visualize space, as film even strives to visualize emotions that are triggered by a space, film becomes an effective tool for analyzing and synthesizing spatial sequences”.

“Cinema transports ideas about living and dwelling, it depicts architecture and space; film invents spatial realities, and familiarizes the audience with concepts of space, time and with design concepts”.

Film’s Cultural Politics: Architecture and Cultural Impact:

“Different forces such as politics and economics have had a strong influence on film and thus have changed our culture and societal norms”.

Cinema contributes to the self imaging of a culture as it depicts and reflects the daily experience.

The Chameleon Effect: The Many Faces of Architecture Revealed:

The term "Chameleon effect” refers to the phenomenon of a building’s capability to posses “multiple personalities” and blend into different contexts.

The Chameleon Defined:

“The term Chameleon Effect has been used in several disciplines to describe various forms of the ability to adapt to, re-interpret and interact with the environment”.

“The Ennis-Brown House’s iconic quality is the main reason for its continuously being cast in so many different categories of film. Additionally and despite its iconic status, the Ennis-Brown House is easily adapted, inside out, outside in, to fit the needs of a film’s intention. It can change appearance, as a whole or in part”.

Architecture is made from memory, imagination, and intellectual and physical sensations.

Film uses changes in light, angle, distance, framing, camera movement to build these worlds.

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Staging atmospheres: Materiality, culture, and the texture of the in-between

Mikkel Bille, Peter Bjerregaard, Tim Flohr Sørensen

Reading notes and memorable quotes:

“...studies have argued that atmosphere constitutes a fundamental aspect of the human experience of the world and that it thus is an important part of the identities” (pp.31).

The atmosphere we live in, spend time in, grow up in shapes not only our experience but also has some effect on our individual personalities.

“Yet, the processes of aesthetisation that increasingly shape public and private spaces also entail the possibility of sharing and staging an atmosphere, and thereby become central to social activities and experiences, beyond the realms on individual experience” (pp.31).

Looking into the potential for deliberate staging of atmospheres and the social and political manipulation of people.

The idea of actively shaping experiences and mood can lead us to begin questioning the role of atmosphere as a part of human life. In the case of a commercial context the atmosphere of the commercial was more influential than the product itself.

“The deliberate staging, orchestration, or manipulation of atmosphere, also becomes a way of performing what the world both is, and should be” (pp. 34).

“This highlights that the staging of atmosphere is a way of being together, of sharing a social reality, implying that staged atmospheres are not necessarily threatened by the stigma of authenticity” (pp. 34).

“For Bohme, atmosphere is thus not simply the subjective feel of a room or a situation, nor is it an objectively observable state of the physical environment. Yet contending that atmospheres can be staged (Bohme, 2013), he also implies that they can somehow be built and anticipated, which means that they hinge on the material world as well as subjective dispositions” (pp.32).

Atmosphere emerges from between the subject and the object.

Atmospheres are the perceived quality of a situation, made up by the constellation of people and things.

“The emphasis is on affect as a ‘set of flows moving’ through the bodies of human and other beings’, which foregrounds how affect may be transmitted and shared as something beyond the individual or verbal representation.”

Notes on cultural differences and differences in reading atmosphere based on the individual’s perspective, qualities of (and attitudes towards) life, and upbringing:

“Based on extensive fieldwork in Japanese homes, she contends that atmosphere can equally emerge as an exchange between sociality and detachment, and between active participation and passive lack of involvement.”

“...feeling at home in Japan rests on a balancing of intimacy between family members and possibilities for being alone.”

“Daniels thereby highlights the importance of understanding people's lives and social worlds on the very premise of people's attunement to place…”

“Social sciences often ignore the fleeting dimensions of human life” (pp.32).

“...atmospheres are always located in between experiences and environments” (pp. 32).

“...affect is produced neither by the ‘materialities nor by the inner world alone; it is produced through their interaction’.”

“...the notion of affect she explores and localises in the intermingling between mind and material infrastructure is often referred to in terms of ‘atmospheres’...”

“Atmospheres must have something to do with spaces and temporality, something to do with the intrinsic qualities of materials, and something to do with experience; in essence it must be understood as a spatial experience of being attuned in and by a material world.”

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The Aesthetics of Atmosphere

Bohme G. Reading notes and memorable quotes: Introduction of the human factor to science by bringing aesthetic perspective into ecology: “What affects human beings in their environment are not only just natural factors but also aesthetic ones” (Bohme pp.1).

Aesthetic impressions have an affect on a person in an environment and can be the deciding factor on how someone feels (ie. unwell (Bohme pp.1)).

The elements that make up an environment are not only causal factors that affect us, but they have an impression on the way we feel too.

“The atmosphere of a certain environment is responsible for the way we feel about ourselves in that environment” (Bohme pp.1).

Atmosphere relates objective factors to our bodily feeling within an environment. It is the in-between. They are quasi-objective; you can enter an atmosphere, but they are not beings and thus require a subject in order to experience them.

Stage design requires knowledge on how sound, lighting, material/materialistic qualities, colours, objects, and signs should be used in order to produce a certain climate or atmosphere. It is an important aspect of stage shows, because if each audience member interpreted the stage in a different manner the show would lose its narrative. 

Atmosphere has been used to describe mood since the eighteenth century - connected to the metaphor of a mood hanging in the air. Prior to this it was originally used in relation to meteorology.

What can be learned from the tradition of stage setting is:

Atmospheres can be produced.

Atmospheres are something out there, quasi-objective.

Atmospheres are produced by certain agents or factors

Commodity aesthetics relates to consumption, and how today they are used as ingredients to help groups or individuals stage their lifestyles. Commodities can be used to create a certain atmosphere, and thus are considered to have a stage-value.

Commodity aesthetics caused a shift in how items are advertised to us. Consumers are advertised a life-style, or an association to a particular lifestyle, as opposed to the item itself.

“Thus the aesthetics of atmospheres in advertising means that commodities are not presented as things which are useful within a certain practice but as signs which help to produce a certain atmosphere in life” (Bohme pp.5).

Architecture and design have always produced atmospheres, however the thinking was mainly concentrated around the visual representation of things. A thought process that grew to the height of its popularity with Bauhaus modernity, with the famous saying “Form follows function”.

“In the fields of architecture and design the turn is from the form or shape of things to their contribution of tuning the space of our bodily presence” (Bohme pp.5).

“...the individual as a living person and his or her perspective being taken seriously in architecture and design…” (Bohme pp.7).