Atmosphere
Atmosphere
Definition
Atmosphere (or ambiance, mood, genius loci) names the overarching, multisensory, and largely pre-intellectual impression of a space or place. Pallasmaa defines it as "the overarching perceptual, sensory, and emotive impression of a space, setting, or social situation" — a "mental 'thing' … suspended between the object and the subject." Architecturally, the atmospheric turn (Zumthor, SANAA) treats atmosphere as the true source of architectural quality, felt instantly and haptically before it is understood. In social theory (Böhme, Sloterdijk), atmospheres are quasi-objective yet subject-bound, and can be staged instrumentally — opening onto a "politics of atmospheres" that governs behaviour through the senses.
A second, sociological sense — Baudrillard's ATMOSPHERE. In The System of Objects, Baudrillard uses the same word for something deliberately not felt but calculated: the "discourse of atmosphere" in which the modern interior is organized through "a calculated balance between hot and cold tones" and through materials homogenized as cultural signs — "The entire modern environment is thus transposed onto the level of a sign system, namely ATMOSPHERE, which is no longer produced by the way any particular element is handled, nor by the beauty or ugliness of that element" (p. 41). His exemplary product is "a purely signified warmth – hence one which, by definition, is never realized: a warmth characterized, precisely, by the absence of any source" (p. 39). Where the phenomenological atmosphere is the lived, pre-intellectual bond of body and place, Baudrillard's is its commodity-form: the systematic production and deferral of exactly the qualities (warmth, intimacy, nature) the phenomenological tradition treats as given. The two senses are the negative and positive images of one another — see design-atmosphere and atmospheric-values.
Key Thinkers
- Juhani Pallasmaa — peripheral perception, haptic architecture, "the architecture of the eye detaches and controls, whereas haptic and atmospheric architecture engages and unites."
- Gernot Böhme — atmospheres as co-presence of subject and object; the production and staging of urban atmospheres.
- Christian Norberg-Schulz — genius loci and the existential spatial basis of meaning.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the lived body as the pre-intellectual, sensory ground of the atmospheric impression (now a full author page).
- Jean Baudrillard — the sociological counter-register: ATMOSPHERE as the modern interior's sign system, producing "a purely signified warmth… characterized, precisely, by the absence of any source" — the calculated commodity-form of the felt atmosphere (see design-atmosphere, atmospheric-values).
- Jonathan D. Solomon — the political register: atmosphere as the wielded medium of occupation and power — "the public and private spheres are defined by public and private 'spheres, or atmospheres"; "the clouds of teargas in Admiralty and the perfumed air of the adjacent Pacific Place shopping mall are both tools for reinforcing the hierarchies of Hong Kong's political establishment" (see atmospheric-politics, ambient-conditioning, smellscape).
- (Related, not yet paged: Peter Sloterdijk on spheres — now directly cited via Solomon's chapter ("Atmospheric Politics," Space Reader 2009; the Palm House caesura; "Foam City"); Peter Zumthor — see log.)
Related Concepts
- Spectacle — the atmospheric as imaged/spectacular vs. as lived-haptic experience.
- Iconic Architecture — the image-driven "architecture of the eye" that the haptic turn opposes.
- Embodiment — the haptic, sensory ground of the atmospheric impression; atmosphere as felt through the body before it is understood.
- Derive — psychogeographic/phenomenological engagement with place.
- Uncanny — the felt, pre-intellectual impression of place; the uncanny as its disturbing, unhomely register.
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
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The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the sociological counter-concept: ATMOSPHERE as a "sign system," not a felt quality; the design/atmosphere counterpoint; and "signified warmth… characterized, precisely, by the absence of any source." The book is the wiki's principal demystification of the atmosphere the page's phenomenological sources affirm (see atmospheric-values, Gernot Böhme).
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Seduced by Form: Aesthetics of Spectacle in Contemporary Art Museum Architecture
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The Architectural Uncanny (Vidler 1992) — the uncanny as the unhomely register of the atmospheric impression.
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Warped Space (Vidler 2000) — the anxious, pathological register of felt space.
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Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — interior objects "responsible for creating atmospheric effect but it is the latent effect that is seething behind the detail" (p. 11) — atmosphere made through objects rather than space alone.
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Structures of Atmosphere (Baudrillard 1968/2006) — the sign-system sense of the word: atmosphere as "a calculated balance between hot and cold tones" (p. 39); signified warmth with "the absence of any source" (p. 39); the environment "transposed onto the level of a sign system, namely ATMOSPHERE" (p. 41) — the sociological demystification of the felt atmosphere the rest of this page tracks. See design-atmosphere, atmospheric-values.
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Fabricating interiority (Manack 2018) — a third, disciplinary-design sense: atmosphere as the unified single expression of the interior's elements. Under the fabricating conception's "trajectory toward singularity," the interior's four techniques are merged "into singular emphatic elements," and "the effect has been for the interior architect to consider spatial design as a unified atmosphere in a direct manner, with a limited vocabulary but a high degree of dynamic quality… floor, wall, ceiling, furniture, lighting, and beyond can be conceived not as distinct elements or layers, but rather as a singular expression." Where Pallasmaa's atmosphere is felt and Baudrillard's is calculated, Manack's is fabricated — the atmosphere as the designed product of the interior's total-surface synthesis (see fabrication).
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The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — a fourth, representational sense: atmosphere carried by the drawing. Via Mark Wigley ("the surface wraps the atmosphere: the outer visible layer of an invisible climate"; working drawings are "the lines on paper without atmosphere cleared of any effect, nothing to threaten the authority of the line"), Hedges counters that Sheet No. 24 "can also be seen as a decorative surface that exudes an atmosphere that the viewer of the drawings is meant to experience, something of the building's atmosphere. Drawings are atmosphere simulators, and even the most abstract lines produce sensuous, unpredictable effects." The room itself keeps its atmosphere as residue: "its surfaces emanating the atmosphere of its past" — atmosphere surviving occupation, and reproducible from the drawing after the room is gone. See waiting-room, waiting-drawing.
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On the Means by which Repose is Attainable in Decoration (Dresser 1876/2006) — a fifth, prescriptive-Victorian register: atmosphere as the "spatial effect" that finishes and linings "significantly contribute" to (editors' headnote), engineered by prescription rather than staged or calculated. Dresser specifies the effect's recipe — knowledge and harmony manifested in small-mass colours, dark grounds, cream ceilings and light-over-dark dado arrangements — and its enemy (glitter, reflection, "excitement," whose "constant endurance… is exhausting"). The Intimus editors generalize: such texts are "a testament to written discourse of the late nineteenth century where effect and experience were regulated by prescriptions of taste and decorum" — atmosphere as a decorum before it was a phenomenology or a sign system. See repose, neutral-colour-effect.
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Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the olfactory register of the word's first sense. Drobnick's "museum atmosphere" is Clive Bell's: the gloom "that enveloped works of art and asphyxiated visitors," blown out with "the dust of erudition and the stale incense of hero-worship" (p. 90) — atmosphere as the ambience a reforming blow can disperse. And his "volatile effects created by odoriferous materials, ventilated scents, and other wafting perceptions" (p. 89) supply what the atmospheric tradition left untheorized: the smell of atmosphere — the white cube's "pollution-free pristine state" (editors, p. 89) as engineered anosmia, atmosphere reduced to vision. See olfaction, heterosmia, aromatopia, white-cube.
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Sensorial interior landscapes (Garófalo-Khan 2018) — a sixth, ambient-conditioning sense: atmosphere as the conditioned medium of a biophilic interior. "Sensorial manifestations of ambient conditioning" is the chapter's first register: the wet cave's "distinct thermal environment" (flowing water, earth as thermal sink, deep shadows), Vals's "thermal conditioning of the entire building" with "a sensual resonance," SOL Grotto's "mediated experience of water, coolness, and light," and Bienvenidos al Sur's thicket whose "diffused boundary modulates moisture, light, air, smell, and sound." Where Pallasmaa's atmosphere is felt, Baudrillard's calculated, Manack's fabricated, and Hedges's drawn, Garófalo-Khan's is conditioned — atmosphere as the designed state of air, heat, moisture, and light, delivered through porous, boundary-dissolving construction rather than the sealed envelope. See ambient-conditioning, biophilia.
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From ambient environments to sentient spaces (Gattegno & Johnson 2018) — a seventh, energetic-produced sense: atmosphere as the machine-radiated envelope. The prototype is Banham's Standard of Living Package, "more than a mere set of mechanical systems. It was an atmosphere maker, 'breathing out warm air along the ground … radiating soft light and Dionne Warwick in heart-warming stereo…'" — atmosphere without enclosure, produced by an energy-provider interfering with the local meteorology (see the-campfire). Its contemporary form is programmatic: "The creation of atmospheres, the development of visceral spaces of vivid experience, and engagement are key to these installations"; the installations "aspire to create ranges of atmospheres around them that compel varying degrees of engagement"; and one of the four engagement levels is explicitly "an atmospheric range of mood, color, light, and effect upon experiencing the installation in its entirety." Where Pallasmaa's atmosphere is felt, Baudrillard's calculated, Manack's fabricated, Hedges's drawn, Dresser's prescribed, and Garófalo-Khan's conditioned, Gattegno & Johnson's is radiated and data-fed — the atmosphere as the output of a sensing, computing surface plugged into the energy-information grid (see sentient-spaces, ambient-conditioning).
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Design studio through the subtle revelations of phenomenology (Smith 2018) — an eighth, attentive sense: atmosphere as the object of trained perception. Atmosphere appears in Smith's list of the conditions through which students must learn to perceive "the world and themselves in it": "as object, material, atmosphere, and states of transition and ephemerality." Its content is the gathered multisensory register of the adumbrations — "late afternoon sunlight washing across a wall, the smell of garlic cooking in the kitchen, faint music drifting from another room, the warmth on your back from a crackling open fire; with all of these sensory perceptions occurring in unison as you gaze at snow glistening on distant mountains" — and its medium is Marion's unsaturated phenomena: "faint outlines, vague traces, peripheral glimpses, wafts of breeze, shimmers of light, nuances of color, overlapping soundscapes, or delicate whiffs of scent." Where the other senses name what atmosphere is (felt, calculated, fabricated, drawn, prescribed, conditioned, radiated), Smith's names how it is learned: atmosphere as the studio's training-object, apprehended only once perception has been heightened enough to notice "the many subtle aspects of sensory experience." See subtle-revelation, adumbration.
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Touch, Taste, Smell (Brown 2018) — a ninth, exhibit-olfactory sense: atmosphere as the museum's sampled, stored, and friction-released smell-field. Tolaas's Smellscape Central Park Autumn 2015 (Cooper Hewitt, 2016) infuses wall paint with "smell molecules" sampled from the adjacent park, released by "a gentle application of friction… to the painted surface" to "arouse memories, recreate place, capture seasonality, and stir emotional and intellectual responses" — the atmosphere not ambient (Drift's conditioned air, Banham's radiated energy) but archived in the surface itself, an atmosphere the visitor must act upon to receive. The medium's curatorial limits are the concept's new edge: "people form all types of personal associations and judgments about smells from… their personal experience," and "smells are more difficult to stably position in space than visual objects" (Keller, via Brown) — an atmosphere that cannot be stabilized, only offered. See smellscape, olfaction, aromatopia.
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Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects (Odom 2018) — a tenth, produced sense: atmosphere as the primary output of production-oriented practices. The chapter's opening thesis names atmosphere as the outcome of design's "fundamental agency": form generation and planning have become "secondary considerations" for speculative practices whose point is "to produce spatial effects and atmosphere" — and note 21 positions Böhme's "Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics" (with Harman's "Tool Being") as one of the two theoretical stage-setters "where the concept of Productions and Production-Oriented Practices is developed." Odom quotes the concept's founding indeterminacy — "we are not sure whether we should attribute [effects] to the objects or environments from which they proceed or to the subjects who experience them" (Böhme 1993, p. 113) — and then engineers it: "Situating contemporary practices… production-oriented design practices may be positioned in the breach between contemporary theoretical references from the work of Gernot Bohme (Atmospheres) and Graham Harman (object-oriented ontology)." Where Pallasmaa's atmosphere is felt, Baudrillard's calculated, Manack's fabricated, Hedges's drawn, Dresser's prescribed, Garófalo-Khan's conditioned, Gattegno & Johnson's radiated, Smith's learned, and Brown's archived, Odom's is systematized as output — atmosphere as what a "holistic, proliferating set of systematized generative processes" exists to produce, with the produced condition "supersede[ing] constituencies of the system to produce wonder." See productions, production-oriented-practices.
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Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (Solomon 2018) — an eleventh, wielded sense: atmosphere as the administered medium of urban power and occupation. The chapter's genealogy opens the concept onto political theory and urbanism: "Atmosphere fascinates architects because it creates an alternative to the narrative of building statics" — Wigley's "The Architecture of Atmosphere"; Banham's "well-tempered environment," Lavin's "kiss," Kipnis's "blush"; Gissen's nineteenth-century Paris ("ensnared water, gas, trees, stone, and animal and human ablutions into a circulatory vision of an urban streetscape"); Sloterdijk's Palm House caesura ("marked a clear caesura in the history of building"); the atmospheric artworks (Eliasson's Weather Project, Liu's Cloud, the Blur Building — "an architecture of atmosphere"; the Dutch Pavilion as "an operational unit of the sprawling triad of space station, greenhouse, and Human Island"); and the public-realm atmospherics (PARK(ing), urban beaches). Its Hong Kong thesis is the concept's political turn: "Atmosphere itself may be neutral; it is wielded on both sides of Hong Kong's economic and political divides. The clouds of teargas in Admiralty and the perfumed air of the adjacent Pacific Place shopping mall are both tools for reinforcing the hierarchies of Hong Kong's political establishment." Where every other sense asks how atmosphere is made (felt, calculated, fabricated, drawn, prescribed, conditioned, radiated, learned, archived, produced), Solomon's asks who wields it — and answers: both establishments and occupations, stratification and teargas alike. See atmospheric-politics, ambient-conditioning, smellscape.
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Altered (e)states (Erdman 2018) — a twelfth, mooded sense: atmosphere as the plural mood-field of the altered ensemble. "The Repulse Bay Complex serves as an interesting testing ground in this context, where diverse material assemblies and moods augment heterogeneity in experiences, while also producing enough cohesion to give the property a new identity" — moods in the plural, attached to material assemblies and distributed across disconnected interventions, rather than the singular unified atmosphere Manack fabricates or the wielded city-air Solomon documents. Where Odom's produced atmosphere is the POP's output and Solomon's the political medium, Erdman's is the identity-cohesion agent: the property's "greater sense of cohesion" carried by mood-variation rather than by formal integration. See alteration, interiorized-object, heterogeneous-space.
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Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — a thirteenth, fostered-illusion sense, and the editors' own headnote formula: the interior named "a physical and psychological refuge – a space within and yet with physical atmosphere" (p. 339) — atmosphere as what a room-within has of the physical, the refuge's air. The sense's content is temporal and evental: the interior "becomes events, 'in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life'" (Deleuze & Guattari quoted, p. 343) — atmosphere as one of the five inseparables (hour, season, atmosphere, air, life) that individuate the interior's events, i.e. atmosphere as a co-individuating term rather than an effect. And the sense's valence is inverting: in Woolf's window-world "the sun's light is associated with truth while candles and lamps foster illusions and circumscribe our world. This world-of-within I like" (p. 343) — the candle-lit atmosphere as fostered illusion, the interior's own truth-regime against the sun's. Where Pallasmaa's atmosphere is felt and Baudrillard's calculated, Taylor's is avowed — the illusion-space claimed as the interior's good. See refuge, haecceity, temporality.
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Domestic Doyennes: Purveyors of Atmospheres Spoken and Visual (Turpin 2003/2006) — a fourteenth, conversational-evental sense: atmosphere produced by talk and manufactured by a hostess. Its two poles are the essay's primary question's two answers. First, Priestley's dialogue-level sense: certain exchanges are "'atmosphere creating'" — "various aspects of a verbal exchange help define an experience that in some ways creates an implied space," with the confider's disclosure "project[ing] an aura of security onto the event" and words themselves "but extra shutters and curtains and blazing coals and cushions" — atmosphere generated by proximity and disclosure, without any designed medium at all. Second, the salonnière's hosted sense: "In these situations, the women created atmospheres both spoken and visual to ensure a successful event" — atmosphere as a deliberate event-output, jointly manufactured in the verbal ("an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity") and the visual (the Chambre Bleu's blue damasks and gilded panels) media, and staked on the hostess's position ("she would lose her most valued position if the environment was not perfect"). And the degraded form: "Staccato conversations permitted all present to participate in the creation of an atmosphere characterized by a 'false view of life'" — atmosphere as what a whole company collaboratively (and falsely) produces. Where every other sense names how atmosphere is made from materials (felt, calculated, fabricated, drawn, prescribed, conditioned, radiated, learned, archived, produced, wielded, mooded, fostered), Turpin's names how it is made from company: the gathering as the atmosphere's source, the hostess its engineer, the conversation its medium. See conversation, salon.
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Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).
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source-notes/clucas-2000-cultural-phenomenology-and-the-everyday
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source-notes/luna-yim-2023-language-of-contemporary-architecture
Open Questions
- Does the atmospheric/affective turn amount to a form of governance (cf. Douglas Spencer's "affective turn as governance", and noopolitics), or a critical alternative to spectacular ocularcentrism?
- Is Baudrillard's "purely signified warmth" (the calculated system) the truth of the phenomenological atmosphere (all felt ambience is staged) or its opposite (the lived atmosphere is precisely what no sign system can produce)? Can the two senses of "atmosphere" be held in one concept at all?
- Manack's "unified atmosphere" makes the word name a fabricated totality — the interior's elements conceived "not as distinct elements or layers, but rather as a singular expression." Is this the phenomenological atmosphere deliberately engineered (Böhme's staging at building scale), the commodity-form completed (Baudrillard's system owned by a designer), or a third thing — and does the "limited vocabulary" of the delimited material palette function as atmosphere's production constraint?
- Gattegno & Johnson's "atmosphere maker" (Banham's Package) and their "ranges of atmospheres that compel varying degrees of engagement" make the word's seventh sense an instrument of compulsion: atmospheres designed to compel engagement at graded intensities. Does the energetic-produced atmosphere push Böhme's "politics of atmospheres" from staging into harvesting — and is "Dionne Warwick in heart-warming stereo" the Package's honest admission that the produced atmosphere is always already programmable content?
- Odom's tenth sense makes atmosphere a design output — "What does your work produce?" presupposes the designer can produce the very effect whose attribution Böhme declares indeterminate ("not sure whether we should attribute [effects] to the objects… or to the subjects who experience them"). Can a design method claim as its product what phenomenology says cannot be attributed to either pole — and does "produce wonder" ("conditions that supersede constituencies of the system") quietly answer Böhme by relocating atmosphere from attribution to effect?
- Solomon's eleventh sense declares "atmosphere itself may be neutral" while documenting it wielded by establishments and occupations alike (teargas vs perfume; "prodigious scents" vs "Little Manila"). Is neutrality atmosphere's political condition of possibility (anyone can wield it) or its exculpatory myth (the wielded air was never neutral)? Can the page's eleven senses — from Pallasmaa's felt to Odom's produced to Solomon's wielded — be held together, or does the political sense retroactively administer all the others (atmospheric-politics)?
Theme
- Phenomenology — the atmospheric turn as one phase of the phenomenological tradition.
