Atmospheres in the Arts
→ atmopheric intelligence; atmospheric sense [the]; peripheral vision; physical and mental landscape; unfocused vision
Space, Place and Atmosphere: Peripheral Perception and Emotion in Architectural Experience (2012)
Atmosphere seems to be a more conscious objective in literary, cinematic and theatrical thinking than in architecture. Even the imagery of a painting is integrated by an overall atmosphere or feeling; the most important unifying factor in paintings is usually their specific feel of illumination and colour, more than their conceptual or narrative content. In fact, there is an entire painterly approach, as exemplified by Joseph Mallord William Turner and Claude Monet, which can be called ‘atmospheric painting’, in the two meanings of the notion; atmosphere being both the subject matter and expressive means of these paintings. ‘Atmosphere is my style’ Turner confessed to John Ruskin, as Zumthor reminds us. The formal and structural ingredients in the works of these artists are deliberately suppressed for the benefit of an embracing and shapeless atmosphere, suggestive of temperature, moisture and subtle movements of the air. ‘Colour field’ painters similarly suppress form and boundaries and utilize large size of the canvas to create an intense interaction and presence of colour.
Great films, such as the films by Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir, Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky, are also steeped in their characteristic atmospheric continuum. Also, theatre relies heavily on atmosphere which supports the integrity and continuity of the story regardless of the often abstracted and vaguely hinted features of the place or space. The ambience can be so suggestive and dominating that very few cues of the setting are needed, as in Lars von Trier's film Dogville (2003) in which houses and rooms are often indicated by mere chalk lines on the dark floor, but the drama takes a full grip of the spectator's imagination and emotions.
Somewhat paradoxically, we can also speak of ‘atmospheric sculpture’, such as the sketch‐like modelled works of Medardo Rosso, Auguste Rodin and Alberto Giacometti. Often it is the atmosphere of the works, as the abstracted sculptures of Constantin Brancusi, that creates the unique sense of a singular artistic world. Artists seem to be more aware of the seminal role of ambience than architects, who tend to think more in terms of the ‘pure’ qualities of space, form and geometry. Amongst architects, atmosphere seems to be judged as something romantic and shallowly entertaining. Besides, the serious western architectural tradition is entirely based on regarding architecture as a material and geometric object as experienced through focused vision. Standard architectural images seek clarity rather than ephemerality and obscurity.
When describing his creative process in the essay ‘The Trout and the Mountain Stream’, Alvar Aalto confesses: ‘Led by my instincts I draw, not architectural syntheses, but sometimes even childish compositions, and via this route I eventually arrive at an abstract basis to the main concept, a kind of universal substance with whose help the numerous quarrelling sub‐problems [of the design task] can be brought into harmony’. Aalto's notion of ‘universal substance’ seems to refer to a unifying atmosphere or intuitive feeling rather than any conceptual, intellectual or formal idea.
Music of the various art forms is particularly atmospheric, and has a forceful impact on our emotions and moods regardless of how little or much we intellectually understand musical structures. That seems to be the very reason why music is commonly used to create desired atmospheric moods in public spaces, shopping malls and even elevators. Music creates atmospheric interior spaces, ephemeral and dynamic experiential fields, rather than distant shapes, structures or objects. Atmosphere emphasizes a sustained being in a situation rather than a singular moment of perception. The fact that music can move us to tears is a convincing proof of the emotive power of art as well as of our innate capacity to simulate and internalize abstract experiential structures, or more precisely, to project our emotions on abstractly symbolic structures.
Atmospheric Sense [The]
→ atmospheres in architecture; atmospheric intelligence; atmospheres in the arts; odours in architecture; peripheral vision; physical and mental landscape; unfocused vision
Sarah Robinson, Juhani Pallasmaa, editors, Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design, Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2007, 60–61
I have become so impressed with the power of our atmospheric judgment that I want to suggest that this capacity could be named our sixth sense. Thinking only of the five Aristotelian senses in architecture fails to acknowledge the true complexity of the systems through which we are connected to the world. Steinerian philosophy, for instance, deals with twelve senses,81 whereas a recent book, The Sixth Sense Reader, identifies more than 30 categories of sensing through which we relate to and communicate with the world.82 This idea of a wider human sensorium underlines the fact that our being‐in‐the world is much more complex and refined than we tend to understand. That is why understanding architecture solely as a visual art form is hopelessly reductive. Besides, instead of thinking of the senses as isolated systems, we should become more interested in and knowledgeable about their essential interactions and crossovers. Merleau‐Ponty emphasizes this essential unity and interaction of the senses: ‘My perception is […] not a sum of visual, tactile, and auditive givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being. I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once’.83 This flexibility and dynamic of our interaction with the world is one of the important things that neuroscience can illuminate for us. The craft of architecture is deeply embedded in this human sensory and mental complexity. This criticism of the reductive isolation of the senses also applies to the common understanding of intelligence as a singular intellectual capacity. Contrary to the common understanding of intelligence as a definite cerebral category, psychologist Howard Gardner suggests seven categories of intelligence, namely linguistic, logical‐mathematical, musical, bodily‐kinaesthetic, spatial, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences, to which he later adds three further categories: naturalistic, ethical and spiritual intelligences.84 I would add four further categories to Gardner's list: emotional, aesthetic, existential and atmospheric intelligences. So, we may well have a full spectrum of a dozen modes of intelligence instead of the single quality targeted by IQ tests. The complex field of intelligence also suggests that architectural education, or education at large, faces a much wider task, and at the same time, possesses far greater potential, than standard paedagogy has thus far accepted. Education in any creative field must start primarily with the student's sense of self, as only a firm sense of identity and self‐awareness can serve as the core around which observation, knowledge, and eventually wisdom can evolve and condense.
Notes
1 1 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, London: WW, Norton & Company, 1992, 26.
2 2 Ibid., 27.
3 3 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, New York: Vintage Books, 1988, 57.
4 4 See David Howes, ‘Hyperesthesia, or The Sensual Logic of Late Capitalism’, in Id. editor, Empire of the Senses, Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2005, 281–303.
5 5 Ibid., 288.
6 6 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, 72.
7 7 As quoted in Georges Perec, Tiloja ja avaruuksia [Espèces d'espaces], Helsinki: Loki‐Kirjat, 1992, 72.
8 8 Dr Nold Egenter in the University of Lausanne in particular has studied the building behaviour of apes in northern Japan.
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