Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces

by Gernot Böhme, Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul (Editor)

There is fast-growing awareness of the role atmospheres play in architecture. Of equal interest to contemporary architectural practice as it is to aesthetic theory, this 'atmospheric turn' owes much to the work of the German philosopher Gernot Böhme.

Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces brings together Böhme's most seminal writings on the subject, through chapters selected from his classic books and articles, many of which have hitherto only been available in German. This is the only translated version authorised by Böhme himself, and is the first coherent collection deploying a consistent terminology. It is a work which will provide rich references and a theoretical framework for ongoing discussions about atmospheres and their relations to architectural and urban spaces. Combining philosophy with architecture, design, landscape design, scenography, music, art criticism, and visual arts, the essays together provide a key to the concepts that motivate the work of some of the best contemporary architects, artists, and theorists: from Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron and Juhani Pallasmaa to Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell.

With a foreword by Professor Mark Dorrian (Forbes Chair in Architecture, Edinburgh College of Art) and an afterword by Professor David Leatherbarrow, (Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture,
University of Pennsylvania), the volume also includes a general introduction to the topic, including coverage of it history, development, areas of application and conceptual apparatus.

Genres: Architecture, Philosophy, Theory

216 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 12, 2017

About the author

Gernot Böhme (born 3 January 1937, in Dessau) is a German philosopher and author, contributing to the philosophy of science, theory of time, aesthetics, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. He is the main pioneer of German ecocriticism, the study of the relationship between culture and the environment. He has been the director of the Institute for Practical Philosophy in Darmstadt since 2005. Despite being one of Germany's most acclaimed public intellectuals, very little of his work has so far been translated into English.
German

1995 Atmosphäre: Essays zur neuen Ästhetik. Frankfurt am Main
1999 Theorie des Bildes. Fink, München
2001 Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre, Fink
2002 Die Natur vor uns. Naturphilosophie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. Kusterdingen
2003 Der Typ Sokrates, Suhrkamp
2005 Goethes Faust als philosophischer Text. Die Graue Edition, Kusterdingen
2006 Architektur und Atmosphäre. München
2008 Invasive Technisierung. Technikphilosophie und Technikkritik. Kusterdingen
2008 Ethik leiblicher Existenz. Über unseren moralischen Umgang mit der eigenen Natur. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main

English translations

2001 Ethics in Context: The Art of Dealing with Serious Questions, Polity
2012 Invasive Technification: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Technology, Continuum
2017 Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, Bloomsbury
2017 Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism, Mimesis

Reviews

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title and description of this book misled me to expect a phenomenological poetics of architecture a la Peter Zumthor / Gaston Bachelard — the bulk of it does not actually deal with architecture as such but rather the conditions for its explicit perception. Böhme develops a theory of aesthetics departing from the traditional subject/object relation towards the in-between, indeterminate ground thereof. His aesthetical ontology is one wherein "the thing" is inseparable from its spatial presence; it is not of essence and unity (as it has been traditionally cast in Western aesthetics) but rather of "radiation" into surrounding space through the rising-up of latent "ecstasies" (understood as immanent modes of Being, not mere predicates — Spinoza is never mentioned but similarities to his philosophy seem apparent). Atmospheres, then, emanate from and are produced by things while reciprocally affecting the aesthetic experience thereof. Böhme thus replaces the critique of judgment with bodily presence, spatially-diffuse and indefinite — and therefore escaping full disclosure within semiotics and language.

This aesthetical-ontological project is applied to such disparate subjects as ethics (expanding Habermas's idea of communicative action to include atmospheric presence), pedagogy (altering the program of aesthetic education to account for the increasing technification of the human body), contemporary art (describing the "spatial turn" as manifest in post-war art, design, music and architecture), and religious space. I would have liked to see an engagement with Merleau-Ponty, whose perceptual phenomenology is indisputably the most significant elaboration of "bodily presence" to date — indeed, Böhme's philosophical style seems Modernist to a fault, ignoring altogether recent articulations of spatial experience in Jameson, Sloterdijk, Augé et al in favor of decidedly more traditional modes of thinking. Still, the notion of atmosphere outlined in these essays is something worth engaging with, even if it does call for further expansion.

[Finn Braaten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely excellent! This book wonderfully investigates a theory of aesthetics derived from a concept that, while familiar to one's common experience, seems almost indescribable before reading the book.