On Phenomenology light, embodied experience, & tension

Auras, Genius Loci, Phenomena, Poetics, Atmospheres— all these elusive terms have been used to describe the sense of feeling of a given space. Difficult to pin down, several architects have written on the topic and done their best to break down the magic they experience.

Peter Zumthor

Quality architecture for Peter Zumthor is not necessarily academic or intellectual, rather it’s something that moves him. Which inevitably brings up questions such as “What on earth is it that moves me?” How can I get it into my own work?, and “How do people design things with such a beautiful, natural presence, things that move me every single time.” Here Zumthor questions the feeling of space, the never ending discussion within the field of architecture. Zumthor claims that we perceive atmosphere through our emotional sensibility, which he defines as “for of perception that works incredibly quickly, and which we humans evidently need to survive.” Compared to music, this automatic emotional response just happens, we don’t think about it. It is the same with architecture. While reflecting on a poetic journal entry, Zumthor observes, the entry can ultimately be distilled down to the senses. The five senses are created by an emotional reaction.

So what exactly is needed to generate these interactions?

Zumthor breaks it down to 9 categories:

1. Body of Architecture

This is the material presence of things in a piece of architecture, it’s frame. Think of materials of a building as its anatomy. Individual elements come together to form a bodily mass.

2.

The temperature of a space is both physical and psychological. Naturally the materials of a building will affect its temperature, as there is variation between material and color on the amount of heat the can absorb and or reflect.

Thresholds, crossings, transitions between realms. This is where the magic happens. Relating back to the previous point, how do people navigate within space, but also how do our buildings move. They are alive too.

8. Levels of Intimacy

How do materials react with each other? Material options are endless, but the key is to find the right balance. Theres a “critical proximity” to this balance which depend on the type of material and its weight.

This is the interaction of people and things.

Proximity and distance has a profound impact on our perceptions of intimacy within a space. What’s the right human scale for the proportion of users of a building.

Think of an interior as a large instrument which can collect, amplify, and transmit sound on it’s own. Zumthor asks us to listen to each building and hear it’s tone.

This point elaborates on how architecture involves movement. How do people move throughout a space? Are they directed by the architecture? Architecture is both a spatial art and a temporal art.

Where and how the light falls, where shadows are cast, and where light is reflected. Daylight can have an almost spiritual quality.

Juhani Pallasmaa

In “The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses”, also attempts to breakdown atmosphere, or as he calls it phenomenology. “The way places feel, the sound and smell of these places, has equal weight to the way things look.” In this he highlights the importance of the senses.

Pallasmaa criticizes architecture today for it negligence of the senses, which results in the negligence of the body. This ultimately leads to sensory imbalances that results in alienation, detachment, and solitude. Perhaps paying attention to our sensory experiences is the antidote. Like Zumthor, Pallasmaa also highlights some of these solutions.

Pallasmaa encourages readers to think of the body has the “locus of perception, thought, and consciousness, and significance of the senses in articulating storing and processing sensory responses and thoughts, have been strengthen and confirmed” via modern science.

In this explanation of how the body processes senses, an important point is made: The human body is needed to process these senses. “Architecture articulates the experiences of being-in-the world and strengthens our sense of reality and self; it does not make us inhabit world of fabrication or fantasy”. There is are instinctual and unconscious aspects of out relation to space and out unconscious use of space in behavioral communication.

Pallasmaa says that we can strengthen our sense of architecture by strengthening our senses of materiality and hapticity, texture and weight, density of space and materialized light.

In order to do this we need to think of the body as the center of space, and sensory experiences to be integrated through Gibson’s 5 Sensory system which includes our:

1.visual system

2. auditory system

3. taste-smell

4. basic orienting system

5. haptic system

In addition to noting the importance of the sense, Pallasmaa also argues that, in architecture, a tension must be maintained between the program, function, and overall comfort of a space. ii

In “The Architect of Light”, a documentary, which focuses mostly on Renzo Piano’s Centro Botin art gallery in Santander, Spain, in which he discusses atmospheres, film, and architecture, he also discusses a tension of elements and how he considers the human experience and it’s movements through space when he designs.

In the documentary, Piano puts into words the subliminal qualities of space: a site’s underlying presence, what is beauty, and how light, constantly shifting throughout the day, is one of the most important building materials. Piano’s definition of architecture, “ a constant passing from light to shadow, and from shadow to light, again and again. It’s a constant game of tension.” or “the sense of an agreement between all these thing [which] isn’t easy”. iii

From these sources a general consensus of atmospheric criteria can be established. What overlapping phenomenological elements of atmosphere do these authors others define?

There seems to be three main criteria: light, embodied experience, and tension.

Notes

Zumthor, Peter. Atmospheres : Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006. pg.10