Feeling Spaces: Grounding the Body in Architectural Atmosphere

Abstract

How do atmospheres ground the subject through embodied experiences of space? This thesis is an argument for embodiment and duration in architectural space, a theory of spatial hospitality that attempts to make some room for the subject as a spatial being. My research has proceeded over two lines of inquiry: on the one hand a dissertation forming a phenomenological study of contemporary atmospheric spatial practices, and on the other a practice-led studio investigation exploring perception, duration and the unfolded embodied experience of atmospheric spaces.

By its very nature the concept of atmosphere is vague and diffuse. In these spaces, the felt experience of atmosphere acts upon individuals within their surroundings, which in turn are being co-constituted by that subject. At its core, this dissertation is an ontological study of subjectivity and atmosphere in the perceptual environments and spaces produced by artists Robert Irwin (1928 - ), James Turrell (1943 - ) and Olafur Eliasson (1967 - ) and architect Peter Zumthor (1943 - ). I argue that the intertwining of perception, embodiment and temporality enables a phenomenological understanding of subjectivity that is grounded in local spaces through atmosphere. These atmospheric environments unfold as an open exchange between viewer, object and environment that subverts the static in favour of the mutable encounter and opens the object up to the time and place of this encounter. Atmospheres unfold between a space and its inhabitant - a topological experience of space that is co-produced with the subject through their perceptual, embodied and temporal engagement.

The dissertation is deeply tied to its other half: an expanded practice-led studio investigation exploring space, time and the embodied experience of atmosphere. My practice-led research has taken the form of a series of spatial installations and atmospheric interventions in architectural spaces that make room for the embodied subject, structures that emerge as diffuse multisensory atmospheres. Central to this investigation is the contingency of perceptual experiences that stretch the feeling of the "now" - the meeting of light and materials, scale, the haptic quality of a space, colour, surface, shadow, movement, openings and thresholds. These experiential qualities open up embodied-durational structures through the multisensory, topological experience of felt space. That is, a spatiality that is grounded in the subject and the active relationships of inhabiting space - lived space that is not abstract or sublime but simply an unfolding of our phenomenological contact with the world. Show more