On Atmosphere
The Body + The Senses:
We experience space through our body.
Our senses; sight, sound, touch, taste and smell help us mediate through our everyday. Our natural environment consists of a set of fundamental givens such as gravity, wind, light, rain, fire and earth. Our built environment employs a set of building blocks to mediate and control these natural givens in a way that hopefully helps define our everyday.
We all have bodies and senses - some more tuned in than others but regardless… it is common ground that unites us.
The Human Scale:
Architecture creates the built environment – of primary purpose to mediate between our bodies and the natural environment.
The experiential aspect of the built environment is fundamentally tied to the scale of the human body. We can refer to historical references like Leonardo Da Vinci’s the Vitruvian man or Le Corbusier’s Modular man. We can also just refer to our own personal experiences.
It’s a given of how we experience space as we can only do so by processing the surroundings through our own personal bodies.
Ephemeral Activation:
Our built environment is meant to house our human activities and elevate our experiences.
The underlying beauty of architecture is during the intersection of the natural with the built environment and the activation that occurs mediating between the two. Elements within the natural world are continually changing over the course of a day, the seasons, the weather and the community.
Since our built environment typically is interacting with our continually changing natural one and experience is tied to our individual bodies moving within a space – our true sensory experience is an ephemeral one.
The Feeling of a Place:
A memorable atmosphere is one where the design elements activate all our senses. When our body and its senses are activated towards a mutual goal the experience becomes a harder to define emotional one rather than a scientific one.
The feeling of a place is tied into the atmosphere of that space. The rest of our senses kick in to help define the experiential atmosphere of a given place. A holistic well-defined space activates all our senses.
A cohesive sensory plan takes into account how light hits a material, how that material feels when you touch it, how that material might absorb or amplify sound, how the material smells. Maybe it’s cedar. Maybe it’s stone that smells a certain way when it gets wet. Maybe it’s a steam shower of unsealed stone that shows wet feet print and becomes heavy with scented steam while in use. Maybe it’s the sound of the steam being released into the air that cuts the heavy silence. Maybe it’s piped in music. Maybe it’s a light mist from a rain shower that sets the background noise or maybe it’s muffled footsteps in the distance. Maybe it’s watching the light dance and try to cut its way through the thick steam.
Maybe it’s all of these things together that define the experience.
Let There Be Light:
Light is the most easily evident continually changing element. Both natural and artificial sources are employed throughout the course of a day to help define our spaces, activities and lives. Our sight tends to be our most dominant sense and we rely heavily on it to help us see our surroundings.
Living up north as most of us do, we become intrinsically aware of the importance of light in our everyday.
Whether it is the summer solstice when we have an abundance of natural light or winter solstice when a single lit candle can provide a relatively large experiential impact – we know in our bones the importance of light. Living in a such a state of continually changing days going from one extreme to another, most of us develop a heightened sense of awareness to our experience of space through the fundamental element of light.
The Sun, The Switch + Fire:
All sources of light - solar - lunar - artificial - fire (big like a bonfire and small like a candle) - act to illuminate the things around us.
Light gives shape to space. It helps create and define an atmosphere. Light interacts with materials. It implies the texture of things. It might indicate that an object is fuzzy or hard. It might highlight the reflectivity of a material to extend the feeling of the space through a reflection.
Light can even capture atmospheric qualities from fog and obscure the sight. In situations of darkness, a single cut through a material can produce a highly dramatic activation of space. Light when limited and controlled helps strategically define how a space feels. Light can make a space feel cozy and comfortable or creepy and intimidating. Even the specific color temperature of light can hugely impact our impressions – and make the same space feel either residential and warm or commercial and cold.
Our Latent Potential:
In Alaska, this heightened sense of experience honed in by living in a natural environment of extremes gives us as a collective community the latent potential to capitalize on our unique set of givens.
We are intrinsically and inherently primed as a community to use design - that mediation device between us and our world – as a tool to define our ideals of what it means to be a human body interacting with other human bodies and with the natural world around us. We have the potential ability to tap into our collective senses – minimally already heightened to light – to help make us more tuned in to other sensory experiences.
Design is the ultimate tool to employ in addressing issues facing us individually, collectively, privately, publicly, pragmatically and inspirationally. This tool can be implemented to help elevate our everyday.
Follow the Light:
Let there be light whether it be from the sun, a LED, a bonfire, a candle or maybe even from within. Without light we live in darkness and no one likes to be left in the dark… unless of course you have the tools to mediate it.
I want to end with a quote by Peter Zumthor:
Delivered on January, the 5th 2018 by Julia Foland at the Anchorage Museum for the inaugural Pecha Kucha hosted by the Alaska Design Forum.