The overall thrust of this paper concerns how we analyse our environment and construct the public space through our senses. It also factors ambiance-related aspects into this analysis of built systems. The core idea underlying our approach is that when the public space is seen as more than just an abstract notion or as empty space between buildings, it acquires specific sensory contours that comprise environmental and spatial data, perceptual aspects and modes of use. We should not think of the public space as being defined a priori and should instead look at the sensory configurations within which an environment takes shape and in which public practices and behaviours play out. The field analyses focus on grasping the tangible modalities of an urban “publicness” and thereby qualifying its built systems. This involves a scale of comprehension that is tied to our field of perception and which grounds our approach, the main characteristic of which is the priority given to working on l...

The phenomenological approach occupies a central position in contemporary discourse on architectural design and atmospheric perception. Its cross-disciplinary applicability enables systematic engagement with questions of health, cognition, and embodied experience. This potential is especially relevant given architects’ expanding interest in the complex interplay between architecture, the mind, emotion, touch, and aesthetics. Despite this increasing popularity, systematic phenomenological analysis of healthcare architecture seems to be lacking. In this article, we utilise Hermann Schmitz’s new phenomenology to construct narrative case study descriptions of the atmospheric experiences in four psychiatric hospitals.
Results show that Schmitz’s phenomenology offers a versatile method for investigating various architectural environments, encouraging active bodily engagement and attentiveness to nuanced, transient aspects of atmospheric experience. The method allows us to approach architec...

In this introduction we outline the historical roots and philosophical underpinnings of the relationship between atmosphere and film, showing how atmosphere is an essential, if somewhat underexplored, characteristic of the cinematic form. We describe how subsidiary themes emerging from this fundamental connection, such as the creation of mood, modes of reception, the spectator’s cinematic experience and the roles of space, location, sound and technology are explored though the variety of case studies assembled here, which each focus on certain film works. We also identify and consider the questions raised by these papers about how technological processes may unsettle the relationship of a film to its location; the particular ontologies of documentary and ‘cinéma-vérité’; the forms and significances of the environmental forces in film; the reconstitution of a world through the emotions of spectatorship and the issues that may raise about directorial responsibility and ethics. Our con...