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...

Présentation

Cet appel à contribution propose de croiser deux champs de recherche qui, jusqu’à présent, ont principalement existé indépendamment l’un de l’autre : le champ de recherche sur les scènes culturelles et celui sur les ambiances et atmosphères. Leur croisement – c’est l’hypothèse qui anime la proposition de ce dossier thématique – permet pour les deux champs de recherche une ouverture vers des questionnements prometteurs à ce jour peu explorés.

Depuis une vingtaine d’années, se développent des travaux cherchant à expliciter l’effervescence culturelle, les dynamiques d’innovation ou créatives qui prennent corps au sein de lieux, de territoires (urbains ou non), d’espaces publics à partir du vocable de scène, le « scene thinking » proposé par Woo et al. (2015). Ce qui est remarquable avec les démarches se revendiquant de la « scene », c’est d’abord leur pluridisciplinarité. Elles s’inscrivent en effet dans le « spatial turn » proposé par les perspectives en cultural studies (G...