Atmospheres - Zumthor, Philipe Starck et al.

Time & time again I refer back to my favourite books - including the small beautifully bound rich brown and silver embossed 'Atmospheres' (Peter Zumthor). I love the feel of this book - the weight of it, the texture of the cover and the smell of the paper (you don't get this added pleasure from reading a kindle!).

According to Zumthor, atmosphere is an aesthetic category.

Atmosphere is crafted as an architectural quality that provokes a spontaneous response - whether this is emotional or something more basic, though, I'm not sure. Perhaps atmosphere is something that unlocks memory of another place and time? In any case, I agree with him that it is a quality, an impression, sensed in a fraction of a second, something you're not consciously aware of until you try and analyse it.

Atmosphere requires material presence plus a person experiencing or sensing this presence via sound, light, temperature and spatial recognition resulting from a distinct tension between inside and out.

Reading another book (not so nice to hold and smell but nice enough, nonetheless: Architectural Design: Interior Atmospheres. Julieanna Preston (Ed) Profile no. 103, v78, no. 3 May/June 2008), I was struck by Philippe Starck's treatment of the ceilings in Le Lan restaurant, Beijing.

As someone who is always complaining about ceilings in healthcare settings (we spend so much time looking at them), this was refreshing but perhaps not what I'll be striving for necessarily...

I love the richness without being stuffy, the baroque theatricality of this compared with more restrained examples of atmosphere such as seen in, for example, Japanese interiors.

Architecture described as being defined by a certain atmosphere celebrates a 'Romantic' sensibility in which emotion and sensory perceptions overshadow the rational and the intellectual (p5, editorial by Helen Castle).

NB. Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement toward the end of the 18th century, at its peak during 1800 to 1850. It was during this time that the term 'atmosphere' expanded from planetary gases to include a 'sense of surrounding influence, mental or moral environment.' It validated intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience.

Sound - The MIX house -see http://www.joelsandersarchitect.com/