Reflections: Why Atmospheres
March 20th, 2025
Atmospheric perception is pre-cognitive and operates through multiple sensory channels simultaneously
Our experience of space is fundamentally multisensory, Pallasmaa (2014) engaging not just vision but our entire sensory apparatus including proprioception, thermoception, and auditory processing. This holistic engagement has direct implications for both physical and cognitive wellbeing, as our bodies unconsciously process and respond to environmental stimuli long before conscious awareness occurs.
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“As we enter a space, the space enters us, and the experience is essentially an exchange and fusion of the object and the subject. Robert Pogue Harrison, an American literary scholar, states poetically: ‘In the fusion of place and soul, the soul is as much of a container of place as place is a container of soul, both are susceptible to the same forces of destruc- tion’ (Harrison 2008: 130). Similarly, atmosphere is an exchange between the material or existent properties of the place and our immaterial realm of projection“
Christian Borch
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This quote reminded me of a moment when a three-dimensional space transformed me. It was in 2009 at the Dia Beacon just north of New York City. With my priorities on school and staying financially afloat this was perhaps the first time in three years I had the luxury to move slow.
Richard Serra, installation view at Dia:Beacon “ways of relating movement to material and space.”
I have this distinct memory of walking into Serra’s work and feeling this physiological shift. It almost felt like I was breaking. Breaking away from something and towards something else. As I looked up I remember truly feeling how the weathered steel carved through space. How this form literally transformed sound and perspectives. I remember feeling the sunlight through the windows and trees rustling in the soft wind just outside. I feel this particular work forever changed me.
Lastly, this piece I had viewed in the moma a few months prior. While I wasn’t initially moved by it, compositionally it’s nothing special. But, the tension of each piece of steel next to each other moved me. This was a moment I felt empathy of form or perhaps better put-- I identified with this form. This imperfect cube at first glance its weathered, barely standing, in an environment it didn’t visually mirror in (the pristine moma). After further consideration each piece is leaning into itself in a seemingly impossible stance that has stood boldly in that gallery for decades.
Richard Serra’s Equal at the MoMA
Neural Mirroring
Empathetic responses to 3 dimensional spaces and atmospheres
Sadar describes this neurological dimension as "polyphonic perception," where our neural systems process environmental information at a pre-conscious level. The ability to grasp atmospheres emotionally before understanding them intellectually. (Pallasmaa)
More thoughts on this to come...
Reference: Quasi-Materials and the Making of Interior Atmospheres John Stanislav Sadar
On the Experience and Politics of Architecture, edited by Christian Borch, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2014.