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Reading three week one

The

Sixth

Sense

The Meaning of Atmosphere and Mood

Juhani Pallasmaa

Through its blinkered emphasis on visual form and function, has modernity divorced us from our sense of belonging to the cosmos? What, then, is the secret of creating architecture

that envelops and inspires us? As scientific research increasingly favours the point of view that our unconscious – as opposed to detailed – perception has higher existential value, Helsinki-based architect and professor emeritus Juhani Pallasmaa argues that peripheral vision is key. Only through engagement with this can architects trigger what could be described as our sixth sense – the atmospheric.

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, Interior of a Great House: The Drawing Room, East Cowes Castle,

c 1830

Turner’s atmospheric interior pulls the viewer into the embrace of the space.

Whether people are conscious of it or not, they actually derive countenance and sustenance from the ‘atmosphere’ of the things they live in or with. They are rooted in them just as a plant is in the soil in which it is planted.

— Frank Lloyd Wright, 19541

Why do we identify with and feel a strong emotional attachment to certain spaces and places, while others leave us cold, or even frightened? Why do we feel like insiders and participants in some spaces, whereas in others we experience alienation and ‘existential outsideness’?2 Is this not because the settings of the first type embrace and stimulate us, make us surrender ourselves to them, and feel protected and sensually nourished, strengthening our sense of reality, belonging and self; whereas alienating and disturbing settings weaken our sense of being?

Guest-editor Matias del Campo introduces this 3 with the following: ‘Instead of perpetuating the techno mantra of computational design, this issue of 3 strives to examine the characteristics of contemporary architectural production in terms of their ability to evoke mood, radiate atmospheric conditions and portray phenomenological traits of the sensual as well as the actual.’ From this point of departure I have chosen to give certain historical and biological perspectives in order to frame the notions of mood and atmosphere in an experientially meaningful context. It is evident that modern and contemporary architectures have turned a blind eye to many of the fundamental sensory and mental issues concerning our relationships with physical settings, both ‘natural’ and man-made. Through modernity, the art of building has gradually focused on the technical, formal and aesthetic concerns of architecture instead of cultivating its inherent relational and mediating characteristics.

Harmony as an Architectural Aspiration

Resonance with the cosmos and a distinct proportional tuning were essential qualities of architecture from antiquity until the instrumentalised and aestheticised construction of the industrial era. The fundamental task of architecture was to create a correspondence between the

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Tuning the world – harmony of numbers in music and architecture

Pythagoras (570–495 BC) established the relations between number ratios

and sound frequencies.

This woodcut shows him experimenting with bells, water glasses, stretched cords and various-sized pipes. His Hebrew counterpart, Jubal, uses weighted hammers on an anvil. From F Gafuro, Theorica musice, 1472.

Since the beginning of modernity, architectural theory, education and practice have primarily been concerned with the expressive qualities of form and space.

Aulis Blomstedt, Study of Pythagorean intervals applied

to the human scale, undated, late 1950s

Blomstedt connected visual and musical harmonies in

a system of numbers in accordance with Pythagorean principles. He concluded his meticulous studies in the early 1960s in a proportional system that he entitled Canon 60.

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Jaakko Klemetinpoika Leppänen, Petäjävesi Church, Petäjävesi, Finland, 1764

The intoxicating and haptic atmosphere of an all-wood space.

microcosm of the human realm and the macrocosm of the universe. This was sought through proportionality based on small natural numbers following Pythagorean harmonics. The Renaissance also introduced the competing proportional ideal of the Golden Section. But while during the modern era only a handful of scholars and architects, such as Hans Kayser, Rudolph Schindler, Le Corbusier and Aulis Blomstedt, were interested in proportional harmony as a means of assuring an experiential coherence of architectural works, similar to musical tuning, in today’s consumerist and utilitarian society any aspiration for harmonic attunement of a larger context, or inner harmonic cohesion within the architectural work itself, has been entirely abandoned.3

Since the beginning of modernity, architectural theory, education and practice have primarily been concerned with the expressive qualities of form and space. Form and formal expression have even become synonymous with modernity.

This orientation favours focused vision and the Gestalt principles described in psychological literature. Le Corbusier’s credo ‘Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light’, illustrates this visual and formal orientation.4 Studies on vision have been primarily interested in focused perception and static gaze, which, however, are exceptional conditions in the lived reality. It is evident that focused vision necessarily implies outsideness in relation to what is seen. Thus, the fundamental experience of being embraced by space necessarily calls for diffuse and peripheral perception in motion.

It is this omnidirectional, multisensory, embodied and emotive encounter with space and place that makes us insiders and participants. I suggest, therefore, that it is the biased focusing on visual form that is responsible for the weak atmospheric quality and sense of interiority in much contemporary architecture. Architects in the modern era have considered ambiences, feelings and moods as something naive, romantic and entertaining instead of regarding such experiences as necessary constituents of environmental quality. Indeed, it is only recently that atmosphere, mood and attunement have become part of modern architectural theory and discourse.5 Modern thinking

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has been interested in phenomena that can be consciously observed and rationally analysed, but the experience of mood and feeling does not arise from directed, focused and conscious attention.

Mood seeps into our mental constitution in an unnoticed and unstructured manner, in

the same way that we feel temperature, humidity or the smell of the air, unintentionally and in an embodied manner.

Altogether, mood is closer to an embodied haptic sensation than to an external visual percept.

The atmospheric paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner, the Impressionists and Abstract Expressionists evoke strong sensations of interiority, tactility and the feel of the skin. The art forms of painting, cinema, literature and theatre, and especially music, have been more aware of the significance of atmosphere, feeling and mood than architects. Some time ago I asked a Finnish composer and a pianist6 about the role of atmospheres in their music. Smiling enigmatically, both answered: ‘Music

is all atmosphere.’ Is this not why music is used in films to create and heighten moods, or to evoke specific tunings and desires in commercial settings? A master novelist’s skill as well as that of the film or theatre director is likewise to evoke, articulate and sustain specific moods in order to create the dramatic flow and continuum of the narrative. Should this not also be the task of the architect?

Visual Elementarism and Embodied Understanding

Modernism has favoured an elementarist view where entities are assumed to arise from elementary units and percepts. However, when we study our perceptions and experiences critically, we seem to be perceiving essences of complex multisensory entities such as the characteristics of spaces, places, landscapes and urban settings in an instant. These perceptions take place even quicker than we become conscious of any details, or even our own active attention. We gaze intentionally at visual objects and events, whereas atmospheres come to us omnidirectionally, similarly to acoustic and olfactory sensations.

We sense the overall mood, tuning, feeling, ambience and atmosphere of a setting before we have become conscious of it, or have identified any of its constituent features. In the process of design, atmospheric qualities also arise unconsciously in an embodied and haptic manner rather than through conscious retinal strategies and intentions. The sense of a coherent experiential entity is evoked by the designer’s

sense of existence and body more than conscious and deliberate visual intentionality.

Atmosphere is certainly closely related with the spirit of place, its genius loci, as well as our empathic and affective capacities. In the same way that music can charge a spatial or social situation with a particular mood, the ambience of a landscape, townscape or interior space can project similar integrating and encompassing feelings. Emotional reactions usually arise vaguely, without any distinct focused object or nameable cause. Love, happiness and hate, for instance, are not objects; they are relationships, moods and states of mind. Similarly, we may never intellectually ‘understand’ a work of art, but it can convey an ineffable influence throughout our entire lives.

‘Understanding is not a quality coming to human reality from the outside; it is its characteristic way of existing,’ argued Jean-Paul Sartre.7 This implies that, contrary to our accepted beliefs, we grasp entities before details, singularities before their components, multisensory syntheses before individual sensory features, and emotive or existential meanings before intellectual explanations. We sense embodied and existential meanings outside of the direct, conscious cognitive channels of our life situations. This exemplifies embodied and tacit knowledge. Yet these processes are

in evident conflict with established perceptual assumptions as well as the

‘Understanding

is not a quality coming to human reality from the outside; it is its characteristic way of existing’ — Jean-Paul Sartre

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Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona,

1938

Perfect harmony and atmospheric attunement of landscape and architecture.

unquestioned priority given to formal and focused vision and cognitive understanding. Since the Greek philosophers, focused vision has been regarded as synonymous with knowledge and truth. However, neuroscience lends support to the view that we experience entities before elements, and we intuit lived meanings without conceptual or verbal signification. Our atmospheric

sense is clearly an evolutionary priority and a consequence of the activities of our right-brain hemisphere.8

Atmospheric Perception in Evolutionary Perspective

I suggest that we have developed our capacities of judging entities at the edge of our awareness through evolutionary processes. This point is also made by therapist-philosopher Iain McGilchrist.9 It has obviously been advantageous for humans to get the meaning of settings

in an instant in terms of their existential and survival qualities. We have developed, as other animals to various degrees, two independent yet complementary systems of perceiving; one mode of precise focused perception and the second of diffuse and unfocused peripheral scanning.10 Today’s science confirms the assumption that we have these two systems of perception – the conscious and unconscious – and that the first is activated 20 to 30 milliseconds before the latter. According to scholars such as Anton Ehrenzweig, unconscious scanning is also our creative mode of perception.11

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Alvar Aalto, Säynätsalo Town Hall, Säynätsalo,

Finland,

1952

An emotive, atmospheric image of an Italian hill town concealed in contemporary architecture.

Peter Zumthor, Therme Vals, Graubünden, Switzerland, 1996

Zumthor is one of the internationally known architects today writing about the significance of atmospheres in architecture. His own architectural works project a strong atmospheric quality and cohesion.

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Notes

1. Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘The Natural House’ [1954], in Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (ed), The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Writings

on Architecture, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2010, p 350.

2. Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness, Pion (London), 1986, p 51.

3. For information on proportionality, see: Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, Academy Editions and St Martin’s Press (London and NewYork), 1988; Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Attunement,

MIT Press (Cambridge, MA

and London), 2016; and Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘Man, Measure,

and Proportion’, Encounters 1 – Juhani Pallasmaa: Architectural Essays, Rakennustieto Publishing (Helsinki), 2012, pp 231–48.

4. Le Corbusier, Towards

a New Architecture, The Architectural Press (London), 1959, p 31.

5.The most recent studies of this subject are the books and writings of Peter Zumthor, Tonino Griffero, Jean-Paul Thibault and Alberto Pérez- Gómez.

6. Composer Kalevi Aho and pianist Minna Pöllänen.

7. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Emotions: An Outline of a Theory, Carol Publishing Co (NewYork), 1993, p 9.

8. See Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary:The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT and London), 2009, p 40.

9. Ibid, p 12.

10. Ibid, p 102.

11. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art [1970], Paladin (St Albans), 1973.

12. Ibid, p 59.

13. Ibid.

14. Iain McGilchrist, ‘Tending to the World’, in Sarah Robinson and Juhani Pallasmaa

(eds), Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA and London), 2015, pp 99–122.

15. Gabriele d’Annunzio, Contemplazioni della morte, Milan, 1912, pp 17–18. As quoted in Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Pegasus Foundation (Dallas, TX), 1983, p 16.

16. Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL and London), 2007, p 9.

17. See Ehrenzweig, op cit,

p 284.

18. Matti Bergström, Aivojen fysiologiasta ja psyykestä (On the Physiology of the Brain and Psyche), WSOY (Helsinki), 1979, pp 77–8.

19. David Howes (ed),The Sixth Sense Reader, Berg Publishers (Oxford and NewYork), 2011, pp 23–4.

However, precision needs to be suppressed for the purpose of observing

large entities. The mathematician Jacques Hadamard suggested that even in mathematics, the ultimate decision must be left to the unconscious, as a clear visualisation of problems is usually impossible.12 He stated categorically that it is mandatory ‘to cloud one’s consciousness in order to make the right judgement’.13 McGilchrist relates this divided attention with the differentiation of our two brain hemispheres. It is biologically advantageous to be able to make precise and focused observations and general, vague peripheral ones simultaneously, but would this

be impossible within a single system of perception?14 Focused vision detaches

itself from contextual interactions, whereas atmospheric observations fuse and unite all the sensations through the sense of being and self. The omnidirectional senses of hearing, hapticity and smell complement the visual sensations to produce a multisensory existential experience relating us fully with our setting. The experience of atmosphere or mood is thus predominantly an emotive, pre-reflective mode of experience.

Mood and Emotion

The richest experiences happen long before the soul takes notice. And when we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have already been supporters of the invisible for a long time.15

— Gabriele d’Annunzio, 1912

One reason why peripheric perceptions have been undervalued, or totally neglected, in architecture is that we have not acknowledged that emotions evaluate, articulate and structure our relations with the world.

Emotions are regarded as unconscious, secondary reactions, instead of possessing intentionality and factual value. Yet emotions arise from primal levels of consciousness and, significantly, the first wave of neural signals is always directed to these unconscious systems. As the philosopher Mark Johnson has argued: ‘There is no cognition without emotion ... emotions are not second-rate cognitions; rather they are affective patterns of our encounter with our world, by which we take the meaning of things at a primordial level.’16 There is strong evidence that the unconscious system of perception has a higher existential priority.17 The potential superiority of the unconscious processes in comparison with consciousness is revealed dramatically by the neurological fact that the information-handling capacity of our entire nervous system is estimated to be 1015 times the capacity of our conscious system.18

The nature of vision itself has been grossly misunderstood as something automatic, objective and precise. Research has revealed that the process of

vision is a fragmented and discontinuous mosaic that constantly fuses perceptions with memory and imagination. A visual image itself is composed of separate percepts

of colour, form and movement, received at the temporal distance of 40 to 60 milliseconds. In addition, our focused vision sees what we have learned and

what we want to see, whereas the peripheral system of perception is capable of identifying what is genuinely new. Mood tunes us emotively with our environment, and as a consequence we do not need to continuously and consciously monitor its overwhelming medley of details.

We are not related to our environments only through the five Aristotelian senses;

in fact, The Sixth Sense Reader (2011)19 lists over 30 systems through which we

are connected with the world. I suggest that the atmospheric sense could be named our sixth sense, and it is likely to be existentially our most important. Simply, we do not stop at our skin; we extend our bodily self by means of our senses and our technological and constructed extensions. The elecromagnetic waves of the human heart can now be measured from a distance of 5 metres (16 feet) away, but in principle they extend to infinity. Thus, we unknowingly inhabit the entire universe. 1

Text © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 126 © Photo Adolfo Vera; p 127 Digital image © Tate, London, 2014; p 128(b) © Aulis Blomstedt Estate; p 129 © Photo Kari Hakli; pp 130-31 © Michael DeFreitas North America/Alamy Stock Photo; p 132(t) Courtesy Alvar Aalto Museum, photo Eino Mäkinen; p 132(b) © Hélène Binet

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