CfP AAG 2019 : Towards a political ecology of ambiances/atmospheres

2020

How does the notion of “infinite places” allow us to question the production of a contemporary architectural space? For creators, what are the new challenges for the design of the atmospheres of these new forms of public space? This article aims to bring together the urban practices identified by the Encore Heureux collective with a praxeological thought of the design of atmospheres. Infinites places trough ambiance are analyzed in their potentials to create infinite conflicts, infinite negotiations and infinite sympathies between the back plan and the emerging events.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2011

2012

This paper questions the potential criticism offered by the concept of ambiances. By defending three postures of research (to articulate the sensitive and politics, to defend an ethics of the commitment, to translate and share the common), it puts the foundations of a sensitive criticism of the urbanity.

International Political Sociology, 2015

What might thinking about atmospheres add to our understandings of politics? How might this provocation open up other characters, venues, objects, and purposes in the study of politics (Magnusson 2011:1)? In The Politics of Urbanism (2011), Warren Magnusson invites us to challenge our accounts of politics by seeing like a city . In doing so, he claims that we are more likely to be able to see a multiplicity of political authorities and political spaces, which in turn complicate a sovereign and statist account of politics (Magnusson 2011:4). But what happens when we shift or expand the emphasis from acts of seeing to acts of feeling , to follow the ways in which bodies are affected by senses, chemicals, rhythms, and sounds—aligning some people with others and against other others (Ahmed 2004)? The concept of atmospheres encourages us to think about the ways in which moods, ambiance, and feelings play an important role in political life. A political moment or movement is often experienced as a “structure of feeling” (Williams 1977) or “moody force field” (Amin and Thrift 2013:161) before it can be explained as (and reduced to) a rational, conscious decision (Anderson 2009). I will point to three ways in which thinking about atmospheres challenges and expands our studies of politics by drawing on a literary text—specifically, a novel by Hanif Kureishi called The Black Album (1995). Literary texts intervene in this question of what counts as politics by questioning the “carving up of space and time, the visible and invisible, speech and noise” (Shapiro 2010; Ranciere 2011:4). Working with a novel thus …

Literature and Aesthetics, 2013

We are always in atmospheres. Every where has, is an atmosphere. We are always affected by atmosphere, more or less consciously, more or less intensively. A crowded street, an open field, night, a moment of anticipatory tension, a jubilant throng, the aroma of freshly-turned earth on a green hillside in the rain in the sombre stillness of a funeral, a post-coital haze, a boring seminar in a white box-shaped room. However neutral or benign a space is designed to be, however unconsciously or habitually dwelt, it has, it is, atmosphere. If space is anything more than volumetric void, ideal abstraction, or pure potential, it is atmosphere. Certainly, if space, as opposed to place, can be experienced, it is as atmosphere. This article outlines a phenomenological-performative methodology for the apprehension of atmospheres, based in the work of Hermann Schmitz and Gernot Böhme. It examines the concept of atmosphere in detail, and proposes a practical application in a site-specific performance project conducted in urban environments. Ultimately, it claims a role for performance phenomenology as a means of providing a more in-depth, body-centred analysis of the aesthetic experience of being in place than is attainable by other means.

2019

By recognizing the potential of literary language in the description of architectural atmospheres, this contribution aims to confront the shortcomings of conventional pedagogical approaches in architecture that often fail to provide an in-depth understanding of the experiential aspects of place. To contribute to the development of appropriate instruments of analysis and design to read and describe urban atmosphere, this article combines two main insights: first, that it is of crucial importance to investigate site-specific atmospheres to understand how people experience the urban territories they use or inhabit; and second, that it is through literary devices that atmospheres can be read and described. By bringing together these insights, this article aims to propose pedagogical exercises that help students of architecture to develop a better understanding of the experiential aspects of site-specificity. By adding to the conventional tools of architect and planners a set of tools in...

Social and Cultural Geography

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2015

In this paper, I propose to explore a new way of designing and experimenting with the city. How are we to conceptualize the changes in contemporary cities on the basis of their ambiances? What about the sensory and emotional production of urban territories? What happens when our aim is no longer just to design space but also to install an atmosphere? Such questions are situated at the intersection of issues of a social, aesthetic, urban, ecological and political nature. I should like to advance a hypothesis: we are currently witnessing what I call the 'setting of ambiance' in urban spaces. To give an account of this phenomenon, I do not intend to offer a formal definition of what an ambiance may be, but rather to show from what it proceeds, on what it is based, what it produces and transforms in urban life. Several ambiance operating modes in the province of urban design will be the focus: establishing the sensory as a field of action, composing with affective tonalities, giving consistency to urban situations, maintaining spaces over time and playing with imperceptible transformations.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2014

URBAN AMBIANCES AS COMMON GROUND? I would like to start with an expression: 'sharing ambiances' 1. There are at least two meanings underlying such an expression. On the one hand, we can question whether it is possible to share ambiances and ask ourselves whether an ambiance can always be shared, whether certain conditions must be met for an ambiance to be shared, whether what is 'shareable' takes on a particular expression when it is viewed through the lens of ambi-ances… These are what we can call 'experienced ambiances', ambiances as they are experienced by the senses. But we can also share conceptions about the idea of ambiances and test the extent to which it is possible to agree on the notion of ambiance, initiate a debate on the meaning and contribution of such a concept, experiment with types of dialogue between different disciplinary fields, etc. We can call these: 'reflective ambiances', i.e., ambiances as they are addressed by thought. To question the shared experience of an ambiance and open up the notion of ambiance for debate is quite simply two sides of the same coin: the two facets of sharing ambiances. This involves the potential crossover between the field of sensory experience and that of reflective thought, the continuity between empirical and theoretical realms. Here, we are already at the heart of the enigma since ambiances play on both sensing and knowing, and involve a certain I-do-not-know-what (je-ne-sais-quoi as commented by Vladimir Jankélévitch 2) that can never be fully resolved. Like Saint Augustine with time, everyone has experiences with ambiances in everyday life and yet we have a lot of trouble explaining exactly what they are. In order to avoid an overly general and abstract argumentation, I will rely on short descriptions, lived experiences and concrete situations throughout the text. This

2020

The limits of sensory apprehension can take different forms: phenomena can be so tenuous that they do not necessarily reach consciousness; habit can bring them out as missing; they can also manifest only in a delayed manner, primarily through their sensory consequences; and finally, devices – such as a digital display – can bring them back into the realm of human perception. This paper first seeks to explore their integration into the lived ambiances, especially from the contem- porary geophysical and climatological expla- nations. Then it questions how architecture and urban design can, through new attention to these limits of the phenomenal, contribute to the readability of the world and collective response-abilities at the time of the entry of humanity into the Anthropocene.