Sometimes the first step into a room is enough. Before I have even looked at it, I sense something. How the door handle feels in the hand, how the floor sounds underfoot, how the light falls through a window. In that moment I do not yet know why a room receives me or keeps me at a distance. I only sense it. Words come later. What works first is what we call atmosphere.
For a long time I assumed atmosphere sat in the room itself, in its materials and proportions. But that does not explain why the same room meets two people so differently. What we experience as atmosphere does not first arise in the room. It emerges from an encounter. Atmosphere always forms between person and space. It is therefore neither purely objective nor purely subjective.
The idea has shifted over time. In Roman religion the Genius Loci meant the guardian spirit of a particular place, bound and local. Today’s theory of atmosphere no longer thinks of atmosphere as the spirit of a place. It understands it as a quality that arises between space and person. The place does not carry it alone. We carry part of it.
The German philosopher Gernot Böhme found a language for this. He describes atmospheres as a reality of perception that lies in the in-between. His aesthetics turns our attention away from judging things and towards what we feel. For interior architecture this is decisive. Design then no longer addresses form and function alone. It also addresses moods, densities and states of feeling.
The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor describes atmosphere as something that works immediately through material, sound, temperature, light and proportion. It creates an overall effect we sense before we explain it. The Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa takes the thought further. Architecture always works through several senses. A purely visual understanding impoverishes the experience of a room. A room speaks to us, through the hand on the handle, through the sound of the floor, long before we judge it.
This encounter has two sides. An outer one, shaped by light, material, sound and smell. And an inner one, shaped by what a person carries within them from earlier spatial experience. Memories, habits and experiences meet the room and shape how we experience it. This inner side is what I call the inner space. It is the precondition for how atmosphere comes into being for each of us.
At the Heissiwald, then, it is not only the floor plan of the house that counts for me. The lilac counts, the light, the dryness and the warmth. The reliability of this place counts. Another person would stand in the same garden and experience something else, because they would bring another inner space with them. Atmosphere therefore cannot be manufactured like a piece of furniture. It arises anew every time, in the interplay.
If atmosphere arises in the interplay, then it can also be shaped. On the one hand through the outer side, through light, material, scale, acoustics and smell. On the other through the inner side, by getting to know our inner space and understanding what atmosphere has been made of for us so far. Perhaps that is where the real work lies. How may a room feel so that it strengthens us at the core? And how much of that do I already bring with me when I step inside?