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The quality of a space or place is not merely a visual perceptual quality as is usually assumed. The judgement of environmental character is a complex multi‐sensory fusion of countless factors which are immediately and synthetically grasped as an overall atmosphere, feeling, mood, or ambience. ‘I enter a building, see a room, and – in the fraction of a second – have this feeling about it’, Peter Zumthor, one of the architects who have acknowledged the importance of architectural atmospheres, confesses.⁶⁴ John Dewey, the visionary American philosopher, who already eight decades ago grasped the immediate, embodied, emotive and subconscious essence of experience, articulates the nature of this existential encounter followingly: ‘The total overwhelming impression comes first, perhaps in a seizure by a sudden glory of the landscape, or by the effect upon us of entrance into a cathedral when dim light, incense, stained glass and majestic proportions fuse in one indistinguishable whole. We say with truth that a painting strikes us. There is an impact that precedes all definite recognition of what it is about’.⁶⁵

This experience is multi‐sensory in its very essence. In his book The Experience of Place, Tony Hiss uses the notion ‘“simultaneo perception” of the system we use to experience our surroundings’.⁶⁶ This is, however, also the way we normally observe, with all the senses at once. As Merleau‐Ponty witnesses: ‘My perception is […] not a sum of visual, tactile, and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once’.⁶⁷ An atmospheric perception also involves judgements beyond the five Aristotelian senses, such as sensations of orientation, gravity, balance, stability, motion, duration, continuity, scale and illumination. Indeed, the immediate judgement of the character of space calls for our entire embodied and existential sense, and it is perceived in a diffuse and peripheral manner rather than through precise and conscious observation. This complex assessment also includes the dimension of time as experiencing implies duration and it fuses perception, memory and imagination. Moreover, each space and place are always an invitation to and suggestion of distinct acts: spaces are verbs.

In addition to environmental atmospheres, there are cultural, social, work place, family, interpersonal, etc. atmospheres. The atmosphere of a social situation can be supportive or discouraging, liberating or stifling, inspiring or dull. We can even speak of specific atmospheres in the scale of cultural, regional or national entities. Genius loci, the Spirit of Place, is a similarly ephemeral, unfocused and non‐material experiential character that is closely related with atmosphere; we can, indeed, speak of the atmosphere of a place, which gives it its unique perceptual character and identity. Dewey explains this unifying character as a specific quality: ‘An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rapture of friendship. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts. This unity is neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual, for these terms name distinctions that reflection can make within it’.⁶⁸ In another context, the philosopher re‐emphasizes the integrating power of this experiential quality: ‘The quality of the whole permeates, affects, and controls every detail’.⁶⁹

Martin Heidegger links space indivisibly with the human condition: ‘When we speak of man and space, it sounds as though man stood on one side, space on the other. Yet space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience. It is not that there are men, and over and above them space’.⁷⁰ 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 destruction’.⁷¹ Atmosphere is similarly an exchange between material or existent properties of the place and the immaterial realm of human perception and imagination. Yet, they are not physical ‘things’ or facts, as they are human experiential ‘creations’.

Paradoxically, we grasp the atmosphere before we identify its details or understand it intellectually. In fact, we may be completely unable to say anything meaningful about the characteristics of a situation, yet have a firm image, emotive attitude and recall of it. In the same way, although we do not consciously analyse or understand the interaction of meteorological facts, we grasp the essence of weather at a glance, and it inevitably conditions our mood and intentionality. As we enter a new city, we grasp its overall character similarly, without having consciously analysed a single one of its countless material, geometric, or dimensional properties. Dewey even extends processes that advance from an initial but temporary grasp of the whole towards details all the way to the processes of thinking: ‘All thought in every subject begins with just such an unanalysed whole. When the subject matter is reasonably familiar, relevant distinctions speedily offer themselves, and sheer qualitativeness may not remain long enough to be readily recalled’.⁷²

This is an intuitive and emotive capacity that seems to be biologically derived and largely unconsciously and instinctively determined through evolutionary programming. ‘We perceive atmospheres through our emotional sensibility – a form of perception that works incredibly quickly, and which we humans evidently need to help us survive’, Zumthor suggests.⁷³ The new sciences of bio‐psychology and ecological psychology actually study such evolutionary causalities in human instinctual behaviour and cognition.⁷⁴ It is evident that we are genetically and culturally conditioned to seek or avoid certain types of situations or atmospheres. Our shared pleasure in being in the shadow of large trees looking onto a sun‐lit open field, for instance, is explained on the basis of such evolutionary programming – this specific type of setting demonstrates the polar notions of ‘refuge’ and ‘prospect’, which have been applied to explain the pleasurable pre‐reflective feel of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses.⁷⁵

Although atmosphere and mood seem to be overarching qualities of our environments and spaces, these qualities have not been much observed, analysed or theorized in architecture or planning. Professor Gernot Böhme is one of the pioneering thinkers in the philosophy of atmospheres, along with Hermann Schmitz.⁷⁶ Recent philosophical studies, relying on neurological evidence, such as Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding,⁷⁷ and neurological surveys as Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World,⁷⁸ significantly valorise the power of atmospheres. Current neurological findings on mirror neurons help to understand that we can internalise external physical situations and experiences through embodied simulation.