









































First step: Walking in Bernardo(’s) Sandals
Challenging what he criticized as the straitjacket 

of fashion, in 1946 the architect, designer, and 
author Bernard Rudofsky launched the line of 
footwear Bernardo Sandals. Making present the 
bodily awareness of the horizontal plane, they were 
designed to adapt to, rather than constrain, the 
anatomy of the foot, aspiring to remain timeless 
pieces, comfortable and wearable outside fads and 
short-lived trends. Decades later, they are still 
defying the passage of time.

More than mere footwear, the sandals are a design 
manifesto expressing the connection between feet 
and floors, always in touch through the intimacy 
of the sole, a relationship Rudofsky celebrates in 
architectural and design projects. Building upon the 
multiple meanings of the Italian word pianta,1 he 
notes the attraction between the sole of the foot (la 
pianta del piede) that caresses the sole of the house, 
and also its plan (la pianta della casa).2 Departing 
from modernist notions about the functionality 
and efficiency of plan organization, he establishes 
an affinity between the plan of the house and the 
materiality of its pavement: “The pavement will 
control the plan. Only on a good plan one can make 
a good pavement.”3 Not only does the floor become 
the place of interaction between the architectural 
body and the human body, but—this essay argues 
—it generates the mood and atmosphere of a place.           

This text begins from an intellectual nudge. 
Critical of scientific ecology in the research on 
the environment, philosopher Gernot Böhme 
introduces the “aesthetics of atmospheres” as an 
operative concept that factors in the subjectivity of 

On Foot: 
Embodied Atmospheres

Andreea Mihalache



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human experience in architectural and urban design. Looking at different 
scales of perception from architectural objects to urban landscapes, he 
contends that “atmosphere is the subject matter of architecture,”4 to which 
architectural critic David Leatherbarrow replies: “Is it?”5 Building upon 
the aesthetics of atmospheres (Böhme) and their association with habits 
(Leatherbarrow), this essay will walk the reader through Bernard Rudofsky’s 
constructions of embodied atmospheres, arguing that, unexpectedly, 
for Rudofsky the locus where atmospheres manifest themselves is the 
horizontal plane of the floor. As one moves through space, be it indoors or 
outdoors, the most immediate (yet unnoticed) encounter is the one with 
the pavement. Soft or hard, warm or cold, smooth or rough, ground planes 
have latent possibilities to provide the first opportunities for the body to 
know and feel its world. Engaging with the floors, one becomes attuned to 
the rhythms, pace, temperatures, textures, and sounds of the world.      

Like other midcentury architects, Rudofsky recognizes that modern 
architecture, and, in a larger sense, the consumer culture, have alienated 
people from their places. If to lose one’s place in the world is—quite 
literally—to lose ground, then becoming aware of the surfaces we step 
on might reconnect us to a deeper sense of the self. Beyond aesthetics, his 
attention to floors and pavements ultimately reflects an ethical concern 
with defining one’s place in the world.

SECOND STEP: PASSING THROUGH ATMOSPHERIC HABITS 
The emergence and frequency of the terms and concepts we employ 

both in research and informal language indicate tacit concerns underlying 
our everyday lives, as well as broader societal and cultural anxieties. 
Etymologically, the term atmosphere (from Greek atmos = vapor and 
sphaira = globe) originally designated the ring of vapor supposed to be 
“exhaled from the body of a planet,”6 but from the eighteenth century 
onward, it has also conveyed a “certain mood hanging in the air.”7 Moods, 
affects, atmospheres—appropriated into the architectural vocabulary from 
psychology and physics, these concepts have become recurrent themes in 
the work of many contemporary architects and theorists. If one notices 
an increased frequency of these terms in the architectural discourse, it is 
not because architecture has not been concerned with them in the past, 
but, rather, because a certain discontent with the current experience 
of the environment is prompting the search for answers outside the 
tangible and the measurable. A sign of a certain disenchantment with the 
quotidian, it speaks about the dissatisfaction with the banality of everyday 
experiences constantly mediated through screens and simulated realities. 
As philosopher Richard Kearney observes, “The more virtually connected 



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we are, the more solitary we become. We ‘see’ brave 
new worlds, but ‘feel’ less and less in touch with 
them.”8

The interest in atmospheres traverses fields 
and disciplines. In architecture, Peter Zumthor, 
Juhani Pallasmaa, and Steven Holl are among 
the most notable contemporary designers and 
theorists invested in the topic of atmospheres, 
but ideas about constructing the atmosphere of a 
place are not new. Alberto Perez-Gomez observes 
an implicit interest in atmospheres as early as 
Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture, where a 
tempered and balanced environment was at the core 
of a healthy life.9 Building upon current scientific 
evidence demonstrating the role of feelings, 
emotions, and moods that architecture engenders 
in our psychosomatic health, he demonstrates 
the importance of studying these hidden and 
unmeasurable dimensions of architecture.10 Juhani 
Pallasmaa observes that it was only from the mid-
1990s onward that the experience of architecture 
has begun to replace a long-established formal 
approach to design.11 Indeed, it seems that 
theorizing unquantifiable and elusive concepts such 
as atmosphere, mood or ambiance has emerged as a 
relatively new phenomenon in the early 2000s.12 
This “atmospheric turn” has various explanations 
that range from deterministic views to social and 
political arguments, from subjectivity to scientific 
evidence.13 Peter Zumthor defines atmosphere as an 
almost-mystical quality of a space, intrinsic to those 
architectures that move you.14 He finds it in “the 
magic of things, the magic of the real world,”15 and 
believes that it offers a possible response to the quest 
for “architectural quality.”16 

From the atmosphere of medieval cathedrals 
(built on the transfiguration of light passing through 
stained glass), to the Renaissance villas in the Italian 
Veneto (intimately connected with existing natural 
caves and breathing the air that circulated naturally 
through a sophisticated system of vents and ducts), 

one becomes 
attuned 

to tHE 
rhythms, 

pace, 
temperatures, 

textures, 
and sounds  

OF THE WORLD

“

”



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to Eileen Gray’s marvelous E.1027 house (centered on experiencing the 
space through sensuous materials and textures defining the mood of 
each room), or Le Corbusier’s espace indicible (suggesting a phenomenal 
experience of the space), architects have long tackled—both explicitly and 
implicitly—the atmosphere of a place.  

In philosophy, the influential work of Hermann Schmitz, regarded as a 
founding father of research on atmospheres, left its mark on the writings 
of contemporary continental philosophers such as Gernot Böhme and 
Tonino Griffero.17 The former explicitly calls into question the primacy 
of vision in people’s interaction with the environment and advocates for 
integrated approaches to architecture and city planning, in both design 
and scholarship, that should carefully consider and actively engage all our 
senses. Böhme observes that atmospheres have an in-between quality: they 
relate factual traits of the environment with one’s bodily feeling in that 
environment, so are both spatial and emotional.18 In other words, they 
are situated between the subject and the object: they touch one’s bodily 
space, which is “neither the place a person’s body takes up, nor the volume 
that it constitutes,” but the sphere of one’s material presence.19 Therefore, 
atmospheres are about presence, and never about representation. Böhme 
proposes that examining architecture and cities through the lens of the 
aesthetics of atmosphere produces two major shifts: first, the turn from 
“what” something represents to “how” something is present.20 (Thus, 
“aesthetics” recovers its original meaning, that of a theory of perception, 
rather than the visual concern with beauty and artistic taste prevalent from 
the eighteenth century onward.) Second, it enables the shift from the form 
or shape of things to the way they engage with the space of our bodily 
presence.21 For Böhme, atmosphere is the subject matter of architecture.22

Pondering over the meaning and implications of this argument, David 
Leatherbarrow nuances Böhme’s theory and outlines—not unlike Le 
Corbusier’s tenets for a new architecture—five points on architectural 
atmospheres.23 First, they manifest themselves immediately or, like 
Böhme also remarked, they are about presence. Second, they are specific 
to historical and cultural contexts, which suggests that they cannot be 
transferred or replicated outside of where they are formed. Third, they are a 
matter of both emotions and intellect. Fourth, they construct backgrounds, 
in the double sense of layers of history and present appearances. Lastly, 
atmospheres are correlated with habits.24 

The latter is perhaps the most relevant for the argument of this essay: 
the idea that the mood of a space emerges from concrete, material 
conditions, from practices and rituals that are enacted and performed 
in unique historical and cultural contexts. Leatherbarrow observes that 



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practical experience and everyday use are key in 
creating atmospheres, which play a two-part role, 
“initial and global, then marginal and tacit.”25 
Simply put, one first perceives them as distinct 
phenomena in the foreground of their experience 
(the way a traveler visiting a medieval city for the 
first time might register and treasure every uncanny 
detail), but eventually, by force of habit and 
repetition, they recede into the background (the 
way an inhabitant of the same historic city is no 
longer aware of what has become familiar and well-
known). Leatherbarrow proposes that atmospheres 
are neither an attribute of the settings from which 
they proceed, nor a matter of individual sentiments 
– he draws attention, instead, to the continuity, 
rather than the split, between object and subject. 

His approach implicitly challenges Böhme’s 
argument that stage set design (where moods are 
fabricated from objective and carefully manipulated 
elements such as sound, illumination or spatial 
geometries) is the paradigm for a theory of 
atmosphere.26 One of Böhme’s tacit goals is to remove 
the impreciseness associated with atmospheres and 
demonstrate that, despite their vagueness, they 
can be produced from concrete factors. However, 
his use of stage set design as the paradigm for this 
theory privileges conventions and artificiality as 
modus operandi, suggesting scripted and therefore 
predictable scenarios, and thus removing the sense 
of spontaneity or happenstance. On the other 
hand, if habits are intrinsic to the formation of 
atmospheres, as Leatherbarrow suggests, then the 
design process alone does not have the power to fully 
prescribe specific ambiances, therefore one needs 
to understand the environment through a more-
encompassing lens, not only beyond its immediate 
physical manifestations but also from within the 
factors that have constituted it throughout time this 
is to say that atmposphere are not about spontaneous 
surfacing or controlled design, but rather that 
critical to grasping their nature is understanding 



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practices of inhabitation developed and sedimented over time. 

It is this balancing act between control and release, between design 
practices and living practices, between space and time, between the 
measurable and the immeasurable that Bernard Rudofsky tackles in many 
of his writings and projects spanning the middle and late decades of the 
twentieth century, where he centers his attention on the overlooked role 
of floors and pavements.

Third Step: Touching the Floor
Known primarily for his 1964 exhibition (and subsequent catalog) 

Architecture without Architects, Rudofsky was a tireless traveler, an ingenious 
footwear designer, a prolific writer, and a gifted architect. At a time when 
most architects looked up above the ground to see as a prevailing mode 
to perceive the environment, he looked down to feel the touch of the 
floor. Despite his consistent return to the theme of floors and pavements, 
scholarship has only marginally examined what is at stake in his obsessive 
return to these horizontal surfaces.27 Rudofsky offers an architectural 
and existential way of anchoring us into the world through floors and 
pavements as the often-overlooked canvas against which life itself unfolds. 
They construct the mood of a place by being active agents of our various 
practices of inhabitation.  

“Stone mosaic, marble slabs, stucco reliefs, mural decorations from the 
simplest geometric ornamentation to elaborate paintings, were employed 
[in Roman outdoor rooms] to establish a mood particularly conducive to 
spiritual composure,” writes Rudofsky in 1952.28 That pavements define 
the character of a room and have the potential to generate spiritual 
dispositions was well-known in ancient civilizations: “Do you know the 
Faun House in Pompei? Here we understand why the Pompeians who 
inherited the Greek culture could easily give up the frescoes: they had 
paintings of profound beauty on the floor.”29

The ground plane is what ties together the individual, the house, and 
the city: house floor or city pavement, the horizontal surface, intimately 
related to the human body through the sense of touch, is the first element 
that creates the mood of a space. The floors have the potential to delay 
movement, slow down the pace, and, implicitly, expand time. As the only 
surfaces that constantly engage the sense of touch, they are neither purely 
functional, nor merely aesthetic. Rarely seen, they are always felt. It is 
through floors and pavements that the sense of touch remains active, and 
yet paradoxically, designs often overlook them. Floors and pavements 
carry an inherent contradiction: on the one hand, they need not to be 
noticed in order to function properly; on the other, as they become 



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unnoticed, they take away one’s awareness of the 
ground. Through floors and pavements, individuals 
experience the unmediated presence of the earth 
while at the same time gain a sense of belonging 
to a larger community. They ground human beings 
into the earth and situate them within the horizon 
of a specific culture.

Although Western philosophy has primarily been 
sight-centered, in the twentieth century existential 
phenomenology recovered Aristotle’s claim in De 
Anima that touch is the most universal, pervasive, 
and intelligent of the senses.30 Against the Platonic 
idea that sight is superior to touch because it is 
distant and mediated (hence the elevated status of 
theoria, i.e. to look at, to speculate), Aristotle argues 
that touch, in fact, does have a medium and its 
medium is the flesh.31 Through touch one reads 
and interprets the world and at the same time is 
touched by it. It is in this reciprocity between the 
self and the world that Rudofsky situates his interest 
in the continuity between the sole of the foot, the 
pavement of the building, and the skin of the earth. 

For Rudofsky, the act of building starts from 
floors and walls, the most vital elements of the 
architectural vocabulary that also give human beings 
the ontological status of their upright posture. “A 
wall is the bread of architecture. (…) Building his 
first wall, he [the man] became, mentally, a biped.”32 
Elsewhere, he writes: “The floor is, literally and 
figuratively, the touchstone of a civilization. A 
good floor is much more than a delight to the 
eye; it appeals to that most sensuous of our senses, 
touch.”33 In the February 1938 issue of the Italian 
architecture journal Domus, Rudofsky publishes 
what appears to be an illustration of an architectural 
foundational moment: builders have laid out in plan 
the foundations of the outer walls of a house and 
are now settling the stones to stabilize the structure. 
Rudofsky’s caption stresses the primordial role of 
the floor and floorplan as the organizing forces of 
the building: “Architecture begins with a pavement: 

if habits are 
intrinsic to the 

formation of 
atmospheres, as 
Leatherbarrow 

suggests, then 
the design 

process alone 
does not have the 

power to fully 
prescribe specific 

ambiances

“

”



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the architect inscribes order in the freedom of nature. But this order has to 
be in harmony with nature.”34

The drawing recalls ancient practices of inscribing the plan of a building 
at full-scale onto the site itself. As Paul Emmons observes, the construction 
of the plan on site anticipates the future building, establishing an intimate 
connection between drawing, site, and architecture.35 While in pre-modern 
times, the floor was the actual floor plan of the new construction, this 
intimate relationship has been gradually lost with the changing practices of 
architectural drawing.36 No longer viewed as an embodied footprint, but 
primarily as a horizontal section, today the floor plan bears little, if any 
affinity at all with the architectural floor.37 Challenging these modern forms 
of representation, Rudofsky explores drawings and buildings as embodied 
phenomena. The surface of the page, the surface of the building floor, and 
the surface of the site itself become one and thus the pavement acquires 
its ontological role. Because “every culture has its perfect pavement,”38 
floors teach more about a certain civilization than any writings or indirect 
accounts.39

Throughout his career, Rudofsky remains a relentless critic of the 
commodification of architecture both in the domestic realm and in 
the public sphere. In 1955, he publishes Behind the Picture Window, a 
collection of essays on the nature of the modern house, written as satires, 
rather than academic papers. The chapters lay out his frustrations with 
the “American way of life”40 and propose what he calls elsewhere “a new 
way of living”41 based on lessons learned from past civilizations. One 

Fig 1: Bernard Rudofsky, Plan of the Procida House project 
published in Domus, Issue 123 (March 1938) 



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such example (which he describes in a later book) 
are the Neolithic houses in Lindenthal, Germany 
discovered in the early decades of the twentieth 
century, and which reveal to Rudofsky a methodical 
architectural strategy that is neither accidental nor 
clumsy.42 Central to their design is the sculpted floor 
that celebrates the intimate encounter of the body 
with the earth and, as the authors infers, situates 
the individual in a specific horizon of inhabitation:

What lifts the Lindenthal houses above the 
commonplace is their sculpted floor. (…) Pausing 
for a moment in the amble of our flat-footed way 
of life (…) it seems that somewhere in the course 
of human advancement we lost our capacity for 
enjoying well-turned-out space. What probably 
happened is that our Fingerspitzengefühl—
our “fingertip feeling”—progressively deserted 
us while numbness crept up on our toes and 
buttocks, body parts traditionally hidden. Yet 
it is exactly these parts that are instrumental in 
probing the ground on which we walk, stand, or 
sit, for they, like no others, keep us in close touch 
with our surroundings.43

The metaphor of the “fingertip feeling” evokes 
both the sense of touch and a design intuition, that – 
neither exact, nor imprecise – is built upon practice 
and habits, and relies upon all senses. Poetry seizes 
the synesthetic experience born at the encounter of 
sight and touch: “I see with my fingertips / what my 
eyes touch.”44 If one can see with their fingers, then 
one can also know with the toes of their feet that – 
not unlike one’s hands—feel, sense, and make sense 
of the environment through touch.  

Fourth Step: Entering the House
In 1938, Rudofsky publishes in Domus the 

drawings for a house on the island of Procida, off 
the coast of Naples. Titled “Non ci vuole un nuovo 
modo di costruire, ci vuole un nuovo modo di vivere” 
(translated in English as “What We Need is not New 
Technologies, but a New Way of Living”), the article 

That 
pavements 

define the 
character of a 
room and have 

the potential 
to generate 

spiritual 
dispositions was 

well-known 
in ancient 

civilizations

“

”



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constitutes, as Rudofsky himself will acknowledge later, the kernel of “half 
a dozen books on architecture, apparel and related matters.”45 Designed 
for a piece of land that he and his wife Berta bought on the island in 
1935, the project, although never built, is Rudofsky’s design manifesto for 
the ideal house. (fig.1) A harmonious encounter between architecture and 
the practices of everyday life, the ideal home eliminates the unnecessary 
prostheses of consumerism, seeking an unmediated relationship between 
inhabitants, their customs, nature, and design.

Having lived and worked in Italy for several years, Rudofsky praised 
and learned from the integration of landscape, design, and lifestyle that 
he noted (and idealized) in the peninsula. Building bridges across time 
and space, his account of the Procida house recalls Pliny the Younger’s 
descriptions of his Tuscan Villa, rendered in minute details in his letters.46 
Pliny’s peripatetic narration moves from the larger scale of landscape and 
climate to renditions of individual rooms, all of which have an intentional 
relationship with the outdoors. Views, sounds, textures create an atmosphere 
attuned to the seasons, as well as the inhabitant’s lifestyle: “a little fountain, 
playing through several small pipes into a vase it encloses, produces a most 
pleasing murmur;” a bedroom with two different orientations looks upon 
a cascade “which entertains at once both the eye and the ear.” Rooms are 
carefully designed with the appropriate orientation that offers shade in 
the summer and sun exposure in the winter, as well as balanced views 
towards the Apennine valleys, vineyards, bodies of water, ivy-covered trees, 
cypresses, and roses. 

In Rudofsky’s Procida project, carefully observed habits, rather than 
programmatic specifications, generate the atmosphere of each space, 
shown in hybrid forms of architectural representation that combine 
two-dimensional and perspectival views. The beginning of the article 
announces that people have long lost the contact with the ground.47 From 
the horseback rider who needs special tools to remove her boots, to the 
woman wearing heels unsuited for walking, to the athlete or the ballerina, 
everyone has lost touch with the earth through the multiple layers 
interposed between the foot and the earth itself.48 More than a rhetorical 
trope or a nostalgic longing for an idyllic pre-modern time, this statement 
indicates a deeper loss: the erosion of our grounding and the dissolution 
of tectonics. As Rudofsky writes elsewhere, modern houses, with their 
transparent walls, appear so light that they could fly away at any moment 
like a magic carpet.49 The gradual disappearance of tectonics translates 
into human uprootedness, and this sense of displacement finds its physical 
expression in the cookie-cutter houses of suburban developments, which 
simultaneously respond to and create the need for artificial environments 



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that remain unchanged, irrespective of location, 
living customs or individual habits.

Designed in a modern vocabulary, the Procida 
house challenges modern assumptions about 
function and program. Although the rooms are 
designated through conventional nomenclature 
(living room, dining room, bedroom, bathroom, 
etc.), the project describes and responds to the 
activities taking place in these spaces, which are 
shown in unconventional forms of architectural 
representation. People’s movements between 
inside and outside are choreographed through the 
materials and textures of floors. In a subtle play of 
scales and textures, the house transforms furniture 
into architecture and architecture into furniture. 
Considering them superfluous, Rudofsky eliminates 
the dining table, the desk, the night table, the 
kitchen table, and the bathtub.50 Having its entire 
floor made of mattresses, the bedroom becomes an 
oversized bed (not unlike Japanese rooms covered 
in tatami),51 where one can only walk barefoot. 
In his theory of inhabitation, Rudofsky operates 
an essential distinction between washing (as 
the modern utilitarian act of removing dirt and 
grime) and bathing (as an ancient form of ritual or 
cultivated leisure).52 He expresses it by placing the 
toilet and the sink, and, respectively, the bathtub, in 
different spaces. The bathroom becomes, in fact, a 
bathtub: dipping into the ground, the floor carves 
it out from the ground plane itself, thus creating 
an intimate relationship between the body of the 
bather and the earth itself. The patio with its natural 
pavement of grass, daisies, violets, and orchids, is the 
true living room of the house, which itself “grows” 
from the floor plane. A tent in the summer and a 
fireplace (shared with the music room) in colder 
weather, allow for the year-round inhabitation 
of this outdoor room. Firmly anchored into the 
ground, the body of the house and the bodies of its 
inhabitants find their place in the world. 



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Fifth Step: Wandering Down the Street
Shifting his attention from the domestic realm to the public sphere, 

in 1969 Rudofsky publishes Streets for People: A Primer for Americans, a 
book “about the great outdoors, the pedestrian street, and the people one 
meets there.”53 Written at a time when America enthusiastically embraces 
suburban living while ignoring its urban centers and public spaces, the 
book has a twofold goal: to unpack the malfunctions of American cities in 
contrast with their European counterparts and to provide design resources 
for a future when even Americans will recognize the need for “a more 
dignified city life.”54

Lavishly illustrated with Rudofsky’s own photographs and filled with 
erudite literary and musical references, each chapter addresses a particular 
theme: cleanliness and hygiene, covered urban structures (such as canopies, 
porticoes, and gallerias), urban practices (from walking and strolling to 
processions, rituals, and performances), soundscapes and street music, 
street names, stairs, bridges, elevated streets, water and street food. An 
entire chapter, “Diamant Streets and Crystal Pavements” (a reference 
to the frozen water canals of Venice), is dedicated to urban floors and 
their intimate connection with the body of the pedestrian. Textures and 
colors bring to life this canvas that unfolds under people’s feet often as an 
extension of the house floors. Evocative descriptions conjure up the marble- 
and lava-paved streets of antiquity, the splendor of Babylonian streets, the 
square hard stones of Florence, the pink marble mosaic of a street gutter in 
Evora, or brick-paved ramps with stone footholds for horses.

The atmosphere of the city results from the orchestration of all these 
different elements articulated on the ground plane, which, almost like 
a living creature, moves, undulates, and meanders. A firm presence in 
space, as Böhme describes the atmosphere, yet often tacit and marginal, as 
Leatherbarrow puts it, the city pavement establishes connections between 
different scales – the personal scale of the body, the convivial scale of the 
community, the larger one of the environment – and remains a ubiquitous, 
yet unremarkable, actor in the urban choreography of the city. 

Rudofsky’s nostalgia for a pre-industrial society and for the cities of 
the Old World is more than anything a nostalgia for time as embodied 
duration, rather than instantaneity. While he often idealizes a far-from-
perfect world, he presents architectural ideas whose goal is to slow down 
time. The floor is the architectural element with the immediate potential 
to make people tarry and linger as they move through space. The most 
inconspicuous, yet the most direct in its engagement with the body, the 
floor constructs the physical measure of our pace. By slowing down its 
pace, the body readjusts to its environment. 



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The floors Rudofsky imagines are often 
impractical, inaccessible to everyone, unsuited for 
comfortable walking, whimsical, and, sometimes, 
quite useless. However, what is at stake in his 
emphasis on the horizontal plane is the awareness 
of time as embodied experience (particularly 
relevant at a moment when architecture is mainly 
concerned with space) and the ethical dimension of 
finding one’s place on earth. The in-between quality 
that Böhme attributes to atmospheres, along with 
Leatherbarrow’s emphasis on habits and behaviors, 
are manifested in Rudofsky’s celebration of floors as 
“the touchstone of a civilization.” 

Last Step: Strolling Away
On the otherwise smooth and inconspicuous 

floor of the Arsenale Building at the 2021 Venice 
Architectural Biennale, one stumbles upon a 
mosaic of stones, some of them carved out in three-
dimensional configurations, with their interiors 
gilded. Among the thought-provoking proposals 
displayed in the exhibition that float, fly, and 
defy gravity, this elegant gesture simply reminds 
us of where we stand in the world. Marking the 
earth, these golden hieroglyphs choreograph the 
dance between “I” and “us,” between a body and a 
multitude of bodies, between low and high, below 
and above. Making us aware of the depth of our 
ground plane, (polished) stone and (shimmering) 
gold define a volume of space and its atmosphere. 
One of the most notable—and most subtle—
projects at the Biennale, this installation designed 
by the Portuguese office Aires Mateus recognizes the 
forgotten role of pavements. “Architecture answers 
to its time. Some things, however, never change: we 
live together under the same sky; we live together 
on the same ground. The sky above our head, 
the ground under our feet: a natural metaphor of 
community.”55 If atmospheres are about presence, 
as Böhme contends, and they cannot exist in the 
absence of habits, as Leatherbarrow observes, 

the 
atmosphere 

of the city 
results from the 

orchestration 
of elements 

articulated on 
the ground plane, 

which, almost 
like a living 

creature, moves, 
undulates, and 

meanders.

“

”



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then the ground, as Rudofsky and Aires Mateus show, could become the 
starting point of further interrogations about the nature of atmospheric 
inhabitations. Ultimately, to sense the mood of a place and to find our 
pace and place in the world we might have to close our eyes and honor our 
“fingertip feeling.” We might have to touch instead of look and tiptoe our 
way through space so that not only do we see with the tips of our fingers, 
but also understand with the tips of our toes. 

ENDNotes
1. Pianta means sole, a level in the house, but also a plant 
2. Bernard Rudofsky, ‘Variazioni,’ Domus, Issue 124 (April 1938), 14
3. Rudofsky, ‘Variazioni,’ 15 (translation by the author)
4. Gernot Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres (London/New York: 

Routledge, 2017), 135-140; these ideas are first published in English in 
an earlier essay from 2002 

5. David Leatherbarrow, ‘Atmospheric Conditions,’ In: Henriette Steiner 
and Maximilian Sternberg  (eds.), Phenomenologies of the City: Studies 
in the History and Philosophy of Architecture (London: Ashgate, 2015)

6. Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, entry “atmosphere.”
7. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, 2
8. Richard Kearney, Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense (New York: 

Columbia University Press, 2021), 4-5
9. Alberto Perez-Gomez, Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis 

of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press, 2016),  2
10. Ibid., 1-13. 

Fig 2: Aires Mateus, Ground, Venice Biennale in 2021



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11. Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘Space, Place, and Atmosphere: 
Peripheral Perception in Existential Experience,’ 
In: Christian Borch (ed.), Architectural 
Atmospheres: On the Experience and Politics of 
Architecture. (Basel: Birkhauser, 2014), 19

12. Among the most recent publications in the field, 
one will find: Journal of Architectural Education, 
“Atmospheres,” Vl. 73 Issue 1 March 2019; 
Perez-Gomez, Alberto. Attunement; Borch (ed.), 
Architectural Atmospheres; Klaske Havik, Hans 
Teerds, and Gus Tielens, with Juhani Pallasmaa 
and Peter Zumthor, Building Atmosphere. 
OASE#91 (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2013); 
Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural 
Environments, Surrounding Objects (Basel: 
Birkhauser, 2006). Quite tellingly, Adrian Forty’s 
Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern 
Architecture from 2000, a book that eruditely 
traces the philosophical and intellectual history 
of architectural terminology, does not include an 
entry on architectural moods or atmospheres.

13. Christian Borch justifies the rationale of a volume 
he edited in 2014 as a follow-up to current fads 
and fashions that examined the atmospheric 
qualities of architecture and urban spaces. 
(Borch, “Introduction: Why Atmospheres?” in 
Borch (ed.), Architectural Atmospheres)

14. Zumthor, Atmospheres, 11
15. Ibid., 19
16. Ibid., 11
17. In 1969, Hermann Schmitz publishes The 

Sphere of the Emotions where he discusses 
emotions as atmospheres. His work, which is 
still to be translated into English, exercised a 
decisive influence on Gernot Böhme (whose 
first publication on atmospheres, Atmosphäre: 
Essays zur neuen Äesthetik, dates from 1995) and 
Tonino Griffero (Atmosferologia: Estetica degli 
spazi emozionali, first published in 2010 and 
translated into English in 2014) 

18. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, 3



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19. Ibid., 180
20. Ibid., 26
21. Ibid., 5
22. Ibid., 135-140
23. Leatherbarrow, ‘Atmospheric Conditions,’ 85-100
24. Ibid., 96
25. Ibid., 87
26. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, 3
27. The topic appears in full book chapters or specific reflections in various 

articles. He dedicates an entire book to the theme of streets and street 
life (Bernard Rudofsky, Streets for People: A Primer for Americans (New 
York:  Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969), designs and commercializes 
a line of footwear that exists to this day (the Bernardo Sandals), and 
introduces original, if impractical, floors in the exhibitions he curates.

28. Bernard Rudofsky, ‘Giardino, stanza all’aperto: a proposito della casa 
giardino a Long Island, NY,’ Domus, Issue 272 (July-August 1952), 5

29. Rudofsky, ‘Variazioni,’ 15
30. See Kearney, Touch, Ch.2 ‘Philosophies of Touch: From Aristotle to 

Phenomenology,’ 33-60
31. Ibid., 35
32. Bernard Rudofsky, ‘The Bread of Architecture.’ Arts & Architecture, 

Vol.69, No.10 (Oct. 1952), 28
33. Bernard Rudofsky, ‘Before the Architects.’ Design Quarterly, 

No.118/119 (1982) 61; The same idea reappears Bernard Rudofsky, 
Behind the Picture Window (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 
186 

34. Rudofsky, ‘L’architettura comincia con un pavimento,’ in: Domus no. 
122 (February 1938), 1

35. Paul Emmons, Drawing Imagining Building: Embodiment in 
Architectural design Practices. (London/New York: Routledge, 2019), 
Ch.1. ‘Footprint Plans,’ 21-47

36. Emmons observes: “The close relationship between plan and earth is 
shown through practices of inscribing the plan at full-scale onto a site.” 
Ibid., 29

37. Ibid., Ch.1. ‘Footprint Plans,’ 21-47
38. Rudofsky, “Variazioni,” 15
39. Rudofsky, “Before the Architects,” 61
40. Rudofsky, Behind the Picture Window, 5
41. Rudofsky, ‘Non ci vuole un nuovo modo di costruire, ci vuole un 

nuovo modo di vivere,’ in: Domus, Issue 123 (March 1938), 5 
42. Bernard Rudofsky, The Prodigious Builders. Notes towards a Natural 



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History of Architecture. (New York and London: 
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 102-107

44.  Octavio Paz, ‘This Side.’ The poem can be 
found online: https://www.poetryverse.com/
octavio-paz-poems/this-side 

45. Front matter to Bernard Rudofsky, Now I Lay 
Me Down to Eat: Notes and Footnotes on the Lost 
Art of Living (New York: Anchor Books, 1980)

46. Pliny the Younger, “LII Letter to Domitius 
Apollinaris,” https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/
ancient/pliny-letters.asp#GenPart%20VII

47. Rudofsky, “Non ci vuole un nuovo modo di 
costruire, ci vuole un nuovo modo di vivere,” in: 
Domus, Issue 272 (July-August 1952), 6

48. Ibid., 6.
49. Rudofsky, ‘Giardino, stanza all’aperto,’ Domus 

Issue 123 (March 1938), 71
50. Rudofsky, ‘Non ci vuole un nuovo modo di 

costruire, ci vuole un nuovo modo di vivere, 
Domus, Issue 272, (July-August 1952), 8

51. Ugo Rossi makes this observation in his analysis 
of the Procida house in Ugo Rossi, Bernard 
Rudofsky Architetto (Napoli: Clean Edizioni, 
2016), 76

52. Rudofsky, Behind the Picture Window, chapter 
‘Our indecorous bathroom’ 

53. Rudofsky, Streets for People, 15
54. Ibid., 21
55. Hashim Sarkis, Biennale Architettura 2021: 

How Will We Live Together? (Venice: La Biennale 
di Venezia, 2021)


