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 AP . vol 6 . No 1/2 . 2023 166 MI HA LA CH E 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 167 isparchitecture.com 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 “ ” AP . vol 6 . No 1/2 . 2023 168 MI HA LA CH E 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 169 isparchitecture.com 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 AP . vol 6 . No 1/2 . 2023 170 MI HA LA CH E 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 171 isparchitecture.com 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 “ ” AP . vol 6 . No 1/2 . 2023 172 MI HA LA CH E 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) 173 isparchitecture.com 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 “ ” AP . vol 6 . No 1/2 . 2023 174 MI HA LA CH E 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 175 isparchitecture.com 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. AP . vol 6 . No 1/2 . 2023 176 MI HA LA CH E 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. 177 isparchitecture.com 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. “ ” AP . vol 6 . No 1/2 . 2023 178 MI HA LA CH E 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 179 isparchitecture.com 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 AP . vol 6 . No 1/2 . 2023 180 MI HA LA CH E 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 181 isparchitecture.com 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)