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S U R F A C E  /  P A T T E R N

review / JONATHAN HALE

Atmospheric Architectures:       
The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces 
Gernot Böhme. Edited/translated 
by A-C. Engels-Schwarzpaul. 
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

This is a fascinating collection of essays by the German philosopher Gernot 
Böhme, who was a professor of philosophy at Darmstadt Technical University 
from 1977 until his retirement in 2002. The book focuses on his understanding 
of atmosphere as ‘a basic concept of a new aesthetic’—the means by which the 
world appears to us in experience, and thereby challenges the age-old philosoph-
ical schism between experienced objects and experiencing subjects. Drawing on 
a range of classical sources in philosophy from Aristotle and Plato to Kant and 
Hegel, he also takes inspiration from J. W. Goethe’s writings on light and colour, 
as exemplified in Goethe’s description of scientific experiments as mediators be-
tween subjects and objects. 

For architects frustrated by the traditional fixation on buildings as static objects, 
there is an obvious advantage to this renewed emphasis on how designed envi-
ronments are experienced by their users. But there remains in Böhme’s writing 
a lingering tension between the more-or-less ‘objective’ qualities of ‘things-in-
themselves’ and those ‘subjective’ responses that—at least partly—result from 
their users’ own unique perspectives. In several places Böhme suggests that 
atmospheres may in fact possess ‘quasi-objective’ qualities, while at the same 
time he also acknowledges the influence of contextual factors such as social and 
political conditions. Disappointingly, at least for this reader, the issue is nev-
er properly elaborated here, and is perhaps an unfortunate consequence of the 
book’s ‘collected essay’ format.

As the book brings together a collection of separately published writings, most 
of which are no longer than typical journal papers (between 12 and 20 pages), 
the effect is rather like reading a series of short summaries of—or introductions 
to—some much larger works. There are several repetitions of the same summary 
definitions, and the arguments circle around without ever quite pinning down 
some tantalisingly suggestive concepts. 

One of the most interesting—and timely given the current fashion for so-called 
Object Oriented Ontology—is the questioning of the nature of surfaces of things 
as constituting fixed and determinate boundaries. Böhme instead proposes a 
definition of things based on what he calls their ‘ecstasies’, or emanations—the 
effects that they have on the objects and spaces around them. 



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REVIEW / Gernot Böhme Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces S U R F A C E  /  P A T T E R N

This idea of a fundamental continuity in the fabric of things around us is strong-
ly reminiscent of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the ‘flesh of the world’, 
that shared primal fabric of materiality out of which what we later call sub-
jects and objects gradually emerge. While Böhme does refer several times to 
Phenomenology as a relevant philosophical framework, it is curious that he 
makes only passing reference to the work of Martin Heidegger, and (apart from 
the Ancient Greeks) makes no reference to any non-German thinkers. This is a 
pity because it misses an important strand of thinking on the social and political 
contexts of ‘atmospheric experience’ in post-war French thought, perhaps most 
vividly exemplified in Jean Baudrillard’s seminal 1968 text Le système des objets 
[1]. 

One theme that does come through strongly in Böhme’s work—and chimes well 
with other recent writers—is the effect of so-called non-material phenomena on 
the experience of built forms and spaces. I am referring here to work by David 
Leatherbarrow, Peter Zumthor, Jonathan Hill and others on the ‘agency’ of envi-
ronmental conditions such as local climate and weathering processes, although 
Böhme casts a wider net to include factors such as lighting, acoustics, colour and 
music. He also credits the initial idea of designing atmospheres to the English 
landscape garden, specifically as described and theorised at great length by the 
German historian C. C. L. Hirschfeld in the late eighteenth century. 

Overall, the essays are thoughtfully translated, and usefully introduced, in a way 
that will make Bohme’s work accessible and engaging to a wide audience. The 
message of the book is inspirational in its shift from the study of objects toward 
experience, and it will sit nicely among similarly motivated titles in Bloomsbury 
Academic’s impressively burgeoning architecture library.

REFERENCES

[1] Jean Baudrillard, The System 
of Objects, London: Verso, 1996 
[1968].