• 1 This text was previously published in French (Augoyard, 2004) and has been revised in 2013 for this (...)

1In the past 30 years what is known as ‘maîtrise des ambiances’ (atmosphere control) has become a mainstream subject in teaching at French schools of architecture (Ecoles Nationales Supérieures d’Architecture). Among the perceptible qualities of the architectural and urban environment – light, sound, air flow, tactile matter, and systems affecting our movement and posture – some have been prioritized in instruction on project design. The atmospheres such techniques seek to control mainly relate to acoustics, lighting and heating. In these three fields a stock of learning has built up which now serves as the basis for regulations and standards, inspires efficient techniques and, lastly, induces strategies for creating comfort.

• 2 This attitude is obviously not just a defensive mechanism, but none of the explanations habitually (...)

6The production of ambiances involves art and know-how in two ways: all too often implicitly, in any ordinary architectural act; and as an expert skill in ongoing work on the sensory aspects of urban development. In the practice of any architectural or planning project, a master plan, a decision on form or a choice of material necessarily entails light, sound, heat and/or tactile effects the overall impact of which is usually only controlled by the limits set by regulatory technical obligations. The rest – anything that cannot be considered an active nuisance – is almost always ignored, dismissed as insignificant or covered up by some aesthetic judgement restricted to the visible appearance. The rest is supposed to be an unknown land, and as such unpredictable, the good and ill effects of ambiances only appearing once construction is complete2.

• 3 Instances of towns planning well lit urbanism are now commonplance, witness the Plan Lumière in Lyo (...)
• 4 Many light artists or designers have worked on the urban environment in the past 15 years, notably (...)

8This is very different from the artistic ability of the new creative designers of what has ended up being called ‘urban scenography’. Work dramatizing the urban scene with sound and light was once the preserve of land-art practitioners such as Christo or Max Neuhaus. They are now an integral part of the overall process of urban development to which they bring imagination and a sense of spectacle3. Looking specifically at France we may cite several already historic references. Nicolas Frize transformed the practice of composers in residence by focussing directly on the relevant space, with the population of the host town. Laurent Fachard transposed the aesthetics of his stage-lighting mentor Henri Alekan for use on facades and historical monuments, rejuvenating the city with light4.

• 5 Key Gestalt theory concepts such as the figure and the background are still much more pertinent for (...)

9The concept of architectural ambiances has greater ease integrating this type of artistic input, a know-how focused on producing the urban space which is largely foreign to the semantics of the environment. On the other hand, the fact that the core concept remains resolutely plural – as in ambiances – reflects a far from negligible handicap. In the present state of our knowledge, to speak of urban ambiance corresponds to nothing that can be analysed precisely, apart from the succession of sensory registers, each sense involving specific rationales for observation and specific tools. Nor is there any scope for interdisciplinary confrontation. We have accumulated knowledge on heat ambiance, sound ambiance, light ambiance, even odour ambiance – in which people are beginning to take an interest, but we still lack a trans-sensory theory covering the various disciplines concerned by the perception and the variety of sensations. This cannot be replaced by some work on binary interactions in physiology and ergonomics, nor yet by the celebrated though hypothetical correspondence theory, nor indeed by the existence of general explanatory models thought to be applicable to all, or almost all, the senses5.

• 6 It seems hardly necessary to point out that panoptism, in the epistemological sense, found in the R (...)
• 7 Regarding the practical rationale of design in planning and architecture, which emerged as a rhetor (...)

14Since the Renaissance, much as other forms of learning with a rational basis, architecture has been largely dominated by the visual6. Sight has become the predominant sense, not only by rooting design in drawing, but also fundamentally connoting the language of analysis and directing the rhetoric of architectural conception7. Seeing is self-evident. From plans to models, from the drawing board to the building site, the production of built forms depends so much on vision that we sometimes even forget its hegemony.

• 8 This approach supposes a sensory immanentism of thought. See our discussion of this hypothesis: Aug (...)

15Returning to the primal state of things, with respect to perception, research on architectural ambiances encounters a collection of signals and sensory stimuli all with equal rights. It has every scientific reason to query the nature of an invisible form, following the rationale of hearing or smell to describe an inhabited territory, and wonder how a heat, olfactive or aerodynamic landscape composition might appear8. After all, there is no need for such a space – be it defined by sound, fragrance or heat – to be orthogonal. Nor is there necessarily any congruence between its visual, sonic and tactile limits, each being of a very different nature. The spatial reference, as defined by Newtonian characteristics, loses its value for the purposes of explanation when dealing with sensory processes other than seeing. Furthermore, it can be demonstrated that even the visible is not entirely subject to Cartesian spatiality (Augoyard, 1995b). At the same time, it is hard to imagine representations of touch, heat and fragrance which would comply with the rationale specific to each of these sensations. How is one to convince an architect that a sonic form is primarily a matter of time? ‘And how can I draw that,’ she might ask.

• 9 This was one of the questions raised at the symposium, Au-delà du paysage moderne, organized by the (...)

16Given these various forms of resistance, it is apparent how deeply rooted the visual metaphor is in the way we conceive the built space. Is it illusory to want to re-establish the ‘balance of the senses’, to which vernacular architecture – or intuitive building not subject to the hegemony of sight – seem to have paid more attention9? At the very least we need to disturb the mindsets of architects and planners who too often forget the existence of the other sensorialities. Rehabilitating the currently ‘minor’ senses involves three tasks. The first concerns criticism of the stereotypes which govern the definition of briefs. The second must work to modify cognitive attitudes to the built space. The third brings into play the architect’s creative imagination.

• 10 This should be apparent from structural analysis of the modalities of language used in the didactic (...)

18But how could this be achieved? It is the task of information and, to an even greater extent, education. So it is a long-term undertaking, because it involves changing cognitive attitudes forged in the Classical age which impregnate not only architectural studies but also the entire curriculum10. For example, in a strictly theoretic modality, there is little point in learning the properties of the sound environment. To genuinely understand what should be called a ‘hearing of the world’, with well rooted knowledge we need a pedagogy of listening, which involves reforming our acquired auditory habits, which are most of the time actually attitudes of not listening. Without this propedeutics, there is no hope that when the morphology of the built space emerges the architect will be able to think in terms of sonic form in a manner comparable to visible form.

• 11 L'empreinte des sens is the title of a review of knowledge at the interface between physiology and (...)
• 12 See also the interesting experiment with detached houses, the Maisons des cinq sens, built by L'Eff (...)
• 13 This is one of the key themes of the international network devoted to “The sound quality of inhabit (...)

19Without this incorporated sensory experience, which would need to be applied to each of the sensory channels, the sonic, aerodynamic, olfactive and tactile qualities of a space will never be anything more than additions to the visibility of the created form; and the imprint of the forgotten senses11 will never be pregnant, nor contribute effectively to the production of form. The third task of research is to facilitate the ordinary exercise of the constructive imagination, that is just as inventive with regard to hearing, movement, smelling and relating to the air, as it is with regard to seeing. This deliberate, much needed polysensory qualification for all types of architecture cannot simply be derived from the specialist know-how used in exceptional architectural undertakings, such as opera houses, auditoriums, exhibition centres or experimental solar houses. The approach to building deployed in everyday architecture must invent, in keeping with its own economy, suitable processes and systems for creating comfort12. An ethno-historical investigation is also needed of intuitive and inventive knowledge and know-how born of natural but also cultural necessity to master the components of comfort in everyday architecture13.

• 14 An interesting attempt was made in 1980 by an acoustician and an architect-researcher to test typo- (...)

22Among the questions about architecture which have thus been restated, one of the most important is to know how the project process can link up all the learning accumulated on architecture. The ecological question which forces us to address the relations between the human and physical dimensions of situated phenomena is similar, in this respect, to the architectural question. It thus emerges that the descriptive, taxonomic undertaking applied to architectural forms, as typo-morphological species, is far from being sufficient to serve as the exclusive basis of architecturological learning. As with memory, architecture is not just a polypary of images. Just setting aside the field of the visible is enough for the types and classes to lose their relevance14.

• 15 The last summary proposed by Elizabeth Dumaurier, much regretted, was exemplary in this sense. See (...)
• 16 It is worth noting that the most ambitious attempts at phenomenonological analysis of perception of (...)

25We may recall that research in France has treated the question of the perception of built space in three very distinct ways in the past 50 years. Either by developing an experimental psychology, often too eager to shrug off its behaviourist origins by looking for openings in comprehensive psychosociology15. Or by developing the phenomenological seam which was explored with mixed fortunes by architectural and planning researchers. However appealing it may be, the use of the logical and verbal organum of the post-Husserlian field cannot dispense with the patient labour of reduction, the meticulous attention paid to objects without which any phenomenological enterprise loses contact with reality16. Or, lastly through certain endeavours of urban sociology focusing on collective representations of objects such as landscape, habitat, public space and heritage.

• 17 On account of the immanence of the sensory in social interaction the figure of the stranger is perc (...)

28Furthermore, the development of a sociological rationale, at the heart of the urban phenomenon, could end up idealizing the notion of social cohesion. As if the analytic register had ended up by creating conditions for everyday existence, as if learning, forgetting the senses, had produced a reality stripped of all sensation. Yet social interaction would have absolutely no effect without the sensory-motor instrumentation which incorporates it. How can anyone think that sensory marks will have no effect on the ‘message’, except as a hylomorphism which we can no longer admit and which elementary observation contradicts17?

• 18 This work on paradigms was carried out in particular as part of collaboration between the two teams (...)
• 19 Augoyard (1979, 2010); The books of the “Ambiances, ambiance” collection edited by A la Croisée are (...)

30Architecture and towns are not just objects. Their sensory effects act at the centre of a knot tying together perception and action, form and function, the individual and the collective. How then can architects and planners think about the way a built space is used without knowing how it is ‘lived’ by the residents who ‘reconstruct’ it? We may suppose that with progress in work on the sensory environment our understanding of the relation between the end-user of a space, and the professional or expert, may change slightly. The end-user’s sensory environment will no longer only be considered as an object for consumption, or perhaps contemplation, and action, in the sense of protest. Knowledge of the modalities of everyday practice is becoming a priority. How can we make do with received conceptual tools and explanatory models? The task of updating the multiple forms of interdependence requires paradigmatic tools such as the effect, the motif, the ambiant and the transcript18 but also the procedures for clarifying and simulating made possible by digital modelling. With this sort of descriptor we shall be able accurately to develop the rhetoric of ordinary action which I have sought since my earliest work19.

• 20 Would not know how to hold place count of publications which under the name of “esthetics of the ar (...)
• 21 See Sylvia Ostrovetsky’s semiotics of vernacular styles (Ostrovetsky, 1983) and Marion Segaud’s not (...)

31A great deal of work has been done on architecture from the perspective of art history, but very little on its aesthetic side, as Baumgarten understood it: the theory of beauty through an self-sufficient sensibility20. It seems easier to deal with the production of built forms, to classify categories, styles and schools, than it is to analyse how an architectural or urban work was received. The brief, partial pages in Hegel’s Aesthetics fit into the larger framework of a theory of the symbolic hierarchy of forms, given their prescriptive nature. Few authors have ventured into the perception of architecture, and those who have did so with the intention of criticising prior judgements inspired by taste, and to reform the representations of the urban scene (Camillo Sitte) or monuments (Aloïs Riegl). Some psychologists and philosophers of art – such as Ervin Panofsky, Pierre Francastel, Ernst Gombrich or indeed, Nelson Goodman – made valuable comments on the connection between perceptive organization and the structures of representation of architectural works. Similarly, with regard to the meaning of architecture, there are theories as famous as those formulated by Venturi or Christian Norberg-Schultz of which the phenomenological vein brings us closer to feeling. But more psycho-sociological approaches, carefully underpinned by semiological interpretation of user representations, rather than direct observation of the sensory experience21, go no further in their exploration of the sensory modalities of the perception of built form. Between the aesthetic experience of the work of architecture and sensory experience of the built environment, there remains a gaping hiatus.

• 22 The Bauhaus aesthetics may be considered to have inherited a great deal from this current.
• 23 Study of the rationale of action, or the manners of doing. This spectator-based pragmatism was deve (...)

33The built environment confronts two questions central to contemporary debate on aesthetics, in the following way: to know where the borders of the artistic run; to understand the role of the perceiving subject. Few tools are available as yet in the field of general aesthetics to elucidate the contradictory articulation between form and function. On the one hand the invaluable German aesthetics movement, which spans the past two centuries, provides a set of meaningful hypotheses in this direction22. On the other pragmatism23 as applied to the spectator has made fundamental observations on sensory and cultural reception. These two apparently different approaches do however have one vital point in common: all analysis converges on questions concerning contextualized perceptual organization. What forms of rationale are specific to each sense? How is intersensoriality articulated, enabling us to obtain unity of form? Debate on these questions is underpinned by a common hypothesis: our relation with the sensory and formal environment should be thought of as an exchange, a constructive circulation between given and configured, sensed and acted, perceptible and representable, individual and collective.