Ambiances

Finding scenography in everyday urban atmospheres

Joslin McKinney — 2026-07-31

This article explores how concepts from the field of scenography can be applied to the recognition of affective atmospheres in familiar places. Responding to calls to develop research methodologies that attend to the first-hand experience of sensory and bodily engagement with the materiality of urban atmospheres, I explore how “found” scenographies can be a technique for registering and examining the varieties of urban atmosphere. Utilising phenomenography, I draw on scenographic thinking to develop a focus and a framework for the perception and analysis of everyday urban atmospheres. The article promotes imaginative and performative modes of bodily engagement with urban environments in order to appreciate the dynamic entanglements of bodies, spaces and materials that constitute urban environments and the potential range of affects for diverse bodies.

Physique des ambiances en contexte

2026-03-11

English version

Présentation

Les ambiances architecturales et urbaines sont constituées par un ensemble complexe de perceptions sensorielles, émotionnelles et culturelles qui définissent la manière dont un espace est vécu. Elles englobent notamment des modalités physiques de l’environnement tels que la lumière, le son, les textures, les températures ou encore les odeurs, qui se composent au prisme de configurations sociales et spatiales pour créer une expérience unique. La métrologie physique des phénomènes d’ambiance, en s’appuyant sur des outils de mesure et des protocoles précis, permet d’analyser de manière effective les dimensions « objectivables » des phénomènes sensibles.

L’étude quantitative des niveaux d’éclairement, de la réverbération sonore ou des flux thermiques par exemple, offrent des informations précises sur ces phénomènes permettant une compréhension approfondie des impacts physiques sur le ressenti des usagers. C’est ce croisement entre science et perception qui pe...

Contextual Physics of Ambiances

2026-03-11

Version française

Presentation

Architectural ambiances encompass a complex interplay of sensory, emotional and cultural perceptions that shape how a space is experienced. Regarding their physical dimensions, ambiances include elements such as light, sound, textures, temperature and odours, which are shaped through social and spatial configurations to create a unique experience. The physical metrology of ambiance phenomena, relying on precise measurement tools and protocols, allows for an analysis of the objectifiable dimensions of sensory phenomena.

For instance, studies on lighting levels, sound reverberation or thermal flows provide designers with a deeper understanding of the physical impacts on user perceptions. This intersection of science and perception enriches the architectural design process, enabling the creation of more suitable, comfortable and stimulating spaces. By confronting measurable data with aesthetic and cultural dimensions, architecture can better address inhabi...

Listening to Forms, Sensing Formants

Théo Marchal — 2025-12-19

Writing about the work of someone who has been a supervisor, a colleague and a friend is never simple. Instead of attempting an overview of his whole scientific and academic work – well beyond the scope of this paper – we propose to revisit several moments in which sound shaped Grégoire Chelkoff’s conceptual and methodological developments. This text should be understood as a navigation through his ideas, gradually leading us to the notions of forms, formants and formalities, which he first developed during his PhD research (Chelkoff, 1996) and later presented in an article translated into English here. While the works discussed here gravitate around the emergence of these concepts, they belong to a wider set of scientific and pedagogical inquiries that we do not claim to retrace in full. Our aim is simply to put selected elements into perspective, offering a humble introduction and contextualisation to this publication.

Sound and public spaces

Grégoire Chelkoff was an architect, a r...

Forms, Formants and Formalities: Categories for Analysing the Urban Environment

Grégoire Chelkoff — 2025-12-19

The overall thrust of this paper concerns how we analyse our environment and construct the public space through our senses. It also factors ambiance-related aspects into this analysis of built systems. The core idea underlying our approach is that when the public space is seen as more than just an abstract notion or as empty space between buildings, it acquires specific sensory contours that comprise environmental and spatial data, perceptual aspects and modes of use. We should not think of the public space as being defined a priori and should instead look at the sensory configurations within which an environment takes shape and in which public practices and behaviours play out. The field analyses focus on grasping the tangible modalities of an urban “publicness” and thereby qualifying its built systems. This involves a scale of comprehension that is tied to our field of perception and which grounds our approach, the main characteristic of which is the priority given to working on l...

Psychiatric Atmospheres: Exploring the Potential of Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology in Atmosphere‑sensitive Analysis of Psychiatric Hospital Architecture

Eline L. van Leeuwen — 2025-10-28

The phenomenological approach occupies a central position in contemporary discourse on architectural design and atmospheric perception. Its cross-disciplinary applicability enables systematic engagement with questions of health, cognition, and embodied experience. This potential is especially relevant given architects’ expanding interest in the complex interplay between architecture, the mind, emotion, touch, and aesthetics. Despite this increasing popularity, systematic phenomenological analysis of healthcare architecture seems to be lacking. In this article, we utilise Hermann Schmitz’s new phenomenology to construct narrative case study descriptions of the atmospheric experiences in four psychiatric hospitals.
Results show that Schmitz’s phenomenology offers a versatile method for investigating various architectural environments, encouraging active bodily engagement and attentiveness to nuanced, transient aspects of atmospheric experience. The method allows us to approach architec...

Park Patrol: Urban Securitisation, Racialised Policing, and the Everyday Struggle for Görlitzer Park

Katharina Ciax — 2025-10-27

This paper examines how everyday security practices – such as patrols, identity checks and racial profiling – alter the spatialities of and felt realities in the Görlitzer Park in Berlin, which disproportionately affect marginalised groups, fostering feelings of insecurity and exclusion. It focuses on how institutional security measures – covering discursive, practice-based, and infrastructural modifications – have transformed the park into a space characterised by increased control. The ethnographic study reveals that security-driven urban design strategies, such as the use of surveillance technologies and spatio-material interventions, worsen exclusion and marginalisation, particularly through racialised policing and affective atmospheres of fear and control. Despite civic resistance and participatory initiatives advocating for equitable access, these institutional security practices persist, reflecting broader trends in the governance of urban spaces. By connecting securitisation...

Atmosphere in film

Rosine Bénard O’Kelly — 2025-06-24

In this introduction we outline the historical roots and philosophical underpinnings of the relationship between atmosphere and film, showing how atmosphere is an essential, if somewhat underexplored, characteristic of the cinematic form. We describe how subsidiary themes emerging from this fundamental connection, such as the creation of mood, modes of reception, the spectator’s cinematic experience and the roles of space, location, sound and technology are explored though the variety of case studies assembled here, which each focus on certain film works. We also identify and consider the questions raised by these papers about how technological processes may unsettle the relationship of a film to its location; the particular ontologies of documentary and ‘cinéma-vérité’; the forms and significances of the environmental forces in film; the reconstitution of a world through the emotions of spectatorship and the issues that may raise about directorial responsibility and ethics. Our con...

Ambiances et scènes culturelles. Croisements, articulations, contextualisations

2025-04-30

English version

Présentation

Cet appel à contribution propose de croiser deux champs de recherche qui, jusqu’à présent, ont principalement existé indépendamment l’un de l’autre : le champ de recherche sur les scènes culturelles et celui sur les ambiances et atmosphères. Leur croisement – c’est l’hypothèse qui anime la proposition de ce dossier thématique – permet pour les deux champs de recherche une ouverture vers des questionnements prometteurs à ce jour peu explorés.

Depuis une vingtaine d’années, se développent des travaux cherchant à expliciter l’effervescence culturelle, les dynamiques d’innovation ou créatives qui prennent corps au sein de lieux, de territoires (urbains ou non), d’espaces publics à partir du vocable de scène, le « scene thinking » proposé par Woo et al. (2015). Ce qui est remarquable avec les démarches se revendiquant de la « scene », c’est d’abord leur pluridisciplinarité. Elles s’inscrivent en effet dans le « spatial turn » proposé par les perspectives en cult...

Cultural scenes and atmospheres. Intersections, articulations, contextualisations

2025-04-30

Version française

Presentation

This call for papers proposes to bring together two fields of research that, until now, have largely existed independently of each other: the field of research on cultural scenes and that on ambiances and atmospheres. Their intersection – this is the hypothesis behind the proposal of this special issue – allows both fields of research to open up to promising lines of inquiry that have been little explored to date.

For the past twenty years, there has been a growing body of work seeking to explain the cultural effervescence, the dynamics of innovation or creativity that take shape in places, in territories (urban or otherwise), in public spaces based on the term “scene”, the “scene thinking” proposed by Woo et al. (2015). What is remarkable about approaches related to the notion of the “scene” is, first of all, their multidisciplinary nature. They are part of the “spatial turn” proposed by cultural studies perspectives (Guibert, 2012) and draw on research ...