The Atmospherization of Everyday Experience

Abstract

The current focus on air has prompted us to rethink the way we design the urban experience and plan cities. If efforts are made to set the ambiance of urban space we may reasonably assume they entail air-conditioning of various sorts playing on a wide range of scales, issues and contexts. One of the questions this process raises is the connection between ‘Air’ in the singular – a homogeneous, undifferentiated medium essential to live organisms – and urban airs in the plural – specific atmospheric situations that set their mark on sensory spaces. Touching on air we are really dealing with a transverse field which plays on all the senses and all the registers of urban life. As a tentative proposition, without in any way claiming to be exhaustive, we may draw a distinction between air as weather, subnature, commodities and the ambient.