Atmosfera: a essência do espaço arquitectónico

Abstract

To say that we live in an architectural world governed by a culture of images may be a cliché; however, it seems to be impossible not to discuss this issue. Architecture reaches us through an endless number of visual textbooks, websites, journals, magazines and monographs that are limited to debit images, and we, as mere spectators don't pass by them indifferently, our attention is aroused even though this seduction is limited to vision. Contemporary architecture should not be confined to a line of images, but to an environment, an atmosphere that is created by the spatial elements and requires contact with the main agent of architectural space: the human being. Nowadays, we are seduced by an image when we should be seduced by the space itself, largely because of a contemporary tendency to be mediated by images, renders and eccentricity of shapes. The architect, while sensitive and educated to deal with shapes, spaces and people, needs to balance this visual propensity, in order to produce spaces with character, with an essence that moves the audience through its corporeal side, by the entirety of its architecural body. Architecture, in its genesis, is the stage for the conduct of humans' actions and day-to-day experiences. However, how can the process of architecture be approached? What is the approach that can be done to the architectural space when it seeks an atmosphere? This study aims to seek what is beyond the human senses in order to find which "touch" people as far as architecture is concerned. It attempts to discover how you can get to an architectural environment so we may be impressed by architectural spaces, so that it might have the ability to "touch" us within. To do so, the study argues the stroll and the enjoyment of the space, the meeting between the user and space. However, behind a space that encourages discovery through the body, lies a phenomenological approach to the architectural space that seeks, secondarily, to contaminate the relationship between body and space - the fourth dimension of architecture. It is in the interest of this work to look for the premisses that make the architectural space something that transcends its user, touching him, so that keeps the memory of that space inside him. Architecture should go further than a game of planes and volumes, and seek a purpose, an identity... an atmosphere.