Cinematic Atmospheres & Bodily Prompts

Atmosphere can be a conceptual tool to disrupt static and representational modes of spatial thinking; through its very formlessness, intensities, transient qualities, which questions the identity of objects and subjects as discrete envelopes. This project moves from understanding occupation through a lens of spectatorship where the world is understood through viewership, distance and passivity, to exploring experience and the entanglement between ourselves across and through architecture. Therefore, this thesis explores the proposition that cinematic atmosphere is a tool to amplify the relationship between people and architecture, through the body. To explore this, a design-as-research methodology was used at three different scales to explore the relationship between cinematic atmosphere and architecture through iterative design experiments and to refine the design proposition and proposal. The first design scale explored how the body was orientated by texture and light’s intangible and tangible atmospheric qualities. The following experiment looks at the complexity of designing with cinematic atmosphere through the design of a performance arcade. The final experiment was to design a bathhouse that explored the variable densities of atmosphere. To conclude, architectural outcomes and iterative design explorations demonstrate the importance of drawing from the cinematic atmospheric qualities to generate architecture that suggests an orientation and attunement to the body and the lives they co-author.