The Explication of Air
Air as a medium is itself invisible; it carries certain effects that can become sensually experienced, through our skin, smell, hearing, or breathing. While being a medium, air is also part of the atmosphere, of the climate surrounding us. The atmosphere is part of the larger environment that we share with other entities. Changes in the atmosphere usually cannot be perceived immediately.
Yet, they impact our surroundings and thereby our everyday lives in a fundamental way. Emanuele Coccia designates this sphere that we cannot access with our senses as the foundation of what he calls “human sphere”:
The human sphere—culture, history, the life of the mind—is not autonomous, it has a foundation in what is not human; the apparently nonspiritual elements—air, water, light, winds—do not engender mind but can influence the human being, his or her behaviors, attitudes, and ideas.
1 Nudgingis a concept in behavioral science, political theory, and behavioral economics that proposes positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions as ways to influence the behavior and decision-making of groups or individuals (Independent 2017).
52 Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes
Climates engender and set up the majority of humans in their physical aspect and, even more, in their social mores. (2019, 131)
Here, Coccia draws upon the reciprocity of body and mind, stating that changes in the environment impact not only human bodies but also how they act in those environments and their constructions of abstract ideas about them. His position aligns in this point with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and current theories of embodiment, such as enactivism, which seek
alternatives to cartesian dualism. For Coccia, air functions as that medium that allows us to experience the embeddedness in the world through breathing:
“To breathe means to be immersed in a medium that penetrates us with the same intensity as we penetrate it” (2019, 29). Coccia re-contextualizes air in this way as an environmental medium that no longer possesses spiritual qualities, but that, as a medium, embeds us in the world through the act of breathing, parallel to the scientific explication of air.
Today, we know that air, or, more precisely, oxygen, enabled the possibility of complex life developing on Earth. Some 2.7 billion years ago, photosynthetic microbes started to produce oxygen that changed the planet radically, giving birth to the ozone layer and to a more constant atmosphere on Earth. Only in the 18th century did scientists find that air was not empty, that space was composed of gases and different matters (Johnson 2009, 122). Since then, air has been shown to be composed of bacterial life, electronic waves, and pollution.
The history of the knowledge of air is a story of an elusive medium that is vital to humans, but at the same time increasingly fraught with danger: During World War I, air was discovered as a possible weapon. While being the medium we are embedded in, it is also a material that can be altered—used as a carrier for poisonous substances in chemical warfare, for example. As philosopher Peter Sloterdijk points out, with the gas attacks of World War I, the target moved from the enemy’s body towards its environment, turning it into an unlivable space. With these new dimensions of the significance of air being unpacked, a certain naive ignorance of the air, which Sloterdijk insinuates, has been increasingly replaced with concern (2009, 50). The increased awareness of what the invisible air we breathe is composed of and the urgency connected to this—through its instrumentalization in military practice as well as its increasing air pollution due to industrialization—leads to, according to Sloterdijk, a latency of air that establishes a feeling of uncanniness. This uncanniness, in Sloterdijk’s reference to Martin Heidegger, puts our “home-land” (Heimat), our feeling-at-home in a place, in danger:
Having become aware of the primary and secondary greenhouse effects, living and breathing under open skies can no longer hold the same meaning as before. From the open-air homeland that mortals have had
The Lived Body in Changing Climates 53
since time eternity, something uncanny, uninhabitable, unbreathable was withdrawn. Ever since Pasteur and Koch discovered the existence of microbes and had it established in scientific publications, human exis-tence has had to be prepared to take explicit measures for symbiosis with the invisible—and all the more so to prevent and defend itself against microbiotic competitors that have now been identified with precision. As of the 1915 German gas attacks and their allied retaliations, the air totally lost its innocence. (2009, 109)
Once again, the joint development of knowledge about air and technological innovation can be noted. After air was deployed as a medium for chemical attacks, technologies for monitoring the air and defense against approaching threats developed as well. In addition to these developments in the military sector, knowledge about changes in air composition and the increasing awareness that air can be unhealthy for humans has led to an increased devel-opment of air conditioning systems. New ways of measuring, preparing, and representing air in this way gave rise to design strategies that condition air for predetermined purposes.
Architecture as the field that manages what Sloterdijk has called the
“symbiosis with the invisible” is at the forefront of air design. Air design in architecture takes into account how, for example, oxygen levels impact our moods and actions, as can be seen in a phenomenon that is referred to as
“casino air.” As the urban online dictionary states, the notion of “casino air”
points towards the assumption that casinos intentionally increase the amount of oxygen in the air in order to afford longer concentration periods. The myth that some hotels in Las Vegas used to pump extra oxygen into their casinos to keep people awake might be false, but it still holds true that temperatures in casinos are lowered and flashing lights installed, which might have the effect that visitors stay awake longer and feel stimulated. Particular air con-ditioning systems for casinos additionally purify the air and thus increase the amount of oxygen—even if in the form of subtraction of other particles and not through addition of oxygen per se. The gambling industry would be an interesting example for the ways atmospheric media are used to “nudge,”
to influence people’s behavior and decision-making. In her book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (2014), Natasha Dow Schüll provides an interesting analysis of this phenomenon using the example of the gambling industry.
Air design is also a crucial element in what is being called the atmospheric turn in architecture (Vignjević 2017). What is idiosyncratic about this turn is that it doesn’t stop at the mere regulation of air, which has been part of the design of indoor spaces since the beginning of the 20th century. Rather, it seems to re-instantiate an understanding of the human as a “dweller,” as a being that inhabits a world with sensual, emotional, and cognitive dimensions
54 Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes
of experience. The goal in this context is thus less to create a stable indoor climate than to involve the body and its senses in the experience of the space.
According to architect Juhani Pallasmaa, “[s]ignificant architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual beings” (2005, 11).
The turn towards invisible material flows in architectural design has produced a growing number of works as well as theoretic publications over the past 20 years (Zumthor 2006; Pallasmaa 2014). Architects such as Peter Zumthor, Juhani Pallasmaa, Herzog & de Meuron, C+arquitectos, AMIDcero9, R&Sie(N), Philippe Rahm, and Mark Wigley attach new meaning to atmospheric processes and draw new relational dependencies between them and the con-struction of living spaces that include the human in their corpomateriality, which itself is being embedded in these interdependencies. These newly con-sidered relations between the human and their environment relate, at least in part, to the ecological crisis we are facing today. What has been called the era of the human—the Anthropocene—surfaces how deeply human actions have altered the planet. The atmospheric turn in architecture considers the other side of this dynamic: how the atmosphere that has been altered by the human species effects our bodies, emotions, and actions in return. It takes into account that the border between the human habitat and the outer environment is not that clear anymore. The effects of global warming and industrialization, such as increased pollution, stand in stark contrast to the idea of the home as a shelter from any unwanted external impacts. Excluded materials and processes such as waste, pollution, or extreme weather con-ditions tend to push back into our everyday life. They end up in our blood-stream as plastic particles, while the particles that pollute the air of seemingly distant countries reappear in our own skies, and heavy rainfalls flood our streets and basements. Walls cannot shelter us from the tiny particles ingested from polluted air, which today are considered the largest global threat to life (Worldwatch 2019). This leads to a re-contextualization of the role of architecture as well.
Part of the atmospheric turn in Architecture is the urge to take into consid-eration changing climates and their unpredictable consequences. Architecture as the construction of spaces for human inhabitation defines then a contact zone between humans and their environments instead of clear boundaries.
Architecture becomes the theory and practice in which individual everyday life meets global crisis. In this sense, according to Juhani Pallasmaa,
architecture calls for a deepened sense of materiality, gravity and reality, not an air of entertainment or fantasy. The power of architecture is in its ability to strengthen the experience of the real, and even its imaginative dimension arises from this strengthened and re-sensitized sense of reality. (2014, 240)
The Lived Body in Changing Climates 55
In taking serious the refusal of the distinction between the climate as a non-human sphere and the non-human sphere of culture, society, and technology, air design in the atmospheric turn moves from epistemological measures and representations of air towards its performativity and affectivity: Because atmospheres not only have a materiality that comes with idiosyncratic effects on our bodies, but also impact our feelings and moods, the deepened sense of reality Pallasmaa is speaking about concerns especially the pre-conscious dimension of our involvement with the world:
The all-encompassing and instantaneous perception of atmospheres calls for a specific manner of perception—unconscious and unfocused peripheral perception. This fragmented perception of the world is actually our normal reality, although we believe that we perceive every-thing with precision. Our image of our world of perceptual fragments is held together by constant active scanning by the senses, movement and a creative fusion and interpretation of these inherently dissociated percepts through memory. (2014, 243)
In exploring the “dialectic tension between the physical and the immaterial,”
(Pallasmaa 2014, 243) the atmospheric approach in architecture challenges, yet again, and from a different angle than that brought forward by famous fore-runners like architect Buckminster Fuller in the first half of the 19th century, how we understand our relation to the environment. Put into practice, as Rahm formulates it, architecture must consider two orders of magnitude:
At the large scale, meteorological architecture explores the atmospheric and poetic potential of new construction techniques for ventilation, heating, dual-flow air renewal and insulation. At the microscopic level, it plumbs novel domains of perception through skin contact, smell and hormones. (Filipendin 2014, 4)
For Rahm, representational measures cannot bridge these scales. Numerical data that represent climatic processes are thus not implemented in the home to provide a visual link between climate and subject. Numerical data only informs the design process by providing orientation; the main focus lies on homeostatic processes and how the body participates in them. As such, Rahm’s practice draws consequences from the discrepancy between numerical or graphical representations of climatic processes and how we experience them sensually and emotionally:
Climate change is forcing us to rethink architecture radically, to shift our focus away from a purely visual and functional approach towards one that is more sensitive, more attentive to the invisible, climate-related aspects of space. Slipping from the solid to the void, from the visible to the invisible, from metric composition to thermal composition, architecture as meteorology opens up additional, more sensual, more variable
56 Aesthetic Experience of Metabolic Processes
dimensions in which limits fade away and solids evaporate. (Filipendin 2014, 7)
In using mainly invisible phenomena and structuring the space according to their effects on bodies and other materials, Rahm explicates the mediality of atmospheric media such as air: What becomes explicit are the invisible forces behind the forms, the effects air as a medium has, and not so much the for-mations themselves. The effects of these forces on the sensual apparatus will therefore play a central role in my investigation of a metabolic aesthetic.
To conclude this section, the explication of air can now be seen as having troubled the relationship between human and environment. The atmos-pheric turn in architecture proposes a design that restructures this relation by considering the modes of perception and sensation enabled by the effects of invisible atmospheric processes. In order to evaluate these modes of perception as they arise in Rahm’s work, I will return briefly to the question of agency as it is projected onto the human subject facing an increasingly compli-cated relation to the world, and how an explication of the metabolic inter-relations between human and environment can re-situate human agency.