The backstage of urban ambiances (original) (raw)
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How does the notion of “infinite places” allow us to question the production of a contemporary architectural space? For creators, what are the new challenges for the design of the atmospheres of these new forms of public space? This article aims to bring together the urban practices identified by the Encore Heureux collective with a praxeological thought of the design of atmospheres. Infinites places trough ambiance are analyzed in their potentials to create infinite conflicts, infinite negotiations and infinite sympathies between the back plan and the emerging events.
Les perspectives critiques de la notion d'ambiance
2012
This paper questions the potential criticism offered by the concept of ambiances. By defending three postures of research (to articulate the sensitive and politics, to defend an ethics of the commitment, to translate and share the common), it puts the foundations of a sensitive criticism of the urbanity.
SHS Web of Conferences
The concept of “ambiance” has been shaped over the years by questioning the interactions between three attractors: architecture and the city, climatic and sound phenomena, uses and perception. Studied in pairs, each of these attractors refers to very different disciplinary fields; architecture and phenomena concern the physics of the city, architecture and uses interest sociology and uses and phenomena are rather turned to comfort. Studies concerning ambiances are therefore highly interdisciplinary and raise many questions: living spaces, urban renewal and heritage, urban prospective and the city as a stage. For this, many conceptual and technical tools are mobilized: digital tools for simulation and immersion, investigation, surveys and storytelling, prototyping, field action. What may be new in the field of academic studies is the awareness of artistic creation as a resource for the use of digital tools, storytelling and the representation of complexity through original means.
2020
The limits of sensory apprehension can take different forms: phenomena can be so tenuous that they do not necessarily reach consciousness; habit can bring them out as missing; they can also manifest only in a delayed manner, primarily through their sensory consequences; and finally, devices – such as a digital display – can bring them back into the realm of human perception. This paper first seeks to explore their integration into the lived ambiances, especially from the contem- porary geophysical and climatological expla- nations. Then it questions how architecture and urban design can, through new attention to these limits of the phenomenal, contribute to the readability of the world and collective response-abilities at the time of the entry of humanity into the Anthropocene.
Learning from the ambiance throughout Urban Renewal
Bitácora Urbano Territorial, 2021
Developed within the context of public space studies, the proposition applies the concept of ambiance to urban micro-space as an alternate approach to urban studies, providing a contrasting perspective to other urban disciplinary methods. Ambiance is understood here as the emerging feature of the relationship between the uses of space and the (physical and sensory) built space as it becomes meaningful when used, inhabited and built by individuals. Introducing the concept of ambiance as used by authors such as Augoyard (2010) and Thibaud (2004), allows us to avoid the problem of comparing spaces that are different in form and scale, as it focuses on the relationship between constructed/sensory space and social use. A study of three sectors of the inner district of Santiago-Chile, which where renewed in three different moments of urban public policies, is proposed to illustrate this approach. The middle-class neighborhoods and their inhabitants are studied in a praxeological perspecti...
A sonic paradigm of urban ambiances?
2011
This paper intends to investigate urban ambiances through focusing on the world of sounds. Although the aesthetics of everyday life implies employing the whole human sensorium, making it difficult to artificially separate the information received from the individual senses from each other, I explore what can be learned about an ambiance when we just listen to it. In other words, how and under which conditions is it possible to develop a sonic paradigm of urban ambiances? The basic argument is to consider sound as a particularly efficient medium to investigate and develop an account of urban ambiances. Various ideas will be explored in order to answer this question, involving theoretical, epistemological and methodological arguments. Three main directions are accentuated: the first one relates to the tuning into an ambiance, the second relates to the unfolding of an ambiance, and the third relates to the situating within an ambiance. Urban spaces provide numerous ambiances to be felt with all the senses. Whether we think of a lively outdoor marketplace or an ordinary parking lot, an attractive historical center or an accessible subway station, the very way we relate to these places is based on the sensory experience they provide. It is a matter of light and colour, sound, smell, touch and heat, as well as the manner in which we walk and talk, move and look, relate and behave. In other words, urban ambiances always create a subtle interweaving of synaesthesia and kinaesthesia, a complex mixture of percepts and affects, a close relationship between sensations and expressions. To put it succinctly, an ambiance can be defined as a space-time qualified from a sensory point of view. It relates to the sensing and feeling of a place. Each ambiance involves a specific mood expressed in the material presence of things and embodied in the way of being city dwellers. Thus, ambiance is both subjective and objective: it involves the lived experience of people as well as
From situated perception to urban ambiences
2002
Perception is central to the theory of ambience. Far from being one of many fields of research, perception is present throughout work inspired by ambience-oriented thinking. What models of intelligibility of perception can be used to pinpoint and clarify the notion of ambience ? Alternatively, in what respects do architectural and urban ambiences prompt us to adopt new ways of addressing the problematic of ordinary perception ? The aim of this paper is to highlight the close relation between ambience and perception. We seek to demonstrate that one of the issues for the notion of ambience is a reappraisal of the situated, sensory and practical character of perception. Three basic arguments are developed : ambience can be characterized as the quality of the situation, as a motor solicitation and as a sensory background.
Creating ambiances, co-constructing place: a poetic transect across the city
Debates in cultural geography around ideas of atmospheres have been considerably enriched in recent years by engagement with the literature on ambiances particularly associated with the Centre de recherche sur l'espace sonore et l'environnement urbain (CRESSON). Those working on both atmospheres and ambiances are concerned, among other things, with how places feel. In the ambiances literature, however, there is much greater emphasis on undertaking active interventions with the intention of re-engineering the feeling of urban spaces. This paper reflects on a collaborative intervention undertaken by a cultural geographer and a professional poet. Methodologically we report on a novel extension to the idea of the urban transect (Melemis & Tixier, 2010). Rather than simply recording the feeling of urban places for later analysis, we develop the use of an arts-based intervention to actively manipulate urban ambiances in the field. We thus respond to Augoyard’s (2007) notion that artists alter ambiances through their creative practice, but we do so in a more democratic manner, asking non-artists to engage with poetry as a means of remaking the immediate feeling of places. The analysis of this exercise presented here is comprised of both conventional academic and poetic writing. We conclude that the ambiances literature provides a powerful rationale for engaging in more activist collaborations between artists and scholars seeking to improve the feeling of places in partnership with residents.
The Influence of the Sensual Environment of the Urban Space on the Users
Bulletin of the Faculty of Engineering. Mansoura University
The paper explores the relationship between People and the architectural spaces they occupy; understanding the occupants' impressions while meeting their surrounding environment. In the first place, the relation between human senses and architecture was studied, as the senses are the tools that relate people to the outer environment. The study was then improved through studying the human personality, feelings and people's impression not to be restricted only on sensations. The study then focuses on the awareness of architectural space using the philosophical field of Phenomenology. Any object, event or experience which a person can see, hear, touch, smell, taste, feel or understand is a focus for a phenomenological study. An analytical study was then directed in sensory parks, where different exercises are seen, from social skills to business. Parks are spaces where