Call for Papers

Lebenswelt 28 (2026)

TITLE: Atmospheres of intimacy and immensity

EDITORS: Aurosa Alison (Università di Napoli L’Orientale) aurorarosa.alison@unior.it; Bàlint Veres (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design – MOME) veresbal@mome.hu

SCHEDULE:

Deadline: September 1, 2025
Submission of referee list: Review phase September - October 2025
Peer review phase: Possibility of correction November 1-30, 2025
Final papers delivery: December 1, 2025
Publication: January 2026

 

- Essays must be unpublished and between 30,000 and 40,000 characters in length

- Articles can be submitted by sending an email to the following addresses: lebenswelt@unimi.it; alison@unior.it ; veresbal@mome.hu

- Articles must be formatted according to the journal's guidelines: https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/Lebenswelt/about/submissions

DESCRIPTION

The intermediate and radiating ground that Gernot Böhme identifies in the inceptive character of atmospheres is the dialectical character of our modality of presence in places (1995). Neither inside nor outside, but also neither completely introjected nor wholly exteriorized. This mutual relationship presupposes a character in continuous change depending on the situations or places we perceive. In this way, the perceptive modality of what is real plays with a mutable and often ambivalent reality, where embodied spaces and exteriorized spaces meet. The Leib understood as a sensitive bodily presence, can introduce and emanate atmospheres in a continuously productive and self-productive process. That means the Leib itself, by absorbing and producing atmospheres, uses a constitutive dialectic that is also projected in the types of spaces with which it interacts.

The dialectic form of space has been part of much of the phenomenological philosophy of the second half of the 20th century. Gaston Bachelard introduced the concepts of intimate immensity and inside-outside in The Poetics of Space (1957), highlighting an ambivalent but coadjutant constitution. Merleau-Ponty, in The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), indicates the body, the incarnate body, as the threshold of the outside. 

The conformation of dialectic spaces in atmospheres was first considered and applied in architectural theories that have focused mainly on perceptive factors (Holl, S.; Pallasmaa, J.; Perez-Gomez, A., 1994), aspects concerning the arrangement of purely phenomenological and sensitive concepts in the reading and interpretation of architecture (Pallasmaa, J., 1996, 2009, 2011), and the phenomenological elements to be included in the “commandments” to be followed for architectural design (Zumthor, P., 2006). Furthermore, starting from the nineties, these reflections have become part of architectural projects that were carried out upon the influence of the phenomenology of atmospheres, encompassing those as their active and productive part (Zumthor, P., Topography of Terror 1993, Thermal Baths of Vals 1996, Kolumba 2003, Bruder Klaus Chapel, 2007). The elements in the constitution of atmospheres, such as those echoed by the senses (touch, sound, smell, etc.), become an integral part of these projects (Zumthor, P., 2006). In a more marked way through the phenomenological exercise, Steven Holl introduces the elements of the body into his projects, emphasizing the correspondence between the architectural body and the human body, as well as aspects concerning the creation of atmospheres (Holl, S., 2005). Holl designed the Chapel of St. Ignatius (1997) to architecturally represent the corporeality of the forms and the investment of natural light as a repetition of the incoming and outgoing character of the atmospheres that surround it. 

In addition to the perceptive, phenomenological, and atmospheric factors, these designers have all taken into consideration the dialectic question in the theoretical interpretation: Zumthor, in his tract on the use and creation of atmospheres, focuses on inside/outside (2006), Holl (2000) adds to this the dynamic tension between light and shadow, while Pallasmaa (2009) emphasizes the “atmospheric sense” as the capacity to embody.

The dialectical theme of atmospheres is constantly developing and points towards places where the power of atmospheres is perceived and radiates but remains unquantifiable. In this regard, the incommensurability of atmospheres characteristically manifests itself:

- in places that are characterized by leaving a trace, by evoking a memory,
- in fluid places, technologically innervated by the media,
- in places expanded by the virtual,
- in interstitial and liminal places where there is no absolute borderline,
- in places that recall memory with the power of absence that characterizes them,
- in places of passage, of entry and exit,
- in places where atmospheres can overlap each other and mingle.

This call is an opportunity to reflect on spaces of dialectical atmospheres going beyond architecture and getting ever closer to what we can define as architectonics. Today, atmospheres are increasingly fluid, even evanescent. What will the upcoming design developments for atmospheres be? How will the dialectical nature of atmospheres interact with a technocratic social system increasingly permeated by digital interfaces and characters? How can atmospheres engage less with natural and material entities and more with virtual and/or artificial ones? How can media and digital processes use atmospheres and vice versa?

These questions come to mind regarding the state of the art of the dialectic of atmospheres that we submit to scholars, researchers, philosophers, artists, architects, designers, digital designers, and people involved in neuroscience.

 

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