1st Edition
Aesthetics of Participation Atmosphere, Design, and Experience at the Oslo Opera House
This book explores the way people participate with the Oslo Opera house, Norway. As an iconic and culture-led building, these participations reveal the tensions between staged space and individual experience.
Movement, materiality, light, and art are viewed through an atmospheric lens to demonstrate how architecture can shape people’s engagement with, and understanding of, urban space. This book contributes to a growing literature on atmosphere in relation to our experience of the built environment. In adopting this atmospheric perspective, the book speaks to the concerns of designers, users, and researchers interested in the way contemporary development infuses our cities with the experiential, as a means of developing access, participation, and democracy. It explores the ways in which people experience a building, held up against the claims, intentions, and assumptions that surround it.
The book’s focus on design, participation, and experience, in relation to political ideals, will appeal to architects, planners, and academics concerned with the production of space. Equally, its underlying atmospheric contribution and methodological approach will be of interest to designers, scholars, professionals and students of ambiance, affect and atmosphere, architecture, city planners and urban developers, human geographies, anthropology and urban studies.
Chapter 1. Introduction: The Oslo Opera House
A social monument
Tourists and locals
An atmospheric lens
The Nordic invitation to Participate
Immaterial Architecture
Chapter 2. Adopting an Atmospheric Lens
Atmospheric perspectives
Thinking about atmospheres
Building experience: architecture and atmosphere
Coercive atmosphere
Research atmosphere: methods and tools
Withdrawing from atmosphere: taking photography seriously
Pinholes and Fuzzy
Digital media participation
Chapter 3. Transformative Participation
The road to Bjørvika
The Fjord City
Bjørvika and beyond
Snøhetta
A Nolli map
Competition entry 04321
The Art
A stone saga
Rethinking participation: Arnstein’s ladder
Chapter 4. Material Participation
From the city to the roof
Marble: surfaces of the white carpet
Whiteness
Marble’s social and synesthetic Character
Whiteness and a cleansing of the eye
Whiteness and blur
Designing ambiguity: the palace, whiteness, and a Norwegian sensibility to nature
Chapter 5. Movement Participation
Architecture of the Oblique
Dwelling, Tripping, Inhabiting
Life in the Norwegian Open Air
Resonance, Dissonance, and a Good-Natured Elitism
Chapter 6. Light Participation
Nordic Light, Nordic Architecture: From the Roof to the Foyer
Daylight in the OOH
Artificial Light
Transitions
From Bubbles to Foam
Chapter 7. Art Participation
First Encounter with the wall
Democratic Surfaces
Democratic surrounds: The wall as weather machine
Creative Kitchens: process as art
The wall through social media
Selfies and mirror selfies
The wall, Dissensus, and a Partitioning of the Sensible
Chapter 8 Conclusion: Exiting the house
Bibliography
Biography
Jeremy Hektor Payne-Frank holds a PhD from the Department of People and Technology at Roskilde University. His research explores urban experience in relation to architecture, art, and design through experimental ethnographic methods.
