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 different modes of participation 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. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of Figures Preface Chapter 1: Introduction: The Oslo Opera House A social monument Tourists and locals An atmospheric lens The Nordic invitation to participate Immaterial architecture Notes Chapter 2: Adopting an atmospheric lens Atmospheric perspectives: Böhme, Rancière, and Sloterdijk Thinking about atmospheres Building experience: architecture and atmosphere Coercive atmosphere Research atmospheres: methods and tools Withdrawing from atmosphere: taking photography seriously Pinholes and fuzzy Notes 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 Notes Chapter 4: Material participation From the city to the roof Marble: surfaces of the white carpet Whiteness Marble’s social and synaesthetic character Whiteness and a cleansing of the eye Whiteness and blur Designing ambiguity: the palace, whiteness, and a Norwegian sensibility to nature Notes Chapter 5: Movement participation Architecture of the oblique Dwelling, tripping, inhabiting Life in the Norwegian open air Resonance, dissonance, and a good-natured elitism Notes Chapter 6: Light participation Nordic light, Nordic architecture: from the roof to the foyer Daylight in the OOH Artificial light Transitions: liquid light From bubbles to foam Notes Chapter 7: Art participation First Encounter with The other 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 Notes Chapter 8: Conclusion: Exiting the social monument Bibliography Index