An Essential Vocabulary of Atmospheric Architecture: Experiencing, Understanding, and Narrating Kansas State’s Beach Museum of Art

Informed by (new) phenomenology and cog/neuroscience and grounded in the architectural discipline’s expertise, atmospherology (namely, the study of affective atmospheres in space) can benefit from a shared lexicon to encourage mutual understanding and knowledge construction. A basic language of atmosphere helps cultivate an affective education that makes architects capable of articulating tacit experiences and designing atmospheric qualities. Fifteen essentials are discussed: affordance, arousal, atmosphere, attunement, body, conscious, emotion, feeling, first impression, generator of atmosphere, lived space, mood, nonconscious, resonance, and valence. Lastly, this essay develops an atmospherological critique of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art on the Kansas State University campus in Manhattan (Kansas) to evaluate the accuracy, coherence, and adaptability of the lexicon’s concepts.