Aesthetics of Participation

Atmosphere, Design, and Experience at the Oslo Opera House
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-66878-9
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 184 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 268 g

Reihe: Ambiances, Atmospheres and Sensory Experiences of Spaces

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 literatureon 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.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate, Undergraduate Advanced, and Undergraduate Core

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hektor Payne-Frank, Jeremy

Fachgebiete

• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Humangeographie
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Geographie: Allgemeines, Karten & Atlanten

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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: Böhme, Rancière, and Sloterdijk

Thinking about atmospheres

Building experience: architecture and atmosphere

Coercive atmosphere

Research atmosphere: methods and tools

Withdrawing from atmosphere: taking photography seriously

Pinholes and fuzzy

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 synaesthetic 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: liquid light

From bubbles to foam

Chapter 7. Art participation

First encounter with the 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

Chapter 8 Conclusion: Exiting the social monument

Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

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.