Designing empathies: Architectural spaces between perception and operativity

Abstract

This paper develops the notion of designing empathies in order to rethink architectural space between perception and operativity. Starting from Peter Zumthor’s Atmospheres (2006) and his claim that architectural quality lies in a building’s capacity to “move” us, the argument reframes being emotionally touched as the threshold between embodied reception and projectual intention. The first part reconstructs a genealogy from Einfühlung (Vischer, Lipps, Wölfflin) to twentieth-century pedagogies (Moholy-Nagy, Bauhaus) and contemporary theories of embodied simulation (Gallese, Rizzolatti), showing how architecture is experienced through bodily mimicry, affective resonance, and sensory participation. The second part situates these insights within neo-phenomenology and atmospherology (Schmitz, Griffero, Böhme), where atmospheres appear as quasi-objective, spatialized feelings that seize the felt body and structure lived space beyond metric description. Through Zumthor’s design principles and further examples (Le Corbusier’s polychromy; Picon and Ratti’s sensory cartographies), the paper argues that atmospheres can be approached as operative design principles: not fully controllable effects, but staged conditions—light, materiality, sound, thresholds, rhythms—through which experience emerges without being predetermined.