Silvia Benedito

Atmosphere Anatomies

On Design, Weather, and Sensation

How will the human body, collective and individual, cope with the estimated increases in global air temperatures and in the earth’s corresponding thermal stress? Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design, Weather, and Sensation offers an in-depth examination of design strategies that situate the body and its bioclimatic milieu at the core of their spatial formation.

Drawing upon ten paradigmatic projects in urban design and landscape architecture – from Rousham Gardens, Oxfordshire, to the city of Chandigarh in India – the book investigates the designers’ bioclimatic aims and their spatial outcomes. Woven throughout the book, the evocative photographic essays of Iwan Baan showcase the selected projects as inhabited spaces for everyday life.

How will the human body, collective and individual, cope with the estimated increases in global air temperatures and in the earth’s corresponding thermal stress? Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design, Weather, and Sensation offers an in-depth examination of design strategies that situate the body and its bioclimatic milieu at the core of their spatial formation.

Drawing upon ten paradigmatic projects in urban design and landscape architecture – from Rousham Gardens, Oxfordshire, to the city of Chandigarh in India – the book investigates the designers’ bioclimatic aims and their spatial outcomes. Woven throughout the book, the evocative photographic essays of Iwan Baan showcase the selected projects as inhabited spaces for everyday life.

Winner of the Sustainability and Innovation Book Award 2022


“an ambitious collection of essays that proposes a new framework for understanding landscape design.
Landscape Architecture Magazine

“It is rare - and always thrilling - to discover a book that makes us think differently about architecture, by helping us to understand hitherto inscrutable aspects of it.
Alice Rawsthorn


 

Author(s): Silvia Benedito

Foreword by Christophe Girot, afterword by James Corner

With photographs by Iwan Baan

Design: Integral Lars Müller

16,5 × 24 cm, 6 ½ × 9 ½ in

360 pages, 335 illustrations

paperback

2021, 978-3-03778-612-3, English
CHF 40.00

Silvia Benedito

Silvia Benedito is a registered architect, urban designer and associate professor of landscape architecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), Harvard University. She focuses her design and research efforts on the quality of the constructed environment in its capacity to foster communal well-being and ecological resilience. In her work, Benedito advocates for a vigorous disciplinary intersection of architecture and landscape architecture at the different scales of the territory: from the residential compound to the neighborhood, from the city to the countryside. She is the co-principal of OFICINAA, an international award-winning architecture, landscape and urban design practice based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Ingolstadt, Germany.

Iwan Baan

Photo Iwan Baan

Iwan Baan (*1975 in Amsterdam) is an architecture and documentary photographer. He has worked for major architectural studios like SANAA, Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Herzog & de Meuron, Toyo Ito, and architects like Steven Holl and Zaha Hadid. His works are published regularly in architectural magazines and newspapers, among them Domus, a+u, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. In his photography, Baan focuses on the connection between architecture and the surrounding environment. Instead of isolating the built structure he embeds it in history and context.