8-9th of June, 2026
University of Southern Denmark, Odense.
Atmospheres of the built environment: key features, and an evaluation of the neuro-cognitive approach to architecture
In the first part of my talk I will provide an overview and critical discussion of key features of the notion of atmosphere, based on existing works and my reading of those. These include the inherently affective nature of atmospheres, their qualitatively global character, their “in-betweenness”, and their relationship to moods. In the second part I will briefly introduce the “neuro-cognitive” approach to architecture, and assess, with reference to a recent study, whether its methodology is adequate for studying the atmospheres of the built environment and how they affect visitors/perceivers.
Giovanna Colombetti
University of Exeter
Giovanna Colombetti is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology (SPSPA) at the University of Exeter, where she coordinates the interdisciplinary research cluster Mind, Body, and Culture within EGENIS (The Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences). She works primarily in the philosophy of embodied and situated cognition, and the philosophy of emotion, drawing on different traditions and disciplines—such as phenomenology, analytic philosophy, theoretical and experimental psychology, neuroscience, and performance and material-culture studies.
Her first monograph, The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (published in 2014) proposed a dynamical and enactivist reconceptualization of affective phenomena. Since then, Giovanna’s research has focused on the notion of situated affectivity, and she has recently completed another book on this topic, titled Feeling with Things: Toward a Theory of Material Affective Scaffolding (forthcoming with MIT Press).