Exploring atmospheric affordances and felt body communication

Moving from neo-phenomenological theory of the lived (or felt) body (Leib), the paper outlines its constitutive role in human experience but especially in aesthetic (in a broad sense) perception of the natural and built-up environment. Against every reductionist, introjectionist and therefore also projectivist objectification of the experience of places, a pathic phenomenology – that emphasizes the affective involvement that the perceiver feels unable to critically react to or mitigate the intrusiveness of – is an adequate investigation of the felt body as a sounding board of outside atmospheres thought as affordances and architectural affective spaces. By means of its specific dynamic, based on the polarity between narrowness and vastness, as well as its lived “islands”, in fact, the felt body communicates with what happens in its situations (beings, lines, objects, buildings, etc.), without drawing on the five senses and the perceptual body schema, through a wide range of relationships due to encorporation and/or excorporation.