Atmospheres That Touch
A. Sioli (TU Delft - Situated Architecture)
Elisavet Kiourtsoglou (Greek State Scholarships Foundation (I.K.Y.), University of Thessaly)
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Abstract
Hearing about the death of Fernando Pessoa, the famous Portuguese poet, Ricardo Reis returns to Lisbon from Brazil. He wanders the streets of the city, lost in his thoughts, during the day, and then retreats to a small hotel. One of the first nights, he notices that “when one awaits to sleep in the silence of a room that is still unfamiliar, listening to the rain outside, things assume their real dimension, they all become great, solemn, heavy.” He lies in bed in an attempt to fall asleep, surrounded by his small hotel room and its basic amenities, immersed in the room’s silence as disrupted by the sound of the rain, attuned to the felt impressions these acoustic dimensions create, receptive of the emerging atmosphere of an unfamiliar place: great, solemn, heavy. Although a fictional character—the product of the imagination of the author José Saramango—Ricardo Reis’ thoughts connect eloquently the actual elements that inspired the creation of this book: the embodied experience in a place of a given scale, the prevalent acoustic conditions and the perceived atmosphere. [...]
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