Abstract

With its emphasis on the reciprocal influences between disciplines, as well as on the role attributed to the human senses in the perception of space, contemporary studies on inhabited “atmospheres” have a precedent barely mentioned in the relevant historiography: fin-de-siècle architecture. In France at the close of the 19th century, synaesthesia became a fashionable subject that, coming from the new psychological aesthetics, soon exceeded its original limits to reach architecture, while in Germany, the romantic notion of Gesamtkunstwerk found in Wagner perfor­mances a new realm for the arts to collaborate in and produce amazing, dreamlike ambiences. In parallel, synaesthetic perception became the leitmotiv of installations conceived for the multi-sensory enjoyment of the members of an incipient mass cul­ture, giving rise to architectures that were technically sophisticated but also playful: buildings for international fairs. Synaesthetic atmospheres for flâneurs, Wagnerians, and crowds were the seed of the electroacoustic pavilions by Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis, or Charles and Ray Eames, as well as of atmospheric integration of the arts of the kind that we would see in Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, and many of the 1950s and 1950s avant-gardes.