Jun 27, 2025
2 min read
When architects speak about atmosphere, the term often slips into the abstract. It resists measurement, avoids reduction and tends to be described in metaphors. In Atmospheres, a short book adapted from a 2003 lecture, Peter Zumthor doesn’t try to define the term in technical language. Instead, he circles it carefully, assembling a tactile vocabulary of materials, light, sound and memory. The result is one of the most honest articulations of how buildings make us feel, and why that matters.
Zumthor’s writing is less theory than intuition. He speaks of spaces that “touch the soul” and the elusive sense that something is “just right.” But within that subjectivity lies a deep attentiveness to detail. His atmospheres are not created by accident; they are composed. Texture, temperature, acoustics and proportion are tools in the architect’s hands, and Zumthor uses them to tune experience the way a musician tunes an instrument.
“Atmosphere is the immediate effect that a place has on us.”
– Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres
For those interested in designing spaces of stillness, Atmospheres offers something more than poetic reflection. It offers criteria. Not rules, but qualities that recur: material compatibility, the sound of space, temperature of a room, tension between interior and exterior, things that surround me and levels of intimacy. These are not visual elements alone. They are sensory, embodied and affective.
Stillness, in Zumthor’s world, is never simply silence. It’s the feeling of being held in space. Not as spectacle, but as presence. The thermal mass of a wall, the sound of footsteps on timber, the way light moves across a surface over the course of a day. These things don’t shout. They sit.
What makes Zumthor’s work resonant for those studying environments of solitude and calm is that it’s never about emptiness for its own sake. His buildings are not minimal in a stylistic sense. They are precise. They invite inwardness because they ask nothing of the visitor, and offer everything in return. Attention becomes optional, then inevitable.
The Bruder Klaus Field Chapel in Germany, the Therme Vals in Switzerland: these are buildings not remembered for what they say, but for how they make one feel. They do not assert themselves; they unfold. And in that unfolding, they make space for a slower kind of attention. One that is increasingly rare in the built world.
For designers seeking to create environments that support stillness, Atmospheres is not a manual. But it is a reminder: that architecture is not just seen, but felt. That atmosphere is not a by-product, but the very substance of spatial experience. And that stillness is not the absence of activity, but the presence of care.