Psychiatric Atmospheres: Exploring the Potential of Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology in Atmosphere‑sensitive Analysis of Psychiatric Hospital Architecture

The phenomenological approach occupies a central position in contemporary discourse on architectural design and atmospheric perception. Its cross-disciplinary applicability enables systematic engagement with questions of health, cognition, and embodied experience. This potential is especially relevant given architects’ expanding interest in the complex interplay between architecture, the mind, emotion, touch, and aesthetics. Despite this increasing popularity, systematic phenomenological analysis of healthcare architecture seems to be lacking. In this article, we utilise Hermann Schmitz’s new phenomenology to construct narrative case study descriptions of the atmospheric experiences in four psychiatric hospitals.Results show that Schmitz’s phenomenology offers a versatile method for investigating various architectural environments, encouraging active bodily engagement and attentiveness to nuanced, transient aspects of atmospheric experience. The method allows us to approach architectural environment as a pre-dualistic background from which atmospheric qualities and perceptions emerge. Schmitz’s systematic repertoire of concepts provides a structured basis for differentiated descriptions, yet it maintains sufficient flexibility to allow further refinement and empirical validation through researchers’ and audiences’ embodied experiences. These qualities are of particular significance for healthcare architecture research, consolidating the need to discuss corporeal elements in scientific terms, while grounding that discussion in the discourse on ‘atmospheric perception.’ Such an approach holds potential for moving towards an approach to psychiatric hospital architecture that is both systematic and attuned to atmospheric nuances. ; L’approche phénoménologique occupe une place centrale dans le discours contemporain sur la conception architecturale et la perception atmosphérique. Son applicabilité interdisciplinaire permet d’aborder de manière systématique les questions de santé, de cognition et d’expérience incarnée. ...