Atmosphere of landscapes and haptic feeling: an aesthetic sense for communication

Perceptions of atmospheres and the identity of landscapes are experiences linked to haptic qualities, and thus to the interpretation of space and its symbolic representations (Panofsky, 1961). The relational organization of the senses shapes haptic perception; hapticity, therefore, is not merely tactile experiences but a measure of the perceptual intelligence (Petrelli, 2015), activated by the body in motion. Through haptic sensibility enabled by movement, both consciousness and emotional response are involved, the visible and the tangible, but also emotional encounter and memory, in a unique space-time interweaving. Haptic perception, deriving from the sense of touch as a function of the skin, in fact, constitutes the mutual contact between us and the environment, both acting as receptors of a communicative interface (Bruno, 2002, p. 6): an exchange of energy and information between the body and its environment. The relationship between the multisensory body and the environment is essential; focusing on the visual form may be responsible for the weak atmospheric quality evoked by many contemporary spaces and their representations (Pallasmaa, 2016). The quality of atmospheres isinfluenced by the overall bodily, haptic, and visual perception; haptic perceptual values, in turn, can be interpreted as multisensory factors that are not merely a sum of visions provided by the body moving in space but are also shaped by the atmospheric conditions of a landscape (Mazzocut-Mis, 2002, p. 149). The atmosphere is thus a spatial quality, a refection of the fusion of perceivable factors in the place in which one moves – or imagines moving (Dai, Zheng 2021). This study aims to investigate the relationship between haptic perception and the representation of ‘atmospheric identities’, particularly for the communication design of territorial identities, realized through aesthetic dimensions and atmospheric tones (Böhme, 2016), changing over time but permanently anchored in the symbolic elements that emerge from the landscape, recognized by cultural and social memory as ‘images of the city’. It is important to recognize that landscapes represent a tangible and aesthetically perceived interconnection of relationships in the environment (Calzolari 1999). These relationships weave together the interactions of human societies and individuals with their surroundings, shaping the atmospheric and aesthetic character of the environment and its structures.