Autumn has arrived. With the shorter days we spend more time again in the rooms that surround us. The light shifts, mornings begin more slowly and our home gains weight. In these weeks I notice it more clearly than usual.
At first glance I would not call our flat special. Sometimes I call the building a modern concrete block, sober and reserved. And yet it gives us a great deal. It is dry and warm, the large windows let in light, the balcony looks onto the creek and the routines of everyday life simply work. Before we moved here we lived on a farm where water dripped from the ceiling in winter and we shared the rooms with mice. I know the difference. What this flat gives us above all is relief. That too, I have learned, works atmospherically.
I remember the day my daughter Linnea was born through a sound. Exhausted and happy we came home, I lay down with her in bed and from the neighbouring house a piano piece drifted over. I nursed her and fell asleep. Ever since, that piano sets off a particular feeling in me every time. The sound itself has stayed the same. What has changed is what I bring with me when I hear it.
Perhaps this is where what concerns me begins. What we experience as the atmosphere of a room does not first arise in the room. It emerges from an encounter. Atmosphere forms in the interplay between a person and a space. It therefore has two sides. An outer one, shaped by light, material, sound and scale. And an inner one, shaped by what a person carries within them from earlier spatial experience.
The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor describes atmosphere as something that works immediately through material, light, sound and temperature, creating an overall effect we sense before we can explain it. The piano from the neighbouring house explains nothing to me. It works long before I think about it. And it works because I bring something to it.
This inner side is what occupies me. I call it the inner space and understand it as a figurative description of a part of our personality that grows out of early spatial experience. I mean feelings, needs and ways of reacting that we form in childhood and in later life and that accompany us to this day. Much of it comes into being long before we can think about it consciously or put it into words. It shows itself later, rather indirectly, in what gives us security and in what we retreat to when we want to come to rest.
Not without reason does the term lean on that of the inner child. Both turn our attention to something early that lives on in us. The inner space is as varied as we people are. It arises from the flats, houses and rooms a life leads through, from their floor plans and their light, from their sounds and from what we experienced in them. Some of those rooms I have long forgotten. They have worked on me all the same.
The inner space is not a real room. It is a figurative description of spatial experience already acquired, which influences how we experience the world to this day, often without our noticing. It describes a structure that becomes active in encounters. When a piano sound reminds me of the first hours with my daughter, it is this inner space that answers.
I am not alone with this idea. In The Poetics of Space the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard examines how we perceive interiors and what they set off in us. Our unconscious, he writes, is housed. Because our inner life was largely formed in interiors, it has itself taken on the form of such rooms. I find this image apt. It describes why early homes keep working in us although we left them long ago. And why we never enter a new room entirely unbiased.
With that, the meaning of the word place shifts as well. A place is something that has become familiar. It comes into being where we know our way around, where we act repeatedly, where meanings and routines have grown. What newly surrounds us is not yet a place. It is an environment we do not yet know and to which no relationship yet exists.
For my family this distinction is not an abstract question. We are facing a voluntary upheaval, a move to the other side of the world. When we go, very little of the outer space will remain at first. The flat will not come with us, nor the creek in front of the balcony, and the piano from the neighbouring house I will not hear in another place.
What remains is the inner space. It carries the past homes onward within it and keeps working even when the outer place changes or falls away entirely. In its encounter with new rooms it is decided whether atmosphere gives us hold or whether it must first come into being anew.
Perhaps that is a beginning. If the inner space is what remains, then it is worth getting to know it while the familiar place is still around us. I want to understand which rooms I am made of before I leave them. Which of them gave me hold? And which do I want to carry on into what comes next?