Designing empathies. Architectural spaces between perception and operativity

Abstract This paper develops the notion of designing empathies in order to rethink archi-tectural space between perception and operativity. Starting from Peter Zumthor’s Atmospheres (2006) and his claim that architectural quality lies in a building’s capacity to “move” us, the argument reframes being emotionally touched as the threshold between embodied reception and projectual intention. The first part reconstructs a genealogy from Einfühlung (Vischer, Lipps, Wölfflin) to twentieth-century pedagogies (Moholy-Nagy, Bauhaus) and contemporary the-ories of embodied simulation (Gallese, Rizzolatti), showing how architecture is ex-perienced through bodily mimicry, affective resonance, and sensory participation. The second part situates these insights within neo-phenomenology and atmos-pherology (Schmitz, Griffero, Böhme), where atmospheres appear as quasi-objec-tive, spatialized feelings that seize the felt body and structure lived space beyond metric description. Through Zumthor’s design principles and further examples (Le Corbusier’s polychromy; Picon and Ratti’s sensory cartographies), the paper argues that atmospheres can be approached as operative design principles: not fully con-trollable effects, but staged conditions—light, materiality, sound, thresholds, rhythms—through which experience emerges without being predetermined.