The seminar was part of the curriculum for students of liberal arts / communication design and limited to lectures in Italian. In fact, it was very difficult for me to follow the comments of the kind and obliging professor on philosophical, scientific, and cultural approaches to the discussion of aesthetics over the centuries. The insights into the aesthetics-discussion extended from Kant’s Critique of Judgment to more recent discourses, but also shed light on optical phenomena and on pop culture.
To compensate for the linguistic deficit, the professor offered to read, summarize or give a lecture on a German book (‘Atmospheres’ of Gernot Böhm) as oral exam. He also took the subject-specific background into account : So the choice to take Gernot Boehm was a joint decision as his book has (in German-speaking countries) meanwhile gained a certain degree of popularity among architects: he is on the track of the abstract essence of atmosphere, that somehow locates between object and viewer, this certain magical entity, which architecture is all about.
