La ville comme "Stimmungslandschaft"

This thesis analyses the city of Buenos Aires as a lived space in its historical context, based on my childhood memories. It characterizes the specific Stimmung that colours the urban and suburban spaces of Buenos Aires in the XIXth and XXth century. I achieve this by the use of the city's various representations, such as architecture, literature, painting, photography, sculpture, cinematography, music, etc. The feelings these sources bring allow me to capture not only how the city was viewed, but also the emotional effects it created. I start from the hypothesis that the city, as a lived space, is loaded with emotions and arouses specific feelings. This idea can be expressed by the term urban Stimmung that is a category of the urban feeling. The latter is captured in the representations of the city. The objective of this thesis is to conduct a study focused on the emotional effects of the urban form, in particular the Stimmung it evokes. The thesis consists of five parts: The first chapter, The memories of childhood, is a description of my experiences in relation to the urban and suburban spaces of the city. This allows me to capture the particular Stimmung that influences these two types of spaces. The second chapter, What we learn from the history of Buenos Aires, presents the socio-cultural context of the urban form of Buenos Aires. We use this knowledge to better define and understand the fundaments of the feelings observed in the different parts of the city. The third and the fourth chapters, The urban and suburban world of Buenos Aires, are divided into different sub-chapters. Each of them characterizes a particular feeling related to a specific area of the city. Finally, in the last chapter, The inner world, I propose a classification of some of the inner spaces of Buenos Aires in order to specify the particular Stimmung that characterizes these spaces in their relation to the outer spaces. In this way I give a broader impression of the Stimmungslandschaft of Buenos Aires. Through the analysis of the urban Stimmung of Buenos Aires, this work draws attention to the integration of the emotional aspects in the process of architectural design.