Climate breakdown demands new ways of thinking, new ways of relating to other human and non-human beings, and therefore new ways of approaching the future. Approaches to the future that adequately account for the climate need to be sufficiently far-reaching to avoid quick-fix solutionism, and sufficiently grounded to avoid unbounded flights of visionary fancy. The climate crisis is a gritty, contested situation that cannot be approached through one means alone. If architecture and spatial practice realise their inherent interdisciplinary potential, they could contribute to forming new modes of spatial relation that have profoundly social and climatic implications. The reverse is equally true: the social, economic, and environmental shifts required will bring new spatial formations which require new spatial practices. This essay explores how futures may be thought of in terms more appropriate to climate. Architects and spatial practitioners are capable of effecting social and ecological change despite their historical implication in the structures and practices of the extractive capitalist system within which they operate. The different projects and practices studied here, from the 1960s to the present, offer ways of thinking about the future that have spatial consequences in the built environment but reach into wider socio-political and ecological realms. What we can take from these practices and projects are lessons in how systemic change must guide design for the future, and how new spatial relations can support this change rather than circumscribe its parameters. As the various practitioners described in this essay prove, subverting systems from within is possible. And from that subversive first step, critical, imaginative, and projective steps can follow.

This article investigates the ideas of New Phenomenology, as developed by Hermann Schmitz. Schmitz distinguishes between the physical body that can be seen and touched, and the felt body that is the place of affective involvement. By locating the felt body as the basis of all human experience, Schmitz radically transcends the division between subject and object in favour of understanding human relations with the world as a question of embodied communication and meaningful situations. Basic principles of philosophical phenomenology, as described by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, are outlined, and New Phenomenology as conceived by Schmitz is presented. The aim is to investigate the relation of human being to the built environment. The Church of St Peter in Klippan designed by Sigurd Lewerentz, the Salk Institute in San Diego designed by Louis Kahn, and the Nordic Pavilion in Venice designed by Sverre Fehn are described, analysed, and discussed through the lens of New Phenomenology. The findings are located in relation to various scholarly writings on phenomenology in architecture, and it is argued that the content of the work of architecture may be emotionally gripped as meaningful presencing in specific situations. It is concluded that – in a world where we desperately need to rethink human relation to the environment in general, and the architect’s relation to building in particular – New Phenomenology can draw attention to human and environment as intrinsically connected. As such, understanding architecture in terms of embodied communication and meaningful situations may be one way to activate environmental awareness.

During the 1620s, when churches throughout Northern Italy were scaling back musical expenditures due to shrinking coffers, the confraternity Misericordia Maggiore continued to lavishly fund music in Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo. In a decade marred by war, austerity, death, famine, and plague, music received robust institutional support. Drawing from new archival research, a picture emerges of the enduring importance of musical life to the Bergamasque community in the face of challenges on multiple fronts. Additionally, Bergamo surfaces as a neglected site of almost unparalleled large-scale musical activity in early Seicento Italy.