This book explores the way people participate with the Oslo Opera House, Norway. As an iconic and culture-led building, these different modes of participation reveal the tensions between staged space and individual experience.

Movement, materiality, light, and art are viewed through an atmospheric lens to demonstrate how architecture can shape people’s engagement with, and understanding of, urban space. This book contributes to a growing literatureon atmosphere in relation to our experience of the built environment. In adopting this atmospheric perspective, the book speaks to the concerns of designers, users, and researchers interested in the way contemporary development infuses our cities with the experiential, as a means of developing access, participation, and democracy. It explores the ways in which people experience a building, held up against the claims, intentions, and assumptions that surround it.

The book’s focus on design, participation, and experience, in relation to political ideals, will appeal to architects, planners, and academics concerned with the production of space. Equally, its underlying atmospheric contribution and methodological approach will be of interest to designers, scholars, professionals, and students of ambiance, affect and atmosphere, architecture, city planners and urban developers, human geographies, anthropology, and urban studies.