Okay...but how does it make you feel?

 "The engagement with ecological concerns is contemporary architecture's most direct path to political effect, and this performance largely depends on the envelope's design" (Alejandro Zaera Polo The Politics of the Envelope). 

"Quality in architecture does not - not to me anyway - mean inclusion in architectural guides or histories of architecture...quality architecture to me is when a building moves me" (Peter Zumthor Atmospheres). 

When truly thinking about architecture, seeing it and being in its space, it is truly hard to not think about the envelope. There are so many examples of buildings that do not have good envelopes that make me cringe every time I walk in, but go in anyways. Target, Walmart, the doctors office, the mall, etc. But, the major question remains, how can we make the envelope's more about the atmosphere of the program both inside and outside? When I read these two quotes I had this exact question. 

Buildings affect the world's environment. No matter how much we don't want to hear that, they do. People also affect the world's environment in a way that they judge what it is they see. Is there a way to combine these two effects into one central meaning? 

I believe that Urban design becomes the link between the building envelope, public/private spaces, and the street (people move in cars everyday and ooo and ahh at all types of buildings they pass along the way). Urban design allows us to design in a way that is ecological but also equitable. Not to say that architect's are Urban designers, because I can assure you we are not. However, to be able to think in such a way about the building envelope that it does not stop at the architecture, the architecture continues past the front door, through the sidewalk, onto the street and into people's minds as they see it. 

There is only one experience of architecture that has ever truly done this for me, and that was of more Urban design than architecture, the 9/11 memorial in New York City. It truly feels like a mourning, but also an atmosphere of peace and tranquility. There are many pieces of architecture that have wowed me, but none that have moved me like that piece and I think it is beyond the architecture in the fact that it is a whole corner block, it engages the street as cars slow around the edges, and it allows you to psychologically be at peace while in the middle of one of the loudest cities in the U.S. Why can't all architecture have this impact?

"We perceive atmosphere through our emotional sensibility - a form of perception that works incredibly quickly, and which we humans evidently need to help us survive" (Peter Zumthor Atmospheres).