Carsten Friberg is an assistant professor at the Aarhus School of Architecture.

In his research Carsten Friberg is particularly interested in the concept of atmosphere or ambience. He analyses how people affect and are affected by situations, objects, rooms and other people. He focuses especially on the sensory and bodily aspects of concrete situations, for example exploring such questions as

• How can we enhance our sensitivity to the sensory components in a particular situation to understand how we should react to and act with the people we encounter in the situation?
• How can we establish and convey a sense of community with others by means of sensory components (such as objects, body language, and the organisation and interior design of a room)?
• How do we determine whether we have a bodily and sensory rapport with others?

An important dimension in Carsten Friberg’s research is our sense of belonging to cultural communities and the issues of how we feel in the concrete situation and to what extent we share values with the people we encounter.

In recent years, atmosphere has emerged as a specific research topic. Carsten Friberg’s work in this area is particularly related to Gernot Böhme’s efforts to define atmosphere as a key element in aesthetics and to the recent discussions in aesthetics revolving around sensory perception and the body (see for example Richard Shusterman and Mario Perniola). Another area of particular interest is 18th-century aesthetics, for example represented by Baumgarten and Kant. In this regard, the objective is to examine what these older studies of aesthetics can teach us today, particularly with regard to enhancing our sensitivity to cultural products in a broad sense. This is especially relevant with respect to communication. Carsten Friberg seeks to uncover whether aesthetics, as it was articulated in the 18th century on the basis of rhetoric and the Baroque, has a conceptual framework that we can learn from and reuse in our efforts to describe and analyse concepts such as cultural communities, aesthetic communication and aesthetic education.

Carsten Friberg gives lectures and workshops for bachelor and master’s students at the Aarhus School of Architecture, especially within the subject areas of aesthetics, atmosphere and architecture, and design theory. He also teaches Ph.D. scholars in a basic graduate school course on aesthetics and the theory of science.
Carsten Friberg has a cand.phil. degree from Odense University (now the University of Southern Denmark) in 1994. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Copenhagen in 2004 with the dissertation Æstetiske erfaringer – Filosofiske betragtninger af den moderne kultur (Aesthetic experiences – Philosophical observations of modern culture).