Architecture Encompasses All the Senses–A Book Review
As architects, we (I don’t know if I can call myself that quite yet) recognize the fact that architecture is more than just visual stimulus. Architecture enhances all the sense and combines the sensual experience to form a memorable recollection of the space. Whether the space is confining, inspiring, frightening, or depressing, architecture is used in a way to elevate our human experience.
This post is to recommend a book I hope you’ve already heard of: Juhani Pallasmaa‘s The Eyes of the Skin. Don’t judge a book by the cover–it is not a Renaissance medical journal. What it is is a fabulously written and inspiring book of what he thinks is great sensual architecture–and how our senses fueled by the architecture amplify our experience.
If you have read it, I would like to know what you think. He claims that modern buildings today mainly alienate the senses besides visual satisfaction. Flashy architecture, he says, with abstract angles and reflective glass, make buildings become withdrawn from the epitome of humanity. What do you think?
Despite this argument, his writing about sensual experience is very inspiring and philosophical in nature and I highly recommend reading it.
I will leave you with a quote from him:
“Architecture enables us to perceive and understand the
dialectics of permanence and change, to settle ourselves in the world, and to place ourselves in the continuum of culture and time. In its way of representing and structuring action and power, societal and cultural order, interaction and separation, identity and memory, architecture is engaged with fundamental existential questions…our domicile becomes integrated with our self-identity; it becomes part of our own body and being.”
I don’t have the book but read enough from Amazon’s preview pages to get a sense of what it’s about along with your quote. (By the way, Juhani Pallasmaa is a “he” not that it’s of any real importance.)
Your quote from his book is an important one. Architecture is far more than a visual image. As a manifestation of self it necessarily must include all the senses. Where I may disagree with Pallasmaa based on my brief scan of his book of his book is with what seems to be an intellectual bias against vision.
An emphasis on “being” does not negate the eyes as being a portal to the soul…to self. On the other hand, “self” is at the center of all of who we are and accessible through all the senses, senses that as he points out, can and have been downplayed if not anesthetized.
Reading some of his background it appears to me that having come from a rigidly intellectual view of architecture with all its biases typical of dogmas, he perhaps overcompensated in the other direction.
Anyway thanks for the thought provoking post.
(Oops about the gender! I have no idea why I just assumed Juhani was a girls name!)
But interesting points you made. I would agree with you that I think he is being a bit too radical with his dislike of ocular dominance. Vision is a very important and main aspect of architecture. If we didn’t have vision, architecture would almost be unnecessary…but that’s different topic in itself.. what would architecture be without vision?