The body in the center

Vision and Knowledge

The book starts off its premise by showing how in Western Culture Vision and Knowledge are inextricably linked, and how that recently architects have become too reliant on purely visual readings of Architecture. Actually Architecture and space are appreciated in much deeper ways on many different levels. A plea is made for the other four senses in architecture so much left behind in the modern world by sight. All the other senses are dealt with but perhaps the body and haptic world are most pertinent to the Architectural project.

The Body in The Centre

“I confront the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body onto the facade of the cathedral, where it roams over the mouldings and contours, sensing the size of recesses and projections; my body weight meets the mass of the cathedral door, and my hand grasps the door pull as I enter the dark void behind. I experience myself in the city and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and the body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.”

 

The Task of Architecture

The task of Architecture is to design for the whole human experience, the body and the mind as a totality of senses and existance. Stirring, and beautiful stuff, and this book goes down as a must read.

JUHANI PALLASMAA

The eyes of the skin – ARCHITECTURE AND SENSES

Preface: Steven Holl THIN ICE

„ Throughout our world consumer goods propelled by hyperbolic advertising techniques serve to supplant our consciousness and diffuse our reflective capacity.” In architecture the application of new, digitally supercharged tecniques currently join the hyperbole. With this noisy backround the work of Pallasmaa evokes reflective solitude and resolve – what he has once called ’The architecture of Silence’. I will urge my studnet to read this work  and reflect on ’background noise’. Today the ’depth of our being’ stands on thin ice.”

INTRODUCTION Touching the world

The polemical essay was initially based on personal experiences, views and speculations. I had become increasingly concerned about the bias towards visio, and the suppression of other senses, int he way architecture was conceived, taught and critiqued, and about the consequent disappearance os sensory and sensual qualities from arts and architecture.

..I have learned that our skin is actually capable of distinguishing a number of colours; we do indeed see by our skin.

..ALl the senses, including vision, are extensions of the tactile sense; the senses are specialisations of skin tissue, and all sensory experiences are modes of touching anfód thus related to tactility. Our contact with he world takes place at the boundary line of the self through specialised parts of our enveloping membrane.

Ashley Montagu, anthropologist, based on medical evidence, confirms the promacy of the haptic realm:

„The skin is the oldest anfd the most sensitive of our organs, our first medium of communication, and our most efficient protector..Touch is the parent of our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It is the sense which became differentiated into others, a fact that seems to be recognised int he age-old evaluation of touch as „the mother of senses”.”

..my  body remembers who i am and where i am located int he world. My body truly is the navel of my world, not int he sense of the viewing point of the central perspective, buta s the very locus of reference, memory, imagination and integration.

It is evident that „life-enhancing’ architecture has to address all the senses simultaneously and fuse our image of self with our experience of the world.

A wise architect works with his/her entire body and sense of self.

The computer creates distance between the maker and the object..

We are inside, and outside of the object at the same time. Creatice work calls for a bodily and mental identification, empathy and compassion.

The remarkable factor int he experience of envelopong spatiality, interiority and hapticity is the deliberate suppression of sharp, focused vision.

In fact , there is medical evidence that peripheral vision has a higher priority in our perceptual and mental system.

Peripheral vision integrates us with space, while focused vision pushes us out of the space, making us mere spectators.

’The hands wanto see, eh eyes want to caress.’ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

’The dancer has his ear in his toes.’Friedrich Nietzsche’

’if the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.’ Richard Rorty

’The taste of teh apple…lies int he contact of the fruit with the palate, not int he fruit itself; in a similar way…poetry lies int he meeting of poem and reader, not int he lines of symbols printed ont he pages of s book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.’ Jorge Luis Borges

’How would the painter or poet express anything other then his encounter with the world.’ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

PART1

Vision and Knowledge

Peter Sloterdijk: ’The eyes are the organic prototype of phylosophy..”

Renaissance: the system of the senses was related with the image of the cosmic body: vison was correlated to fire and light, hearing to air, smell to vapour, taste to water, and touch to earth.