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rootedness

Discover the insights and lessons of architect Juhani Pallasmaa

In Rootedness: Reflections for Young Architects, Juhani Pallasmaa delivers an insightful and expansive collection of his most compelling ideas into architecture’s position among arts and culture. Pallasmaa speaks to architecture students and young professionals, discussing each topic with sincerity and openness, suggesting what can be learned from areas of culture beyond the boundaries of familiar professional disciplines. He outlines the growing need for an architecture based in self-awareness, reconnection to the environment, and a sense of ethical responsibility.

Each essay in Rootedness was initially conceived and presented as an educational lecture and has been carefully edited with clarifications, refinements, and valuable expansions. Accompanying sketches by the author emphasize the personal and intimate nature of the essays. The book also includes:

  • Explorations of perception, creative practice, and the need for an ethical stance
  • Thoughts, meditations, and challenges emerging from the author’s search for identity and purpose in his architectural work
  • A wealth of references within the essays, as well as recommendations for books and films from which readers may draw further inspiration

Designed for students of architecture at any age, Rootedness: Reflections for Young Architects will also inspire professional architects, designers, and those in other creative professions.

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Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

WALKING IN THE FOREST: Editor’s Foreword

References

PROLOGUE: In the Wake of Rilke's

Letters to a Young Poet

References

1 LEARNING TO BE: Selfhood, Friendships, and the World

References

2 THE SPACE OF IMAGINATION: Emotion, Memory, and the Imagination

References

3 EMBODIED THINKING: Mind, Thought, and Hand

References

4 SHARED IDENTITIES: Empathy, Compassion, and Collaboration

References

5 TOUCHING THE WORLD: Hapticity, Intimacy and the Existential Sense

References

6 DWELLING IN TIME: Tradition, Newness, and Innovation

References

7 SENSORY THINKING: Peripheral Attention, Vagueness, and Uncertainty

References

8 THE ART OF LEARNING: Learning, Unlearning, and Forgetting

References

EPILOGUE: A Confession

References

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER LEARNING: Books and Films

SKETCHES

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

WALKING IN THE FOREST: Editor’s Foreword

PROLOGUE: In the Wake of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet

Begin Reading

EPILOGUE: A Confession

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER LEARNING: Books and Films

SKETCHES

End User License Agreement

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rootedness

reflections for young architects

 

JUHANI PALLASMAAPeter MacKeith, Editor

 

 

 

 

This edition first published 2024

© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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The right of Juhani Pallasmaa to be identified as the author of this work and the right of Peter MacKeith to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Applied for:

Hardback ISBN: 9781394217052

Cover Design: Wiley

WALKING IN THE FORESTEditor’s Foreword

The origins of this book are rooted in both the relative immediacy of the last five years and in the superlative lifelong experience of its author – Juhani Pallasmaa.

I first asked Juhani to consider joining the faculty at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, University of Arkansas as a visiting professor in 2017; we were able to formalize the necessary arrangements for the spring of 2018, when he arrived in Fayetteville as the Fay Jones School’s distinguished visiting professor in architecture and design for the semester.

As Juhani describes in the Introduction, in asking him to teach within the school’s interdisciplinary first‐year curriculum, I had suggested that he might consider the stance, if not the template, of Rainer Maria Rilke’s small book, Letters to a Young Poet, through a series of lectures – presented almost as confiding letters – to the beginning students, addressing the newly arrived students’ outlooks and perspectives on architecture and design. Juhani undertook this role and responsibility with typical commitment and vigor, and I remember well how he sat at a small table in the front of the school’s lecture hall each week during the term, reading the texts now published here. I also remember that the lectures soon became crowded with students from the upper years and faculty from all programs – suddenly everyone understood themselves as a beginning student and needed a seat!

From the start, we had discussed the conversion of these lectures into a small book itself, and this is now that publication, emerging out of a simultaneously slowed and intense period of time and history – pandemic, recession, political crisis, and war. To remember the spring of 2018 can seem dreamlike in retrospect.

But the vibrancy of those lectures now resonates in the printed pages. For the origins, motivations and expressions of this book are equally rooted in the long lived experience of its author, and these roots are deeper, more substantial, and durable – certainly capable of bridging across the interval between their initial spoken presentation and their printed quality now. Indeed, this “rootedness” – the necessary centering of identity and awareness, of sensitivity and intellect, to act creatively and responsibly in architecture and the arts – is precisely the central proposition of the author, as relevant to the curious reader now as it was to beginning student in 2018. In this sense, the book is both autobiographical and educational, both confession and primer, and the dual qualities intertwine and mutually reinforce one another for a superlative richness and density.

To continue further would be to presume upon the author, but I will suggest one last extended framework for reading these reflections. As cosmopolitan and well‐traveled as Juhani Pallasmaa is, he is utterly rooted in his Finnish homeland, physically, emotionally, and metaphorically. As he described to me in a published interview in 2005, “My travels have strengthened my appreciation of individuals and achievements of other cultures, on all continents, but also reinforced my deep mental connection with the Nordic landscape. I can say sincerely that the more I have traveled, the more attached I feel to the Finnish natural and cultural soil. Often, in these fantastic destinations, before I fall asleep, I have an image of a view out onto a lake or deep into the Finnish forest.”1

To be clear, what the reader will not encounter here in Rootedness is a guide to the Finnish forest or an advocacy of “an architecture of the forest.” Rather, I suggest that what the reader may encounter in reading is the conceptual, or mental, experience of walking in the forest, of a slowed sense of time, of invigorated breathing, of a deliberate movement (intellectually and emotionally) across, and through a diverse and dense terrain, oriented by significant recurring trees and boulders, and the cosmological elements of the sun, moon, or stars overhead – or, in the case of this book, oriented by significant, recurring intellectual companions and literary references, and the cosmological elements of time, history, human nature (including our mortality), and our presence in the universe.

This is a deep Finnish dreamworld, mythical perhaps, but one from which Juhani’s sensibilities and writings emerge, one simultaneously geographical, cultural, intellectual, and emotional, and one meriting a further degree of larger exploration. The vision of Finland as an “Ultima Thule” – an end of the world – populates the historical and cultural imagination. Indeed, the perception and valuation of the Finnish wilderness as a virtuous periphery, and as a source for artistic and cultural renewal, even as a source of national identity, extends well back into European history.

Undeniably, the Finnish forest wilderness was the source for artistic and cultural renewal for the developing cultural (and ultimately national) identity of the Finnish people, as these emerged throughout the nineteenth century and led to a proud declaration of the independent nation‐state in 1917. But the forest wilderness has been the same deep resource of identity for so many Finnish artists, architects, composers, and writers from the nineteenth century until the present day.

In this way, Pallasmaa’s beckoning to walk with him in the forest of identity – a sylvan experience both personal and cultural – has its antecedents and companions. For instance, as recorded in the journals of Juhani Aho, the nineteenth‐century Finnish author and journalist, Finnish artists of that time found a forest of stilled light and suspended time. In the summer of 1892, Aho undertook an excursion to the eastern Finnish region of Karelia, together with his wife Venny Soldan and the painter Eero Järnefelt. In search of the sources of the emerging Finnish identity in the forested landscapes of the region – the original landscapes of the Finnish myth‐epic poem The Kalevala – Aho recorded his impressions in travel books and also in written vignettes, short intense evocations of place and mood he entitled Lastuja (“shavings”).

One of Aho’s vignettes, “Synkän korven sydämeen (Into the Heart of a Gloomy Deep Forest),” is a poetic confession from the excursion subtitled “Luonnonkuvauksia Raja‐Karjalasta (Nature Descriptions from Borderland Karelia).” In the depths of the Karelian forest, Aho describes a shift in the travelers’ experience of time, a palpable slowing of its passage: “Time seems to lose its measure, the journey along this pine barren seems to have been indefinitely long, even though it has not yet last a full hour. And I wonder how long we may have been sitting here resting, although not yet five minutes have elapsed since we placed ourselves here.”2

If this expansion of duration in the forest, this slowing of boreal time, into a “measureless” sensation is an absolute condition of our experience of nature, as Aho suggests in 1892, here I suggest to the contemporary reader of the following pages of Rootedness: Reflections for Young Architects that this is the absolute condition of the experience of this book.

Allow yourself, then, to enter this forest of thought, reflection, and expression that is this book, to walk alongside the author for a chapter, to encounter over the course of reading one chapter, and then another, and then another, recurring figures inhabiting that landscape – Joseph Brodsky, for instance, Alvar Aalto, of course, Groucho Marx, surprisingly, and unsurprisingly, Rilke himself. As well, the author walks in spiraling paths, tracing and retracing his steps, his patterns of thought, and his propositions in deliberate recurrence.

There is a density to this forest of thought, to be sure; in Finnish, this quality is understood as “tiiveys,” a condensation as much of emotion as it is of material. And there is an animated quality of lived experience expressed in every sentence and word in that spirit; in Finnish, this qualitative understanding is understood as “elämys.” Elämys: the Finnish word translates into English as “experience,” but immediately loses its depth and potency in the translation. The Finnish word connotes an enriched understanding of experience – of a space or place, of a moment in time – one that is not merely enjoyable in a directly physical way, or esthetic in a cognitive awareness of forms and colors, but occurs to a profound depth of suspended time and emotional resonance. For an architect, such an experience often compels an immediate desire to know how such a place was constructed, then designed, and then conceived; to seek out how such a phenomenon was reified, and perhaps, in time, to be afforded the opportunity to evoke a similar depth of experience in others through their own designed construction. It is this experience I wish also for the reader of Rootedness, one both of the forest and in the forest.

As a tangible coda to these propositions, the architect’s most recent constructed work may be illustrative. In summer, 2023, in central Finland, in forested peatlands of Pehkusuo, near the Kuivajärvi Lake, at the Hyytiälä Forestry Field Station of the University of Helsinki, where scientific research related to forest management and climate change is advanced, Pallasmaa centered an artistic work in the landscape of his design entitled “After the Rain.” Part of “Periferia/Periphery,” a commissioned group exhibition at the field station, “After the Rain” is a 36 m diameter circle configured along its circumference every 30° by 12 thin vertical steel rods glowing in the colors of the spectrum. “A rainbow drawn into a circle,” as Pallasmaa describes it, in effect a drawing directly into nature, gently but distinctly marking the earth and the surrounding forest, registering the presence of light, wind, and the nearby lake waters, and intensifying the understanding of the specific place and its geographical history. “Twelve is the dividing line of the clock, calendar and compass,” Pallasmaa relates, “and through this, the work becomes a dimension of place and time. The blue color comes to the north, so the work can be used as a giant compass.”3

Walk with Juhani Pallasmaa; with this sense of time, with this sense of orientation, enter the forest that is Rootedness: Reflections for Young Architects.

Editor’s Acknowledgements

Gratitude and appreciation must be given to Katri Sola, who assisted in the production of the manuscript and in the preparation of the images for this book, and to the editorial and production team at Wiley for their commitment, stamina, sensitivity, and patience.

Gratitude, appreciation, and affection must be given to Juhani Pallasmaa for the privilege of the editorial role, for the opportunity to collaborate once again, and for the abiding friendship of more than 30 years.

References

1

Juhani Pallasmaa,

Encounters: Essays in Architecture

, Peter MacKeith, ed. (Helsinki: Rakennustieto, 2005), 21.

2

Heikki Kirkinen and Hannes Sihvo,

The Kalevala: An Epic of Finland and All Mankind

(Helsinki: The Finnish‐American Cultural Center/The League of Finnish‐American Societies, 1985), 44.

3

“ Maan Korvessa (In the heart of the land),” Pia Parkkinen, Culture Section, Helsingin Sanomat, June 30, 2023 (translation the author).

PROLOGUEIn the Wake of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet

In the spring of 2018, as I was beginning to think about the contents of my agreed teaching assignment at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the dean of the school, Professor Peter MacKeith, brought to me in Helsinki the little book entitled Letters to a Young Poet.1 These famous letters were written by Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the greatest poets of the modern era, who was born in 1875 and died of leukemia at the young age of 51 in 1926.

“Why don't you approach your lectures to our students through something like this?” my friend suggested to me. As I knew the book very well, I first felt a slight shiver through my body. I have often spoken about the book to students across the world as well as about many other writings by its author (in fact, I already had three copies of the book in my library: German, English, and Finnish). In other lectures and throughout my writings, I have spoken often of Rilke's poetry and of his extensive poetic correspondence with numerous people. Rilke's superb book on the French sculptor‐genius Auguste Rodin2 (Rilke actually worked as the secretary of the artist, whom he had greatly admired, in 1905–1906) and his stunning, quasi‐autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge3 have been essential references for me.

For me, Rilke has been one of the most amazing creative artists in modern history and culture, and the thought of trying to do anything echoing his writings felt like blasphemy. Yet, after a few minutes my second reaction was: “Juhani, you will be 82 later this year, and if you do not now dare to do anything that is suggested to you, you will never be able to do it.” After all, Rilke was only 27 (55 years younger than I was at the time of my doubt) when he wrote the first one of his letters to Franz Xaver Kappus, the aspiring young poet. I also remembered a line from Rilke's eighth letter in their correspondence: “[…] Only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence.”4

In fact, this would not be the first time that I encountered and engaged with Rilke in a teaching situation. In 2016, I led a week‐long workshop at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia,5 in which I gave my students the assignment to design the burial ceremony and urn of Rilke on the Duino Coast on the northern Adriatic Sea near Slovenia. The poet had stayed in the Duino Castle in 1910 for some time as the guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, and there he began to write his poetic ten‐part masterpiece The Duino Elegies,6 which was ultimately published in 1923. For the studio exercise, two other artists were given as optional “clients” to the students: Giorgio Morandi, the great painter of metaphysical still‐lifes, and Alberto Giacometti, the existentialist Swiss–French sculptor.

As I thought more on the possibility, it occurred to me just how much of a constant companion Rilke has been for me. On that realization, I remembered that several years ago my friend Rax Rinnekangas – the Finnish writer, photographer, and filmmaker – had published a small book entitled Metamorphoses: a soliloquy to Rainer Maria Rilke.7 As my friend describes the initial inspiration, he had stayed a night in a humble hotel in the historic Spanish town of Ronda, and, as he woke up in the morning, he noticed a small framed black‐and‐white portrait photograph on the wall opposite his bed and recognized it as the poet Rilke. He went down to the reception to ask why they had a photograph of the famous poet in the hotel room. The hotel concierge informed my friend that the poet had stayed in that room during 1912–1913, and my friend felt so intrigued by the coincidence of sleeping in the same bed as one of his literary idols that he decided to write a series of letters to Rilke, 82 years after the poet's premature death.

This is a touching example of how a great artist may live among us indefinitely, without boundaries. In this way, it makes perfect sense to start a correspondence with a person who is not physically among us, but who is most vividly present through his works. “An artist is worth a thousand centuries,” writes Paul Valéry, another master poet whom Rilke admired.8 Great artistic works – poems and novels as well as material works such as paintings, sculptures, and buildings – maintain their eternal sense of newness and freshness, and, through them, we can develop emotionally vivid relationships with our favorite artists, even though they might have lived hundreds of years ago. Reading a great novel with intense focus or gazing with equal intensity at a masterpiece of painting brings the author or artist back to life, standing next to the reader and viewer. Studying Vermeer's painting, View of Delft (1660–1661), alone in the gallery in the Mauritshuis in Delft, as close as the security will allow, I finally felt that I stood next to the Dutch painter, painting “the yellow spot,” the yellow wall that Proust described so vividly in the novel The Captive.

I describe these events related with Rilke as examples of how we might become unexpectedly close to the great men and women artists of the past. With my eight reflections in this book, I wish to promote and stimulate such imaginative relations and encounters. One of the reasons why our sense of time and the layering of culture are flattening and diminishing in our era is that in the modern world “Life is only for the living,” as T.S. Eliot regrets in his poetic masterpiece Four Quartets,9 when, in fact, we should recognize the rich presence of the past in our everyday lives.

I do not intend to follow the themes of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet in these reflections, but I will attempt to talk about architecture with the same sincerity and openness with which Rilke wrote about poetry in his letters to the young man. I will also try to evoke a densely layered consciousness in the histories of the arts, literature, and philosophical thought, and suggest what a young student of architecture and design might learn from areas of culture beyond the boundaries of the professional disciplines of architecture and design. Historical facts, knowledge, or thinking are not isolated atoms in a formless cloud of information, as digitalized bits; on the contrary, they form a dense network of causalities and interactions. This endless interaction and intertwining is crucial in all creative thoughts, and it makes knowledge even seemingly far from one's discipline useful in one's own work.

I wish to create a kind of a forest of thought in which the reader can become happily lost. The side note references are not given to show the extensiveness of my library; my numerous quotes are only intended to leave traces that the readers may follow beyond the contents of these condensed texts. To maintain the initial atmosphere of the lecture hall, I have used only the names of the persons whom I am discussing and/or quoting in the text, with only minimal notation of their profession or time period. Everything in these reflections arises from my 86 years of life experience, more than 60 of those as an architect, from my library of 10,000 books, and from my 106 circumnavigations of the globe (the figure is calculated from my total amount of flying hours; by today's passenger airplanes, one circumnavigation of the globe equals 48 hours of flight time).

And thus, to my dialogue with Rilke: in February 1903, the 27‐year‐old poet, already accomplished and lauded, received a letter from a young German man, Franz Xaver Kappus, who introduced himself as an aspiring poet, and then asked for advice on how to become a poet. (As it happened, Kappus had attended the same military officers school as Rilke, only several years later.) The letter had been in transit to Rilke for several weeks due to his rather mobile life within Europe. However, on February 17th, 1903, Rilke answered the letter of the unknown young man, and this became the first of ten letters that Rilke was to write to Kappus in response to the younger poet's letters during the following five years. Rilke's tenth and last letter was dated in Paris on the day after Christmas in 1908.

This famous correspondence forms the background and resonance for my talks, and I advise my readers to read Letters to a Young Poet and also Rilke's correspondence with his wife. The sculptor Clara Westhof (a number of these letters are on the painter Paul Cézanne10) as well as his letters to others, such as Auguste Rodin and many of his friends, admirers, supporters, and lovers of high esteem.11 Rilke's correspondence in 1926, the last year of his life, with two notable Russian writers – Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva – is also touching because of their mutual admiration.12

Altogether, letters are a special category of literature altogether, and Rilke's small book has many worthy companions, I can recommend the voluminous letters of Anton Chekhov – the Russian writer and playwright (especially the annotated volume format that puts the letters in their historical and social contexts13), the letters of Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo,14 as well as the letters of Paul Cézanne.15 I even wish to highlight the curious correspondence between the poet T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx – the eldest of the legendary Marx Brothers of early cinematic comedy, in Groucho Marx Letters,16 to exemplify how totally different personalities can become friends. A remarkable recent correspondence is the exchange of letters between the authors J.M. Coetzee, the South African Nobel Laureate, and Paul Auster, the Brooklyn‐centered American.17

Due to the intimacy of the literary medium, you can easily place yourself in the role of the recipient and read the letters as if they were addressed to you. In this way, you will never forget the lesson on literary restraint by Anton Chekhov in his letter to Maxim Gorki – a beginning writer at the time: “Your only fault is your lack of restraint and lack of grace. When someone expends the least amount of motion on a given action, that's grace. You tend to expend too much […] Color and expressivity in nature descriptions are achieved through simplicity alone, through simple phrases like ‘the sun sets’, ‘it grows dark’, ‘it began to rain’.”18 One can almost mentally touch the hand of the writer of a personal letter, and begin to ask him or her questions. You might even end up writing letters to your secret mentor – who may no longer be among the living – as my friend Rax was compelled to write to Rilke.

A last note on the recent unexpected reappearances of Rilke for me: after having given the first three of my lectures at the Fay Jones School, I visited a bookshop in Fayetteville with Peter MacKeith, and spotted a book by the biologist Edward O. Wilson, entitled Letters to a Young Scientist,19 wherein Wilson advises the reader on biophilia, “the science and ethics of life.”20

These unexpected encounters exemplify the phenomenon that a deep immersion in a subject will produce echoes, references, and parallels to that subject. This is not magic, although it may seem so: through the immersive process, your attention and eyesight simply become sharper and more focused in the area in which you are engaged, and you begin to recognize and receive connections and resonances that would have otherwise never occurred. While I was working on the manuscript for these lectures and this book, for instance, I received as a gift a book entitled Letter to a Young Architect,21 by the Greek architect Alexandros N. Tombazis. While Tombazis does not mention Rilke and his letters, to my mind the gift was an almost logical result of my immersion in the literature of letters.

Letter‐writing has an important place in my own development as an architect and educator. I have been an eager correspondent for decades, and, in the spring of 2018, I donated my correspondence files of roughly 1000 letters (27 meters of archival shelf space) to the Finnish National Archive. Due to the usual symmetry of correspondence, roughly half of these letters are of my hand. Until the onset of the digital era, I carefully filed my letters alphabetically and chronologically in large binders. A digital print of a careless and hurried contemporary letter, often containing mistakes in spelling and grammar, does not inspire anyone to file them, when compared with carefully worded, typed, and composed letters, not to speak of letters written in beautiful longhand. Such is the hurried and fragmented nature of culture today, increasingly prosaic, or even meaningless, compounded by ever‐increasing amounts of stimuli and entertainment. The architect‐philosopher Paul Virilio observes that “the most important product of today's culture is speed”22; in agreement, I advise my students to resist the insidious erosion of meaning and value that results from haste and carelessness. Secrets and treasures can only be encountered slowly, attentively, and laboriously, and this is part of the value of letters and thinking toward our work through letters.

The overall title of my lectures, “Rootedness,” echoes intentionally the beautiful title of the 1949 book L'Enracinement23 (usually translated in English as “The Need for Roots”) by the French social philosopher, writer, and mystic Simone Weil, who was an activist in the French Resistance during the World War II. The need for rootedness in the world, in culture, and in life, is evident in the contemporary condition of frenetic activity, alienation, and lack of focus.

Working on my nine lectures, I realized that reading Letters to a Young Poet becomes genuinely meaningful only when one knows enough of its writer. In the same way, I thought to begin my series of lectures by introducing myself and my work as an architect to my audience. In all cases, the background of the writer provides a distinct echo to the literary message, although many writers advise their readers to believe in the text, not the writer. As the Czech writer Milan Kundera argues, books are always wiser than their writers because they arise from “the wisdom of the novel.”24 In my view, there is a similar “wisdom of architecture” that we should identify and heed. All great pieces of architecture are surely “wiser” than their designers, as true creative work always reaches something beyond the conscious grasp and understanding of its maker. Essentially, studying architecture is learning this secret wisdom of the art form and feeling at ease with that important wisdom.

As I have grown to live my life as an architect, I have grown to experience the world through an architect's eyes, sensibilities, and mindset. In the first of my lectures in Fayetteville, I presented my design work as an architect‐designer in a survey entitled “Thought and Form: Twelve Themes in my Work.” These themes are not a program or a preconception: I have simply noticed that I have returned repeatedly to certain themes, which are part of my persona and history, or the way I am related with my world. In 2011, I closed the design activities of my office in Helsinki after having finalized my last architectural project in Lapland – the Rovaniemi Art Museum and Concert Hall called Korundi. After that date, I have only written, lectured, taught, and participated in competition juries in different countries. While I may have changed my designer profession to writing, in truth, this is now simply the best means for me to continue my curiosity for and interest in the mysteries of the world and art.

In this book format of my original 2018 lectures, the basic structure and contents of the lectures have been maintained, but the manuscripts and subsequent editing process has allowed for clarifications, refinements, and slight expansions. As the original introductory survey lecture of my architectural work consisted of more than one hundred and fifty paired images – too many to be included in this book – and as my writings also arise from my experiences as a designer, I decided to replace that visual introduction to my design work with a personal confession on my work as a writer at the end of these chapters as a final piece. That final reflection is provided here as an epilogue entitled “A Confession.” This personal approach reflects the fact that I have not studied philosophy academically, but have come to my understandings and observations of this most important way of “being in the world” through experience, reading, close observation, and shared dialogues over the course of life. Rootedness is a correspondence, then, with students and with Rilke, but also with my past, present, and future.

References

1

Rainer Maria Rilke,

Letters to a Young Poet

,

transl. by M.D. Herter Norton (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1934), reissued 1993.

2

Rainer Maria Rilke,

Rodin

(New York: Archipelago Books, 2004).

3

Rainer Maria Rilke,

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

(New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992).

4

Rainer Maria Rilke,

Letters to a Young Poet

, op.cit., 68.

5

See, Juhani Pallasmaa,

One Week Workshop, Burial Urn for an Artist

, Workshop Report

, Aleš Vodopivec and Klara Bonine, eds. (Ljubljana: University of Ljubljana, 2015).

6

Rainer Maria Rilke,

Duino Elegies

, transl. by David Young (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978).

7

Rax Rinnekangas,

Muodonmuutos: yksinpuhelu Rainer Maria Rilkelle

[Metamorphosis: soliloquy with Rainer Maria Rilke] (Helsinki: Lurra Editions, 2006). Rilke lived in the La Reina Victoria Hotel in Ronda for three months in the winter 1912–13. Rinnekangas has also made a film

Luciferin viimeinen elämä

[The last life of Lucifer], 2013, which has numerous references to and quotes from Rilke.

8

Paul Valéry,

Dialogues

, trans. William McCausland Stewart (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), XIII.

9

T. S. Eliot,

Four Quartets

(London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1944, 2001).

10

Rainer Maria Rilke,

Letters on Cézanne

, Clara Rilke, ed. (New York: North Point Press, 1985).

11

Letters of

Rainer Maria Rilke (W. W. Norton & Company, 1969).

12

Letters Summer 1926: Boris Pasternak

,

Marina Tsvetaeva, Rainer Maria Rilke

(New York: New Review of Books, 2001).

13

Anton Chekhov,

Letters of Anto

n

Chekhov