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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
THE EYES OF THE SKIN
Explore the relationship between architecture and the sensory experience with the fourth edition of this groundbreaking work
First published in 1996, The Eyes of the Skin is a classic of architectural theory. It asks the far-reaching question why, when there are five senses, is one single sense—sight—so predominant in architectural culture and design? With the ascendancy of the digital and the all-pervasive use of the image electronically, the subject is all the more pressing and topical since the first edition’s publication. Juhani Pallasmaa argues that the suppression of the other four sensory realms has led to the overall impoverishment of our built environment, often diminishing the emphasis on the spatial experience of a building and architecture’s ability to inspire, engage and be wholly life enhancing.
For a student reading this text for the first time, The Eyes of the Skin is a revelation. It provides a fresh, compelling insight into architectural culture which continues to inspire more than a quarter-century after its initial publication.
The fourth edition of The Eyes of the Skin also features:
- The author’s latest views on the emphasis of place, unfocused perception and existential experience
- Updates and clarifications throughout, to reinforce how our sense of self in the world remains our most important sense with the greatest architectural impact
- An updated Foreword that touches on the current understanding of the seminal importance of the existential sense
The Eyes of the Skin is a must-read for all architecture students, who will find its insights transformative.
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Table of Contents
COVER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
FOREWORD: THIN ICE
Notes
INTRODUCTION: TOUCHING THE WORLD
Notes
PART
ONE
Vision and Knowledge
Critics of Ocularcentrism
The Narcissistic and Nihilistic Eye
Oral Versus Visual Space
Retinal Architecture and the Loss of Plasticity
An Architecture of Visual Images
Materiality and Time
The Rejection of Alberti’s Window
A New Vision and Sensory Balance
Notes
PART
TWO
The Body in the Centre
Multi-Sensory Experience
The Significance of the Shadow
Acoustic Intimacy
Silence, Time and Solitude
Spaces of Scent
The Shape of Touch
The Taste of Stone
Images of Muscle and Bone
Images of Action
Bodily Identification
Mimesis of the Body
Spaces of Memory and Imagination
An Architecture of the Senses
The Task of Architecture
Notes
A DOOR HANDLE, A HANDSHAKE
Apertures
Poetics
Notes
INDEX
PICTURE
CREDITS
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Guide
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword: Thin Ice
Introduction: Touching the World
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Index
Picture Credits
End User License Agreement
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JUHANI PALLASMAA
THE EYES OF THE SKIN
ARCHITECTURE AND THE SENSES
FOURTH EDITION
This edition first published 2024© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Edition History: John Wiley & Sons Ltd (3e, 2012)
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The right of Juhani Pallasmaa to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pallasmaa, Juhani, author.
Title: The eyes of the skin : architecture and the senses / Juhani Pallasmaa.
Description: Fourth edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2024. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023034968 (print) | LCCN 2023034969 (ebook) | ISBN 9781394200672 (cloth) | ISBN 9781394200696 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781394200689 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Architecture—Philosophy. | Senses and sensation in architecture.
Classification: LCC NA2500 .P35 2024 (print) | LCC NA2500 (ebook) | DDC 720.1—dc23/eng/20231206
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034968
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034969
Cover Design and Image: Wiley
THIN ICESTEVEN HOLL
Foreword
When I sat down to write these notes in rainy New York City, thinking of the fresh white snow which had just fallen in Helsinki and the early thin ice, I remembered stories of Finland’s cold winter, where every year short-cut roads are improvised across the thickly frozen north lakes. Months later as the ice begins to thin, someone will take the gamble to drive across the lake and crash through. I imagine the last look out over white ice cracks spread by cold black water rising up inside the sinking car. Finland’s is a tragic and mysterious beauty.
Juhani Pallasmaa and I first began to share thoughts about the phenomenology of architecture during my first visit to Finland for the 5th Alvar Aalto Symposium in Jyväskylä in August 1991.
In October 1992, we met again in Helsinki when I was there to work on the competition for the Museum of Contemporary Art. I remember a conversation about Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writings as they might be interpreted or directed towards spatial sequence, texture, material and light, experienced in architecture. I recall this conversation took place over lunch below decks in a huge wooden boat anchored in the Helsinki harbour. The steam rose in curls above the vegetable soup as the boat rocked slightly in the partially frozen harbour. I have experienced the architecture of Juhani Pallasmaa, from his wonderful museum additions at Rovaniemi to his wooden summerhouse on a remarkable little stone island in the Turku Archipelago in southwestern Finland. The way spaces feel, the sound and smell of these places, has equal weight to the way things look. Pallasmaa is not just a theoretician; he is a brilliant architect of phenomenological insight. He practises the unanalysable architecture of the senses whose phenomenal properties concretise his writings towards a philosophy of architecture.
In 1993, following an invitation from Toshio Nakamura, we worked together with Alberto Pérez-Gómez to produce the book Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture.1 Several years later the publishers, A+U, chose to republish this little book, finding its arguments proved important to other architects.
Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin, which grew out of Questions of Perception, is a tighter, clearer argument for the crucial phenomenological dimensions of human experience in architecture. Not since the Danish architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture (1959) has there been such a succinct and clear text which could serve students and architects at this critical time in the development of 21st-century architecture.2
Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, the book he was writing when he died, contains an astonishing chapter: ‘The Intertwining – The Chiasm’. (It was, in fact, the source of the name I gave my 1992 competition entry for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki – Chiasm was changed to Kiasma, there being no ‘C’ in Finnish.) In the chapter’s text on the ‘Horizon of Things’, Merleau-Ponty wrote: ‘No more than are the sky or the earth is the horizon a collection of things held together, or a class name, or a logical possibility of conception, or a system of “potentiality of consciousness”: it is a new type of being, a being by porosity, pregnancy, or generality …’.3
In the second decade of the 21st century, these thoughts go beyond the horizon and ‘beneath the skin’. 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 techniques currently joins the hyperbole. With this noisy background, the work of Pallasmaa evokes reflective solitude and resolve – what he has once called ‘The Architecture of Silence’. I will urge my students to read this work and reflect on ‘background noise’. Today, the ‘depth of our being’ stands on thin ice.
Notes
1
Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez‐Gómez,
Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture
,
Special Edition, A+U Publishing (Tokyo), July 1994.
2
Steen Eiler Rasmussen,
Experiencing Architecture
, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1959.
3
Maurice Merleau‐Ponty,
The Visible and the Invisible
, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1968, pp 148–9.
TOUCHING THE WORLDJUHANI PALLASMAA
Introduction
My little book The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses was first published in 1996 in the ‘Polemics’ series of Academy Editions, London. The editors of the series invited me to write an extended essay of 32 pages on a subject matter that I found pertinent in the architectural discourse of the time.
The second part of the manuscript took its basic ideas from an essay entitled ‘An Architecture of the Seven Senses’, published in the July 1994 special edition of A+U entitled Questions of Perception, a publication on Steven Holl’s architectural work, which also included essays by Holl himself and Alberto Pérez-Gómez. A somewhat later lecture of mine given in a seminar on architectural phenomenology at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in June 1995, where the three writers of Questions of Perception presented lectures, provided the basic arguments and references for the first part of this book.
Somewhat to my surprise, the humble book was received very positively, and it became required reading in architectural theory courses in numerous schools of architecture around the world.
The polemical essay was initially based on my personal experiences, views and speculations. I had simply become increasingly concerned about the dominance of vision and the suppression of other senses in the way architecture was taught, conceived and critiqued, and the consequent disappearance of sensory and sensual qualities from architecture.
As this new edition was first discussed between the publisher and myself, I was hesitant to expand my text of the original edition, as I consider the original edition a historical document, which is grounded in the understanding and thinking of the senses at the time the book was written, more than a quarter of a century ago. However, I agreed to make minor corrections and clarifications, which do not alter the original arguments, but make them easier to understand. The additions also intentionally expand the original arguments beyond the senses to the existential sphere of architecture.
During the years since I wrote the book, interest in the significance of the senses, both philosophically and in terms of experiencing, teaching and making architecture, has grown significantly. My assumptions about the role of the body as the locus of perception, thought and consciousness, as well as about the significance of the senses in articulating, storing and processing sensory responses and thoughts, have been strengthened and confirmed by other writers. In particular, philosophical investigations on human embodiment, experience and atmospheres, as well as recent neurological research on the senses, have provided support for my assumptions.
In the 28 years since the first publication of the book, my thinking has deepened and widened. For instance, I have understood the significance of atmospheres in our multisensory experiences and evaluations of environments and architecture.
With the choice of the title ‘The Eyes of the Skin’, I wished to express the significance of the tactile sense for our experience and understanding of the world, but I also intended to create a conceptual short circuit between the dominant sense of vision and the suppressed sense modality of touch. Later, in a conversation with the American light artist, James Turrell, I learned that our skin is capable of distinguishing a number of colours; we actually do see by our skin.1
The significance of the tactile sense in human life has become increasingly evident. The view of Ashley Montagu, the anthropologist, based on medical evidence, confirms the primacy of the haptic realm:
[The skin] is the oldest and the most sensitive of our organs, our first medium of communication, and our most efficient protector […] Even the transparent cornea of the eye is overlain by a layer of modified skin […] Touch is the parent of our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It is the sense which became differentiated into the others, a fact that seems to be recognized in the age-old evaluation of touch as ‘the mother of the senses’.2
Touch is the sensory mode which integrates our experiences of the world and of ourselves. Even visual perceptions are fused and integrated into the haptic continuum of the self; my body remembers who I am and how I am located in the world. My body is truly the navel of my world, not in the sense of the viewing point of the central perspective, but as the very locus of reference, memory, imagination and integration. All the senses, including vision, are, in a way, extensions of the tactile sense; the senses are specialisations of skin tissue, and all sensory experiences are modes of touching, and thus related to tactility. Our contact with the world takes place at the boundary line of the self through specialised parts of our enveloping membrane. We humans, just as all animals, are extending ourselves into the world through our actions as well as material and mental constructions. As representatives of Homo sapience, our image of self does not stop at the skin, as we relate and extend ourselves in countless ways by means of mobility, technology, materials, culture and beliefs, both scientific and religious.
It is evident that ‘life-enhancing’3 architecture has to address all the senses simultaneously, and help to fuse our image of self with our experience of the world. Architecture is fundamentally a relational art; it relates us with both the intimacies and immensities of the world. The essential mental task of buildings is relational accommodation and integration. They project our human measures and sense of order into the measureless and meaningless natural space. Architecture does not make us inhabit worlds of mere fabrication and fantasy; it articulates the experience of our being-in-the-world and strengthens our sense of reality and self. Most importantly, it projects experiential meaning to our existence in the world.
The sense of self, strengthened by art and architecture, also permits us to engage fully in the mental dimensions of dream, imagination and desire. Buildings and cities provide the horizon for the understanding and confronting of the human existential condition. Instead of creating mere objects of visual seduction, architecture relates, mediates and projects meanings. The ultimate meaning of any building is beyond architecture; it directs our consciousness back to the world and towards our own sense of self and being. Profound architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete, embodied and spiritual beings. In fact, this is the great function of all meaningful art.
In the experience of art, a peculiar exchange takes place; I lend my emotions and associations to the place, and the place lends me its atmosphere, which entices and emancipates my perceptions and thoughts. An architectural work is not experienced as a series of isolated retinal pictures, but in its full and integrated material, embodied and spiritual essence. It offers pleasurable shapes and surfaces moulded for the touch of the eye and the other senses, but it also incorporates and integrates physical and mental structures, giving our existential experience a strengthened coherence and significance.
In creative work, the artist, craftsman and architect are directly engaged with their bodies and their existential experiences rather than focusing on an external and objectified problem. True artistic works are always relational entities, fusing and integrating our external and internal worlds, our bodily experiences and mental imageries. The message and value of a piece of sculpture or an architectural structure is not in its material existence, but in the poetic experiences and emotions that it mediates of our life world and its meanings.
A wise architect, also, works with his/her entire body and sense of self. While working on a building or an object, the architect is simultaneously engaged in a reverse perspective, his/her self-image, or more precisely, existential experience. In creative work, a powerful identification and projection takes place; the entire bodily and mental constitution of the maker becomes the site of the work. Ludwig Wittgenstein acknowledges the interaction of both philosophical and architectural work with the image of self: ‘Working in philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more a work on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On how one sees things […]’.4
The computer is usually seen as a solely beneficial invention, which liberates human fantasy. I wish to express my serious concern in this respect, at least considering the current role of the computer in education and the design process. Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multisensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey. Design is not merely a rational, technical and performative task; architecture relates us to the course and depth of culture and makes our existence understandable. Architecture helps us give human existence its human as well as metaphysical meaning; we do not dwell only in space, place and time; we also dwell in hidden myths and spirit. Existence and life are not abstractions, and the task of the art of building is to clarify and relate human existence and give it meanings that exceed the mundane.
The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as working with models put the designer in a haptic contact with the object, or space. When drawing, we touch the object and hold it in our hands. In our imagination, the object is simultaneously held in the hand and inside the head, and the imagined and projected physical image is modelled by our embodied imagination. We are inside and outside of the conceived object at the same time. Creative work calls for a bodily and mental identification, empathy and compassion. Recent research on mirror neurons provides an experimental basis for the understanding of the complex processes of embodied simulation.5
Existence and life are not abstractions, and the task of the art of building is to clarify and relate human existence and give it meanings that exceed the mundane.
We tend to think of the sense of vision only as the focused vision. However, the role of peripheral and unfocused vision in our lived experience of the world, as well as in our experience of interiority in the spaces we inhabit, has evoked my interest. A remarkable factor in the experience of enveloping spatiality, interiority and hapticity is the deliberate suppression of sharp, focused vision. This issue has hardly entered the theoretical discourse of architecture as architectural theorising continues to be interested in focused vision, pure and clear form, conscious intentionality and perspectival representation. The very essence of the lived experience is moulded by unconscious haptic imagery and unfocused peripheral vision. Focused vision confronts us with the world, whereas peripheral vision envelops us in ‘the flesh of the world’, to use an expression of Merleau-Ponty. Alongside the critique of the hegemony of vision, we need to reconsider the very essence of sight itself and the essential collaboration of the various sensory realms.
Photographed architectural images are centralised images of focused Gestalt. Yet, the quality of an architectural reality seems to depend fundamentally on peripheral vision, which enfolds the subject in the space. A forest context and richly moulded architectural spaces provide ample stimuli for peripheral vision, and these settings centre us in the very place, both material and experiential. The preconscious perceptual realm, which is experienced outside the sphere of focused vision, seems to be more important existentially than the focused image. In fact, there is medical evidence that peripheral vision has a higher priority in our perceptual and mental system.6
