Juhani Pallasmaa, "Excerpts from The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses"

The architect Juhani Pallasmaa began his career as a “constructivist” in keeping with the dominant aesthetic of Finnish architecture in the 1960s.  This aesthetic  emphasized the self-consciously “modern” rationality and standardization championed by many great theorists of the time such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Le Courbusier, who famously remarked that houses should be designed as “machines for living.”  Although Pallasmaa grew quite accomplished in this austere functionality, his fascination with Japanese culture, together with new insights from a trip to Africa, gradually produced a profound change in the way he thought about buildings.  During this same period he immersed himself in Continental phenomenology, a branch of philosophy that regards ideas as secondary to direct experience. His engagement with phenomenology led him to move beyond the modernist aesthetic toward a deepened understanding of form, no matter what idiom it might assume. He now saw it as the “task of architecture to make visible ‘how the world touches us.”

Architecture, Pallasmaa argues, is never simply a “machine,” but an expression of our most elemental physical and spiritual relations to the world.  At least as important as the aspect of space is the aspect of time because buildings are meant not only to enclose but also to endure beyond our own lives.  Confronted with our physical impermanence, modernism often reacts with terror: it strives for an abstract timelessness that cults us off from the living world by overemphasizing the sense of sight--the sense most removed from the ceaseless flow of temporal experience.  The antidote Pallasmaa prescribes is an architecture that heightens our awareness of being in the here-and-now by appealing to the full range of our senses.  “Materials and surfaces,” he writes, “have a language of their own.  Stone speaks of its distant geological origins, its durability and inherent symbolism of permanence; brick makes one think of earth and fire, gravity and the ageless traditions of construction; bronze evokes the extreme heat of its manufacture, the ancient processes of casting and the passage of time as measured in its patina. . . . These are all materials and surfaces that speak pleasurably of time.”  To speak pleasurably of time is to enjoy it rather than fleeing into lifeless perfection.

In addition to working all his life as a practicing architect, Pallasmaa served as Director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture (1978-1983), a Professor of Architecture at Helsinki University of Technology (1991-97) and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture 1993-96.  He has taught at various universities in Europe, North and South America and Africa, and has received a number of important honors including the Finnish National Architecture Award (1992) and the International Union of Architects´ Award for Architectural Criticism (1999). His books are widely admired across a range of disciplines.

Pallasmaa, Juhani, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester : Wiley-Academy ; Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 14-19, 46-60.

Biographical information drawn from
http://architecture.about.com/od/architectsaz/p/pallasmaa.htm
http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/juhani-pallasmaa/a-selection-of-architectural-works-designed-by-juhani-pallasmaa.html

Links to Explore:

Driveway Square: a description, by Pallasmaa, of one of his projects.

re:place magazine: a review of a public appearance and lecture by Pallasmaa.

Questions for Connecting:

• Pallasmaa's book The Eyes of the Skin, from which these selections were taken, can be understood as a protest against a loss of depth in our awareness of space, which becomes shallow once we overlook the importance of hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Pallasmaa associates this loss of depth with what he calls the "modernist idiom." "It is thought-provoking," he notes, that a "sense of estrangement and detachment is often evoked by the technologically most advanced settings, such as hospitals and airports." His protest against the modern loss of depth is echoed in a different way by Nicholas Carr in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Carr quotes the journalist Bruce Friedman, who complains, "I now have totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print... Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it." Has the Internet really expanded our world, or has it taken an additional step toward the contraction of consciousness that Pallasmaa warns against? And how might the Internet be transformed to make it more richly sensuous?

• If Pallasmaa is troubled by the tyranny of sight, Oliver Sacks is intrigued by the experience of blindness (in his essay "The Mind's Eye"). Though an experienced neurologist, Sacks was quite surprised to learn that the blind can adapt their brains to this condition in remarkably different ways. But he was just as surprised to find "huge variations" in the way that those with sight are able to process visual information. As his research continues, he is forced to conclude that the boundary between sight and the other senses is impossible to define with precision. One "can no longer say of one's mental landscape what is visual, what is auditory, what is image, what is language-they are all fused together and imbued with our own individual perspectives and values." Does Sacks lend support to Pallasmaa's argument? How does he contradict or compliment it?

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