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

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading:

1. Re-read the epigraphs that begin Pallasmaa’s selection. What themes, ideas, and implications connect them to one another? Clearly, he is using them to make a point about the senses and experience, but why does he choose five instead of one? What does the activity of putting them together tell us about the way he wants us to read? And how does it prepare us for what follows in the rest of the selection? What is the message of Pallasmaa’s style—why does his writing often feel more like poetry than ordinary prose?

2. What does Pallasmaa mean when he refers to the “pathology of everyday architecture”? In what ways does that pathology arise from our “ocular-centrism”—our over-dependence on the visual? Pallasmaa follows up “Vision and Knowledge” with sections that challenge the “hegemony” of the eye. First he explores a different way of seeing, one that includes shadows as well as light. Then he considers the experience of sound, of scent, of touch, and even of taste in the built environment. In what ways does each section help to correct the pathology he describes initially?

3. Using Google Images, find some examples of the architecture that Pallasmaa celebrates: Luis Barragan’s many buildings, Alvar Aalto’s Saynatsalo Town Hall or Paimio Sanatorium, the Great Peristyle at Karnak, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Konstantin Melnikov’s Melnikov House. How do these structures embody the complexity that Pallasmaa wishes to restore? Were you surprised to see how modern they appear? Do they succeed in nurturing a sense of “human rootedness”? And if so, how do they do it?

Questions for Writing:  

1. Pallasmaa writes that architecture “is fundamentally confronted with ques- tions about human existence in space and time, [and] it expresses and relates man’s being in the world.” What does he mean by “being in the world,” and how can a building “express” and “relate” it? In what ways does Pallasmaa challenge the view that architecture is basically all about decorat- ing structures that are much the same except for their surface features? How does architecture shape our experience, and how do our cultural values shape architecture in turn?

2. One crucial aspect of the built environment is the relation between “interiority” and “exteriority.” But when Pallasmaa uses those terms he does not mean the inside and outside of a building. Instead, he is referring to the interplay between spaces in the physical world and “the dark interiority of self.” In what ways are we “dark” inside ourselves, and how does our enjoyment of space depend on the preservation of this darkness? As you go from building to building today, pay attention to the places that make you feel protected and comfortable. How do these places differ from the ones that seem to leave your interiority “exposed and violated”?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:  

1. 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 almost 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?

2. 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 to 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 complicate it?”