Arquitecto

Hapticity and Time Juhani Pallasmaa Notes on fragile architecture Materials and surfaces have a richly complex language of their own that evolves and changes over time. In this major essay, Juhani Pallasmaa puts the case for haptic, sensuous architecture. Modern consciousness and sensory reality have gradually developed towards the unrivalled dominance of the sense of vision. Thisthought-provoking development has been observed and analyzed by a number of philosophers in recent years. [1] David Michael Levin, one of today's thinkers concerned with the hegemony of vision, motivates the philosophical critique of the visual bias in the following words: 'I think it is appropriate to challenge the hegemony of vision in the ocularcentrism of our culture. And I think we need to examine verycritically the character of vision that predominates today in our world. We urgently need a diagnosis of the psychosocial pathology of everyday seeing -- and a critical understanding of ourselves, as visionary beings'. [2] I believe likewise that many aspects of the pathology of today's architecture can also be understood through a critique of the ocular bias of our culture. As a consequence of thepower of the eye over the other sensory realms, architecture has turned into an art form of instant visual image. Instead of creating existential microcosms, embodied representations of the world, architecture projects retinal images for the purpose of immediate persuasion. Flatness of surfaces and materials, uniformity of illumination, as well as the elimination of micro-climatic differences,further reinforce the tiresome and soporific uniformity of experience. All in all, the tendency of technological culture to standardize environmental conditions and make the environment entirely predictable is causing a serious sensory impoverishment. Our buildings have lost their opacity and depth, sensory invitation and discovery, mystery and shadow. Multi-sensory experience: the significance oftouch Every significant experience of architecture is multi-sensory; qualities of matter, space and scale are measured by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle. Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasizes this simultaneity of experience and sensory interaction as follows: 'My perception is [therefore] not a sum of visual, tactile, and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being:I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once'. [3] Even the eye collaborates with the other senses. All the senses including vision, are extensions of the sense of touch: the senses are specializations of the skin, and all sensory experiences are related to tactility. Ashley Montagu's view, based on medical evidence, confirms the primacy ofthe tactile 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 he recognized inthe age-old evaluation of touch as 'the mother of the senses'. [4] Touch is the sensory mode which integrates our experience of the world and of ourselves. Even visual perceptions are united and integrated into the haptic continuity of the self; my body remembers who I am and where I am placed in the world. In the opening chapter of Combray, Marcel Proust describes how the protagonist wakes up inhis bed and gradually reconstructs his world on the basis of 'the memory of the sides, knees and shoulders'. [5] The task of architecture is to make visible 'how the world touches us', [6] as Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the paintings of Paul Cezanne. Paraphrasing another notion of Merleau-Ponty's: architecture concretizes and frames human existence in the 'flesh of the world'. [7] In...