Tag Archives: Juhani Pallasmaa

Open Senses

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The London Open Senses Festival ran from 19-21 May 2017. The first of its kind, first of many I hope, the festival included an rich mix of sensory events and experiences, and a symposium at the University of London. The symposium included many excellent presentations and workshops while the most pertinent to my research was a presentation by architect Juhani Pallasmaa. Titled Landscape of the Senses – Touching the World, the presentation explored the hegemony of vision in our culture and in architecture. The senses are often regarded as independent systems but they are in fact integrated as part of our embodied condition. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1958) speaks of the polyphony of the senses. In life, sensory stimuli don’t occur in isolation and embodied sensory experiences are essential to our wellbeing. If we remove ourselves from bodily sensory experiences we live impoverished lives. Therefore, we need an integrated approach in research and design.

Pallasmaa also spoke about the shallow appropriation of the sensory realm in marketing strategies. This sensory manipulation of the senses leads to hyperesthesia (or hyperaesthesia), a condition that involves an abnormal increase in sensitivity to stimuli of the senses. According to Pallasmaa, we are in an era of branded manipulations, of total anesthetisation. The essence of architecture and its social significance are being replaced by a formal aesthetic rhetoric and an uncritical view of digital technologies further detaches us from sensory experiences. Unfortunately, Pallasmaa didn’t have time to elaborate on these statements and explain what he means by the essence of architecture. Further reading into his many books and papers will surely enlighten the topic. However, I agree that many contemporary buildings and urban spaces lack social significance. Does the rise in interest in the senses across so many disciplines points to a societal malaise? Perhaps, as Pallasmaa points out, in a digitally enhance world, people have become starved of meaningful embodied experiences.

On the other hand there are interesting new possibilities emerging through technologies. In the morning of the symposium, I visited Thresholds by Matt Collishaw in Somerset House (not part of the festival). Thresholds is an immersive installation that uses the latest VR technology. It reproduces the interior of King Edward’s school in Birmingham to take us back to 1839, to an early exhibition of photography by British scientist William Henry Fox Talbot. As in all VR experiences, I wore a headset but this time, I also had a unit strapped to my back. Initially the experience felt artificial, like being in a game, and intriguing at the same time. As my mind adapted to the environment details emerged and the VR space began to resonate with my senses. I could touch the wood of the photography display cases. Mice occasionally running across the room, insect flying around the chandeliers, and a fire burning in the fireplace, animated the space. I could feel the warmth of the fire but I didn’t have the same confidence moving my hands towards it as I would in real life. Perhaps because I couldn’t see my own hand, only an orange glow. My sense of depth and movement functioned as expected but I still needed time to adapt the the virtual environment. After a while, I could also hear the noise of a crowd coming from outside the room. I believe it was meant to be a riot though I never felt the tension the same situation would cause in reality. This was staged and the experience was short lived (six minutes). Nonetheless, the scenographic use of technology was amazing.  It also illustrates possibilities for integrating sensory experiences into a virtual space. The experiment would have failed if it had only focused on the visual. Frieze magazine commented that ‘Collishaw has not recreated an historical experience, but has instead constructed an entirely new one.’ Matt Collishaw is an amazing artists who challenges perceptions and expectations.

The ocular-centric paradigm occupies a prominent place in Pallasmaa’s critique of architecture. He argues that the role of the senses and the impact of the way spaces resonate with our senses is largely overlooked in architectural practices because of the use of an ocular centric language of symbols and images. He is not the only one to expound a a multi-sensory approach to architecture and design. Architect Joy-Monice Malnar and artist Frank Vodvarka (2004) also tell us that ‘sensory data are rarely central to design decisions’ and interior designer Sashi Caan (2011) identified that practice-led research in this area lacks rigour. I also include myself in this school of thought. In my research , I aim to enrich our knowledge of embodied sensory experiences through the study of atmospheric qualities and user relations in spaces, and promote a multi-sensory (integrated) approach to spatial design practices.

Visual culture dominates but vision is a sense of distance. We don’t need to be close to something to see it and this can create a distance between body and space. Pallasmaa may have been thinking about the work of theorist Henry Lefebvre (1974) when he spoke out against the prevailing ocular centric paradigm. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre explains that ‘[the image] detaches the pure form from its impure content – from lived time, everyday time, and from bodies with their opacity and solidity, their warmth, their life and their death’. Lefebvre takes and uncompromising position when he says that ‘[…] the image kills’. I wouldn’t go as far but I agree with Pallasmaa who says that ‘it is […] important to survey critically the role of vision in relation to the other senses in our understanding and practice of the art of architecture’.  As Caan explains, ‘[d]esign is the deliberate intervention in our environment to ameliorate the conditions of our existence’. We can’t achieve this if we rely mostly on the visual sense when designing. Therefore, we need to encourage a multi-sensory mind-set in spatial design practices to enrich our experiences of everyday spaces.

Bachelard, G. (1958, 1994 ed.) The Poetics of Space. 
Boston: Beacon Press.
Caan, S. (2011) Rethinking Design and Interiors – Human Beings and the Built 
Environment. London: Laurence King. 
Lefebvre, H. (1974, 1991 ed.) The Production of Space. Oxford, England:Blackwell Publishing. 
Malnar, Joy MoniceVodvarka, Frank (2004) Sensory design. Minneapolis,Minn.: University of Minnesota Press. 
Pallasmaa, J. (2005) The Eyes of the Skin. Architecture and the Senses. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Umwelten

Umwelten is a site-specific performance at the Royal Academy by Juri Nishi in collaboration with Bitter Suite. Blindfolded I was led into the space of the performance where three performers choreographed their movements with mine and choreographed my movements with theirs as I was led on a sensorial journey through the room. It was the most wonderful experience. At no point did it feel unsafe or awkward. I became completely immersed into the performance and completely relaxed, becoming malleable to the choreography. My Umwelten became a fluid space unconstrained by traditional architectural principles.

Event’s flyer: umwelten

The Umwelt, located in the fairly new field of sensory ecology, is a theory developed by ethologist Jacob von Uexküll. The events’ flyer describes sensory ecology as the study of how organisms acquire, process and respond to information from the environment, exchanging materials, energies and sensory information. Von Uexküll studied how animals behave in relation to their environment and theorised that the qualities of an environment are not intrinsic to the environment but depend on the way the mind interprets the world. Therefore, organisms can have different Umwelten even in the same environments. This is an interesting theory because it articulates that qualities in the environment are subject dependent and that the mind and the world are inseparable. The theory of Umwelt recognises the complexity of the phenomenal environment as perceived and interpreted by the subject of perception.

Although I was blindfolded, I completely surrendered to the fluid environment created by the performance. I was told it lasted 20 minutes, it felt like barely 10 had passed. At the end of the performance, I was given a pad and pencil to draw my impression of the space as it emerged in my imagination. Still under the spell of the performance I drew a symbolic mental map that illustrates a fluid journey, in parts lacking definition in a space removed from architectural conventions. When the performance ended, I felt very light, almost floating, and this continued for a long time afterwards, until I took the tube to the next event I was attending that day. My London Underground umwelten brought me back to reality.


My Umwelten during the performance

Actual space where the performance took place

Buchanan, B. (2009) Onto-Ethologies. The Animal Environments of Uexkull, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. 
Albany: State University of New York Press.
von Uexküll, J. (1934, 2010 ed.) A Foray into the World of Animals and 
Humans with a Theory of Meaning. 
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Journey to the Interior

This event is described as ‘a multi-sensory, participatory performance and a feast, inspired by George Bellas Grenough, a geologist and founder of the Geological Society, London as well as Jules Verne’s story the Journey to the Centre of the Earth’.

Artistic Director, Tereza Stehlikova and her team, created an impressive array of sensory experiences around the topics of geology and journey to the centre of the earth. The journey began in Kensal Green cemetery all the way through to the core of the earth, through to carbon art by Mateusz Gidaszewski, sugar metamorphics by Ellie Doney, and ended with an amazing meal designed and prepared to enrich our experience of the themes chosen for this event. The food was intriguing, enticing and delicious. The company was excellent.

Event’s flyer: journey

Mémoires d’espaces

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Juhani Pallasmaa – Retinal Architecture and the Loss of Plasticity

‘The architecture of our time is turning into the retinal art of the eye. Architecture at large has become an art of the printed image fixed by the hurried eye of the camera. The gaze itself tends to flatten into a picture and lose its plasticity; instead of experiencing our being in the world, we behold it from outside as spectators of images projected on the surface of the retina.’

Memoires-d'espaces

Unprecedented access to technologies of the visual enables us to capture and reference our environment with exceptional ease. We have become accustomed, even conditioned, to quickly record our surroundings and transform them into ephemeral moments of appropriation. It seems that we require tangible proof of our lives so as not to forget a single moment, a single encounter.

The cult of the image is also actively promoted by the carefully constructed ideals of glossy magazines and coffee table books celebrating architecture and architects. This gives us instant access to archives and desires but what are we losing or gaining in the process? Does the prominent role of the image in Western culture today affect our cultural identity?

The development of cultural identity happens over time as a historical set of recollected moments that shape our knowledge, thoughts and behaviour. So memories and the ability to remember are an essential part of not only our past, but also our present and future. As our understanding of architecture becomes increasingly conditioned by the way it is photographed, flat images become abstractions of buildings and we are presented with a series of fragmented views of externalised and idealised versions of our environment. Memory however is dynamic, not a simple storage device. It consists of mental images gathered through experiences. Environments are all encompassing multi-sensorial entities and immersion triggers what Marcel Proust calls ‘involuntary memories’(1), experienced through being, knowledge, matter, identity, time and space.

So the gaze loses its ability to form itself into the environment when, superseded by the eye of the camera, it cannot construct the relationships characterised by the multiplicity of meanings we encounter as we move through our surroundings. When the gaze is confined to flat restricted viewpoints, it cannot be interactive or participatory, nor can it facilitate, in the words of Jean Piaget ‘a gradual construction of meanings essential to our perceptions of our environment’(2). Positioning ourselves behind a camera creates a warped relationship between the body and its surroundings, a loss of direct connection and engagement. We look but we don’t see, we see but we don’t feel. Time accelerates and we are compelled to move quickly to the next subject, emulating what Fredric Jameson calls ‘the frantic economic urgency’(3). So, when experience is reduced to the unfulfilled encounter of the image and impoverished two-dimensional environments, the supremacy of the visual over other sensorial modalities means we are in danger of losing the knowledge that we need to inform awareness. Maurice Merleau-Ponty even suggests we become ‘programmed machines, removed from the open and active form of the sensing body’(4) and therefore it seems that in our postmodernist culture, awareness follows depiction.

The resulting fragmentation of our perceptions leads to both the dispersal and reconfiguration of collective memories resulting in subjective experiences defined by the media, where desires, manufactured with the help of semiotic advertising psychology, replace reality. Bernard Stiegler takes this point even further and expresses his concern about the communality produced by the similarity of images available in the media. He remarks that we ‘come to share an increasingly uniform memory. For example, those who watch the same television news channel every day at the same time become, in effect, the same person.’(5) Transposed into architectural images, this implies that those who repetitively view the same photographs of any given environment, are likely to develop the same perceptions of that environment.

Take Peter Zumthor’s celebrated Thermal Bath Vals in Garubunden, Switzerland. It is entirely designed through careful manipulation of sensory modes. Local materials are used for their relationship with the site and tactile qualities, room plans are labelled by temperature notation and slivers of light and dripping water are introduced to enhance atmospheric conditions. The character of its interior emanates from the considerations of its components as active participants to promote the feeling of wellness and serenity essential to the context of the environment. However most of us only know this building because we have seen carefully executed and selected images, not because we have been there and experienced it for ourselves. Yet many will profess the characteristics of the Thermal Baths with genuine enthusiasm. Although to a certain extent, memories, knowledge and imagination allow us to decode what we see and transpose it to stimulate other senses, we are nonetheless reduced to spectators in the construction of cultural ideals. Our architectural and spatial consciousness and by default our related memories, are defined by images more than by direct experiences. In the words of Susan Sontag ‘photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is’(6)

So the commodification of culture, imposed on us by the architecture of the visual and the drive to create striking and desirable images, favours the representation of form over real human enjoyment, and authentic pleasure is removed when architecture is staged to fulfil lifestyle consumer desires. Architecture becomes flat and lifeless, debased by its assimilation into consumer images, removed from human experience. The loss of plasticity, the lack of direct engagement with our environment and the proliferation of superficial encounters bring about an idealised, distorted and subjective view of reality whereby meaning becomes referential to the image rather than deferential to the multiplicity and complexity of the human condition. In other words ‘reality has come to seem more and more what we are shown by the camera.’(7) However, as Yi-Fu Tuan points out ‘what begins as an undifferentiated space becomes a place as we get to know it better and endow it with value’(8) and ‘the more our sense of touch is restricted or neglected, whether social relationships or urban design, the more we diminish our possibilities for aesthetic enjoyment and our sense of connection with the material world.’(9) As a result our cultural identity seems diffused and even confused. Faced with a much more disappointing reality when our expectations are not met, we can become prone to anxiety due to an inability to form meaningful relationships with our environment.

Science fiction cinema and writers have also expressed their unease at the potential the image for manipulation. For example, Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner is based on the impossible task of its main character figuring out whether his memories are real or implanted and his only link with his real or imagined past are photographs. Phillip K. Dick’s protagonist in ‘We can remember it for you wholesale’ merges reality and fantasies by selecting both factual and false memories, which are then further woven into his identity with the addition of images in the form of films and postcards as proof of his voyage to Mars. The alteration of photographs is today common practice, but unless someone remembers, are we not in danger of altering our collective memories by re-visualising history?

So is there nothing to be gained from images of our environment? Pierre Nora speaks of ‘lieux de mémoire’ (spaces or realm of memory), connecting the driving force behind the image with ‘the rise of the visual narrative in contemporary culture’(10) . Despite its experiential limitations and the danger of distortion in our cultural identity and history, photography enables us to preserve an archived version of past architecture displaced by urban development that regularly obliterates many areas of our cities. It provides us with a unique means to construct our own personal architectural mementos and in effect, curate our memories of places we have been to. It also offers us an opportunity to re-discover our environment by framing its components in ways that remove the surrounding visual clutter. The act of reinterpretation helps us stop and reflect. Although the image does produce a two-dimensional encounter, it also makes the invisible visible by helping move our gaze beyond the foreground and adjusting our environment to reveal previously unnoticed vistas, elements and details.

We often take our environment for granted yet our daily interactions are complex and dynamic. We are confronted with social constructs, historical products, personal emotions, memories and imagination. So, while spaces are constantly evolving and re-made, it is our memory, the way we retain information, that really creates the mental space each of us possess of individual or shared experiences. I agree that we need to immerse ourselves in our environments to fully experience them, but I also believe there is a place in our culture for images that are not about revealing all, but surprise and offer constituents of moments fixed in time, yet always evolving because they are alive with personal sensorial connotations; they are windows onto past experiences, unlocking hidden meanings to create alternative memories beyond the original moment in space and time. At a personal level, photographs trigger not only visual but also sensorial and emotional recalls beyond the limitations of time, whereby captured moments become permanent ones that we can revisit at will and public spaces become private memories.

Valerie Mace

Notes
1. Farr I. Ed (2012) Memory. Documents of Contemporary Art MIT Press [p.33 Para 2]
2. Malnar M. J., Vodvarka F. (2004) Sensory Design University of Minesota Press [P49 Para 5 / P50 Para 1]
3. Jameson F. (1991) Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Verso [P9 Para 3]
4. Malnar M. J., Vodvarka F. (2004) Sensory Design University of Minesota Press [P25 Para 1]
5. Farr I. Ed (2012) Memory. Documents of Contemporary Art MIT Press [p.17 Para 2]
6. Pallasmaa J. (2005) The Eyes of the Skin. Architecture and the Senses Wiley [P31 Para1]
7. Pallasmaa J. (2005) The Eyes of the Skin. Architecture and the Senses Wiley [P30 Para5]
8. Malnar M. J., Vodvarka F. (2004) Sensory Design University of Minesota Press [P129 Para1 ]
9. Classen C. ed (2005) The Book of Touch (Sensory Formations) Berg Publishers [P49 Para2 ]
10. Farr I. Ed (2012) Memory. Documents of Contemporary Art MIT Press [p.20 Para 3]

Bibliography

Classen C. ed (2005) The Book of Touch (Sensory Formations). Berg Publishers
Van Schaik L. (2008) Spatial Intelligence. New Futures for Architecture. John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Sturken M., Cartwright L. (2001) Practices of looking. An introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press

Hoboken S. A. (2009) Place advantage: applied psychology for interior architecture (N.J. : Wiley ; Chichester : John Wiley [distributor])

Malnar M. J., Vodvarka F. (2004) Sensory Design. University of Minesota Press

Jamesom F. (1991) Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso

Pallasmaa J. (2005) The Eyes of the Skin. Architecture and the Senses. Wiley

Cairns G. (2010) …deciphering Advertising, Art and Architecture. New Persuasion Techniques for Sophisticated Consumers Libri Publishing

Belsey C. (2002) A Very Short Introduction to Poststructuralism. Oxford University Press

Farr I. Ed (2012) Memory. Documents of Contemporary Art. MIT Press

Gibson J. J. (1986) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Psychology Press

Borden I. (2012) Stimulating the senses in the public realm. a-n Publications [P1 Para8] <http://www.a-n.co.uk/publications/article/341492/341479> [accessed 3rd November 2012]