While collecting the reading list for my Project Proposal’s Literature Review, I stumbled upon by pure accident on a book called ‘The Eyes of the Skin, Architecture and the Senses’ (Pallasmaa, 2012). The author’s name, Juhani Pallasmaa, did not tell me anything either at the time. I never heard of him, and I was not even able to figure out his nationality just by reading his last name. The only thing I was sure about was that I wanted to know how can I create an interior influencing all of the human senses, and when I started reading the book, I realised, I hit the jackpot.
Pallasmaa (2012) beautifully delivers an architectural theory of the senses throughout his book, in a way, that I believe is very easy to understand, and I have to say to this day I have not read a more digestible and more interesting design theory than this.
He critiques today’s ocularcentric society, and it helped me realise, that I too, am to blame for the problem at hand. We as a society value the eyes above all other senses. This, I think, is not up for debate. It is evidenced by everything around us, the way we market things for consumerism, and the way we present a project to a client, it is visible everywhere. Perhaps even the word ‘visible’ shows us how much everything needs to be seen to be understood, accepted as truth or allowed to exist.
Just simply, from personal experience, I can say I thought countless times to myself that my life would be virtually worthless, had I lost my sight one day. Even Pallasmaa (2012) mentions in his book Le Corbusier’s famous quote, “I exist in life only if I can see” (Corbusier, 1991).
In my BA Final Major Project, I was asked a question by one of my lecturers for the final presentation: ‘how do you expect to evoke the feeling of happiness through your design?’ I answered, ‘I think, mostly through aesthetics’. And I believe, there is no doubt, that I have been able to do that, based upon the feedback I have received from everyone seeing that project that day. But why did it never occur to me, that in that way, I am only focusing on one sense above all else?
I have planned on continuing my journey with a similar project during my MA but incorporating all of the senses, but only by reading Pallasmaa’s work did I fully realise how much I have missed the mark with my previous work. “The world becomes a hedonistic but meaningless visual journey”, writes Pallasmaa (2012), “a cancerous growth of vision, measuring everything by its ability to show or be shown, transmuting communication into a visual journey” is his way of describing how we design and live today. This is how he describes society’s obsession with this sense. However, we as human beings cannot be reduced to only one sense, because if we do perhaps, we cannot even call ourselves human beings anymore. By reducing ourselves, we forget that our way of experiencing this world is a lot more complex, it could possibly be considered the most complex thing in this world. “I perceive in total with my whole body” (Pallasmaa, 2012), that is our way of life, we use our whole body, and that includes all of our senses, not just the eyes.
It could be argued, as well, that by only focusing on our eyes, we distance ourselves from each other and perhaps even from ourselves, because to look, to gaze, in most instances, requires distance. Pallasmaa (2012) describes that sight is our only sense that is able to be nihilistic and that this is due to the distance it requires, he describes the nihilistic eye writing that it “deliberately advances sensory and mental detachment and alienation”, and that other senses, like touch, could never be this way “because of the unavoidable nearness, intimacy, veracity and identification that the sense of touch carries”.
Pallasmaa (2012), also describes a phenomenon that we possibly all know too well, which is that the eye, quite often requires reassurance from touch, that sometimes once we saw something, we need the confirmation of touch, So if we know that our most valued sense, often tricks us and we have to check with other senses to make sure that we have seen everything correctly then why do we not value all our senses the same way? Why are we not designing in a way that engages our whole bodily experience? Is this not a missed marketing opportunity in a world that revolves around marketing?
So how am I able to go against what is a clear societal bias, that I have previously engaged in? How can I turn the theory I have read, enjoyed and agreed with into practice? I have to be honest, there were some parts of this book, that made me angry, and not because I didn’t agree with them, but because I realised I will not be able to design with such ease as I used to. Because now I know that my process was flawed. “Ignorance is bliss” (Gray, 1768) has never been more true. So how can I, as a designer who likes to focus on aesthetics and is quite good at it, challenge myself and work with my other senses? Am I to blindfold myself, and try modelmaking and creating shapes that feel nice without seeing them? Should I go to a space that inspires me usually, close my eyes, and see whether it still does? If so, why is that? What do I hear, smell, taste, or touch when it does? And what overlaps do I see between my senses when that happens? Maybe this could be a good way to turn practice into theory. However, it will be done, by me or someone else who realises our ocularcentric problem, it has to be an experimental way of doing things, as this issue is certainly one of those cases, that we realise has not been taught in school, and maybe it should have been.
Reference List
Corbusier, C. E. J. (1991). Precisions. MIT Press.
Gray, T. (1768). Poems. Printed for J. Dodsley.
Pallasmaa, J. (2012). The eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses (3rd ed.). Wiley.
Image Reference List
Figure 1. - But, R. (2022). Images of The Skin of the Eyes [Photograph].
Figure 2. - But, R. (2022). Images of The Skin of the Eyes [Photograph].
Figure 3. - But, R. (2022). Images of The Skin of the Eyes [Photograph].