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Pallasmaa
Pallasmaa
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BEYOND VISION
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All the senses, including vision, are extensions of the tactile sense;
the senses are specializations of skin tissue, and all sensory
experiences are modes of touching, and thus related with tactility.
Through vision we touch the sun and the stars, as Martin Jay
poetically remarks in reference to Merleau-Ponty.9
Our contact with the world takes place at the boundary line of the self
through specialized parts of our enveloping membrane. The sense of
self and identity does not stop at the surface of the skin.
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The haptic fusion with space and place surpasses the need for
physical comfort and the mere desire to touch. Bachelard recognizes
the desire for a total merging of the self and the house through a
bodily intertwining as he writes: Indeed, in our houses we have
nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up
belongs to the phenomenology of the verb to inhabit, and only those
who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity. 13 The pleasure
of curling up also suggests an unconscious association between the
images of room and the womb; a protective and pleasurable room is
a constructed womb, in which we can re-experience the
undifferentiated world of the child, the forgotten infant concealed in
our adult bodies. Todays architecture, however, tends to offer mere
wombs of glass for us to inhabit.
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EXISTENTIAL SPACE
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'How would the painter or the poet express anything other than his
encounter with the world,21 writes Maurice Merleau-Ponty. How
could the architect do otherwise, we can ask with equal justification.
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The settings of our lives are irresistibly turning into a mass produced
and universally marketed kitsch. In my view, it would be ungrounded
idealism to believe that the course of our obsessively materialist
culture could be altered within the visible future. But it is exactly
because of this critical view, that the ethical task of artists and
architects, the defense of the authenticity of life and experience, is so
important. In a world where everything is becoming similar and,
eventually, insignificant and of no consequence, art has to maintain
differences of meaning, and in particular, the true criteria of
experiential quality.
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Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else
dares imagine will literature continue to have a function, Calvino
states. The grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving
together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes' into
a manyfold and multifaceted vision of the world. 31
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NOTES
1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, 46.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Emotions: An Outline of a Theory. New York: Carol
Publishing Co., 1993, 9.
3 Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems1923-1967. London: Penguin Books,
1985. As quoted in Sren Thurell, The Shadow of A Thought The Janus
Concept in Architecture. Stockholm: School of Architecture, The Royal
Institute of Technology, 1989, 2.
4 As quoted in Eric Shanes, Constantin Brancusi. New York: Abbeville Press,
1989, 67.
5 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. New York: Vintage
Books, 1988, 57.
6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Film and the New Psychology, in Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense. Evanston: Northwestern University,
1964, 48.
7 Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness. London: Pion Limited, 1976, 51.
Relph defines the notion as follows: Existential outsideness involves a
self-conscious and reflective uninvolvement, an alienation from people and
places, homelessness, a sense of the unreality of the world, and of not
belonging.
8 Joseph Brodsky, Less than One. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986,
124.
9 As quoted in David Michael Levin, editor, Modernity and the Hegemony of
Vision. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press,
1993, 14.
10 Ashley Montague, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. New
York: Harper & Row, 1968 (1971), 3.
11 Kent C Bloomer and Charles Moore, Body, Memory and Architecture. New
Haven and London: The Yale University Press, 1977, 44.
12 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: Swanns Way, translated
by C.K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin. London: Vintage, 1996, 4-5.
13 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969,
XXXIV.
14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cezanness Doubt, in Merleau-Ponty, Sense and
Non-Sense. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1991, 15.
15 Bernard Berenson, as quoted in Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human
Significance of the Skin, Harper & Row, New York, 1986, 308-309.
Somewhat surprisingly, in my view, Merleau-Ponty objects strongly
Berensons view: Berenson spoke of an evocation of tactile values, he
could hardly have been more mistaken: painting evokes nothing, least of
all the tactile. What it does is much different, almost the inverse; thanks to
it we do not need a muscular sense in order to possess the voluminosity
of the world []. The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, The Primacy of Perception,
Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1964, 166.
I cannot, however, support this argument of the philosopher. Experiencing
the temperature and moisture of air and hearing the noises of carefree
daily life in the erotically sensuous paintings of Matisse or Bonnard one is
confirmed of the reality of ideated sensations.
16 As quoted in Scott Poole, Pumping Up: Digital steroids and the Design
Studio, unpublished manuscript, 2005.
17 See, Walter Benjamins Philosphy: Destruction and Experience, edited by
Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne. London and New York: Routledge,
1994.
18 Hall Mildred Reed, Hall Edward T., The Fourth Dimension in Architecture:
The Impact of Building Behaviour. Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1995.
19 Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking. In David Farrell Krell,
Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco,
London: Harper & row, Publishers, 1997, 334.
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