Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

In books like, ‘The Eyes of the Skin’, architectural theorist, Juhani Pallasmaa posits unmediated sensual encounter as the site of authentic engagement with the built environment. Such ideas are today very prevalent in mainstream architectural discourse. This paper will argue that they are also highly problematic. Pallasmaa rejects visual intentionality, construing it as the instrument of an alienated and objectifying reason that, manifested in architecture, distances us from our Being-in-the-World. Referring to the phenomenologist philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and indebted to Henri Bergson’s concept of ‘duration though lived experience’, Pallasmaa’s theory promises a poetic inhabitation of the world, irreducible to reason and characterised by an animistic embodiment, allegedly offering a more meaningful architectural experience. From a position informed by contemporary rationalist thought, and drawing on neuroscientific, anthropological and philosophical arguments, I will make the case that Pallasmaa’s project is weakened to the point of collapse by the misunderstanding of his own intellectual resources, particularly in respect of the use of concepts of embodiment in the works of Heidegger and Merleau Ponty that are incompatible. I will show how his ideas about embodiment, disinterested vision and sensuality actually constitute, not a richer, but an impoverished account of lived experience that, far from overcoming alienation, mystifies it and is unwittingly complicit in its construction. I will specifically discuss Pallasmaa’s account of experience in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, his comparisons of human and animal-created structures and his forays into neuroscience. The paper will dispute Pallasmaa’s claim that immediate sensual encounter is the route to authentic engagement with the world and will question whether the unmediated lived experience for which he yearns, is possible for humans at all.