ORO Editions

which the human being returns from the Modern era's visual-eye dominance to a natural perception that integrates all the senses "in the very constitution of the body and the human mode of being". His is an existential engaging with buildings in which a person's inner life and the world itself, including the built environment, interpenetrate and co-influence each other. The foundation of this architectural phenomenology is the idea that reality is revealed through the lived human experience, which becomes an opportunity to construct meaning.

Scott Poole (2019) writes that Pallasmaa's inquisitiveness over a long writing career orbits around the question, "How does the experience of architecture help us to more fully grasp the meaning in our existence?" It may seem obvious to those outside the discipline that architecture is a multi-sensory event, yet much of contemporary design is driven by abstractions rather than concreteness—by ideas of buildings as economic commodities, functional utility or aesthetic and compositional novelty. It has become a radical stance for architects to put trust in and value human perceptions as based in a grounded reality, biologically rooted, and revealing "essential things about human life".

Architecture, in Pallasmaa's words (Pallasmaa 2019), is "an extension of nature into the man-made realm". One's experience in buildings—and of the natural forces interacting with them—"concretizes the cycle of the year, the course of the sun, and the passing of the hours of the day". In such a first-person, participatory perspective, the act of sensing and knowing the world is also to sense and know one's self. This gives rise to precepts, such as the need for dim spaces to facilitate imagination, the understanding of architectural space as articulated through sound and echo, the essentialness of silence that generates states of tranquility, the fireplace as an intimate zone merged with its utility, the door handle as the handshake of the building, and how gravity and the ground's density and texture are sensed and measured by the foot's sole.