BACHELOR OF SCIENCE (HONOURS) IN ARCHITECTURE THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM (ARC61303/ARC2224) SYNOPSIS: REACTION PAPER (MARCH 2017)
Name: Andrew Law Zi Hang
ID No.: 0322670
Lecturer: Mr. Nicholas Ng
Tutorial Time: 10am-1pm
Reader/Text Title:
Synopsis No: 2 Author: Juhani Pallasmaa
The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and Senses
Juhani Pallasmaa has provided an in depth understanding on architecture and provides with new insights. In Part II, He emphasizes the relationship of senses and architecture through the body in relates to the spaces, the elements where we readers can indulge ours souls and sensory within the words of his writing. In "The body in the Center", he has thoroughly bring us to experience the architecture with every part of our body through his writing, exploring each details and spaces like one body is unified with the architecture. "I dwells in the city and the city dwells in me", we are the one who defines the spaces, and the spaces that we defined will eventually shape our senses where a bridge is built between two. The phrase did exist in the current world where one cannot exist with the absence of another as architecture will be soulless and instead being a machine that is solely for functions. I believe that we human, an organism with senses are driving the souls of the world through arts, architecture, spaces where an environment are shaped with us constantly interacting with. However, contradiction are produced due to the existence of both "soulness" and "soulless" places in our current living context where we human will only have interactive moments of our body with the places that posses uniqueness where enough associations is able to generated through our sense. In other words, what we observed nowadays only tends to be a visual elements. In "Multi Sensory Experience", he states that a constant interaction can strengthen the sense of reality and Architecture is one of the thing that we are constantly interacted with. Pallasmaa says that "Architecture is the extension of the nature into the man-made realm" as it gives conceptual and material structures with respond to the context which conditioned a life for the human and provides ground for perceptions and horizon of experience. Therefore, I believe Architecture as an medium to reach out the nature in our everyday's life as architecture is conditioned through the context. "Vision reveals what the touch already know" as Pallasmaa says sense of touch as being the unconscious of vision. It is true that one can stimulate the experience of our five senses through visualizing the depth, distance, contours, edges and the surface as Architecture stimulates senses through its forms, appearance, scales & volumes which ultimately create a memory and existential experience. Therefore one can understand the surrounding with an architecture perfectly blending into the nature through contextual response just like Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, rather than alienating everything surrounding us. Architecture is experienced in its fully embodied material and spiritual presence rather than collection of drawings which I believe so as experience and sense are stimulated through appearance of architecture as a whole. Word Count: 468
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