Architecture and the Senses

By Toby Lewis

Considering ‘Architecture and the Senses’ brings to mind our experience of place. The atmosphere, the sensations, what we smell, touch, the sounds we hear, the images we see, heat and cold, our sense of space and our body in relation to it, also our sense of time as things change or we move. This is the stuff of phenomenology; the study of our experience of the world. Zumthor has written of Atmosphere, Pallasmaa in ‘The Eyes of the Skin’ makes a plea for considering all the senses. Our experience becomes part of our memory. Our memories and ideas form the personal and cultural baggage we bring when responding to place. We do not just see, or just smell.

To work with this we can, to a large extent, rely on our unvoiced intuition. Our experience began long before we had words to describe it. But if we delve into our experience we can reveal implicit meanings, we can develop a cultivated sensibility based on knowledge and imagination. Our current cultural situation, described as post-modern, is characterised by subjective values, ambiguity, lost traditions and the lack of agreed ideals. We rely to a greater extent on our own judgement. In 6th century Greece Thales of Miletus said “know thyself”; that it is up to each of us to find truth, not wait for it to be handed to us through revelation,mysticism or tradition.

For several hundred thousand years our experience has been of the natural world: mountains, rivers, forests, snow. We modified the landscape through farming and made tools and implements, to the point where nowadays many environments are entirely man made. We are confronted by the making of others; where everything was once in someone else’s imagination. We are creatures of imagination and this insatiable curiosity drives our creativity. All art, music, sculpture, literature, architecture is driven by our need to create.

An architect is very aware of the act of creation. It is the basis of our project work. But we rarely, if at all, actually make the things we design. We do not carve or paint or saw. We work in a sensually deprived way. We draw lines and write words so others can make. Unlike most artists and craftsmen we work without the immediate feedback of seeing the thing as it is created. We are unable to judge its effect, to know to stop when it is enough, to have the joy of serendipity or accident in the making.

I think it is a thirst to work in a richer and more sensual way that has led to a resurgence of making amongst schools of architecture. I first noticed this with Ghost Lab under the instigation of Brian MacKay-Lyons in Nova Scotia. It continued with Sam Mockbee’s Rural Studio in Alabama, the AA’s Design and Make course, the summer schools of HelloWood in Hungary, TU Riga in Latvia and, for me personally, in the nine year journey that is Studio in the Woods. There is a greater stimulation and satisfaction in doing it oneself. Trying things out, taking risks, making decisions; it is empowering. So smell the freshly cut wood, hear the wind and the echo of distant chopping, see the results of your labours, feel the sawdust, the mud and the ache in your muscles. Surely this is an architecture of the senses.