BACHELOR OF SCIENCE (HONOURS) IN ARCHITECTURE THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM (ARC61303/ARC2224) SYNOPSIS: REACTION PAPER (MARCH 2015) [10 MARKS] NAME: Evelyn Sinugroho ID: 0318217 LECTURER: Mr. Nicholas Ng Khoon Wu TUTORIAL TIME: 14.00-16.00 SYNOPSIS NO: 3 READER TITLE: The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses AUTHOR: Juhani Pallasmaa
The article “The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses” by Juhani Pallasmaa addresses on the importance of senses in architecture as a basis for interaction between the livings and the world. Pallasmaa briefly talks about the other elements and purposes of architecture, yet he still stresses on the senses as a tool to integrate human with architecture and how architecture should be designed responding to human’s senses. The statement about how human senses interact with the nature catches my attention the most. He stated that nature has a certain elements that can continuously give a constant healthy interaction with human senses. He furthermore stresses that architecture is essentially an extension of nature, spaces that would stimulate human senses and emotional in many ways creating visions to understand the world. I strongly agree on this, in a sense that human are originally created to response sensitively to the nature, to the world. It is through time that human has developed to be slightly detached and that our sense have been dulled. From here, the role of architecture now is to rejuvenate the sense as how nature has done it. But many questions have come into my mind as of how architecture become an extension of nature. Do buildings need to be integrated with nature to give that ‘polyphony of senses’ to the user? Or through biomimicry? To answer this question, I believe Pallasmaa was accentuating on the application of Organic Architecture, criticizing form follow function philosophy as he says ‘Architecture is not an isolated and self-sufficient artifact.’ The idea of organic architecture refers not only to the buildings' literal relationship to the natural surroundings, but how the buildings' design is carefully thought about as if it were a unified organism. Essentially organic architecture is the literal design of every element of a building: From the windows, to the floors, to the individual chairs intended to fill the space. Everything relates to one another, reflecting the symbiotic ordering systems of nature. In conclusion, senses are important to architecture. Senses through nature are mostly metaphysical to human. The sentence ‘architecture as an extension of nature’ can be applied when the building trigger that visceral sense of the nature out of the user.
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