CHAPTER 1: DOMINANCE OF VISION
Figure 2: Los Angeles' Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry. Photo Credits: Alamy
Figure 2: Zaha Hadid Architects Skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere
A deteriorating visual fixation: Instagram-able architecture of the 21st Century The world is witnessing a massive rise and expansion of technological culture. The development of technological tools that favour screens and visual mediums, lead to the very fact that 75 to 80 percent of information consumed of the surrounding world happens through sight and visual imagery. Quite similarly, is why Architecture has become almost entirely centred around vision. Visual culture has caused architecture to lose its wholistic value, and lead to an architecture whose primary emphasis is placed mostly on its visual appeal, with its value being merely measured by its ability to show, to be shown, photographed, or observed. With the evolution of social media and social media tools, especially ones that are photo and/or video-based such as Instagram, a lot of architectural projects nowadays are designed deliberately for the primary purpose of being Instagram-able. “The dominance of vision has never been stronger than in our current era of the visual image” Pallasmaa expresses. And since a huge percentage of information consumed of the world comes through sight as mentioned above, this has encouraged architects, planners, and designers to design architecture that appeals only to the eyes, with very little or no consideration to remaining senses or to different ways one can experience architecture. Architecture’s absence of attention and awareness of utilizing and designing architecture that accommodates other senses besides vision, resulted in the detachment of architecture with the body. In his work, Architecture and the senses, Juhani Pallasmaa talks about sensory design through different and new senses: smell, touch, sight, tongue, hearing, movement, and bodily awareness. He argues that all senses are vital for an authentic 6|Page
