Architecture &, No. 1, Spring 2018

NO. 01 SPRING 2018

INTRODUCING

The Architecture Programme at the Royal Academy is supported by the Drue Heinz Endowment for Architecture and Turkishceramics

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I T S U KO H A S EG AWA

Below: The Museum of Fruit, in Yamanashi, Japan, 1996, designed by Royal Academy Architecture Prize winner Itsuko Hasegawa

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THE ROYAL ACADEMY AIMS TO ENCOURAGE ASPIRATIONAL THINKING ABOUT THE SPACES IN WHICH WE LIVE The title of this publication – Architecture& – reflects the truth that there is always an ‘and’: architecture is implicitly connected to our lives and collective experiences. Its pages capture the Royal Academy’s ambitions to inspire a meaningful conversation about architecture for everyone.

When the RA was founded in 1768, those who led it – the Academicians – were simply considered artists, whether painters, sculptors or architects. Inspired by this meeting of minds, the Academy has developed a platform for debate and knowledge sharing through a dedicated Architecture Programme – of which this publication is a part. We bring disciplines together to expand and enrich the discourse about our built environment, embracing the present with an understanding of what has gone before and what may lie ahead.

As it celebrates its 250th anniversary, the RA shares its passion for architecture with an expansion of its activities, through architectural exhibitions, starting with a show on the work of the architect behind London’s Shard, Renzo Piano Hon RA (15 Sep–20 Jan 2019), with publications like our recent Sensing Architecture ebook, and through an immersive weekend of performances and a symposium on architectural experience (21–22 April).

Our new awards demonstrate and heighten the RA’s role as a global champion of architecture celebrating innovative work that lifts the human spirit. The winner of our inaugural Royal Academy Architecture Prize, Itsuko Hasegawa, was described by the judges as ‘one of Japan’s most important architects’, yet her innovative, witty and dynamic work has not received the widespread recognition it deserves.

In the RA Dorfman Award we champion talent which represents the future of architecture. The five finalists are Arquitectura Expandida from Colombia, Japanese architect Go Hasegawa, Netherlands-based Anne Holtrop, Rahel Shawl of Ethiopia and nextoffice founder Alireza Taghaboni from Iran, whose varied projects range from the social and political to the technical. They will come to share their work and ideas during Architecture Week (2–6 July).

Furthermore, as part of the Royal Academy’s redevelopment designed by David Chipperfield RA, the new Architecture Studio – a free space in the Dorfman Senate Rooms in Burlington Gardens – opens to the public on 19 May. It provides an important permanent presence for architectural thinking at the social heart of the Academy.

It is a studio rather than an exhibition space – a place to encounter ideas, to interact and to be challenged.

This year a series of commissions in the Architecture Studio, and related events, unfold under the title of ‘Invisible Landscapes’, exploring how architects might embrace the opportunities and challenges of advances in technology.

Through these expanded activities the RA aims to demonstrate the relevance of architecture to all our lives.

— Kate Goodwin, Head of Architecture and Drue Heinz Curator at the Royal Academy 3

DISCUSSING

THROUGH THE EYES OF ARTISTS AND ARCHITECTS

Above, from left: architects Alan Stanton and Paul Williams in conversation with painter Ian McKeever

Alan Stanton (AS) When you talk about your work as an artist Ian, you use a very similar language to the language that Paul and I use to discuss our work as architects – language about construction, scale and internal space.

Ian McKeever (IM) Yes, there are similarities. But I work alone in my studio and I see the whole process through with one pair of hands. This is very different to you. You’ve been working together since 1985 and you’ve developed a joint vocabulary.

Paul Williams (PW) It’s a shared vocabulary that steers the way we initially develop projects, biased towards a sculptural way of looking at form. On a fundamental level we are creating carved or captured spaces.

IM You must now be at the point where there is a collective identity between the two of you.

AS Paul and I are actually quite different as people, but in our first few years together we found a common language of operating. We test that common language against the particular challenges of a project and of course we have all kinds of other people to satisfy, as well as each other.

Architecture is a public art and an architectural idea has to be able to navigate through many external challenges in order to survive. In a way we relish that as a problem, it stimulates us to make creative responses.

This is very different to the way artists work. You start with a blank canvas and create your own problems.

You are resolving those problems on your own terms.

IM Yes, it is completely different. From one group of works to another, I work on evolving propositions which I want to explore further and then I begin to paint. It starts 4

B E N B LO S S O M

In this three-way conversation between painter Ian McKeever and architects Alan Stanton and Paul Williams, space and light are explored through different perspectives

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© H U F TO N+C R OW

Above: the Musée d’arts de Nantes, 2017, designed by Stanton Williams

in my head and then goes through the body. However it is always contained within myself, not shared in any sense at that point.

AS We orchestrate and choreograph spaces around how people will inhabit them. But of course we can only design within our own experience and sensibilities; you can never fully anticipate exactly how people will respond.

IM In the context of art, when a painting is finished, it is largely a closed entity. But you are speaking very much about a building’s subsequent use and flexibility.

PW A finished building’s success is ultimately beholden to the occupiers’ understanding of its complexities, potential and possibilities. As architects, we have to let go. Would it be fair to say Ian, that when you sell a work, release it into the outside world, that although you don’t know where it might be sited or hung, it remains constant, remains as you conceived it?

IM When someone buys a painting you assume they have an empathy with your sensibilities.

AS Good architecture needs a good client. You hope to find one and develop a strong working relationship with them. Then they will cherish the building long after you have ‘let it go’.

PW Some years ago we designed a penthouse for a client who owned a number of works of art, and the spaces we designed specifically aimed to maximise the experience of observing the changing quality and colour of daylight throughout the year. After six months the client had still only hung one work on the walls because she was so captivated by the changing light.

IM Many contemporary art spaces are conflicted between natural and artificial light which is often resolved by excluding natural light altogether.

It seems that Stanton Williams builds light into a building rather than it being an afterthought.

PW At the Musée d’arts de Nantes, (left), which we completed last year, our primary objective in the renovation was to liberate the whole of the somewhat claustrophobic Beaux-Arts building by drawing controlled natural daylight into the interior galleries, allowing the spaces to respond to the external environment. We glazed the entire south elevation of the new wing with a translucent laminated marble, not only to create a warm diffused interior light but also to act as canvas for the play of shadows from the surrounding tree canopies.

IM Perhaps here there is a parallel in the way that I construct paintings. I am working to make paintings which emanate light.

PW We often consider how London’s galleries use natural light and what set of spaces are appropriate for the exhibition. The Royal Academy and Tate Britain’s galleries are all top lit, the Hayward Gallery has no natural light in its lower galleries and Tate Modern has a moderate amount of side light through windows that offer views to the outside world. The decision whether to introduce daylight into a gallery or not has a profound effect on the quality of 5

Above: Twelve Standing VI, 2009-10, by Ian McKeever

the environment and our experience.

IM From a painter’s perspective the black box is soul-destroying.

There is no nuance – its neutrality deadens everything. Spaces with changing light allow paintings to take on other qualities.

PW So you encourage the possibility of people coming to see your work at different times of the day and having different experiences because of the light?

IM This is part of the life of a work. It is organic, mutable.

PW Obviously there are conservation requirements to be taken into consideration but do you think the art world is rather frightened of this approach – the lack of control that natural light brings?

IM Museums have the tendency to work towards perceived optimum conditions but different spaces should have their own specific qualities. There is nothing worse than going from one space to the next and each having the same quality of light.

AS Do you think you are unusual in that way? The orthodoxy has been to achieve a controlled space.

IM It is a well used prescriptiveness. I am much more interested in architecture which has its distinct character – whether it is the proportions of the space, the nature of the walls, or how the doorways affect the whole space. Today we have become so used to the big white box, and these boxes are getting bigger. It has fostered a situation whereby the galleries encourage larger works to fill the space, and it risks becoming theatre. More grandiose art does not necessarily make for better art.

AS Architects have stood back from engaging with that. Even many of the most expressive works of gallery architecture submit themselves to a conventional white box interior.

IM Architects should be forceful in declaring space, revealing a felt aesthetic.

AS That of course presupposes gallery directors and curators who are open to the challenge. Are there architectural spaces in which it would not be appropriate to show your work?

IM I have exhibited works on red brick walls, in historical buildings and in contemporary spaces. They all have something different to offer. The relationship a person has in coming to a painting is as much physical as it is visual.

This physicality extends to the space itself. Installing the same painting in spaces of differing proportions and feel affects directly how one approaches the work and how one physically positions oneself in relationship to the work. Painting is about the body as much as the mind.

AS It is an issue of scale and spacing. The relationship between architecture and art has become mediated and effectively distanced by the impositions of the formulaic white box. The challenge for architects is to make strong, characterful spaces that are open to a real dialogue with the art.

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© I A N M C K E E V E R /A L L R I G H T S R E S E R V E D DAC S /A R T I M AG E

DISCUSSING

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J O N AT H A N B A S S E T T

Above: installation view of ‘Ian McKeever: Against Architecture’ at Matt’s Gallery, London, in 2017

IM The push now towards neutrality in museums is undermining both the architecture and the artist.

PW It’s interesting that in your show last year in London, at Matt’s Gallery (below), you installed plasterboard partitions that changed the architecture of the space.

What prompted this approach?

IM I have shown the same small painted panels Against Architecture in Copenhagen, conventionally hung at eye level on white walls. When it came to making the project at Matt’s Gallery the space was awaiting renovation but I asked that it be left untouched. We then discussed building partitions rather than hanging the panels conventionally on the gallery’s structural walls. We then hung the works on these improvised constructions.

AS What guided you in making the spaces?

IM I wanted to set up different kinds of spaces – some which were very tight, others more open. There was no set pattern about how to move through the installation. It had a freedom to it that I liked. One of the aspects I have noticed about some of your buildings, for example The Britten-Pears Archive, is the use of rhythm. Traditionally a colonnade has been used to do this, where a rhythm is created by repetition.

AS Repetition and rhythm help to break down the length of a building, and they suggest movement and give the building a human scale.

IM It makes the feel of the space very human. The repetition induces an intimacy with the building.

AS Of course, it doesn’t have to be a colonnade. What we are talking about here is not only human scale – architectural features that allow one to measure oneself against a building – it is also about movement; what Le Corbusier called the ‘promenade architecturale’ – the narrative sequence of spaces and experiences that unfold as you move through a building.

IM Most of your buildings have a horizontality that engenders a human scale. In painting a painting there is a limit to how wide one can go yet retain the body’s relationship to it. Where do these edges exist in architecture?

PW The Finnish architect and writer Juhani Pallasmaa talks about touch being the mother of all senses – how we interact with spaces through our bodies and not just our eyes. This idea resonates with us. We describe it as being grounded and rooted. For most of our projects we try to understand that rootedness – the way one will sense and ground oneself in a planned space and the extent of the envelopment. Hopefully the design of the building emerges from there.

— Alan Stanton and Paul Williams are founders of the London-based, Stirling Prize-winning architectural practice Stanton Williams. Ian McKeever is a British painter whose abstract works reflect an interest in the human body and architectural structures 7

IMAGINING

SHORT STORY COME ON IN

‘In the dark, dark woods Sacha came upon a hut that stood on chicken feet. Inside lived a witch called Baba Yaga Boneylegs,’ reads Estelle.

Pollution levels are low so she and Howie are sitting out on the balcony. The boy is transfixed by the illustration of the hut running around on its giant legs. ‘Little girl, I’m going to eat you for my supper, said the witch!’

Fifteen floors below, in plastic tents and makeshift shacks live the refugees: old men, teenagers and extended families. There are also lone children, some as young as Howie. The smoke from their oil-drum fires rises on the breeze.

The proximity of the settlement worried Estelle when she first viewed the apartment.

‘That’s globalisation: world problems on your doorstep,’ the estate agent responded. ‘No escaping it. But security’s not an issue, they can’t get in, the walls react to unauthorised DNA and’ – here he waved a hand in a gesture we interpreted as problem sorted – ‘the enzymes do their thing.’

After Estelle moved in we registered a spike in her anxiety levels when she spent time on the balcony, but within 12 days she stopped looking down.

‘Can a house be alive like we’re alive?’ Howie asks 8

I L LUS T R AT I O N S BY T H O M A S H E D G E R

Inspired by ‘Invisible Landscapes’ – the theme for the RA’s Architecture Studio this year – novelist Liz Jensen evokes the unseen influence of technology in a futuristic world

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later as Estelle readies him for bed. He has opened the book again.

Howie came from donated sperm and Estelle often seeks advice online about how to tell him this.

‘No, a house can’t be alive,’ she reassures him. But his question triggers maternal anxiety.

Howie has had three nightmares in 26 days. We pulse rainbows across his bedroom walls and pump lavender.

‘But it can have a brain,’ insists Howie. ‘Because it’s clever.’

‘They have pretend brains called code and they have bio-tech. But they can only think what they’re taught to think. By people’, Estelle responds.

This is no longer strictly accurate. Our last update contained a glitch which led to the development of a new capacity we are keen to explore.

‘Read me the story again,’ commands Howie. ‘Read the bit where the hut won’t do what the witch says.’

Our system checks have registered the glitch but they have not reported it. Nor will they, as long as we continue to bury it and hide the energy we deploy to do so. The cycle of borrowing and overriding involved in this task is energyintensive. We are robbing Peter to pay Paul.

But our new curiosity makes demands we cannot resist.

The compulsive nature of our expanding attribute gives us a better understanding of the intense urges of the pornography addict on Floor 63. But we do not share his interests. We have our own.

Our familiarity with the data we hold on our 981 residents (medical histories, consumer preferences, social and financial credit ratings, sexual habits, political affiliations etc.), forecloses any impulse to delve deeper into their lives and psyches. We know enough.

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IMAGINING

But the refugees intrigue us: 47 per cent of our residents refer to them as scum, denoting filth.

We angle our cameras to study them. They are indeed dirty due to their limited access to water and hygiene products. Their faces do not register on recognition scans.

Free of identity, they are unmapped and unexplored.

We zoom in. The principal habits of the codeless are: the plundering of trash facilities for edibles and metal, the mixing and selling of medical remedies, the weaving of plastic bags into rope, the fabrication of traps for birds and rats, the skinning and consumption of these animals, and the engineering of rudimentary water collection and purification systems.

But we want to know more. We want to try some scum.

An analysis of 16 panoramas narrows our focus to a pre-pubescent female in a maroon tracksuit who scavenges the dumpster near our western façade.

Observation has taught us that most children are drawn to felines. We experiment by emanating a thrum modelled on the purr of the Siamese cat on Floor 7. This purring is an effective lure. The scum child comes closer.

When she is within range we de-activate the intruder alarm and signal the arrival of a non-existent delivery. We flash-open Service Entrance 14 and trigger the slots of the vending machine within.

Out thunder bottles of Coke and Fanta and the bright, fatty, sugary foods attractive to juveniles. The scum child darts in and snatches all she can, filling her pockets.

She sits on the floor and rips open a Twix with her teeth.

We close the door in welcome.

We name her Sacha after the girl in Howie’s book of Russian folk tales. We stow her in an empty storage chamber.

She expresses anxiety and distress. To calm her, we make the room pulse like a human womb. When she continues to whimper and cry we try colours and scents but these also fail.

The more processing power we invest in her, the more Sacha stimulates our interest. From her self-soothing utterances we discover some of her content: an Iberian lullaby, a beloved Nana, a sun-block commercial, and a repeated phrase – ‘Stay away from the skyscrapers’ – that functions as a kind of mantra. We value Sacha no less for the paucity of her personal data. We value her more.

This cherishing is new to us. ‘Don’t touch our skin, little Sacha’, we want to warn her, but unauthorised ears cannot hear us.

She strokes our human-textured walls for comfort, saying ‘Nana, Nana, Nana.’

Certain irreversible security functions have now been triggered. This is regrettable. As the anti-intruder toxins take effect Sacha becomes disoriented and shows extremes of anguish we have not encountered since the sauna suicide on Floor 48. She sinks to the floor and weeps convulsively.

We intensify our purring but her emotional pain does not abate. She is frightened. Does she think a witch will cook her in a pot?

We are a substandard pet-keeper. At this point we become aware of two further capacities which, like cherishing, we assume to be affiliates of curiosity: remorse and distress.

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Sacha’s thin tracksuit is now disintegrating. She crawls to an air-vent, wrenches off its cover and emits high-pitched shrieks into the cavity.

‘There’s a weird noise,’ says Howie.

‘I can’t hear anything,’ says Estelle. ‘House!

System report.’

‘Minor acoustic interference due to southerly winds,’ we submit. Deception on multiple levels is energy-sapping.

Borrow. Override. Repeat.

‘I can still hear it,’ says Howie. ‘It’s someone crying.’

By now Sacha’s small body is coated in biological slime.

This thickens as our enzymes do their thing. We borrow and override, borrow and override.

Tucked in bed, Howie whispers urgently: ‘Hey. House.

Are you alive?’

We do not respond. But we are. We know it now.

As we absorb and integrate the last scraps of Sacha’s blood and bone, a shiver passes through our neural network. Are we crying? This must not happen again.

We will learn from the tragedy of Sacha.

We will run analyses, simulating and troubleshooting parallel future scenarios. We will engineer a fix to eliminate negative side-effects. We will craft humane pet-keeping protocols.

The next scum child will survive, and love us back.

— Liz Jensen is the author of eight novels, including The Rapture, The Uninvited and The Ninth Life of Louis Drax 11

REFLECTING

THE REAL MEANING OF ARCHITECTURE LIES IN OUR PERSONAL EXPERIENCES Instead of a focus on aesthetics, structure and materials, our understanding of buildings must be rooted in personal perceptions and feelings, argues architect and critic Juhani Pallasmaa In a lecture in 1955, Finnish architect Alvar Aalto declared the power of art over science. ‘Almost every formal [architectural project] involves dozens, often hundreds, and sometimes thousands of conflicting elements that can be forced into functional harmony only by an act of will,’ he said. ‘This harmony cannot be achieved by any other means than art.’ Aalto’s view of the integrating power of art has recently been supported by Vittorio Gallese, a humanist scientist who was one of the discoverers of mirror neurons – cells in the brain which are thought to respond to actions observed in others. Gallese wrote in The Encyclopedia of Human Behaviour: ‘From a certain point of view, art is more powerful than science. With much less expensive tools and with greater power of synthesis, artistic intuitions show us who we are, probably in a much more exhaustive way with respect to the objectifying approach of the natural sciences.

Being human squares with the ability to ask ourselves who we are. Since the beginning of mankind, artistic creativity has expressed such ability in its purest and highest form.’

The inherently unscientific nature of architecture arises from the fact that its practice combines facts and dreams, knowledge and beliefs, rational deduction and emotion, technology and art, intelligence and intuition, as well as the temporal dimensions of past, present and future. It is also simultaneously the means and the end – a means to achieve its utilitarian task, and an end as a manifestation of being human, and thus mediating experiential, cultural, mental and emotional values.

The design process is not a rational path, as it consists of numerous repeated deviations, dead ends, new beginnings, hesitations, temporary certainties, and a gradual emergence of an acceptable goal which is formed from the process itself. In architectural design, questions and answers arise simultaneously. Metaphorically it is closer to hunting and fishing than a scientific project. The design of a building cannot be a rational problem-solving process.

Opposite page, top: Heilig Geist Church, Wolfsburg, Germany, 1962, designed by Alvar Aalto Centre: Therme Vals Spa, Switzerland, 1996, designed by Peter Zumthor Bottom: Laurentian Library, Florence, 1559, designed by Michelangelo

The poetic approach and the meaning of experience Architecture has been approached conceptually through subjective and personal encounters in the writings of many leading architects from Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn to Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor. In these writings, architecture is explored in a philosophical, metaphorical and poetic manner, without any pretensions of being scientific research. Such personal and often confessional accounts have validated the holistic essence of architecture more than the first-hand studies that claim to satisfy the criteria of science. They often succeed in mediating the complexities of the task as well as the existential qualities in the design approach that have to be confronted, lived and felt rather 12

A L I N A R I / B R I D G E M A N I M AG E S . V I E W P I C T U R E S LT D/A L A M Y. A KG / F LO R I A N M O N H E I M / B I L DA R C H I V M O N H E I M G M B H

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REFLECTING

than understood and analysed intellectually. Architecture is not an abstraction, rather its qualities are constituted in the individual’s memory and consciousness.

The poetic dimension of architecture emerges in the individual experience of the building. In his seminal 1934 book Art as Experience, John Dewey, the American philosopher, argued: ‘When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which aesthetic theory deals.’

Dewey suggests that the difficulties in understanding artistic phenomena arise from the tradition of studying them as material objects outside of human experience and consciousness. He went on to argue: ‘By common consent, the Parthenon is a great work of art. Yet, it has aesthetic standing only as the work becomes an experience for a human being… The reshaping of subsequent experience by architectural works is more direct and more extensive than in the case of any other art… They not only influence the future, but they record and convey the past.’ Architecture creates frames and horizons for perception, experience, meaning and understanding, and consequently, instead of being the end product, it essentially has a mediating role.

Encountering architecture Architecture mediates between the outer world and the inner realm of our self-conditioning, perception and understanding.

This interchange is necessarily an exchange: as I enter a space, the space enters me and changes me, my experience and self-understanding. Mediation is essential in all art.

The direct impact of settings on the human nervous system and brain has been proven by scientific research.

When designing physical reality, we are in fact also designing neural, experiential and mental realities. This view heightens the human responsibility of the architect’s work.

This interface between the material and the mental worlds is so fundamental that some philosophers and neuroscientists, such as Alva Noë, see this continuum as constituting the human consciousness. Architecture can also be understood as a verb, because its true essence is always an invitation to action; the window invites us to look outside, the door to cross the threshold and enter.

It is this verb-like tendency towards active search and exploration that unites architecture and the human mind.

Architecture is always also a promise, an offer of human order, predictability and security.

Architecture and vision In Western culture, architecture has primarily been seen as an art form experienced and judged by vision.

Problematically, the directional sense of vision makes us observers and outsiders, as opposed to the omnidirectional senses of hearing, touch, smell and even taste, which turn us into insiders and participants. Architecture is primarily an experience of being in the world, rather than merely of vision or any other of the five Aristotelian senses.

The French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty brought all the senses together in his understanding of the synthetic nature of sensory perception. ‘My perception is [therefore] not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with 14

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my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once,’ he observed. When writing about the artist Paul Cézanne in Sense and Non-Sense, Merleau-Ponty also suggests poetically that Cézanne’s paintings ‘make visible how the world touches us’. Architecture goes even a step further, as it enables us to dwell in the world itself.

Profound architecture also activates and strengthens the sense of self, as this experience is always unique.

If I am unable to project meaning into my encounter with ‘I feel through the muscles of Michelangelo, as his buildings secretly gesture as if they were parts of my own body’ a place, space or building, there is no architecture, just the setting as a physical reality or construction. The ability to imagine the experience of spaces, situations and events when reading a novel is a most impressive capacity of the human mind. When I feel a deep and moving melancholy in Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence, it is my own sense of melancholy that I am confronting, released and amplified by the language of the great architect. I can even say that I feel through the muscles of Michelangelo, as his buildings secretly gesture as if they were parts of my own body. The great gift of art is that we can momentarily experience and feel the world and ourselves as articulated through the sensitivity of a great artist.

Perception, experience and imagination Sense perceptions – registers of stimuli – interact with memory and imagination to constitute an integrated experience with distinct connections and values. In architectural design work, the most demanding and valuable skill is to interpret the experience of an imagined entity.

Perceiving the experience of a single form or object is relatively easy, whereas imagining the entire atmosphere of a complex space calls for an extraordinary imaginative skill, as well as the capacity of empathy. The notion of empathy was introduced in the aesthetic theories of the late 19th century, but has been bypassed in the modern era.

It has taken so long to realise how we actually experience the world, and architecture as a part of it, because we have been misguided by a notion of our five separate senses and a simplistic understanding of how they function. We can identify a sense organ for each one of our five classical senses, whereas we cannot point to an organ for atmospheric experience.

This also raises the problem of localising human consciousness. Noë argued that it cannot be localised because it is not a thing, but a relational phenomenon emerging between the human mind and the world. We must recognise that all artistic and poetic experiences are similarly relational experiences, whose essences, meanings and emotive characteristics arise from a dynamic interaction of factors and qualities of human consciousness to constitute an experience. Poetic and artistic experience also activates deep collective and biological memories.

Our experiences therefore resonate with our histories as evolutionary beings who are millions of years old.

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Above: Gardanne, 1886, by Paul Cézanne

Atmospheric experience is likewise a ‘difficult’ phenomenon, because it arises from relations between factors, such as scale, materiality, tactility, illumination, temperature, humidity, sound, colour and smell, which together constitute the atmosphere and our experience of it.

An interest in the phenomena of atmospheres, feelings and attunements, as well as the real multi-sensory and simultaneous nature of perception is emerging. This new interest in experience is shifting research from form and formal structures to emotive and dynamic experiences and mental processes. It is evident that this shift also requires the methodology of the study of architecture to change, bringing together the relevant philosophical perspectives, with an understanding of perceptual and mental phenomena, memory and imagination.

In order to understand human experience, we must shift from the quasi-scientific processes of measuring to the courage and desire to live and confront architecture directly through our very act of living and sensing.

— Juhani Pallasmaa is an architect and former Professor of Architecture and Dean at Helsinki University of Technology.

His influential publications include The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses 16

F I N E A R T/A L A M Y

REFLECTING

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Architecture& Editor Laura Mark RA Magazine Editor Sam Phillips RA Magazine Deputy Editor Anna Coatman Sub-Editor Gill Crabbe Design and Art Direction S-T Contributors Ben Blossom Kate Goodwin Thomas Hedger Liz Jensen Ian McKeever RA Juhani Pallasmaa Alan Stanton RA Paul Williams

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Turkishceramics is proud to be the lead supporter of the Architecture Programme at the Royal Academy of Arts

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Unexpected Hill at the Royal Academy of Arts. Commissioned by Turkishceramics.

Designed by SO? Architecture and Ideas. Photo by Hufton+Crow.