BACHELOR OF SCIENCE (HONOURS) IN ARCHITECTURE THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM (ARC61303/ARC2224) SYNOPSIS: REACTION PAPER (MARCH 2017)
Name: Chia Sue Hwa Lecturer: Mr. Prince Favis Isip Reader/Text Title: Text 3 – The Eyes of The Skin
ID No.: 0317920 Tutorial Time: 10am Synopsis No: 2 Author: Juhani Pallasmaa
The thesis of this text was a lament on the growing obsession and precedence of the eye and the gaze above all other organs and senses. For Pallasmaa, the eye is a flattering organ; yet it is a distancing one. It is a way to experience without a bodily closeness, and as such it pushes phenomenon to an abstract visual, plain on paper. In contrast, the other sensory systems, smelling, hearing, tasting and touching, invades one’s experiences. The essential topic of discussion in ‘The Eyes of the Skin’ is that architecture and art is a more authentic experience when something is felt by the skin, or smelled, or heard, as opposed to being seen. He emphasizes this with a memorable line, ‘In heightened emotional states and deep in thought, vision is usually repressed'. Part Two of the book begins with an introduction to ‘The Body in the Centre’; depicting the body image as the collision between our body and the experiential world. The text is a philosophical read on how the law of our body and the image of the world form a single existential experience, hand-inhand. Pallasmaa continues on to describe the ‘Multi-Sensory Experience’, proposing the metaphorical notion that architecture is the augmentation of nature in the man-made realm, providing grounds for individual perception and also forms the horizon of experience. Pallasmaa’s writing style is contrasting. The overall writing was deeply profound and poetic; he paints subtle pictures with his words, making it an altogether wholesome read. On the contrary, his hegemonic opinion of the ‘eye’ came across as fanatical at times, even repetitive. His waging of a war of terror on the eye was emphasized slightly too much. As an end note, Pallasmaa concludes that senses do not only convey information of the judgment of the intellect, they are also a means of kindling the imagination of an articulating sensory thought. The making of architecture calls for clear thinking; one which mode is specifically embodied through the sense and body, and especially, through the specific medium of architecture. Word Count: 341 Assessed by:
Mark Date
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