Light Extracts

 “Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings as they might be interpreted or directed toward spatial sequence, texture, material and light, experienced in architecture.”

“The way spaces feel, the sound and smell of these places, has equal weight to the way things look. Pallasmaa is not just a theoretician; he is a brilliant architect of phenomenological insight.”

Page 7

“In the chapter’s text on the ‘Horizon of Things’, Merleau-Ponty wrote: ‘No more than are the sky or the earth is the horizon a collection of things held together, or class name, or a logical possibility of conception, or a system of ‘potentiality of consciousness’: it is a new type of being, a being by porosity, pregnancy, or generality.”

Page 8

“Conceptual short circuit between the dominant sense of vison and the suppressed sense modality of touch.”

“Architecture does not make us inhabit worlds of mere fabrication and fantasy; it articulates the experience of our being-in-the-world and strengthens our sense of reality and self.”

Page 12

“The sense of self, strengthened by art and architecture, also permits us to engage fully in the mental dimensions of dream, imagination and desire. Buildings and cities provide the horizon for the understanding and confronting of the human existential condition. Instead of creating mere objects of visual seduction, architecture relates, mediates and projects meanings. The ultimate meaning of any building is beyond architecture; it directs our consciousness back to the world and towards our own sense of self complete embodied and spiritual beings. In fact, this is the great function of all meaningful art. In the experience of art, a peculiar exchange takes place; I lend my emotions and associations to the space and the space lends me its atmosphere, which entices and emancipates my perceptions and thoughts. An architectural work is not experienced as a series of isolated retinal pictures, but in its full and integrated material, embodied and spiritual essence. It offers pleasurable shapes and surfaces moulded for the touch of the eye and the other senses, but it also incorporates and integrates physical and mental structures, giving our existential experience a strengthened coherence and significance.”

“Ludwig Wittgenstein acknowledges the interaction of both philosophical and architectural work with the image of self: ‘Working in philosophy-like work in architecture in many respects is really more a work on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On how one sees things.’”

Page 13

“A remarkable factor in the experience of enveloping spatiality, interiority and hapticity is the deliberate suppression of sharp focused vision.”

“The very essence of the lived experience is moulded by unconscious haptic imagery and unfocused peripheral vision. Focused vision confronts us with the world whereas peripheral vision envelops us in the flesh of the world.”

“Photographed architectural images are centralised images of focused gestalt. Yet, the quality of an architectural reality seems to depend fundamentally on peripheral vision, which unfolds the subject in the space.”

Page 14

“Peripheral vision integrates us with space, while focused vision pushes us out of the space making us mere spectators.”

“Atmospheric characteristics of spaces, places and settings are grasped before any conscious observation of details is made.”

“Again, neurological investigations suggest that our processes of perception and cognition advance from the instantaneous grasp of entities towards the identification of details, rather than the other way round.”

“The thinking hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in architecture (Chichester, 2009), and The Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery in Architecture (Chichester, 2011).”

Page 15

“The invention of perspectival representation made the eye the centre point of the perceptual world as well as of the concept of the self.”

Page 18

“A collection of philosophical essays entitled Modernity and the Hegemony of vision argues that ‘beginning with the ancient Greeks, Western culture has been dominated by an ocularcentric paradigm, a vision-generated, vision-centred interpretation of analyses ‘historical connections between vision and knowledge, vision and ontology, vision and power, vision and ethics’.”

“Architecture, as with all art, is fundamentally confronted with questions of human existence in space and time; it expresses and relates man’s being in the world. Architecture deeply engaged in the metaphysical questions of the self and the world, interiority and exteriority, time and duration, life and death.”

“Architecture is our primary instrument in relating us with space and time, and giving these dimensions a human measure. It domesticates limitless space and endless time to be tolerated, inhabited and understood by humankind.”

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OCULARCENTRISM

“Architecture has been regarded as an art form of the eye.”

“Vision is regarded as the most noble of the senses, and the loss of eyesight as the ultimate physical loss.”

Page 21

“The art of the eye has certainly produced imposing and thought-provoking structures, but it has not facilitated human rootedness in the world.”

“Modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.”

Page 22

“The prevailing concepts of space and time and their interrelations form an essential paradigm for architecture, as Sigfried Giedion established in his seminal ideological history of modern architecture Space, Time and Architecture.”

Merleau-Ponty

“My perception is [therefore] not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.”

Page 23

“’The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture,’ writes Heidegger.”

“The narcissistic eye views architecture solely as a means of self-expression, and as an intellectual-artistic game detached from essential mental and societal connections, whereas the nihilistic eye deliberately advances sensory and mental detachment and alienation. Instead of reinforcing one’s body-centred and integrated experience of the world, nihilistic architecture disengages and isolates the body, and instead of attempting to reconstruct cultural order, it makes a reading of collective signification impossible.”

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Walter J Ong

“He points out that ‘the shift from moral to written speech was essentially a shift from sound to visual space,’”

“He argues that as hearing-dominance has yielded to sight-dominance, situational thinking has been replaced by abstract thinking.”

“Though words are grounded in oral speech, writing tyrannically locks them into a visual field forever. A literate person cannot fully recover a sense of what the word is to purely oral people.”

“The gradually growing hegemony of the eye seems to be parallel with the development of Western ego-consciousness and the gradually increasing separation of the self and the world; vision separates us from the world whereas the other senses unite us with it.”

“Equally, the task of art and architecture in general is to reconstruct the experience of an undifferentiated interior world. In which we are not mere spectators, but to which we inseparably belong. In artistic works, existential understanding arises from our very encounter with the world and our being-in-the-world-it is not conceptualised or intellectualised.”

Page 28

“Construction in traditional cultures is guided by the body in the same way that a bird shapes its nest by movements of its body. Indigenous clay and mud architectures in various parts of the world seem to be born of the muscular and haptic senses more than the eye. We can even identify the transition of indigenous construction from the haptic realm into the control of vision as a loss of plasticity and intimacy, and of the sense of total fusion characteristic in the settings of indigenous cultures.

“Western architectural theory since Leon Battista Alberti has been primarily engaged with questions of visual perception, harmony and proportion. Alberti’s statement that ‘painting is nothing but the intersection of the visual pyramid following a given distance, a fixed centre and a certain lighting’ outlines the perspectival paradigm which also became the instrument of architectural thinking.”

“The observer becomes detached from an incarnate relation with the environment through the suppression of the other senses, in particular by means of technological extensions of the eye, and the proliferation of images.”

Page 29

“Statements by Le Corbusier – such as, ‘I exist in life only if I can see’; ‘I am and remain an impenitent visual – everything is in the visual’; ‘One needs to see clearly in order to understand’”

“Architecture is a plastic thing. I mean by ‘plastic’ what is seen and measured by the eyes”

“In heightened emotional states and deep thought, vision is usually repressed.”

“Vision and the tactile sense are fused in actual lived experience.”

Page 30

“Moreover, an architectural work is great precisely because of the oppositional and contradictory intentions and allusions it succeeds in fusing together.”

“’In every case one must achieve a simultaneous solution of opposites,’ as Alvar Aalto wrote.”

Page 32

“David Harvey relates ‘the loss of temporality and the search for instantaneous impact; in contemporary expression to the loss of experiential depth. Fredric Jameson uses the notion of contrived depthlessness’ to describe the contemporary cultural condition and ‘its fixation with appearances, surfaces and instant impacts that have no sustaining power over time’.”

“David Michael Levin uses the term ‘frontal ontology’ to describe the prevailing frontal, fixated and focused vision, Susan ssontag has made perceptive remarks on the role of the photographed image in our perception of the world. She writes, for instance, of a ‘mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs’, and argues that ‘the reality has come to seem more and more what we are shown by camera’, and that ‘the omnipresence of photographs has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility. By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is.’”

Page 33

“The sense of ‘aura’, the authority of presence, that Walter Benjamin regards as a necessary quality for an authentic piece of art, has been lost.”

“The increasing use of reflective glass in architecture reinforces the dreamlike sense of unreality and alienation. The contradictory opaque transparency of these buildings reflects the gaze back unaffected and unmoved; we are unable to see or imagine life behind these walls. The architectural mirror, that returns our gaze and doubles the world, is an enigmatic and frightening device.”

“The flatness of today’s standard construction is strengthened by a weakened sense of materiality. Natural materials – stone, brick and wood – allow our vision to penetrate their surfaces and enable us to become convinced of the veracity of matter. Natural materials express their age, as well as the story of their origins and their history of human use. All matter exists in the continuum of time; the patina of wear adds the enriching experience of time to the materials of construction. But the machine-made materials of today – scaleless sheets of glass, enamelled metals and synthetic plastics – tend to present their unyielding surfaces to the eye without conveying their material essence or age. Buildings of this technological era usually deliberately aim at ageless perfection, and they do not incorporate the dimension of time, or the unavoidable and mentally significant processes of aging. This fear of the traces of wear and age is related to our fear of death.

Page34

“In recent decades, a new architectural imagery has emerged, which employs reflection, gradations of transparency, overlay and juxtaposition to create a sense of spatial thickness, as well as subtle and changing sensations of movement and light. This new sensibility promises an architecture that can turn the relative immateriality and weightlessness of recent technological construction into a positive experience of space, place and meaning. The weakening of the experience of time in today’s environments has devastating mental effects. In the words of the American therapist Gotthard Booth, ‘Nothing gives man fuller satisfaction than participation in processes that supersede the span of individual life’, We have a mental need to grasp that we are rooted in the community of time, and in the man-made world it is the task of architecture to facilitate this experience. Architecture domesticates limitless space and enables us to inhabit it, but it should likewise domesticate endless time and enable us to inhabit the continuum of time. The current overemphasis on the intellectual and conceptual dimensions of architecture contributes to the disappearance of its physical, sensual and embodied essence. Contemporary architecture posing as the avant-garde is more often engaged with the architectural discourse itself and mapping the possible marginal territories of the art than with responding to human existential questions. This reductive focus gives rise to a sense of architectural autism, an internalised and autonomous discourse that is not grounded in our shared existential reality. Beyond architecture, contemporary culture at large drifts towards a distancing, a kind of chilling de-sensualisation and de-eroticisation of human relation to reality.

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“The contemporary city I the city of the eye, one of distance and exteriority.”

“The haptic city is the city of interiority and nearness.”

“We are made to live in a fabricated dream world.

“If we desire architecture to have an emancipating or healing role, instead of reinforcing the erosion of existential meaning, we must reflect on the multitude of secret ways in which the art of architecture is tied to the cultural and mental reality of its time.”

Page 37

“An essential line in the evolution of modernity has been the liberation of the eye from the Cartesian perspectival epistemology. The paintings of joseph Mallord William turner continue the elimination of the picture frame and the vantage point begun in the Baroque era; the Impressionists abandon the boundary line, balanced framing and perspectival depth Paul Cézanne aspires ‘to make visible how the world touches us’, Cubists abandon the single focal point, reactivate peripheral vision and reinforce haptic experience, whereas the colour field painters reject illusory depth in order to reinforce the presence of the painting itself as an iconic artefact and an autonomous reality.”

“We tend to interpret a building as an analogue to our body, and vice versa.”

“Since the dynasties of ancient Egypt, measures of the human body have been used in architecture. The anthropocentric tradition has been almost entirely forgotten in the modern times.”

Page 38

“Richard Serra directly address the body as well as our experiences of horizontality and verticality, materiality, gravity and weight. The same countercurrent against the hegemony of the perspectival eye has taken place in modern architecture regardless of the culturally privileged position of vision. The kinaesthetic and textural architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the muscular and tactile buildings of Alvar Aalto, and Louis Kahn’s architecture of geometry and gravitas are particularly significant examples of this.”

“Martin Jay remarks: ‘In opposition to the lucid, linear, solid, fixed, planimetric, closed form of the Renaissance, the baroque was painterly, recessional, soft-focused, multiple, and open.’ He also argues that the ‘baroque visual experience has a strongly tactile or haptic quality, which prevents it from turning into the absolute ocularcentrism of its Cartesian perspectivalist rival’.”

“In this thorough and thought-provoking book The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation, David Michael Levin differentiates between two modes of vision: ‘the assertoric graze’ and ‘the aletheic gaze’. In his view, the assertoric gaze is narrow, dogmatic, intolerant, rigid, fixed, inflexible, exclusionary and unmoved, whereas the alethic gaze, associated with the hermeneutic theory of truth, tends to see from a multiplicity of standpoints and perspectives, and is multiple, pluralistic, democratic, contextual, inclusionary, horizontal and caring. As suggested by Levin, there are signs that a new mode of looking is emerging.”

“This new awareness is forcefully projected by numerous architects around the world today who are attempting to re-sensualise architecture through a strengthened sense of materiality and hapticity, texture and weight, density of space and materialised light.”

Page 41

The Body in the Centre

“I confront the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body onto the façade of the cathedral, where it roams over the mouldings and contours, sensing the size of recesses and projections; my body weight meets the mass of the cathedral door, and my hand grasps the door pull as I enter the dark void behind I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.”

Page 43

“In Merleau-Ponty’s own words, ‘Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system’; and ‘sensory experience is unstable and alien to natural perception, which we achieve with our whole body all at once, and which opens on a world of interacting senses’.

“The percept of the body and the image of the world turn into one single continuous existential experience; there is no body separate from its domicile in space, and there is no space unrelated to the unconscious image of the perceiving self. ‘The body image is informed fundamentally from haptic and orienting experiences early in life. Our visual images are developed later on, and depend for their meaning on primal experiences that were acquired haptically,’ Kent C Bloomer and Charles W Moore argue in their 1977 book Body, Memory, and Architecture, one of the first studies to survey the role of the body and the senses in architectural experience. They go on to explain: ‘What is missing form our dwellings today are the potential transactions between body, imagination, and environment’; ‘To at least some extent every place can be remembered, partly because it is unique, but partly because it has affected our bodies and generated enough associations to hold it in our personal worlds.”

Page 44

The Bowl and the Sea

“Wider horizons. Architecture also gives a conceptual and material structure to societal institutions, as well as to the conditions of daily life. It concretises the cycle of the year, the course of the sun and the passing of the hours of the day.

“Architecture strengthens the existential experience, one’s sense of being in the world, and this is essentially a strengthened experience of self. Instead of mere vision, or the five classical senses, architecture involves several realms of sensory experience which interact and fuse into each other.”

“As martin Jay remarks when describing Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the senses, ‘through vision we touch the sun and the stars’.”

Gherkin

Page 45

“Vision reveals what the touch already knows”

Page 46

“In his view, the work of authentic art stimulates our ideated sensations of touch, and this stimulation is life-enhancing. Indeed, we do feel the warmth of the water in the bathtub in Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of bathing nudes and the moist air of Turner’s landscapes, and we can sense the heat of the sun and the cool breeze in Matisse’s paintings of windows open to a view of the sea.

“An architectural work is not experienced as a collection of isolated visual pictures, but in its fully embodied material and spiritual presence.”

“The visual frontality of the architectural drawing is lost in the real experience of architecture. Good architecture offers shapes and surfaces moulded for the pleasurable touch of the eye ‘Contour and profile (modénature) are the touchstone of the architect,’ as Le Corbusier put it, revealing a tactile ingredient in his otherwise ocular understanding of architecture.”

“’The chief benefit of the house is that the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace,’ writes Bachelard. But even more, an architectural space frames, halts, strengthens and focuses our thoughts, and prevents them from getting lost. We can dream and sense our being outdoors, but we need the architectural geometry of a room to think clearly. The geometry of thought echoes the geometry of the room.”

The Book of Tea, Kakuzo Okakura

“Quiet reigns with nothing to break the silence save the note of the boiling water in the iron kettle. The kettle sings well, for pieces of iron are so arranged in the bottom as to produce a peculiar melody in which one may hear the echoes of a cataract muffled by clouds, of a distant sea breaking among the rocks, a rainstorm sweeping through a bamboo forest, or of the soughing of pines on some faraway hill.”

Page 48

“In Okakura’s description the present and the absent, the near and the distant, the sensed and the imagined fuse together.”

“The art of architecture is also engaged with metaphysical and existential questions concerning man’s being in the world. The making of architecture calls for clear thinking, but this is a specific embodied mode of thought that takes place through the senses and the body, and through the specific medium of architecture. Architecture elaborates and communicates thoughts of man’s incarnate confrontation with the world through thoughts of man’s incarnate confrontation with the world through ‘plastic emotions’, In my view, the task of architecture is ‘to make visible how the world touches us’, as Merleau-Ponty said of the paintings of Cézanne.”

Page 49

“Deep shadows and darkness are essential, because they dim the sharpness of vision, make depth and distance ambiguous, and invite unconscious peripheral vision and tactile fantasy.”

Page 50

“The art of chiaroscuro is a skill of the master architect too. In great architectural spaces, there is a constant, deep breathing of shadow and light; shadow inhales and illumination exhales light. In our time, light has turned into a mere quantitative matter and the window has lost its significance as a mediator between two worlds, between enclosed and open, interiority and exteriority, private and public, shadow and light. Having lost its ontological meaning, the window has turned into a mere absence of the wall. Luis Barragán, the true magician of intimate secrecy, mystery and shadow in contemporary architecture, writes: Take the use of enormous plate windows they deprive our buildings of intimacy, the effect of shadow and atmosphere. Architects all over the world have been mistaken in the proportions which they have assigned to large plate windows or spaces opening to the outside. We have lost our sense of intimate life, and have become forced to live public lives, essentially away from home.”

“A society of surveillance is necessarily a society of the voyeuristic and sadistic eye. An efficient method of mental torture is the use of a constantly high level of illumination that leaves no space for mental withdrawal or privacy; even the dark interiority of self is exposed and violated.”

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“In historical towns and spaces, acoustic experiences reinforce and enrich visual experiences.”

“In rich and invigorating experiences of places, all sensory realms interact and fuse into the memorable image of the place.”

“The centring action of sound affects man’s sense of cosmos,’ writes Walter Ong.”

Page 53

“Ultimately, architecture is the art of petrified silence”

“As time loses its duration, and its echo in the primordial past, man loses his sense of self as a historical being, and is threatened by the ‘terror of time’. Architecture emancipates us from the embrace of the present and allows us to experience the slow, healing flow of time. Buildings and cities are instruments and museums of time. They enable us to see and understand the passing of history, and to participate in time cycles that surpass individual life.”

“Time and space are eternally locked into each other in the silent spaces between these immense columns; matter, space and time fuse into one singular elemental experience, the sense of being. The great works of modernity have forever preserved the utopian time of optimism and hope; even after decades of trying fate, they radiate an air of spring and promise.”

“Heightened experiences of intimacy, home and protection are sensations of the naked skin.”

“Pierre Bonnard, The Nude in the Bath (detail), 1937, Musée du Petit-Palais, Paris.”

“The fireplace as an intimate and personal space of warmth.”

Page 56

“Art is made by the alone for the alone’, as Cyril Connolly writes in The Unquiet Grave.”

“Art projects an unattainable ideal, the ideal of beauty that momentarily touches the eternal.”

Page 58

“A Special joy of travel is to acquaint oneself with the geography and microcosm of smells and tastes.”

Page 59

“The darkness and shadow of the finish peasant’s house create a sense of intimacy and silence; light turns into a precious gift.”

Page 61

“The door handle is the handshake of the building.”

“In our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology of the verb to inhabit, and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity,’ writes Bachelard. ‘And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle,’ he continues. There is a strong identity between naked skin and the sensation of home. The experience of home is essentially an experience of intimate warmth. The space of warmth around a fireplace is the space of ultimate intimacy and comfort.”

Page 62

“Bachelard calls these ‘images that bring out the primitiveness in us’, or ‘primal images’.”

“The house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting. We are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house, and all the other houses are but variations on a fundamental theme. The word habit is too worn a word to express this passionate liaison of our bodies, which do not forget, with an unforgettable house.”

“Tadao Ando has expressed a desire for a tension or opposition between functionality and uselessness in his work: ‘I believe in removing architecture from function after ensuring the observation of functional basis. In other words, I like to see how far architecture can pursue function and then, after the pursuit has been made, to see how far architecture can be removed from function. The significance of architecture is found in the distance between it and function.”

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“The experience of home is structured by distinct activities – cooking, eating, socialising, reading, storing, sleeping, intimate acts – not by visual elements.”

“Authentic architectural experiences consist then, for instance, of approaching or confronting a building, rather than the formal apprehension of a façade; of the act of entering, and not simply the visual design of the door; of looking in or out through a window, rather than the window itself as a material object, or of occupying the sphere of warmth, rather than the fireplace as an object of visual design. Architectural space is lived space rather than physical space, and lived space always transcends geometry and measurability.”

Page 68

Henry Moore

“This is what the sculptor must do. He must strive continually to think of, and use, form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head – he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complex form from all round itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like; he identifies himself with its centre of gravity, its, mass, its weight; he realizes its volume, and the space that the shape displaces in the air.”

Page 69

“The forest enfolds us in its multisensory embrace. The multiplicity of peripheral stimuli effectively pulls us into the reality of its space.”

“The scale and painterly technique of American Expressionist painters provide peripheral stimuli and invite us into the space.”

Page 71

“In today’s architecture, the multitude of sensory experiences is heightened in the work of Glenn Murcutt, Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor”

Page 75

“In 1954, at the age of 85, Frank Lloyd wright formulated the mental task of architecture in the following words: What is needed most in architecture today is the very thing that is most needed in life – integrity. Just as it is in a human being, so integrity is the deepest quality in a building. If we succeed, we will have done a great service to our moral nature – the psyche – of our democratic society. Stand up for integrity in your building and you stand for integrity not only in the life of those who did the building, but socially a reciprocal relationship is inevitable.”

Page 77

“Regardless of having lived in eight houses, I have had only one experiential home in my childhood; my experiential home seems to have travelled with me and constantly transformed into new physical shapes as we moved.”

Page 91

“Mercleau-Ponty’s similar question, ‘How could a painter or poet express anything other than his encounter with the world?”

Page 107

“In my view, an architect is bound to explore and express this very same encounter (with the world). I believe that I am an architect primarily for the reason that this craft offers particularly essential and meaningful possibilities of touching the boundaries of one’s self and the world, and experiencing how they mingle and fuse into each other.”

“Architecture is fundamentally existential in its very essence, and it arises from existential experience and wisdom rather than intellectualized and formalized theories. We can only prepare ourselves for our work in architecture by developing a distinct sensitivity and awareness for architectural phenomena.”

Page 107

“Architecture can strengthen and maintain our grasp of the world and ourselves, and support humility and pride, curiosity and optimism.”

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