
Wider horizons
In the era of visual hegemony and virtual reality, Juhani Pallasmaa's voice resounds as a call back to the multi-sensory, embodied origins of architecture. This influential Finnish architect has challenged the prevailing ocularcentric view, inviting us to rediscover the essence of architectural experience through the prism of the lived body.
For Pallasmaa, architecture transcends mere visible, static form. It is a grounded existential condition that shapes and resonates with our sensory experiences, memories, and imaginations. His philosophy opposes the reduction of the building to a purely visual object, instead invoking a renewed appreciation for the multi-sensory, kinesthetic experience of space.
Pallasmaa sees architecture as the art of petrifying geometries that transform the environment and that can be experienced by all the senses in motion. Vision is accompanied hierarchically by hearing, touch, smell, and even taste, combining the built world with the inhabitant's embodied presence. Surfaces, textures, and raw materials become a canvas evoking reminiscences and reverberations in the body, reinvigorating our sense of phenomenal reality.
This reaffirmation of architecture as a multi-sensory art is grounded in the phenomenology of thinkers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Pallasmaa calls for the abandonment of Cartesian ocularcentrism and a re-consideration of space as an extension of embodied being. He urges us to design not just for the eye, but for the entire body in the act of moving, perceiving, and dwelling.
His ideas powerfully dialogue with the embodied and extended mind philosophies that have emerged in recent years. Just as cognition is not confined to the brain but emerges from the coupling of mind, body, and context, so too does authentic architectural experience resonate as a multi-sensory encounter between the constructed and the lived.
In an era of spectacular architecture and digital imagery, Pallasmaa's voice reminds us that the essence of building is rooted in the realm of physical presence, material gravity, and the perceiving, sentient body. It is a call to reconnect with the archetype of the primordial cave, repositioning the embodied human at the center of the architectural endeavor.