Design for Sensory Reality
Juhani Pallasmaa
DESIGN FOR SENSORY REALITY:
From Visuality to Existential experience
[an extract]
Architecture has been regarded, theorised, taught and practised primarily as a visual discipline, and consequently, environments and buildings are developed through visual images, means and representations. However, regardless of the historical dominance of vision, architecture is essentially an art form of all the senses in interaction. Our experiential sense of reality calls for the interplay of the senses. Fused into a unified experience, these sensations give rise to a multisensory experience of reality. ‘My perception is 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,’ Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes.[1] Only this fully integrated experience can project the veracity of the real.
Sensory Multiplicity
It is evident that the visually perceived aspects of design are developed and communicated through visual means. But how do we conceive the auditory, haptic, olfactory or taste qualities of the building in our imagination, or the peripherally experienced atmospheres and feelings of settings? We have taken the primacy of vision as given in architecture, but there is evidence that man’s earliest spaces were conceived or selected for sound and acoustic effects rather than visual qualities. Cultural historians also testify that until the seventeenth century the most important senses in human environmental experience were hearing and smell, and vision came far behind these primary senses.[2]
Even in visual perception there is an ideated haptic experience that informs us of materiality, hardness, surface texture, weight and temperature. This tactile experience integrated in vision was called modénature by Le Corbusier in his 1923 manifesto of modern architecture, Vers une architecture (commonly translated as Towards a New Architecture).[3] Gaston Bachelard, the philosopher of science and poetic imagery, divided images into two categories – formal and material – and he argued that the latter type convey deeper emotional experiences.[4] The haptic qualities concealed in visual perceptions have a crucial role in the feel of the architectural design. The frequent uninvitingness and hardness of contemporary architecture seems to arise largely from the rejection of this hidden hapticity. We touch, hear, smell and taste through vision in addition to our specialised senses. Besides, as designers we are taught to be aware of only focused vision, but unfocused peripheral perceptions seem to have a more important role in our experience of spatial qualities, situations, atmospheres and feelings. How, then, does the designer concretise these multiple and often vague experiences in his or her working process and how are they communicated to the craftsmen and builders? In fact, the experiential reality of a meaningful piece of architecture is not only the sum of its sensory properties, as it generates its own existential world, which we interact with through our sense of self and consciousness. ‘In a word, the [artistic] image is not a certain meaning expressed by the director but an entire world reflected as in a drop of water,’ Andrei Tarkovsky, the poet of cinematic experiences argues.[5] Memorable architectural entities are similarly also entire unique worlds.
The Biological Dimension
In addition to the five Aristotelian senses, we have sensory systems that we have not consciously recognised or utilised in architecture. The philosophy of Rudolf Steiner categorises 12 senses – touch, life sense, self-movement sense, balance, smell, taste, vision, temperature sense, hearing, language sense, conceptual sense and ego sense.[6] The most important one in architectural experience could well be the existential sense (the Steinerian life sense and ego sense combined). We respond to architecture through our entire sense of being rather than vision in isolation. How does an architect imagine, conceptualise and communicate experiences evoked by the existential sense? To complicate the question of the senses and concretise their impacts, we have biologically determined mechanisms, such as unconsciously manipulated spatial distances in different behavioural situations, which the anthropologist Edward T Hall revealed in his seminal books during the 1960s and 1970s.[7] He also showed the culture-specific roles and hierarchies of the senses, and these anthropological facts question the ethical ground of design activities across cultural boundaries. Design in an alien cultural context necessarily implies the danger of misinterpretation and oversimplification of subliminal behavioural codes and the neglect of sensory realities alien to the differing cultural backgrounds of designers. In the field of architecture the uncritically accepted processes of globalisation are also fundamentally disputable. Hall also pointed out that research had revealed that even our endocrine glands communicate with the outside world and with other humans.[8] The latest expansion in the understanding of how we are interacting with the world is research on our intestinal bacteria, which process vital information and reactions of our metabolisms in relation to our life situation. What are the consequences of the fact that we have more bacterial DNA than human DNA, on our understanding of environmental design?
It is beyond doubt that the architect’s task calls for an understanding of phenomena beyond vision, and subtleties of interaction that can hardly be communicated through visual means. The seminal requirement in today’s research, education and practice is to expand the designer’s imaginative and empathic capacities beyond the visual realm into an embodied, empathic and immersive identification and understanding. This understanding can be achieved through empathic internalisation and imagination. Our senses and behaviour are fundamentally biologically conditioned, and architectural education should also include aspects of biology. The veracity of our experienced reality is in its layered, orchestrated and interactive essence, which engages us as complete human beings with all our senses, emotions, instincts, memories and imagination.
These questions call for a biological and bio-historical understanding of ourselves, and that understanding may eventually answer the questions that have been posed above. ‘Our greatest problem arises from the fact that we do not know what we are, and do not agree on what we want to become’, Edward O Wilson – the biologist and spokesman of biophilia, ‘the science and ethics of life’ – argues thought-provokingly. [9] Design also needs to be grounded in a biologically informed understanding.