Juhani Pallasmaa

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Biography

Juhani Pallasmaa (b. 14 September 1936, Hämeenlinna) is a Finnish architect, professor and one of the most widely read architectural theorists of his generation. He qualified at the Helsinki University of Technology in 1966, ran his own practice in Helsinki from 1983, and served as director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture (1978–83) and professor and dean at the Helsinki University of Technology (1991–97). He has taught widely in the United States and served on the Pritzker Prize jury.

His built work includes the Rovaniemi Art Museum, the Finnish Institute in Paris, and the Kamppi Centre in Helsinki, but his influence outside Finland rests almost entirely on his writing.

The Eyes of the Skin

The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Academy Editions, 1996; second edition Wiley, 2005; third edition 2012) is a short polemic that has become a standard text on architecture curricula worldwide.

Its argument is a diagnosis. Western architecture, Pallasmaa contends, has become ocularcentric — organised around the eye, and specifically around the detached, distancing, controlling eye of perspectival vision and, latterly, of the photograph. Buildings are increasingly designed to be looked at rather than inhabited, and are judged by how they photograph. The result is a built environment that produces detachment and alienation because it addresses only one sense, and that sense the one most easily separated from the body.

Against this he argues that architecture is experienced by the whole body — that the skin, the muscles, the ear, the nose and the sense of balance do most of the work of understanding a building, and that these senses cannot be operated at a distance. "The eyes want to collaborate with the other senses," he writes. Touch is the mother sense; vision is a form of touching at a remove.

Key Ideas

• The haptic realm. Material, weight, temperature, texture and acoustics are not decoration on top of form. They are how a building is actually known.
• Peripheral vision. Focused vision confronts and separates; unfocused peripheral vision enfolds and includes. Pallasmaa argues that the sense of being inside a space is a peripheral rather than a focal experience — a point with direct implications for any designed environment.
• The body as the locus of measure. Doors, thresholds, stairs and handles are the parts of buildings that are touched, and therefore the parts through which a building's attitude toward its occupants is communicated most directly.
• Time and patina. Materials that age well — stone, wood, brick, copper — let a building record duration. Materials that only degrade force a building to remain permanently new until it becomes waste.
• The thinking hand. Developed in The Thinking Hand (2009): the argument that drawing and making are forms of cognition, not transcriptions of ideas formed elsewhere, and that computer-aided design risks removing the hand from the loop.

Selected Works

• The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (1996)
• The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema (2001)
• The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture (2009)
• The Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery in Architecture (2011)

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Pallasmaa's critique of ocularcentrism applies to screens more directly than to buildings. Interfaces are the most thoroughly ocularcentric environments ever constructed — visual, flat, weightless, and designed to photograph well in a product shot. His insistence on the haptic and peripheral is the same argument that underlies calm technology and sonic metadata: that information reaching a person through the whole sensorium costs less attention than information reaching them through the eye alone.

Related Reading

• Calm Technology
• Materials
• Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media
• The Poetics of Space
• Sonic metadata