Om taktilitet og haptikk i arkitekturen - Juhani Pallasmaa

Dette semesteret tar eg Taktilitetskurset til Tom Vavik og i den anledning les eg boka "The Eyes of The Skin" av Juhani Pallasmaa. Den omhandlar taktilitet og haptikk innan arkitektur, og har fleire gode poeng.

"Touch is the sensory mode that integrates our experience of the world with that of ourselves. Even visual perceptions are fused and integrated into the haptic continuum of the self; my body remembers who I am and where I am located in the world. My body is truly the navel of my world, not in the sense of the wieving point of the central perspective, but as the very locus of reference, memory, imagination and integration.

It is evident that "life-enhancing" architecture has to adress all of the senses simultaneously and fuse our image of self with our experience of the world. The essential mental task of architecture is accommodation and integration. Architecture articulates the experiences of being-in-the-world and strengthens our sense of reality and self; it does not make us inhabit worlds of mere fabrication and fantasy.

The sense of self, strengthened by art and architecture, allows 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 and being. Significant architecture makes us experience ourselves as complete embodied and spiritual beings. In fact, this is the great function of all meaningful art."

og:

"The inhumanity of contemporary architecture and cities can be understood as the consequence of the negligence of the body and the senses, and an imbalance in our sensory system. The growing experiences of alienation, detachment and solitude in the technoligal world today, for instance, may be related with a certain pathology of the senses. It is thought-provoking that this sense of enstrangement and detachment is often provoked by the technologically most advanced settings, such as hospitals and airports. The dominance of the eye and the suppression of the other senses tends to push us into detachment, isolation and exteriority. The art of the eye has certainly produced imposing and thought-provoking structures, but is has not facilitated human rootedness in the world. The fact that the modernist idiom has not generally been able to penetrate the surface of the popular taste and values seems to be due to its one-sided intellectual and visual emphasis; modernist 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 adn dreams, homeless."