Juhani Pallasmaa - The Living Art of Architecture

The Eddy Network Podcast Episode 163

Sep 12, 2024

There is a growing list of thinkers, writers, scientists, and artists who have embraced the idea that our experience of the world is where knowledge is born and matured within us. It isn’t that the analytical doesn’t matter. It is rather that the analytical without experience creates a form of enclosure that deadens our perception of ourselves and the world

My first awareness of Juhani Pallasmaa was the cover of his book, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. In it is this thought,

“I wish to express the significance of the tactile sense for our experience and understanding of the world, but I also intended to create a conceptual short circuit between the dominant sense of vision and the suppressed sense modality of touch. …
Touch is the sensory mode which integrates our experiences of the world and of ourselves. Even visual perceptions are fused and integrated into the haptic continuum of the self; my body remembers who I am and how I am located in the world. My body is truly the navel of the world, not in the sense of the viewing point of the central perspective, but as the very locus of reference, memory, imagination, and integration. All the senses, including vision, are, in a way,extensions of the tactile sense; the senses are specializations of skin tissue, and all sensory experiences are modes of touching, and thus related to tactility. Our contact with the world takes place at the boundary line of the self through specialized parts of our enveloping membrane. We humans, just as all animals, are extending ourselves into the world through our actions as well as material and mental constructions. As representatives of Homo sappience, our image of self does not stop at the skin, as we relate and extend ourselves in countless ways by means of mobility, technology, materials, culture and beliefs, both scientific and religious.”

I was honored to have Juhani visit with me on The Eddy Network Podcast. We share similar life experiences and philosophies of life, art, and culture.