Review by Carolyn Sponza, AIA

Carolyn Sponza, AIA, is an architect with Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners in New York City.

“(M)odernist design 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 and dreams, homeless.”

It is this thesis that fuels Juhani Pallasmaa’s Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, a dual examination and indictment of the estrangement of the senses in modern architecture. The book provides a snapshot of how delivery of an image-driven product and reliance on digital media has changed the profession. Pallasmaa is able to aptly capture this phase shift while referencing the historical events that have catapulted our culture from reliance on all senses to dependence upon mainly one—vision.

The book, structured as an expanded essay, is separated into two chapters. The first examines events that have pushed vision to the forefront in Western culture, a trend Pallasmaa refers to as “ocularcentrism.” The Greeks skewed and corrected their architectural proportions in a pursuit of a “pleasure of the eye.” Today, the commodification of architecture equates design with a series of duplicate two-dimensional images, evidencing Pallasmaa’s concept that “architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products.”

In the second portion of the book, Pallasmaa advocates an antidote to the visual decimation of architecture, exploring the experience of space, as conveyed through other senses to the body. Sound is used as an unconscious indicator of spatial volume. Smell has a strong associative quality with place. Taste can relate to sensations of material texture and weight. Touch, the only non-passive sense, divulges an unconscious sense of doing, revealing why traditional architectural metrics were derived from actual dimensions of the body.

One of this chapter’s most interesting aspects was Pallasmaa’s explanation of how both the body and psyche are projected into architectural space, exploring how contextual design can ground both. He also writes in praise of shadow—a concept he thinks is often neglected in modern western spaces but one that ultimately enriches the experience of place, as deciphered by all five senses. His discussion of the “narcissistic eye” not only relates to the urban landscape of self-absorbed stand-alone buildings, but indirectly indicates the rise of the “starchitect” as progenitor of the iconic image.

The prose of the book is graphic and poetic, mirroring Pallasmaa’s desire to engage, or inspire, the senses. Images are used sparingly; pairs of illustrations punctuate the text at strategic locations. True to the expanded essay form, the book hits on larger, overarching ideas but has not enough time or patience to explore them further. Rather, the text relies upon these ideas as stepping-stones in support of a more robust architectural thesis. As a result, interesting concepts, such as the role of the architect in the “erosion of existential meaning,” are introduced and then dropped as the essay swims along. Well researched with ample references, the essay could benefit from an expanded notes section, which would provide additional explanation by the author. However, leaving the reader with unanswered questions might be exactly what Pallasmaa is looking for—prompting further, personal investigation into the role of the senses in the built environment, both academic and applied.