#Juhani Pallasmaa

[noosphe-re]

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 my 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 extensions of the tactile sense; the senses are specialisations 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 specialised parts of our enveloping membrane.

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses

[antronaut]

Animal Architecture

[dare-g]

Rick Joy Desert Works

[russellmoreton]

(via Inquiry is essentially the way of learning : Fragile Architectures of Hapticity and Time)

[rbolick]

Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of Steingruber's "Architectural Alphabet"

Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of Steingruber’s “Architectural Alphabet”

[kvothes]

🪸KVOTHES’ BEST OF 2023🪸

in no particular order, except that i tried to list things that came out this year/last year first <3

poetry

almost obscene, raúl gómez jattin

master, simon shieh

the book, mary ruefle

judas goat, gabrielle bates

please make me pretty, i don’t want to die, tawanda mulalu

ballast, quenton baker

all the flowers kneeling, paul tran

fiction

mrs. s, k. patrick

annihilation, jeff vandermeer

the name of the rose, umberto eco

nonfiction

patricia highsmith: her diaries and notebooks 1941–1995, ed. anna von planta

it was vulgar and it was beautiful: how aids activists used art to fight a pandemic, jack lowery

the eyes of the skin: architecture and the senses, juhani pallasmaa

movies

asteroid city dir. wes anderson

poor things dir. yorgos lanthimos

killers of the flower moon dir. martin scorsese

oppenheimer dir. christopher nolan

stop making sense dir. jonathan demme (1984)

days of heaven dir. terrence malik (1978)

they live by night dir. nicholas ray (1948)

[onetwofeb]

“The ruin has ceased to play the role of a building; it represents a skeleton of memory, a sheer melancholy presence.”

Juhani Pallasmaa on Tarkovsky and Proust and Bachelard

[kyotocosmology]

Books about game design but not really but really

Collecting my suggestions & others' from a twitter thread (remember those?)

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino Pilgrim in the Microworld, David Sudnow Breathing Machines, Leigh Alexander Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman An Inventory of Losses, Judith Schalansky Visit to a Small Planet, Elinor Fuchs (https://web.mit.edu/jscheib/Public/foundations_06/ef_smallplanet.pdf) Noises Off, Michael Freyn Influence, Robert Cialdini Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges Wonderbook, Jeff VanderMeer Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin Motel of the Mysteries, David Macaulay Ghost Stories for Darwin, Banu Subramaniam (esp. “Singing the Morning Glory Blues”) Batman: The Animated Series Writer’s Bible (https://dcanimated.com/WF/batman/btas/backstage/wbible/) Dictionary of the Khazars, Milorad Pavić The Passion, Jeannette Winterson Rainbows End, Vernon Vinge Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing., Robert Paul Smith A Telling of the Tales, William J. Brooke Finishing The Hat & Look, I Made A Hat, Stephen Sondheim Finite and Infinite Games, James P. Cause Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman Life: A User's Manual, Georges Perec The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick 7 1/2 Lessons About The Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett

additions: Microserfs, Douglas Coupland The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski Piranesi, Susanna Clarke

[zemagltd]

Everyday Poetry - "The door handle is the handshake of the building." Juhani Pallasmaa

[riverbird]

"The eye is the organ of distance and separation, whereas touch is the sense of nearness, intimacy and affection. The eye surveys, controls and investigates, whereas touch approaches and caresses. During overpowering emotional experiences, we tend to close off the distancing sense of vision; we close the eyes when dreaming, listening to music, or caressing our beloved ones. Deep shadows and darkness are essential, because they dim the sharpness of vision, make depth and distance ambiguous, and invite unconscious peripheral vision and tactile fantasy. How much more mysterious and inviting is the street of an old town with its alternating realms of darkness and light than are the brightly and evenly lit streets of today! The imagination and daydreaming are stimulated by dim light and shadow. In order to think clearly, the sharpness of vision has to be suppressed, for thoughts travel with an absent-minded and unfocused gaze. Homogenous bright light paralyses the imagination in the same way that homogenisation of space weakens the experience of being, and wipes away the sense of place. The human eye is most perfectly tuned for twilight rather than bright daylight. Mist and twilight awaken the imagination by making visual images unclear and ambiguous; a Chinese painting of a foggy mountain landscape, or the raked sand garden of Ryoan-ji Zen Garden give rise to an unfocused way of looking, evoking a trance-like, meditative state."

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin

[noosphe-re]

Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as working with models put the designer in a haptic contact with the object, or space. In our imagination, the object is simultaneously held in the hand and inside the head, and the imagined and projected physical image is modelled by our embodied imagination. We are inside and outside of the conceived object at the same time. Creative work calls for a bodily and mental identification, empathy and compassion.

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses

[throathole]

“Dazzling images on a huge silver screen… sound that I can feel”

-Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes Of The Skin

[dare-g]

Melancholy of Time

[russellmoreton]

Folder Cover, The Thinking Hand by Russell Moreton Via Flickr: TheThinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. Juhani Pallasmaa

[fettesans]

Top, The first thing you’ll see if you search Google for “tank man” right now will not be the iconic picture of the unidentified Chinese man who stood in protest in front of a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square, but an entirely fake, AI-generated selfie of that historical event. Update 9/21/2023: Google says it has removed the AI-generated selfie from Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Panels, where it was appearing, after 404 Media reached out for comment and first published this story. Via. Bottom, Eva and Franco Mattes, BEFNOED, 2013-ongoing, installation view from the exhibition Fake Views at Frankfurter Kunstverein, July 14 – September 10, 2023. Photo: Melania Dalle Grave. Via.

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Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as working with models put the designer in a haptic contact with the object, or space. In our imagination, the object is simultaneously held in the hand and inside the head, and the imagined and projected physical image is modelled by our embodied imagination. We are inside and outside of the conceived object at the same time. Creative work calls for a bodily and mental identification, empathy and compassion.

Juhani Pallasmaa, from The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, 1996. Via.