Juhani Pallasmaa: "The Ocular-centric View Of The World Has Been Historically Strengthened Especially By The Invention Of Writing And Printing"

Juhani Pallasmaa: "The Ocular-centric View Of The World Has Been Historically Strengthened Especially By The Invention Of Writing And Printing"
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My professional relationship with Juhani Pallasmaa from Finland dates back to mid-June 2009 when I received a letter notifying me that because of his frequent travels around South America (Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil), he have stopped responding to my requests in order to have an exchange of ideas on what I wanted to research about the philosophy of the language of architecture and phenomenology of spatial perception.

At that time I receive of him a brochure from his recently published book "The Thinking Hand" which had not been published yet in Spanish at that time, and it was "The Eyes of the Skin" book that kept first to understand and express my sensitivity ideas on the epistemology of Space Perception contents of a plastic base with existential experience with the environment, materiality, in order to achieve dominance in the aesthetic essence in the experience, the plasticity of the architectural phenomenon through the time.

After many years when I was a lecturer at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico, I receive an invitation, and it what was my surprise that the meeting of Design and Architecture, in celebration of 50th anniversary of the Latin American University of Mexico, based in Celaya, Mexico, was going to give the "Don Francisco Tresguerras" award for the excellency in the architectural field to renowned architect Juhani Pallasmaa.

Since that moment, I had the honor of maintaining a good professional friendship with him and after his return to his town at Hameenlinna, Finland, we have maintained a communication where I could deploy some ideas of a smart thinking to understand his epistemological and architecture language theory, which is then expressed in an open dialogue that ends with the interview below for my Huff Post blog.

1. Mario A. Rodríguez Zamora: How we should re-think in the "ocular centrism" conception of the haptic city and the city of senses today?

Juhani Pallasmaa: The ocular-centric view of the world, human existence as well as of arts and architecture has been historically strengthened especially by the invention of writing and printing, and then further accelerated by countless more recent inventions that further support the unchallenged hegemony of the eye. The dominance of vision has also become evident in urbanism, architecture and object design. Today we live in the era of vision and the visual image.

We need to acknowledge the roles and meanings of all the senses (and definitely not only of the five Aristotelian senses) and their essential interactions. In addition to taking a critical position to the exaggerated and often forced visually, we also need to recognize our simultaneous bias for "rational" thinking and cognition as well as the priority of language over our embodied existence and the tacit wisdom of the body. We tend to believe that we sense only through our five senses and think only by our brain, but our entire bodily being and sense of self sense and "think", as they process and regulate our relationship and interactions with the world. For instance, the significance of the unbelievably voluminous bacterial systems in our intestines, as well as the communicative role of our endocrinal glands, have only fairly recently been identified.

2. MARZ: How you interact the "architecture epistemology" in the diverse international environment that you have teach or how this have been trans-discipline the teaching of the profession?

JP: Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet, confesses:" I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties". I wish to say similarly that I am not a philosopher, i.e. I have not formally studied philosophy in any academic institution. My architectural thinking and writings on architecture and art arise from my personal observations, fifty years of work in architecture, urban design, a well as exhibition, graphic, and product design, and rather intense reading since my school years. For the last 35 years i have been interested in philosophical writings and I associate my personal views especially with the phenomenological movement, as expressed in the writings of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gaston Bachelard, and a number of contemporary philosophers, such as Edward S Casey, David Michael Lewin, Richard Kearney, and Mark Johnson, just to mention a few. I am not a purist at all in my thinking, and I use any evidence from literature, poetry, painting, cinema, and other arts as well as the sciences, to support my views and arguments.

I have traveled the world for sixty years now and become friends with notable thinkers, artists, architects, craftsmen, designers, scientists, therapists, etc., and my interests and views certainly reflect the multitude of my engagements and personal relationships. The best way to break disciplinary and professionalism boundaries is to have friends across these boundaries. That is the reason why I often advice my students to seek friendships beyond the architectural profession, particularly among makers, such as artists and craftsmen.

3. MARZ: From your book The Thinking Hand you have mentioned that the brain configuration, the language and the human culture, on the phenomenological task of the architectural existence, from which way you conceptualize this process?

JP: I believe in the fundamental integrity, interaction and integration of things. Our experiential, cognitive and mental worlds are split into too many compartments that tend to maintain defensively their artificial autonomies. I also think that the biological, evolutionary, historical, and ecological perspectives are or will become crucial in all fields. We are participants in constant unconscious processes and we need to acknowledge these processes and their interactions. The separation of the outer physical realm and the inner mental realm from each other is, perhaps, the most crucial of our mistaken attitudes. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests," The world is wholly inside, and I am wholly outside of myself".

4. MARZ: Which way you can envisage the connection of the visual perception with the corporal changes towards the environment (habitat)?

JP: Lecturing and teaching around the world, I see an increasing interest in our multi-sensory relationships with the world, the interaction and integration of the senses, and a strengthening realization of the fundamental significance of embodiment and an embodied tacit "thinking". Our existence in the world itself structures and articulates basic existential understanding. Embodiment is equally important to perception, memorizing and imagination. We are simply embodied beings.

5. MARZ: Today, we live a material change in the biological life, of which way we can combine the mental atmosphere (noosphere) with our existential terrestrial experience?

JP: I already commented on the negative consequences of categorizations. Thinking needs to be rigorous, perceptive and based on subtle intuition, and it needs to identify both similarities and differences, but these distinctions should not prevent the essential interplay between things that may seem to be categorically different.

6. MARZ: To settle the fundamentals of the architectonical corporeity, of which way we discover what means the building and how the transformation occurs to improve the human habitat?

JP: Architecture addresses our physical and practical, individual and collective, as well as the mental and mythical dimensions of as Merleau-Ponty suggests," The world is wholly inside, and I am wholly outside of myself"ourt being. Architecture is fundamentally an "impure" and "diffuse" field, which cannot be dealt entirely with reason and logic; architecture can only be grasped fully as a poetic enterprise, that fuses all these irreconcilable dimensions. In architectural experience and creative endeavor emotion, existential intuition and embodied and unconscious fusion are more important than reason.

7. MARZ: Why have been difficult the corporeal experience in the architecture?

JP: The visual dominance in thinking as well as architecture derives all the way from Greek thought. Clear vision has been a metaphor for clarity of thought and even truth. As I said earlier, this bias has been reinforced by technological developments to the degree that today we live in an era of the visual image, more than ever in history. On the other hand, the body has been regarded as something that is solely of flesh and it has been assumed to project ethically questionable desires. Religious beliefs, also, tend to suppress our essentially embodied way of existing in the world. Here we still need emancipation in our historically derived thinking.

8. MARZ: Which are the challenges that face the architects today, under the concept The Eyes of the Skin, to see the city in our sustainability context?

JP: Ecological issues are the most important challenges that humanity faces, but these issues are not primarily of technological nature. These burning questions are philosophical and ethical; they call for new attitudes towards biological life, nature and ecological systems, the human historicity as well as our understanding of the meaning of life. Biophilia, "the science and love of life", propagated by the biologist (myrmecologist, to be precise) Edward O. Wilson, is one of the new ways of thinking about human existence on this earth.

9. MARZ: Which are the key characteristics of the visual embodied image of the architectonical aesthetics in the contemporary world?

JP: Modernism has been obsessed with form and especially with strong form, and this orientation aspires to create cohesive and overpowering formal entities. It is evident to me that we also need to think of "fragile form", formal structures that instead of aspiring for totalization and finiteness, think in terms of processes, change, growth and becoming. Landscape architecture has already developed ideas of thinking about physical surroundings in these terms instead of closed and finite forms. The idea of "weak thought" was introduced by the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo.

10. MARZ: As defined the awareness of the sustainability to the incorporeal world with sensitivity and aesthetics in the architecture of the 21 Century?

JP: Thinking in the 21st Century needs to become more "biological" in terms of acknowledging human biological historicity, and the meaning of our genetic constitution as well as our acquired cultural and mental structures, that still continue to guide our reactions and emotions regardless of our new digital realities. The modern man has been blinded by his excessive fascination with the future, but we need to know our deep past in order to understand who we really are. Our recent inventions from the search media to virtual realities as well as algorithmic design, gene manipulation and stem cell operations, have to be valued against the biological background, which finally is the only valid criteria. Our ultimate choices have to be ethical rather than intellectual, scientific, or technological. In this new way of thinking about human cultural evolution in its true ecological context. Also beauty will have a new meaning. "The purpose of evolution, believe it or not, is beauty", the Nobel laureate poet Joseph Brodsky declares with the assurance of a great poet.

Thank you.

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