Essay 1

Essay 1

In “Excerpts from The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the senses”, Juhani Pallasmaa discusses the idea that people's senses have been dulled by both the advancement of society and the fact that we've started to focus and rely mainly on sight to perceive the world around us. As technology changes and moves forward, we begin to lose the naturalistic sense of life that we innately had inside of us as animals on this planet, and we get closer to not having to rely on that same naturalistic sense. Pallasma brings up the idea that we are sight-centered. What she means is that light overshadows the other senses and that society relies on vision too much. Sound is as necessary because, as Pallasmaa states, “buildings do not react to our gaze, but they do return our sounds back to our ears” (Pallasmaa 289). Society should not rely on vision much as it distances and separates humans from reality and the relationship they have. The other senses, such as touch, should be used, as it involves intimacy. Pallasmaa's argument is that of a vision-dominated society which blocks richer experiences in this world and limits knowledge and understanding. He does this through the intimacy of touch, tactile sensation and kinesthetic communication, and how vision is overused and it blocks imagination.

There is a great deal of difference between individuality, solitude, and isolation. Individuality is the qualities, or character, which distinguish a person from other people. Solitude, on the other hand, is simply the state of being alone. Isolation is when one remains alone or apart from others. Those three words seem pretty similar, but contextually have different meanings. The meanings of these words apply to Pallasmaa's text because he discu...

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...us, and sight is not the only important one. As a matter of fact, without even noticing it, we are subconsciously affected by different senses, like hearing. We pick up sounds we aren't even consciously aware of and understand them. The architectural part behind this is that architecture itself actually affected the acoustics that our ears pick up in every building, making every building unique. This is usually subtle, but we actually pick it up more easily in large buildings that have huge rooms, where the sound can be easily discerned as different. Juhani Pallasmaa explains that the senses, and the way we use them, are changing depending on our society and the technology we come up with.

Bibliography

Spellmeyer, Kurt, “The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses”, The New Humanities Reader, Richard E. Miller, Wadsworth Cengage Learning