6 ideas
Pallasmaa holds that Western culture, from the Greeks through perspectival representation, has made vision the leading sense, and that this has pushed the body out of experience. Vision puts the subject at a distance and outside the thing seen. Touch, hearing and smell place the subject inside a continuum with the world, so an architecture built for vision alone breeds alienation and detachment.
All the senses, vision included, are extensions of the skin, specialised forms of tactile contact with the world. The eye itself 'touches': seeing surfaces, textures and distances draws on unconscious tactile knowledge built up through the body. So the fullest experience of a building is haptic, not visual, even when we only look at it.
Focused vision faces the world as a separate object, while peripheral, unfocused vision draws the perceiver in and places them inside a space. Pallasmaa argues that the sense of being enveloped, the atmosphere of a forest or a rich interior, comes from peripheral perception. An architecture that demands focused, frontal viewing therefore excludes us from the space it depicts.
Modern architecture has increasingly been designed as a striking image to be consumed through the camera and publication rather than lived in. The building becomes a flat visual product that loses materiality, weight and the traces of time. It persuades instantly but does not stay with the body or memory.
We measure and understand space with our bodies. A stair is read through the legs, a door handle through the hand, a room's scale through posture and movement. Architectural meaning comes from this 'muscular and skeletal' identification, where the building is enacted by the body rather than merely looked at, so design should address bodily action and memory, not just the eye.
Pallasmaa contrasts materials like stone, wood, brick and weathered metal, which show age, use and wear, with the smooth, flawless surfaces of machine-made materials that deny the passage of time. Patina and erosion let the body sense duration and link the present occupant to earlier ones. A building that cannot age honestly cuts us off from time and history.