MATTER, HAPTICITY AND TIME

TT Journal, ISSUE 7, September 2024

Material Imagination and the Voice of Matter

By Juhani Pallasmaa

“The richest experiences happen long before the soul takes notice. And when we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have already been supporters of the invisible for a long time”.1 Gabriele d’Annuzio

MATERIAL IMAGINATION

Gaston Bachelard, the French philosopher whose books on poetic imagery, imagination and matter have inspired architectural thinking for more than half a century, dedicated a separate book to each one of the four pre-Socratic elements – earth, water, air and fire2 – and he argues that poetic images in all the arts are bound to resonate with these four basic substances. Bachelard even believes that: “It is possible to establish in the realm of the imagination, a law of the four elements which classifies various kinds of material imagination by their connections with fire, air, water and earth.”3

In his phenomenological investigation of poetic imagery, Bachelard makes a thought-provoking distinction between ‘formal imagination’ and ‘material imagination’.4 In his view, images arising from matter project deeper and more profound experiences, recollections, associations, and emotions than images evoked by form. “The eye assigns them [forms] names, but only the hand truly knows them”, Bachelard claims.5 Until recently, modernity at large has been primarily concerned with form rather than the mental and emotional suggestions of matter. Le Corbusier´s passionate definition of the specific realm of the art of architecture, “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light”, exemplifies this predominantly visual and formal orientation.6 We need to remember, however, that in his own later works Le Corbusier revealed the expressive power of matter.

Engagement with material imagination seems to characterise “the other tradition” of modernity, to use the title of Colin St. John Wilson’s influential book.7 We could also think about two different phases of individual architects, as there seems to be a general tendency of young, radical minds to emphasize form and abstraction, whereas in their later age, architects tend to shift towards a more situational, material and emotive expression. Why this would be the case, is an interesting psychological topic itself, but beyond the scope of our current theme.

I believe that it is fair to observe, that during the past three decades, art and architecture in general have shifted towards images of matter, or the poetics of material imagination, the “poetic chemistry”, to use a notion of Bachelard.8 Regardless of the strength of the immaterial Minimalist and High-Tech orientations today, also architecture has become interested in the depth, opacity, weight, patina, and aging of materials.

MATTER AND TIME

“Architecture is not only about domesticating space”, writes Karsten Harries, Professor of Philosophy at the Yale University, “It is also a deep defence against the terror of time. The language of beauty is essentially the language of timeless reality.”9 Architecture’s task to provide us with our domicile in space is surely recognised by all architects, but its second task to mediate our relation with the frighteningly ephemeral, mysterious, and fleeting dimension of time is usually disregarded. Yet, the task of architecture is to inhabit us both in space and time by means of structuring and articulating these natural physical dimensions to resonate with our human measures, and by giving these meaningless and endless natural and physical dimensions their human measures and cultural meanings.

In its quest for the perfectly articulated and autonomous artefact, the main line of modernist architecture has preferred materials and surfaces that express flatness, geometric purity, immaterial abstractness and timeless whiteness. In Le Corbusier’s words, whiteness serves “the eye of truth”,and it mediates thus moral and objective values.10 The moral implications of whiteness are somewhat surprisingly expressed in his statement: “Whiteness is extremely moral. Suppose there were a decree requiring all rooms in Paris to be given a coat of whitewash. I maintain that that would be a police task of real stature and a manifestation of high morality, the sign of a great people.”11

In addition to whiteness, the aspiration towards immateriality, transparency, and weightlessness has increasingly become characteristic to the modern sensibility. “To be modern is to be part of a universe, in which, as Karl Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air’”12, Marshall Berman writes in his influential book on the experience of modernity that has this Marx quote as its very title. Striving towards immateriality has also been seen as a moral virtue: “To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need”, Walter Benjamin writes13. A confession by André Breton, the spokesman of Surrealism, demonstrates this modern obsession with the immateriality of glass: “…I continue to inhabit my glass house, where one can see at every hour who is coming to visit me, where everything that is suspended from the ceilings and the walls holds on as if by enchantment, where I rest at night on a bed of glass with glass sheets, where who I am will appear to me, sooner or later, engraved by a diamond.”14

The modernist surface in painting, sculpture and architecture is usually treated as an abstracted boundary of the volume, and it has a conceptual and formal rather than material and sensory essence. The modernist surfaces themselves tend to remain mute, as form and volume are given priority; form is vocal, whereas matter remains silent. The continued preference for pure geometry and reductive aesthetics further weakens the presence of matter in the same way that a strong figure and contour reading diminishes the interaction of colour between the figure and the ground in the art of painting. All real colourists in painting, such as the Impressionists, Joseph Albers and Mark Rothko, use a weak gestalt in order to maximise colour interaction across painted boundaries.

PERFECTION AND ERROR

As a consequence of its predominantly conceptual and formal ideals, the architecture of our time tends to create settings for the eye which seem to originate in a single moment of time and evoke the experience of flattened temporality. Vision and immateriality reinforce the experience of the present tense, whereas materiality and haptic experiences evoke an awareness of temporal depth and a continuum of time. The inevitable processes of ageing, weathering and wear are not usually considered as conscious and positive elements in design, as the architectural artefact is understood to exist in a timeless space, an idealized and artificial condition separated from the experiential reality of time.

The architecture of the modern era has aspired to evoke an air of agelessness and of a perpetual present tense. The ideals of perfection and completeness further detach the architectural object from the reality of time and traces of use. As a consequence of the idea of timeless perfection, buildings have turned vulnerable to the negative effects of time, the revenge of time, as it were. Instead of offering positive qualities of vintage and authority, time and use attack our buildings negatively and destructively. During the past decades, novelty has become an obsession, an independent artistic criteria and value.

The aspiration for abstraction and perfection tends to lead our attention to the world of immaterial ideas, whereas matter, weathering and decay strengthen the experience of causality, time and reality. There is a fundamental difference between an idealized human existence and our real existential condition. Real life is always “impure” and “messy”, and profound architecture wisely provides a margin for this very impurity of life.

John Ruskin believed that, “Imperfection is in some way essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of process and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent…And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies, which are not only signs of life but sources of beauty.”15

Alvar Aalto elaborated Ruskin’s idea further when he spoke of “the human error” and criticized the quest for absolute truth and perfection: “One might say that the human factor [error in the Finnish original] has always been part of architecture. In a deeper sense, it has even been indispensable to making it possible for buildings to fully express the richness and positive values of life.”16

THE NECESSITY OF RUINS

A particularly thought-provoking example of the human need to experience and read time through architecture is the tradition of designed and built ruins, a fashion that became a mania in 18th and 19th centuries’ England and Germany. Whilst engaged in the construction of his own house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London – which incorporated numerous images of ruins – Sir John Soane imagined his structure as a real ruin by means of writing a fictitious study of his own building as written by an imaginary future antiquarian.17

As some scholars have observed, also Alvar Aalto used subconscious images of ruins, and erosion as well as images of antiquity to awaken a comforting sense of layered time and culture, and to give the Bergsonian notion of “duration” a concrete and material expression.

The architecture of Sigurd Lewerentz, to give an example of the transformative phase of Modernity, connects us with deep time. His later works obtain their unique emotive power from images of matter which speak of opaque depth and mystery, dimness and shadow, metaphysical enigma and death. Death turns into a mirror image of life; Lewerentz enables us to imagine ourselves dead without fear, and placed in the continuum of timeless duration, the “womb of time”, to use Shakespeare’s expression in Othello. The churches of Lewerentz are dreams of the fired clay brick in the same way that Michelangelo’s sculptures and buildings are dreams of marble; the observer is guided gently to enter the unconsciousness of brick and stone.

However, there are also architects in our own time, whose works evoke healing experiences of reality and time. Altogether, there are numerous gifted and deeply perceptive and thoughtful architects today around the world, and in Spain alone, regardless of the overall air of superficiality supported by today’s novelty and image hungry media that tend to present architecture as a singular global trend regardless of the multiplicity of local and individual architectures.

THE TWO EXISTENCES OF THE WORK OF ART

An artistic work exists simultaneously in two realities: the physical reality of its material essence and making, on the one hand, and in the imaginary reality of its artistic image and expression on the other. A painting is paint on canvas, but at the same time, it is also an imaginary picture or world. A sculpture is similarly a piece of stone and an image, and a building an object of utility, matter and structure, as well as an imaginary spatio-temporal existential metaphor. As we are experiencing an artistic work, our awareness is suspended between these two realities and the tension between them charges the artistic work with a hypnotizing power.

In case, the reality of the image overwhelms, the work appears sentimental and Kitsch, but when the material essence over-dominates, the work seems crude, primitive and unarticulated. Michelangelo’s early marble Pietá in the Vatican impresses us as a virtuoso achievement of a young genius, whereas the Rondadini Pietá in Castello Sforzesco, which Michelangelo is known to have worked on a few days before his death, moves us to tears through its extraordinary crude power. In the first case, marble tends to be seen too easily as flesh, whereas the second is a moving image of sorrow and, at the same time, it is an enigmatically and tragically unfinished piece of stone that even includes an extra human arm behind the two figures remaining from an earlier phase of the stone.

THE LANGUAGE OF MATTER

Materials and surfaces have languages of their own. Stone speaks of its distant geological origins, its durability and inherent permanence. Brick makes one think of earth and fire, gravity and the ageless traditions of construction. Bronze evokes the extreme heat of its manufacture, the ancient processes of casting, and the passage of time as measured by its patina. Wood speaks of its two existences and time scales; its first life as a growing tree and the second as a human artefact made by the caring hand of the carpenter or cabinetmaker. These are all materials and surfaces that speak pleasurably of layered time as opposed to the industrially made materials of today that are usually flat, ageless and voiceless.

As a reaction to the loss of materiality and temporal experience in our settings, art and architecture seem to have becomes re-sensitized to messages of matter, as well as to scenes of erosion and decay. At the same time, other sensory modes besides vision, have increasingly become channels of artistic expression. As Michel Serres writes, “If a revolt is to come, it will have to come from the five senses”18. Ashley Montagu, the anthropologist, expresses his concern in a similar tone: “We in the western world are beginning to discover our neglected senses. This growing awareness represents something of an overdue insurgency against the painful deprivation of sensory experience we have suffered in our technologised world.”19

Materiality, erosion and destruction have been favoured subject matters of contemporary art since Arte Povera and Gordon Matta-Clark to Anselm Kiefer, the films of Andrey Tarkovsky, and today’s countless works based on images of matter. “Destroying and constructing are equal in importance, and we must have souls for one and the other…”, Paul Valéry states, and scenes of destruction and decay are, indeed, popular in today’s art.20 The installation art of Jannis Kounellis expresses dreams and memories of rusting steel, coal and burlap, whereas Richard Serra’s and Eduardo Chillida’s authoritative masses of forged and rolled iron awaken bodily experiences of weight and gravity. These works address directly our skeletal and muscular systems; they are communication from the muscles of the sculptor to those of the viewer. The works of bees’ wax, pollen and milk by Wolfgang Leib invoke images of spirituality, ritual and ecological concerns, whereas Andy Goldsworthy and Nils Udo fuse nature and art through using materials, elements, and the contexts of nature in their “biophilic” art works.

EROTICISM OF MATTER

It is apparent, that contemporary art and architecture are again recognizing the sensuality and eroticism of matter. The popularity of earth as a subject and medium of artistic expression reveals another dimension of this growing interest in images of matter. The re-emergence of the imagery of Mother Earth suggests that after the utopian journey towards autonomy, immateriality, weightlessness and abstraction, art and architecture are moving back towards the primordial female images of interiority, intimacy and belonging. Modernity has been obsessed by images of departure and journey, but it seems that images of homecoming are now gaining ground. As Aldo van Eyck famously preached: “Architecture need do no more, nor should it ever do less than assist man’s homecoming”.21

Collage and assemblage combine materiality and layered time. These techniques enable an archaeological density of imagery, and a non-linear narrative through the juxtaposition of fragmented images deriving from irreconcilable origins. Collage invigorates experiences of tactility, narrative and time. Collage and montage are the most characteristic forms of expression in modernity, and these modes of image making have penetrated into all forms of art, including architecture. Re-used and renovated buildings often project a sensory richness and relaxed ambience in opposition to the formality and demanding tenseness of new buildings. They tell an epic narrative of time and life which contemporary buildings usually fail to portray.

AN ARCHITECTURE OF MATTER AND TIME

In his development away from the retinality of the Modern Movement towards a multi-sensory engagement, Alvar Aalto made a distinct step towards ‘images of matter’ in mid-1930s. At the same time, he rejected the universalist ideals of modernity in favour of a regionalist, organic, historicist and romantic aspiration. In his episodic architecture, often based on the technique of collage or assemblage, Aalto suppresses the dominance of a singular visual image or system of logic. This is an architecture that is not dictated by a dominant conceptual idea right down to the last detail; it grows through separate architectural scenes, episodes, and detail elaborations like a piece of symphonic music, a play or a novel, consisting of various parts developed in different emotive moves or acts. Instead of an overpowering intellectual concept, the whole is held together by an emotional atmosphere, an architectural key, as it were.

Erik Gunnar Asplund, Aalto’s friend and mentor, motivated this change of ideals in a lecture given in 1936: “The idea that only design, which is comprehended visually, can be art is a narrow conception. No, everything grasped by our other senses through our whole human consciousness and which has the capacity to communicate desire, pleasure, or emotions can also be art.”22

This transition implies a departure from the predominantly visual air of modern architecture towards a materiality and tactile sensibility. External control and visual effect is replaced by a heightened sense of interiority and haptic intimacy. Sensuous materiality and the sense of tradition evoke benevolent experiences of natural duration and temporal continuum. As I argued earlier, we do not only dwell in space, we also dwell in the continuum of culture, time and memory. Whereas the visual architecture of geometry attempts to halt time, the haptic and multi-sensory architecture of matter makes the experience of time comforting, healing and pleasurable. This architecture does not struggle against time, it concretises the course of time and makes its traces and marks comfortable and acceptable. It seeks to accommodate rather than impress, to evoke the intimate sensations of domesticity and comfort, instead of external admiration and awe.

WATER AND TIME

Joseph Brodsky, the poet, gives a surprising meaning to time: “I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that his spirit is”.23 He makes other intriguing associations between time and water: “I simply think that water is the image of time”24, and: “Water equals time and provides beauty with its double.”25 In the poet´s imagination, God, time, water and beauty are connected to create a mysterious cycle. These associations are not, however, Brodsky´s alone; Gaston Bachelard and Adrian Stokes, for instance, make similar suggestions. Water is also a frequent image in various art forms. Think of the fusion of images of water and the extraordinary sense of time, spirituality and melancholy in the films of Andrey Tarkovsky, or the gentle and hypnotic slowness of the paintings of water by Claude Monet, or the architecture of water by Sigurd Lewerentz, Carlo Scarpa and Luis Barragan. Bachelard speaks appropriately of “water poets”26. Water dripping from a giant seashell into the dark wound in the brick floor at the Klippan Church by Lewerentz, the underwater architecture of the Brion-Vega Chapel of Scarpa, and the melancholically reflecting surfaces of water, as well as the dramatic images of rushing water in Luis Barragan’s buildings, all evoke a heightened and sensitized experience of duration. Water also enhances the experiences of both silence and sound. The reflective surface of water hides its depth, as the present conceals the past and future. The life-supporting image of water also contains the mortal images of deluge and draught. With images of water we are suspended between the opposites of birth and death, femininity and masculinity, beauty and threat.

Images of water turn into a means of concretizing the flow and persistence of time. The dialogue of architecture and water is truly erotic. There is a special fascination in all towns and cities that are in dialogue with water, such as Venice. As Stokes remarks: “The hesitancy of water reveals architectural immobility.”27 Architecture desires to be in dialogue with earth, water, air and fire, as Bachelard’s writings suggest. The sound of the waterfall at Frank Lloyd Wright´s Fallingwater House creates a dense sensuous weave, almost like a textile of visual and audible ingredients, and the merging of architecture and the enveloping forest; one dwells comfortingly in a natural duration next to the beating heart of reality itself.

THE MULTI-SENSORY ESSENCE OF EXPERIENCE

Although architecture has been, and continues to be regarded primarily as a visual discipline, spaces, places and buildings are encountered as multi-sensory experiences. Instead of seeing a building merely as a retinal image, we confront it with all our senses at once, and we live it as part of our existential world, not as an object of gaze outside of ourselves. Merleau-Ponty points out the essential integration of the sensory realms: “My perception is not a sum of visual, tactile and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.”28 Gaston Bachelard calls this fused sensory interaction “the polyphony of the senses”.29 Our buildings occupy the same “flesh of the world” as we ourselves. Every building has its auditive, haptic, olfactory and even gustatory qualities that give the visual perception its sense of fullness and life, in the same way that a masterful painting projects sensations of full sensuous life. Just think of the sensations of a warm and moist breeze, joyful sounds and smells of plants and seaweed magically conveyed by Henri Matisse’s painting of an open window in Nice.

Bernard Berenson, developing Goethe’s notion of ‘life-enhancing’, suggested that when experiencing an artistic work we imagine a genuine physical encounter through “ideated sensations”. The most important of these Berenson called “tactile values”. In his view, the work of authentic art stimulates our ideated sensations of touch, and this stimulation is life-enhancing.30 Genuine architectural works, in my view, also evoke similar multi-sensory sensations that enhance our experience of the world and ourselves.  Although I currently think that the sensations of touch, temperature, weight, moisture, smell and movement in visual images are as real as the visual percept itself, I understand that the multi-sensory essence of artistic experience, suggested by Berenson, is absolutely essential, but rather neglected in the theoretical analysis of art works as well as architecture and education.

TACTILITY AND MATERIALITY OF LIGHT

James Turrell, the light artist, speaks about “the thingness of light”:“I basically make spaces that capture light and hold it for your physical sensing […] It is […] a realization that the eyes touch, that the eyes feel. And when the eyes are open and you allow for this sensation, touch goes out of the eyes like feel.”31 In his view, normal illumination levels today are so high that the pupil contracts. “Obviously we are not made for that light, we are made for twilight. Now what that means is that it is not until very low levels of light that our pupil dilates. When it does dilate, we actually begin to feel light, almost like touch.”32

James Carpenter, another light artist, makes a similar claim about the experiential materiality and tactility of light: “There is a tactility to something, which is immaterial, that I find rather extraordinary. With light you are dealing with a purely electromagnetic wavelength coming in through the retina, yet it is tactile. But it is not a tactility that fundamentally involves something that you can pick up or hold on to […] Your eye tends to interpret light and bring to it some sort of substance, which, in reality, is not there.”33

Light tends to be experientially and emotionally absent until it is contained by space, concretized by matter that it illuminates, or turned into a substance or coloured air through a mediating matter, such as fog, mist, smoke, rain, snow, or frost. “Sun never knows how great it is until it hits the side of a building or shines inside a room”, Louis Kahn observes poetically.34

The emotive impact of light is highly intensified when it is perceived as an imaginary substance. Alvar Aalto´s lighting arrangements frequently reflect light from a curved white surface and the chiaroscuro of the rounded surfaces give light an experiential plasticity, materiality, and heightened presence. Even pleasurable light fixtures, such as those of Poul Henningsen and Alvar Aalto, articulate and mould light, as if slowing down the speed of light and halting it for the enjoyment of the eye and the touch of the skin. The narrow roof slits in Tadao Ando’s and Peter Zumthor’s buildings force light into thin directional sheets that contrast with the relatively dark spaces around. In Luis Barragan´s buildings, such as the Chapel for the Capuchinas Sacramentarias, light turns into a warm coloured liquid that even suggests sonorous qualities that can almost be heard as an imaginary humming sound – the architect himself writes about “the interior placid murmur of silence”35. The coloured windows of the Henry Matisse Chapel in Venice, and many of James Turrell´s light works turn light similarly into coloured air that invokes delicate sensations of skin contact, and feels like being submerged in a transparent substance.

We live in a world of human spirit, ideas and intentions, but we also exist in a world of matter under the quantities and qualities of the physical world. We have two domiciles that constitute an existential singularity: one in the historicity of human thought and emotion, the other in the world of matter and physical phenomena. It is the profound task of the arts, as well as architecture to articulate and express “how the world touches us” as Merleau-Ponty characterized Paul Cézanne’s paintings36, and, conversely, how we touch our world in our attempt to turn it into our home.

                                       ●

Considered materiality and the deliberate articulation of material characteristics give rise to an embracing and integrating architectural atmosphere. The significance of atmosphere and the formless or ephemeral aspects of settings, places and spaces have not been much considered in architectural theory, practice and criticism as they have focused on space, form, structure, and conscious intentionality. Yet, an ephemeral but emotionally enticing atmosphere is often more important for our perception in and evaluation of a place or space than any of its tectonic or formal features.

An atmospheric, integrating and emotive character is often generated and promoted by an overarching sense of materiality, texture and colour. Today, a number of architects frequently combine a reductive formal language, or a rationalist approach, with a strong and tactile presence of materiality.

Sean Godsell, the Australian, uses a classical, constructivist and strictly ordered spatial and structural organization with the dominant presence of rusty steel. In his work, rusting steel provides a unifying patina, and sense of time and erosion that project a poetic and sensuous counterpoint to the rational organization and precise articulation of structure. These structures speak of reason and determination, pride and humility, at the same time that they set themselves in a poetic dialogue with nature, seasons and weather. Instead of arrogantly resisting time and erosion, Godsell’s buildings demonstrate the temporal processes that inevitably take place in our structures and artefacts.

The projects of Studio Mumbai/Bijoy Jain in India portray a combined sense of Indian vernacular tradition and a measured articulation and materiality that is matter-of-fact and luxurious at the same. The textural qualities of his chosen materials create a haptic sense of intimacy and care. The works of Studio Mumbai refer to industrial production and the precision of the machine, while most often being a result of rather low technologies combined with high manual craft and skill. The deployment of traditional local skills elevates the practicalities of architecture and engineering to the level of unique handicraft. The presence of skill, craft and attention to detail give even commonplace materials the air of luxury; this is an example of the innate alchemy of the art of architecture.

John Pawson’s architecture is most often visually reduced to the juxtaposition of white surfaces of differing textures or grains, and surfaces of wood, or occasionally of natural stone, either as a part of the architectural ensemble itself or in the furnishings. The planar architectural language emphasizes surfaces and their minute differences as well as the qualities of illumination, both natural and artificial. Minimal detailing also underlines materiality and the implied tactility of matter, an ideated experience evoked by our imagination when looking at carefully juxtaposed surfaces. This minimal expression tends to evoke an air of an exhibition; the objects of wood or details of stone appear as having been deliberately displayed in the white and silenced spaces. The ambience of Pawson’s architecture frequently also arises from a measured dialogue between old and new, rough and refined, historical and timeless. Regardless of his minimal aesthetics, his spaces whisper rich and sensuous narratives.

The formally reductive architecture of CRC Architects of Spain shares Pawson’s preference for simplicity, but their work exudes powerful sensations of materiality and colour, and an intensity of architectural intent. Their various projects are often based on the theme of a single material or a combination of two materials. Regardless of the similarity of formal reduction, the ambience of the architectures of John Pawson and CRC Architects are very different, indeed. The latter’s work tends to push materials to their technical limits. Glass does not merely imply the absence of the wall; glass reveals its green colour and it enfolds the occupant in a tactile manner. The use of glass in the pavilions in Les Cols Restaurant, for instance, makes one think of the obsessive early modern utopias of glass architecture, such as the prismatic architecture of the German Expressionists, or Andre Breton’s surrealist dream of an all-glass house, “where I rest at night on a bed of glass with glass sheets”.

The extremely simplified geometry or folded plates of steel heighten the impact of CRC’s chosen material. Renovation projects, such as Barberi Space turn into architectural collages with an intense dialogue between the rough materiality and historical patina of the existing structures, on the one hand, and the delicately dimensioned and detailed new parts, on the other.

Today’s forceful chemical industries and material sciences are producing unforeseen materials and composites which will eventually revolutionize architectural structures and details. The new man-made materials often combine paradoxical properties, such as structural durability and translucency or transparency, structural strength and thermal insulation. Self-regulating and adjusting materials that react to environmental conditions take architecture a decisive step towards biological models. Yet, the task of materials is to mediate and express “how the world touches us”.

“I preserve that fine memory. O material! Beautiful stones! … O how light are we become”.37 Paul Valéry

                                        ●

(The essay is a further development of a lecture held in the 1st International Congress of Architecture of the Fundación Miguel Fisac, Almagro, 17-19 October, 2007)


Juhani Pallasmaa (b. 1936), architect, designer, writer, professor emeritus. Practiced design in collaboration with other architects since 1962 and in 1983-2012 through his office in Helsinki. He has held positions as Rector of the Institute of Industrial Design, Director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture, Professor and Dean of the School of Architecture, Helsinki University of Technology, and several visiting professorships in the USA. He has taught and lectured in numerous universities in Europe, North and South America, Africa, Asia and Australia. Member of the Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury 2008-2014.

He has published 65 books and over 800 essays, articles and prefaces, and his writings have been translated into 37 languages. His widely known books include: The Embodied Image, The Thinking Hand, The Architecture of Image: existential space in cinema, and The Eyes of the Skin.

He is Honorary member of SAFA, AIA and RIBA, Academician of the International Academy of Architecture, and has received numerous Finnish and international awards and five Honorary Doctorates.

NOTES

  1. Gabriele d’Annunzio, Contemplazione della morte, Milan, 1912, pp. 17-18. As quoted in Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas, Texas: The Pegasus Foundation, 1983, p. 16.
  2. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas, Texas: The Pegasus Foundation, 1983.
  3. Water and Dreams, op. cit., p. 3.
  4. Water and Dreams, op. cit. “Introduction”, p. 1.
  5. Ibid.
  6. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture. London: The Architectural Press, 1959, p. 31.
  7. Colin St. John Wilson, The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture: The uncompleted project. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007.
  8. Water and Dreams, p. 46.
  9. Karsten Harries, “Building and the Terror of Time”, Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 19, New Haven, 1982, pp. 59-69.
  10. As quoted in Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1993, p. 76.
  11. Le Corbusier, L’art decoratif d’aujourd’hui. Paris: Editions G. Grès et Cie, 1925, p. 192.
  12. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air – The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso, 1990, p. 15.
  13. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism”, as quoted in Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny. Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: The MIT Press, 1999, 218.
  14. André Breton, Nadja as quoted in Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny. Cambridge, Mass., London, England: The MIT Press, 1999, p. 218.
  15. The Lamp of Beauty: Writings On Art by John Rushin, Joan Evans, editor. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980, p. 238.
  16. Alvar Aalto, “The Human Error” in: Göran Schild, editor, Alvar Aalto in His Own Words. Helsinki: Otava Publishers, 1997, p. 281.
  17. Sir John Soane, ”Crude Hints” republished in Visions of Ruin: Architectural fantasies & designs for garden follies. London: John Soane Museum, 1999.
  18. Michel Serres, Angels: A Modern Myth. New York: Flammarion, 1995, p. 71.
  19. Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. New York: Harper & Row, 1986, p. XIII.
  20. Paul Valéry, “Eupalinos or the Architect”, Paul Valéry Dialogues, New York: Pantheon Books, 1956, p. 70.
  21. Aldo van Eyck, Hermann Hertzberger, Addie van Roijen-Wortmann, Francis Strauven, editors. Amsterdam: Stichting Wonen, 1982, p. 65.
  22. Erik Gunnar Asplund, “Konst och Teknik” (Art and Technology. Byggmästaren 1936. As quoted in Stuart Wrede, The Architecture of Erik Gunnar Asplund. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1980, p. 153.
  23. Joseph Brodsky, Watermark. London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 44.
  24. Ibid., p. 43.
  25. Ibid., p. 134.
  26. Bachelard, op. cit., p. 5.
  27. Adrian Stokes, “Prologue: at Venice”, The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, Vol II. Plymouth: Thames and Hudson, 1978, p. 88.
  28. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology”, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense. Evanston, Ill.; Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 48.
  29. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, p. 6.
  30. Bernard Berenson, as quoted in Montagu, op. cit., p. 308-9.
  31. James Turrell, The Thingness of Light. Scott Poole, ed.. Blacksburg, Virginia: Architecture edition, 2000, pp. 1, 2.
  32. Ibid., 2.
  33. Interview with James Carpenter, Lawrence Mason, Scott Poole and Pia Sarpaneva, editors. Blacksburg, Virginia: Architecture Edition, 2000, p. 5.
  34. Louis Kahn, paraphrasing Wallace Stevens, in “Harmony Between Man and Architecture”, Louis I. Kahn Writings, Lectures, Interviews, edited by Alessandra Latour. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1991, p. 343.
  35. Luis Barragan, Official address, 1980 Pritzker Architectural Prize. Reprinted in Barragan: The Complete Works, Raul Rispa, ed.. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, p. 205.
  36. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cezanne’s Doubt”, In Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., p. 19.
  37. Paul Valéry, “Eupalinos, or the Architect”, Dialogues. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956, p. 69.