Inseminations. Juhani Pallasmaa

I therefore tried to design rooms for weak patients that would provide a peaceful atmosphere for people who have to stay in a horizontal position. Thus, I decided against air conditioning because the entering current of air feels unpleasant to the head, and in favor of fresh air heated ever so slightly between the two window panes of the double glazing. I cite these examples to show how incredibly small details can be used to alleviate people's suffering. Here is another example, a washbasin. I strove to design a basin in which the water does not make a noise. The water falls on the porcelain sink at a sharp angle, making no sound to disturb the neighboring patient, as in the physically or mentally weakened condition the impact of the environment is heightened’.³⁰ Aalto often spoke of ‘the little man’ as the architect's real client, and he concluded that we should always design for ‘the man at his weakest’.³¹ These are examples of an empathic imagination in opposition to formalist imagination.

Architecture as Experience

      → experience has a multi‐sensory essence; reconciling

      Architecture as Experience: Existential Meaning in Architecture (2018)

The phenomenon of architecture has also been approached through subjective and personal encounters in poetic, aphoristic or essayistic ways, as in the writings of many of the leading architects from Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier to Alvar Aalto and Louis Kahn and further to Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor. In these writings, architecture is approached in a poetic and metaphorical manner, without any ambitions or qualifications as scientific research. These writings usually arise from personal experiences, observations and beliefs, and they approach architecture as a poetic encounter and a projection of life, and their ambition is to be experientially true. I must personally confess that these personal, and often confessional accounts, have valorized the holistic, existential and poetic essence of architecture to me more than the theoretical or empirical studies that claim to satisfy the criteria of science.

      Historically there are three categories of seeking meaning in human existence: religion (or myth), science and art, and these endeavours are fundamentally incomparable with each other. The first is based on faith, the second on rational knowledge and the third on existential and emotive experiences. The poetic, experiential and existential core of art and architecture has to be confronted, lived and felt rather than understood and formalized intellectually. There are certainly numerous aspects in construction, in its performance, structural reality, formal and dimensional properties, as well as distinct psychological impacts, that can be, and are being, studied ‘scientifically’, but the experiential mental and existential meaning of the entity can only be encountered and internalized.

      During the past few decades, an experiential approach, based on phenomenological encounters and first‐person experiences of buildings and settings, has gained ground. This thinking is initially based on the philosophies of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Gaston Bachelard and many other philosophical thinkers. The phenomenological approach, which acknowledges the significant role of embodiment, was introduced into the architectural context by such writers as Steen Elier Rasmussen, Christian Norberg‐Schulz, Charles Moore, David Seamon, Robert Mugerauer and Karsten Harries, for instance. I also believe that the book Questions of Perception of 1994 by Steven Holl, Alberto Pérez‐Gómez and myself helped to spread this manner of thinking especially in schools of architecture internationally.

The poetic and existential dimension of architecture is a mental quality, and this artistic and mental essence of architecture emerges in the individual encounter with and experience of the work. In the beginning of his seminal book of 1934, Art as Experience, John Dewey, the visionary American pragmatist philosopher argues: ‘In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience. Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding. […] When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals’.³² Here, the philosopher connects the condition of making a piece of art and its later encounter by someone else, as in both cases the mental and experiential reality dominates and the work exists ‘nakedly’ as a human experience. The philosopher suggests that the difficulties in understanding artistic phenomena arise from the tradition of studying them as objects outside of human consciousness and experience. Dewey writes further: ‘By common consent, the Parthenon is a great work of art. Yet, it has aesthetic standing only as the work becomes an experience for a human being. […] Art is always the product in experience of an interaction of human beings with their environment. Architecture is a notable instance of the reciprocity of the results in this interaction. […] The reshaping of subsequent experience by architectural works is more direct and more extensive than in the case of any other art. […] They not only influence the future, but they record and convey the past’.³³ Here, Dewey even assigns an actively conditioning role to architecture in relation to the nature of experience itself, as well as to our understanding of the passing of time and history. I have formulated this view with the argument that architecture creates frames and horizons for perception, experience and understanding of the human condition, and consequently, instead of being the end product, it has essentially a mediating role. The true meaning is always beyond the material essence of the building.

      The significance of experience has been grasped in other art forms, such as theatre, cinema and music, but it has not been understood in relation to such material and utilitarian objects as buildings and larger environments. That is why I have taught architecture through examples and ideas in other art forms.

Architecture as Impure Discipline

      → architecture and being; art vs science I; art vs science II; forgetting; hearth; modes of thinking; moving; optimism; playing with forms; tasks of architecture [the]; triad

      Landscapes and Horizons of Architecture: Architecture and Artistic Thought (2007)

The complexity of the phenomenon of architecture results from its ‘impure’ conceptual essence as a field of human endeavour. Architecture is simultaneously a practical and a metaphysical act; a utilitarian and poetic, technological and artistic, economic and existential, collective and individual manifestation. I cannot, in fact, name a discipline possessing a more complex and essentially more conflicting grounding in the lived reality and human intentionality. Design is essentially a form of philosophizing by means of its characteristic means: space, matter, structure, scale and light, horizon and gravity. Architecture responds to existing demands and desires at the same time that it creates its own reality and criteria; it is both the end and the means. Moreover, authentic architecture surpasses all consciously set aims and, consequently, it is always a gift of imagination and desire, will power and foresight.

      Landscapes of Architecture: Architecture and the Influence of other Fields of Inquiry (2003/2010)

      In the first century BC, in the most influential treatise in the history of architecture Vitruvius acknowledged already. The breadth of the architect's craft and its interactions with numerous skills and areas of knowledge: ‘Let him [the architect] be educated, skilful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of heavens’.³⁴ Vitruvius gives careful reasons why the architect needs to master each of these fields of knowledge. Philosophy, for instance, ‘makes an architect high‐minded and not self‐assuming, but rather renders him courteous, just and honest without avariciousness’;³⁵ this is a most valid piece of advice to architects even today.

      Architecture and the Human Nature: Searching for a Sustainable Metaphor (2011)

      I have called architecture an ‘impure’ and ‘messy’ discipline