Inseminations. Juhani Pallasmaa

as unmasked scientific experiments and emotive confrontations usually creates a feeling of a phenomenon that is beyond the boundaries of normality. Eliasson's atmospheric installation in the immense Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London, entitled The Weather Project (2003), created the authority of real sunlight, that encouraged visitors to lie down on the concrete floor as if they were sunbathing on a beach.

      Altogether, there are three categories of giving human meaning to our being‐in‐the‐world: religion (or myth), science and art. The first is based in belief and faith, the second on rationality and knowledge, and the third on emotion and experience. Eliasson's works usually fuse or short‐circuit the categories of science and art, and give rise to a sublime experience, which can even invoke religious forebodings. While many of his works project sublime experiences, they can also reverse or contradict the viewer's expectations. In a concrete perceptual sense, his mirror works create infinitely repeating spaces or endless perspectival corridors. In his installation at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, the modernist white interior of the Museum was turned into a landscape of rocks, gravel and water, reversing time as if the landscape that existed there before the construction of the museum had taken over. His works in the Bregenz Museum, designed by Peter Zumthor, turned the white minimalist museum interiors into landscapes of water, water plants and fog – the man‐made architectural space turns into a jungle.

      The relationship of reality and art is not as simple and self‐evident as we might think. ‘Nothing is more abstract than reality’, Giorgio Morandi states thought-provokingly,⁵⁰ while another great artist, Alberto Giacometti gives another advice on the problematic relationship of reality and art: ‘The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity’.⁵¹ Neither does science reproduce reality, it reveals its inner structure.

Artists as Phenomenologists and Neurologists

      → beauty; biophilic beauty

      Sarah Robinson, Juhani Pallasmaa, editors, Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design, Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2007, 66–68

Semir Zeki, a neurologist who studies the neural ground of artistic image and effect, considers a high degree of ambiguity – such as the unfinished imagery of Michelangelo's slaves, or the ambivalent human narratives of Johannes Vermeer's paintings ‐ to be essential to the greatness of these works.⁵² In reference to the great capacity of profound artists to evoke, manipulate and direct emotions, he posits the surprising argument: ‘Most painters are also neurologists […] they are those who have experimented with and, without ever realizing it, understood something about the organization of the visual brain, though with the techniques that are unique to them’.⁵³ This statement interestingly echoes an argument of the Dutch phenomenologist‐therapist JH van den Berg: ‘All painters and poets are born phenomenologists’.⁵⁴ Artists and architects are phenomenologists in the sense of being capable of ‘pure looking’, an unbiased and ‘naive’ manner of encountering things. In fact, Bachelard advises practitioners of the phenomenological approach ‘to be systematically modest’ and ‘to go in the direction of maximum simplicity’.⁵⁵ A recent book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer, popularizes this topic, arguing that certain masterly artists, such as Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust, Paul Cézanne, Igor Stravinsky and Gertrude Stein, anticipated some of today's crucial neurological findings through their art more than a century ago.⁵⁶ In his important books The Architect's Brain and Architecture and Embodiment, Harry F Mallgrave connects the latest findings in the neurosciences with the field of architecture directly in accordance with the objective of this book.⁵⁷ In Inner Vision, Semir Zeki suggests the possibility of ‘a theory of aesthetics that is biologically based’.⁵⁸ Having studied animal building behaviour and the emergence of ‘aesthetically’ motivated choices in the animal world for 40 years, I have no doubt about this. What else could beauty be than nature's powerful instrument of selection in the process of evolution? Joseph Brodsky assures us of this with the conviction of a poet: ‘The purpose of evolution, believe it or not, is beauty’.⁵⁹ It is beyond doubt that nature can teach us great lessons about design, particularly about ecologically adapted design and dynamic processes. This can be seen in emerging fields of study, such as bionics and biomimicry. Several years ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a conference in Venice entitled “What Can We Learn from Swarming Insects?” organized by the European Center for Living Technologies. The participants were biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists and a couple of architects. The purpose of the encounter was to gain understanding, through recent research findings and computer simulations, of the miraculous capacities of ants, termites, bees and wasps to construct perfectly adapted nests and wider environmental systems, such as fungus farms and covered road networks. So far, the chain of collective and instinctual actions that enable termites to construct a vault has been simulated, but the embodied collective knowledge that enables them to construct their nest as an artificial lung to sustain the life of a community of millions of individuals remains far beyond our understanding.⁶⁰ We can surely expect more of such deliberations in the future. Edward O Wilson, the world's leading myrmecologist and pioneer of biophilia, ‘the new ethics and science of life’, makes the dizzying argument that ‘the superorganism of a leaf‐cutter ant nest is a more complex system in its performance than any human invention, and unimaginably old’.⁶¹ In his study on the neurological ground of art, Zeki argues that ‘art is an extension of the functions of the visual brain in its search for essentials’.⁶² I see no reason to limit this idea of extension, or externalization, only to the visual field. I believe that art provides momentary extensions of the functions of our perceptual systems, consciousness, memory, emotions and existential ‘understanding’. The great gift of art is to permit us ordinary mortals to experience something through the perceptual and emotive sensibility of some of the greatest individuals in human history. We can feel through the neural subtlety of Michelangelo, Bach and Rilke, for instance. And again, we can undoubtedly make the same assumption about meaningful architecture; we can sense our own existence amplified and sensitized by the works of great architects from Ictinus and Callicrates to Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn. The role of architecture as a functional and mental extension of our capacities is clear, and in fact Richard Dawkins has described various aspects of this notion among animals in his book The Extended Phenotype;⁶³ he suggests that such fabricated extensions of biological species should be made part of the phenotype of the species in question. So, dams and water regulation systems should be part of the phenotype of the beaver and the astounding nets of the spider. Works of meaningful architecture intuitively grasp the essence of human nature and behaviour, in addition to being sensitive to the hidden biological and mental characteristics of space, form and materiality. By intuiting this knowledge, sensitive architects are able to create places and atmospheres that make us feel safe, comfortable, invigorated and dignified without being able to conceptually theorize their skills at all. In this context, I have earlier used the notion ‘a natural philosophy of architecture’, a wisdom that arises directly from an intuitive and lived understanding of human nature, and architecture as an extension of that very nature. Simply, great architecture emanates unspoken but contagious existential wisdom.

Artists vs Architects

      → microcosms; tasks of architecture [the]; tasks of art [the]

      Selfhood, Memory and Imagination: Landscapes of Remembrance and Dream (2007)

      Artists seem to grasp the intertwining of place and human mind, memory and desire, much better than we architects do, and that is why these other art forms can provide such stimulating inspiration for our work as well as for architectural education. There are no better lessons of the extraordinary capacity of artistic condensations in evoking microcosmic images of the world than, say, the short stories of Anton Chekhov and Jorge Luis Borges, or Giorgio Morandi's minute still lives consisting of a few bottles and cups on a table top.

Atmospheres in Architecture