the tyranny of sight

as men, we are visual creatures. it is our dominant sense. we depend on our sight more than our sense of smell, our hearing, taste or touch. without sight, we are helpless. and this has translated to a form of domination over all the other senses.

what these leads to is a primacy of visual impact over everything else in architecture. this is nowhere more evident in modernist architecture, where form, space and order is sacred. the aesthetic, the visual aesthetic is the be-all and end-all. In fact, we can also see this happening to green architecture, where it becomes a visual fad, a style to be sold, to be bought, and to be consumed and reprocessed.

what happened to all the rest of our senses. the touch of the roughness of stone, or the warmth of wood. the sounds of echoes down a hallway. the contrast between the warm fireplace and the bitter winter cold, the smell of fresh herbs in the kitchen. these information transmit to us the sense of scale and the sense of place. how awful is it that we give up all of these, just to create lifeless compositions of glass and steel.

architecture cannot be truly sustainable if it doesn’t touch the soul.

the eyes of the skin is an excellent read on the topic. see space and experience from an alternative point of view.

 

another book that makes for easy reading is the architecture of happiness. it’s lyrical but entertaining. read the review. another classic on sensory architecture: steen eiler rasmussen. together, these 3 texts suggest that there is more to architecture and experiences than just what we see.