as quoted in Bachelard, op. cit., XXIV.4 4 Semir Zeki, Inner Vision – An Exploration of Art and the Brain, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999, 2.
5 5 David Seamon, Arthur Zajonc, editors, Goethe's Way of Science, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998, 2.
6 6 Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, New York: Pantheon Books, 1991, 1.
7 7 Joseph Brodsky, ‘Less Than One’, in Id., Less Than One, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998, 17.
8 8 Walter J Ong, Orality & Literacy – The Technologizing of the World, London and New York: Routledge, 1991.
9 9 Maurice Merlau‐Ponty describes the notion of the flesh in his essay ‘The Intertwining – The Chiasm’, in Id., The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1992.
A
An Artwork is…
→ forgetting
Embodied Experience and Sensory Thought ‐ Lived Space in Art and Architecture (2006)
Rainer Maria Rilke, one of greatest poets of all times, gives a memorable description of the utter difficulty of creating an authentic work of art and of its density and condensation, reminiscent of the core of an atom. ‘For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings…, they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning’.1 The poet continues his list of necessary experiences endlessly. He lists roads leading to unknown regions, unexpected encounters and separations, childhood illnesses and withdrawals into the solitude of rooms, nights of love, screams of women in labour, and being beside the dying. But even all of this together is not sufficient to create a line of verse. One has to forget all of this and have the patience to wait for their return. Only after all our life experiences have turned to the own blood within us, ‘not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them’.2
Aestheticization
→ elementarism; eyes; experience has a multi‐sensory essence; newness
The Existential Wisdom: Fusion of Architectural and Mental Space (2008)
In our materialist and digital age, buildings are regarded as aestheticized objects and judged primarily by their visual characteristics. In fact, the dominance of vision has never been stronger than in the current era of the technologically expanded eye and industrially mass‐produced visual imagery, the ‘unending rainfall of images’,3 as Italo Calvino appropriately describes the present cultural condition. In today's media culture, architecture has been turned into an artform of image and instant gratification. The rapid triumph of computerized design methods over sketching by hand, and full involvement of the body in the design process, has brought about yet another level of detachment from embodiment and immediate sensory contact.
The consumer culture of today has a blatantly dualistic attitude towards the senses and human embodied existence at large. On the one hand, the fundamental fact that, experientially, we exist in the world through the senses and cognitive processes is neglected in the established views of the human condition. This attitude is also directly reflected in educational philosophies as well as practices of daily life; in our cult of physical beauty, strength and virility we live increasingly bodiless lives. On the other hand, our culture has developed an obsessively aestheticized and eroticized cult of the body and we are increasingly manipulated and exploited through our senses. The body is regarded as the medium of identity and self‐presentation as well as an instrument of social and sexual appeal. Current consumer capitalism has even developed a ‘new technocracy of sensuality’ and shrewd strategies of ‘multi‐sensory marketing’ for the purposes of sensory seduction and product differentiation. This commercial manipulation of the senses aims at creating a state of ‘hyperaesthesia’ in the consumer.4 Artificial scents are added to all kinds of products and spaces, whereas muzak conditions the shopper's mood. We have undoubtedly entered an era of manipulated and branded sensations. Signature architecture, aimed at creating eye‐catching, recognizable and memorable visual images, or architectural trademarks, is also an example of sensory exploitation, the attempt ‘to colonize by canalizing the “mind space” of the consumer’.5
We are living in an age of aestheticization without being hardly aware of it. Everything is aestheticized today; consumer products, personality and behaviour, politics, and ultimately even war. Formal and aesthetic qualities have also in architecture replaced functional, cultural and existential criteria. The appearance of things is more important than their essence. An aestheticized surface appeal has displaced meaning and social significance. The social idealism and compassion that gave modernism its sense of optimism and empathy have frequently been replaced by formalist retinal rhetoric. The lack of ideals, visions and compassion is equally clear in today's pragmatic and egoistic politics.
Amplifiers of Emotions
→ Emotions; Emotions and Creative Thought; Microcosms; Spatialized Memories;
Selfhood, Memory and Imagination: Landscapes of Remembrance and Dream (2007)
In addition to being memory devices, landscapes and buildings are also amplifiers of emotions; they reinforce sensations of belonging or alienation, invitation or rejection, tranquillity or despair. A landscape or work of architecture cannot, however, create feelings. Through their authority and aura, they evoke and strengthen our own emotions and reflect them back to us as if these feelings of ours had an external source. In the Laurentian Library in Florence I confront my own sense of metaphysical melancholy awakened and reflected back by Michelangelo's architecture. The optimism that I experience when approaching the Paimio Sanatorium is my own sense of hope evoked and strengthened by Alvar Aalto's optimistic architecture. The hill of the meditation grove at the Forest Cemetery in Stockholm, for instance, evokes a state of longing and hope through an image that is an invitation and a promise. This architectural image of landscape simultaneously evokes remembrance and imagination as the composite painted image of Arnold Böcklin's ‘Island of Death’. All poetic images are condensations and microcosms.
‘House, even more than the landscape, is a psychic state’, Bachelard suggests.6 Indeed, writers, film directors, poets and painters do not just depict landscapes or houses as unavoidable geographic and physical settings of the events of their stories; they seek to express, evoke and amplify human emotions, mental states and memories through purposeful depictions of settings, both natural and man‐made. ‘Let us assume a wall: what takes place behind it?’, asks the poet Jean Tardieu,7 but we architects rarely bother to imagine what happens behind the walls we have erected. The walls conceived by architects are usually mere aestheticized constructions, and we see our craft in terms of designing aesthetic structures rather than evoking perceptions, feelings and fantasies.
Animal Architecture
→ architecture and biology; biophilic beauty
Our established view of architecture and its history is surprisingly limited. Almost all books and courses on architectural history begin with Egyptian architecture, i.e. roughly 5500 years ago. The lack of interest in the origins of human constructions for inhabitation or cosmological and ritual purposes is truly
