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“Life changing architecture must address all senses simultaneously, unifying our image of self with our experience of the world. Ask yourself…What is architecture trying to achieve in a philosophical sense?
Architecture is beyond a world of fabrication and fantasy… architecture consolidates the experience of the sensory mode integrating our experience of the world with ourselves, while also strengthening our sense of reality and self.”
Juhani Pallasmaa
The theory of vision and its connection to perception and knowledge has been at the heart of philosophical discussion in Western culture for thousands of years, as recognised by Juhani Pallasmaa, David Michael Levin, and Graham Macphee, among others. The psychosocial pathology of visual arbitration, as argued by Pallasmaa in his polemical essay: ‘The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses’ (1996), has been the crux of countless literary works of prominent philosophers. These speculations date back to the beginnings of classical Greek literature which epitomised clear vision as the symbolic precondition of truth and knowledge through an abundance of ocular metaphors: specifically evident in the scholarly works of Plato, Aristotle and Heraclitus.
Plato considered vision to be one of humanity’s greatest gifts, and stipulated that ethical universals were accessible to “the mind’s eye.” Analogously, Aristotle regarded sight as the most noble of the senses because it approximates the intellect most closely by virtue of the relative immateriality of its knowing. Heraclitus also enunciated the hegemony of vision as the most prominent of the senses as he alluded to the eyes as “more exact witnesses than the ears.” Levin underlines these interpretations as an excessive appraisal of the epistemological privileging of vision throughout the pre-Socratic era, which delegated an ocularcentric paradigm in philosophical thinking. Philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas broadened the horizon of understanding sight from a different perspective by linking it to the cognition as well as other sensory realms, diffusing the ideology of ocularcentrism in the Middle Ages.
Following on from Aquinas’s theory French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed vision to be conditioned thought because “… it is born as occasion by what happens in the body, it is incited to think by the body.” In this way Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the significance of experiencing the world through perceptual bodily dimensions, stating that he perceives “in a total way” with his whole being. He further articulates the scope of this understanding by claiming that an individual’s perceptions could not solely be validated via ocular, tangible or audible means, but rather a cooperative interaction of all the senses.
Hence, the philosophy of vision and its connection to perception and knowledge can be seen as a heavily discussed concept dating back to the pre-Socratic era. The significance of this analysis has added an extended notion of depth to the discussion of the phenomenology of space in architecture, as it can be seen that our understanding of our environments is derived from a holistic engagement of all the senses rather by visual means. Therefore architecture should be designed for the experience of all the senses, in the way that Merleau-Ponty has indicated: through perceptual bodily dimensions. Exploring this area of research through creative practice in my honours project is going to be quite a challenge!
Catherine K