Juhani Pallasmaa
“The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.” A prolific architect and theorist, Pallasmaa has long championed the embodiment of the passage of time and the sensations of place in the built environment.
Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin calls for a renewed engagement with sensory encounters which surpass the merely ocular. “Beyond architecture,” writes Pallasmaa, “our culture at large seems to drift towards a distancing, a kind of chilling, de-sensualization and de-eroticization of the human relation to reality.” Architecture increasingly predicated on purely visual stimuli leads us further and further away from bodily experience. Claims Pallasmaa, “Human behaviour and construction have become dangerously detached from their ecological context.” In his terms, virtual and actual become opposed ethical conditions. "I see the task of architecture as the defence of the authenticity of human experience," he writes.
Pallasmaa’s words and work establish an impassioned and humane armature for the elaboration and debate of themes relating to Natural Artifice.
www.uiah.fi/opintoasiat/history2/pallas.htm
