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When describing how a traveler is able to identify the various types of buildings – the palace, the barracks, the mill, the theatre, the bazaar - in the City of Zoe, Calvino states: “This … confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without forms, and the individual cities fill it up.”6 In the same way that we carry the archetypal image of the room, the house and the home since our early childhood, we also possess a mental image of the city, which we re-adjust to the varying conditions of reality. The mental experience and memory of the city is more an embodied and haptic constellation than a sequence of visual images; impressions of sight are embedded in the continuum of unconscious haptic experiences. Even as the eye touches and the gaze strokes distant outlines and contours, our vision feels the hardness, texture, weight, moistness and temperature of the surfaces. Without the collaboration of touch, the eye would even be unable to decipher space and depth, and we could not mould the mosaic of sensory impressions into a coherent and plastic continuum. The experience of embodied continuity unites isolated sensory fragments in the temporal continuum of the sense of self. In addition to our five Aristotelian senses, we have an atmospheric sense that grasps immediately the character of complex settings, before we have had any time to consciously observe or analyze its features or qualities. This comprehensive atmospheric sense, could well be regarded as our sixth and most important sense. Besides, the senses constantly collaborate, interact and interfuse, evoking thus a full existential experience and sense of being, which is a totally different quality than the mere additive result of our five senses. 48
“My perception is [therefore] not a sum of visual, tactile, and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being; I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once,” as Merleau-Ponty writes emphatically.7 In his essay “Eye and Mind”, Merleau-Ponty makes a significant remark on embodiment in the art of painting: “Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them […] Things have an internal equivalence in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence.”8 This “carnal formula” gives the works of art and architecture their very sense of life. A profound piece of art, architecture, or urban setting, evokes a sense of life, and this quality usually projects epic experiences. Thus, I confront the city with my entire body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body on the façades of buildings, where it roams imaginatively on the cornices and contours, groping for the size of recesses and projections; my body weight meets the mass of the door, and my hand grasps the door pull, polished to a sheen by countless generations, as I enter the dark void behind. The city and the body supplement each other; they mutually define each other. The city is a true extension of my body and mind, and the city has its second, immaterial life in my recollections, fantasies, and dreams. HEARING THE CITY, CITY OF THE BODY The final chapter of Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s perceptive book, Experiencing Architecture, is significantly entitled