Ocular bias and sensory architecture - creating a sense of place and space

Images, video and text flood us in an evergoing mix everywhere. Yet, it is the sound we cancel out.

If you were to describe your local town square, you would most likely start with a description of its buildings, or stone paved ground surface, or you might be saying something about a fountain and what you see from the corner coffee shop terrace. A, not so far fetched, guess, is that you would describe your space based foremost on its visual objects and stimuli. Characteristics that in many ways are more intrusivethat you can not make disappear with the closing of your eyes - sound and smell, might not be among the first things you were to talk about. Why is that?

Today’s cities can be said to suffer from an ocular bias. The Finnish architect, and former professor of architecture and dean at the Helsinki University of Technology, Juhani Pallasmaa, writes in his seminal work on architectural theory The Eyes of the Skin. Architecture and the Senses in a 3rd edition from 2016:

“Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity.” social contexts. It encompasses how built structures interact with their surroundings and the experiences they create for people. Architectural phenomenology studies how architecture is experienced by individuals, and how actions, events and desires meet spatially.

This ocular bias together with the overall densification of cities leads to a disappearance of the un-programmed, vague, slow rooms where we really get a chance to hear, feel and encounter our city and local community. Add global changes like economic restructuring, climate change, war and migration, traditional notions of fixed identities in specific spaces and places are being challenged.

Knowing all this - how do we build, then? For whom and why? Shelter and home. Expression and being.

... you would describe your space based foremost on its visual objects and stimuli. [...] Why is that? ,,

In architecture, place is the open area, the void between the structural, built element - the mass. You can see the boundaries of the place. Its floors, walls, ceilings, departments. Its shadows and lighting. Its soft and hard parts. Space is carved out of space. Space is created in a space.

Place, in architecture, refers to the unique character and significance of a specific location, shaped by its cultural, historical, environmental, and

An aesthetic can indicate a larger societal artistic trend, hopes and views of the future. Architecture can also be an echo from history - show us what has been and place us in a cultural and social context. A context that sometimes goes against what and who is there on the site today. Many areas with former workers quarters are now seen as trendy and housing there is bought by the (upper) middle class, working from home in a virtual world. Workers and immigrants are pushed out, further and further from the city center. The groups meet, occasionally, on public transport, or on different sides of the cashier’s desk or maybe at the doctor’s office. Layers merge onto layers and everyone who passes and stays in a place becomes part of its history.

The ornamentation and form of the architecture bears witness to the lives that have been lived. The lack of ornamentation, in its classical sense on a house facade, is an equally important time marker. There are plenty of architectural details. From the colonial gingerbread; carpenter gothic and picturesque designed porches; via modernism’s plaster and rhythmically spaced pillars and window bands; the patterned stones of the paved street; the undulating waves of the brick tiled roof - to the placement of a marble slab in relation to the underlying cupboards in the modern kitchen. The choices of materials, their joints, void and mass, shadow and light. Architectural terminologies change, as do aesthetic preferences and cultural and religious superstitions. The human body stays pretty much the same, though. Modes of perception alter slightly with technology. But it is still the human hand that shapes and feels, and the ears that listen. We think with our senses.

Close your eyes.

Revisit your local town square, yet again, how would you describe it?