Berleant, a philosopher and scholar in the field of aesthetics and place, writes, “Awareness also is growing of how encounters with the natural world can breach the boundaries of our private lives and bind us more closely to the regular and enduring patterns of nature.”3 Berleant criticizes the conventional human-environment binary and argues instead that humankind is an inseparable part of the environment. He goes on to say: [Environmental inquiries] are aesthetically relevant because all deal in some way with our perceptual experience of environment, and intrinsic perception is central to and dominant for aesthetics. This experience is not only sensory: perception has an aura to which memory, knowledge, and the conditioning and habits of the body all contribute. As inseparable dimensions of direct sensory experiences, these affect the range as well as the character of any environment, for even when we do not apprehend something directly in sensation, it can still affect us physically and so perceptually.4
It is through perception, through engaging the environmental
qualities of a place on a variety of physical and sensual layers, that corporeal experience is connected to its environment. Thus the humanenvironment relationship becomes a dialogue instead of an opposition. With this in mind, the challenge and potential for architecture is to facilitate that engagement.
Architecture must be more than a physical object in a landscape.
In the essay “The Reality of Image” phenomenologist and architect Juhani Pallasmaa writes, “We have been taught to believe that we have five senses. It is evident, however, that in addition to the five Aristotelian senses, the architectural experience calls for the senses of balance, movement, orientation, continuity, time, self, and existence.”5 This assertion begs the question, what does balance, movement, orientation, continuity, time, self, and existence detect that the traditional five senses cannot? Pallasmaa continues to say, “A great building turns our attention away 3 Arnold Berleant. Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment. (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1997) 2. 4 Ibid., 3. 5 Pallasmaa, Juhani. “The Reality of Image”. In Tom Kundig: Houses 2, by Tom Kundig, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005) 9.
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previous: fig. 3.2 Sutro Baths; 2013.