Juhani Pallasmaa: The Eyes of the Skin and the senses

The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (1996), by the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, is a reflection on how we experience architecture with all the senses and not only with sight. In a culture dominated by the visual, Pallasmaa criticises modern architecture's tendency to focus on visual perception and defends a multisensory approach that involves touch, hearing, smell and even the sense of balance. Only in that way, he argues, are spaces created that are more human and more meaningful.

Against the rule of the eye

The dominance of vision has impoverished the experience of spaces. Modern architecture, influenced by technology and by graphic representation — the rendering, the photograph — has concentrated on visual aesthetics and neglected how bodies actually interact with the built environment. Pallasmaa asks us to go beyond the visual and consider how buildings feel to the touch, how the spaces they create sound and what smells and atmospheres they produce, because all of that conditions how people perceive and inhabit a place.

Touch: materials and textures

Touch, the sense most forgotten by modern architecture, is central to his argument. Materials, textures and surfaces decide our experience of space: the coldness of marble or the warmth of wood are tactile sensations that directly affect our relationship with the surroundings. Pallasmaa cites traditional architecture, where materials and human scale combine to create welcoming and memorable spaces, against many contemporary buildings with polished, cold surfaces that dehumanise the environment.

Hearing and smell: what a space sounds and smells like

Hearing is also part of the architectural experience, though it tends to be overlooked. The sound of footsteps on different surfaces or the echo of a hall changes the perception of a space: buildings are not only visual structures but acoustic ones. The quality of sound — the silence of a library, the contained bustle of a covered market — affects how we feel and behave, and architecture that attends to that dimension produces richer environments.

Smell, less obvious, is just as significant. Smells evoke memories and deep emotions, and a building or an urban space can have a characteristic aroma, from its materials or from the natural surroundings: that of a garden, the damp of an old building. Those smells create a unique and memorable atmosphere, and yet smell is another of the senses relegated in modern architectural planning.

Pallasmaa defends a fuller, more human approach to architecture, one that recognises the weight of every sense in the experience of space. His critique of the primacy of the visual invites architects and planners to reconsider how their designs affect those who inhabit them: integrating touch, hearing, smell and sight makes it possible to create environments that are not only functional and good in the photograph, but deeply human and emotionally meaningful. For the city, the lesson is that a street is also touched, heard and smelled.