Juhani Pallasmaa

The Eyes of the Skin (1996) argues that contemporary architecture suffers from an excess of sight. It is designed on a screen, judged in photographs and rewarded for the image, so the building becomes a surface made to be looked at from outside. What is lost is everything else: how a room sounds, how an entrance hall smells, whether the handrail is cold, whether the floor creaks.

His argument is not nostalgic but physiological. We inhabit with skin, hearing, smell and balance before we do with our eyes, and it is those senses that produce the feeling of being somewhere rather than anywhere. A space that works only visually leaves the body without references, and that, Pallasmaa says, is why so many recent buildings feel immaculate and inhospitable at once.

A Finnish architect born in Hämeenlinna in 1936, Pallasmaa directed the Museum of Finnish Architecture, was a professor at the Helsinki University of Technology and has taught at Washington University, Yale and several European schools. Besides being a theorist he is a practising designer, with built work and industrial design, and that double condition runs through all his books.

The Thinking Hand (2009) defends hand drawing and workshop practice as forms of knowledge the computer does not replace, because thought passes through gesture. The Embodied Image (2011) studies imagination in architecture. His influence is visible in so-called atmospheric architecture and in the recent interest in neuroscience applied to design, though Pallasmaa arrived there from phenomenology, reading Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard.