The Eyes of the Skin

vision down to touch. The Renaissancesystem of the senses was relatedwith the image of the cosmic body; vision was correlated to fire and light,hearing to air, smell to vapour, taste to water, and touch to earth. 11The invention of perspectival representation made the eye the centrepoint of the perceptual world as well as of the concept of the self.Perspectival representationnot only describes but also conditions perception.itself turned into a symbolic form, one whichThere is no doubt that our technological culture has ordered and separatedthe senses even more distinctly. Vision and hearing are now theprivileged sociable senses, whereas the other three are considered asarchaic sensory remnants with a merely private function, and they areusually suppressed by the code of culture. Only sensations such as theolfactory enjoyment of a meal, fragrance of flowers and responses to temperatureare allowed to draw collective awareness in our ocularcentric andobsessively hygienic code of culture.The dominance of vision over the other senses - and the consequent biasin cognition - has been observed by many philosophers. A collection ofphilosophical essays entitled Modernityand the Hegemony if Vision 1 2 argues that'beginning with the ancient Greeks, Western culture has been dominated byan ocularcentric paradigm, a vision-generated, vision-centred interpretationof knowledge, truth, and reality'.13 This thought-provoking book analyses'historical connections between vision and knowledge, vision and ontology,vision and power, vision and ethics'. 14As the ocularcentric paradigm of our relation to the world and of ourconcept of knowledge - the epistemologicalprivileging of vision ~ hasbeen revealed by philosophers, it is also important to survey critically therole of vision in relation to the other senses in our understanding andpractice of the art of architecture. Architecture, as with all art, is fundamentallyconfronted with questions of human existence in space andtime, it expresses and relates man's being in the world. Architecturedeeply engaged in the metaphysicalquestions of the self and the world,interiority and exteriority, time and duration, life and death. 'Aestheticisand cultural practices are peculiarly susceptible to the changing experienceof space and time precisely because they entail the construction of spatialrepresentations and artefacts out of the flow of human experience,' writesDavid Harvey. 15 Architecture is our primary instrument in relating us withspace and time, and giving these dimensions a human measure. It domesticateslimitless space and endless time to be tolerated, inhabited andunderstood by humankind. As a consequence of this interdependence ofspace and time, the dialectics of external and internal space, physical andspiritual, material and mental, unconscious and conscious priorities concerningthe senses as well as their relative roles and interactions, have anessential impact on the nature of the arts and architecture.David Michael Levin motivates the philosophical critique of the dominanceof the eye with the following words: 'I think it is appropriatechallenge the hegemony of vision - the ocularcentrism of our culture.And I think we need to examine very critically the character of visionthat predominatesthe psychosocial pathologytoday in our world. We urgently need a diagnosis ofof everyday seeing - and a critical understandingof ourselves, as visionary beings.' 16Levin points out the autonomy-driveand aggressiveness of vision, and'the specters of patriarchal rule' that haunt our ocularcentric culture:The will to power is very strong in vision. There is a very strong tendencyin vision to grasp and fixate, to reify and totalise: a tendency to dominate,secure, and control, which eventually, because it was so extensively promoted,assumed a certain uncontestedhegemony over our culture and itsphilosophical discourse, establishing, in keeping with the instrumentalrationality of our culture and the technological character of our society,an ocularcentric metaphysics of presence. 17I believe that many aspects of the pathology of everyday architecture todaycan likewise be understood through an analysis of the epistemology of thesenses, and a critique of the ocular bias of our culture at large, and ofarchitecture in particular. The inhumanity of contemporary architectureand cities can be understood as the consequence of the negligence of theto16THE EYES OFTHE SKINPART I 17