The Eyes of the Skin

PART 29ARCHITECTURE AND THE HUMAN FIGUREWe tend to interpret a building as an analogueto our body, and vice versa.Caryatids of the Erechtheum on theAcropolis (421- 405 BC).© Copyright The Trustees of the BritishMuseum.10Since the dynasties of ancientEgypt, measuresof the human body were used inarchitecture. The anthropocentric traditionhas been almost entirely forgotten inmodern times.Aulis Blomstedt's study of a proportionalsystem for architecture based on thePythagorean subdivision of a basic 180 cmmeasure (presumably from the early 1960s).The Aulis Blomstedt Estate/SBlomstedt.As the preceding brief survey suggests, the privileging of the sense ofsight over the other senses is an inarguable theme in \'\Testern thought,and it is also an evident bias in the architecture of our century. The negativedevelopment in architecture is, of course, forcefully supported byforces and patterns of management, organisation and production as wellas by the abstracting and universalising impact of technological rationalityitself. The negative developments in the realm of the senses cannot,either, be directly attributed to the historical privileging of the sense ofvision itself. The perception of sight as our most important sense is wellgrounded in physiological, perceptual and psychological facts.74 Theproblems arise from the isolation of the eye outside its natural interactionwith other sense modalities, and from the elimination and suppression ofother senses, which increasingly reduce and restrict the experience ofthe world into the sphere of vision. This separation and reduction fragmentsthe innate complexity, comprehensiveness and plasticity of theperceptual system, reinforcing a sense of detachment and alienation.In this second part, I will survey the interactionsof the senses andgive some personal impressions of the realms of the senses in theexpression and experience of architecture. In this essay I proclaim asensory architecture in opposition to the prevailing visual understandingof the art of building.38THE EYES OFTHE SKINPART 2 39