Designing With and For Our Sense of Self
Juhani Pallasmaa in correspondence with Carey Van Der Zalm
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Monday 27 July 2020
Dear Juhani,
Last May I had the pleasure of meeting you at Taliesin West, which hosted the 2019 Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum (ACSF). During the event you were recognized with the outstanding achievement award. At the beginning of your presentation you spoke about how important friends are in your life. Well, I know we only had a few opportunities to be in each other’s company at the event. But I can honestly say that when we did, it felt as if we were old friends. In one of those moments, we discussed publishing an interview with you in our forthcoming issue of The Site Magazine.
If you are still open to this idea, I would like for us to be “pen-pals” over the next few weeks and publish our correspondence in what will become our Fall 2020 issue on the topic of healing and architecture. Please let me know if you are willing.
All my best,
Carey van der Zalm
Enäjärvi Lake, Sammatti, Finland
Tuesday 28 July 2020Dear Carey,
I remember our encounter at the ACSF Forum. The pandemic situation has activated colleagues and friends around the world to contact me with varying requests for interviews, prefaces, essays, etc. However, I would be delighted to carry out an email correspondence with you. As I must have said in Arizona, I have closed the design activities of my office, and since 2011 I have been writing ten hours every single day.
I am writing this letter at our lake-side summer house 85 kilometres west of Helsinki, where we have now stayed since late May, and my wife and I drive to Helsinki only when it is necessary for some reason.
With warmest regards,
Juhani
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Tuesday 28 July 2020
Dear Juhani,
Enäjärvi Lake seems so beautiful, serene, and settling. It reminds me of parts of Alberta (from where I am writing this letter), and parts of British Columbia, (where I first saw you lecture in 2010, in Vancouver).
My first question for you is about process. You often say that architecture “cannot be prescribed . . . that it is in the process, not the preconceptions of what it can be.” Can you describe what your process is?
All my best,
Carey
Enäjärvi Lake, Sammatti, Finland
Tuesday 8 September 2020Dear Carey,
Architecture cannot be prescribed because it arises from the juxtaposition and interplay of numerous conditions, requirements, aspirations, and qualities in the design process itself. This complex process gradually fuses facts, beliefs, and visions into an entity that connects quantities and qualities, practicalities and ideals, functional performance, and emotive experience. Due to its complexities and irreconcilabilities, and their fundamentally situational character, architectural projects cannot be produced through theory or reason.
I regard my own design and writing processes as explorations and excavations. I do not try to structure my tasks intellectually in advance, I just begin to sketch or write and allow this spontaneous process to lead me and take me in directions suggested by my embodied identification with the task. I never study projects by other architects undertaking similar tasks. I look at art works all the way from ageless icon paintings and the Sienese School to Piero della Francesca to Vermeer and the Impressionists. I try to turn the task into a part of my felt self image, my sense of self. As a consequence, I am working on myself just as much as on the design or writing task in question.
I do not like to write a lecture or essay outline, as I would be obliged to decide my themes, directions, and ideas outside and before the process of making itself.
With warmest regards,
Juhani
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Tuesday 8 September 2020
Dear Juhani,
Thank you for your response. How are you? How is the change in season at Enäjärvi Lake? The air is cold here now and my intuition tells me that we will have snow sooner than later.
From phenomenology, to philosophy, to neuroscience... How do these different disciplines contribute to the work you do as an architect?
All my best,
Carey
Helsinki, Finland
Wednesday 9 September 2020Dear Carey,
I am writing to you from Helsinki. Indeed, the summer is over here allowing me more time to focus on writing. I hope my responses are helpful.
Architectural qualities arise from the richness of the designer’s experiences, and her poetic sensitivity and desire; they do not arise from theory. In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke reveals touchingly how poetic qualities are born: “For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings—they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which little flowers open in the morning.” After these words, the poet continues the required experiences for the length of half a page. Why would an architectural work arise more easily and prosaically?
Tireless reading, repeated encounters with works of art and wise individuals, as well as intense personal thinking, prepare and fertilize the ground of creative subtlety. Yet, creative work arises from unconscious and embodied impulses and emotions rather than the intellect. In my view, the contents of all arts are primarily existential; they articulate our experiences of being.
With warmest regards,
Juhani
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Wednesday 9 September 2020
Dear Juhani,
Your body of work demonstrates that “the only objective of architecture is to encounter the world, to touch the world.” It demonstrates that architecture is the “mediation . . . between . . . a meaningful touching, between oneself and the world/everything—all at the same time.” How can we create this experience in architecture today, in a world that is more technically driven, increasingly ocularcentric, and less interested in the haptic?
Thank you for your thoughts,
Carey
Helsinki, Finland
Thursday 10 September 2020Dear Carey,
”How could the painter or a poet express anything other than his encounter with the world?”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty asks. I would add: How could the architect do otherwise? The fundamental content in art and architecture is existential; the arts express how it feels to be a human being in this world. This existential essence of art fuses sensations, memories, and dreams into a singular experience of being in and touching the world. All the arts have an essential erotic ambience, but the architecture of our techno-economical and (quasi-)rational age has lost its invitation to nearness, intimacy, and touch. All our senses are specializations of the originary skin tissue of the fetus, and touch has appropriately been called “the Mother of the senses.”
With warmest regards,
Juhani
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Monday 14 September 2020
Dear Juhani,
You bring up an important question: What means does the architect have to express their encounter with the world?
In your presentation at the 2019 ACSF Symposium you spoke about an architecture that acknowledges twelve different senses, one of which is your sense of self. In previous publications, you have described the engagement of seven different senses, the familiar five and then additionally the kinesthetic sense (muscular) and the gravitational sense (skeletal). What are the other five senses that you referred to? How does one engage them?
Wishing you my best always,
Carey
Helsinki, Finland
Thursday 17 September 2020Dear Carey,
The point of my lecture at the ACSF event at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in 2019 was that the human sensory reality is wider and more complex than the five senses. The Aristotelian view has been supported by the fact that we have a visible organ for each one of these five senses. The title of my early essay “An Architecture of the Seven Senses” in Questions of Perception (1996) was polemical and suggested that architecture is engaged with more than the five classical senses. Later, I found out that Steinerian philosophy acknowledges twelve human senses (touch, life sense, self-movement sense, balance, smell, taste, vision, temperature sense, hearing, language sense, conceptual sense, and ego sense). In my view, all these twelve systems of sensing are reflected in architecture.
One of the essays in The Sixth Sense Reader, edited by David Howes, suggests that we have no less than thirty-four systems through which we interact with the environment. The understanding of how we are related to the world has been expanded by yet another discovery, the immense bacterial world in our intestines. Somewhat shockingly, we have more bacterial DNA than human DNA in our bodies.
Aristotle named vision as the most important of the senses, and we continue to think of vision as the most important of our senses in the design and experience of architecture. Yet, our senses collaborate, interact and fuse. Merleau-Ponty expresses this sensory interplay beautifully: ”My perception is [therefore] not a sum of visual, tactile, and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.” As a consequence of this essential sensory interaction, I have suggested that our most significant sense in architecture is our sense of self and being, the existential sense. It could also be called the reality sense, which integrates our total sensory experience. This view is supported by Merleau-Ponty’s suggestive notion of “the flesh of the world”; we are part of this flesh and sense it through our own sense of existence.
The shift away from a confining visuality takes place through a widened consciousness, which seeks to identify with the phenomenon or object, instead of merely looking at it. The seminal extension is to learn to experience the sensation of touch concealed in vision. “Through vision we touch the sun and the stars,” Merleau-Ponty writes poetically.
With warmest regards,
Juhani
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Thursday 17 September 2020
Dear Juhani,
Perhaps you can elaborate with a more personal perspective? You have experienced, designed, and explored the nature of learning and encountering through the senses, specifically the “sense of self” in architecture. What is the most profound encounter you have had with architecture that has developed your sense of self?
All my best,
Carey
Helsinki, Finland
Saturday 19 September 2020Dear Carey,
I am trying to keep my responses brief, although they invite a book-length response.
I believe that early childhood experiences and memories—forgotten long ago—provide the most important mental ground. In my early childhood in the early 1940s, the narrow space between the cow house and the separate sauna building aligned with the entrance porch of my farmer grandfather’s house, and the dialogue between these humble buildings made me feel the purposefulness and meaning of that most humble outdoor space. In my child’s mind, I sensed something sacred. This simple order also made me realize that it was I who made these observations. This early experience has much later been reinforced by the Karnak Temple, the Pantheon, the Ryoanji Garden, as well as numerous masterpieces of modern and contemporary architecture; they have all mediated the same meaningfulness that suggests something above everyday reality. It is usually empty space, like the sublime void of the travertine courtyard of the Salk Institute by Louis Kahn, that addresses and elevates our sense of self.
With warmest regards,
Juhani
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Monday 21 September 2020
Dear Juhani,
You speak of “contradictions” in architecture, and how they are expressed through design “involv[ing] tens, often hundreds, sometimes thousands of different contradictory elements.” Your thoughts remind me of the Japanese Philosophy of Symbiosis and the idea of an in-between, or that of thresholds and liminal space. Formally, how can one embrace the relationship between contradiction and cohesion through design?
All my best,
Carey
Helsinki, Finland
Tuesday 22 September 2020Dear Carey,
The part of your question in quotations is directly from Alvar Aalto in 1955. This is the entire paragraph: “In every case, one must achieve a simultaneous solution of opposites. . . . Nearly every design task involves tens, often hundreds, sometimes thousands of different contradictory elements, which are forced into a functional harmony only by man’s will. This harmony cannot be achieved by any other means than those of art.”
Aalto’s view implies that architectural design cannot be entirely rationally approached as the numerous requirements, intentions, and desires belong to irreconcilable categories. Architectural synthesis arises more from visions, ideals, and beliefs than purely rational and factual ingredients. Besides, architecture is simultaneously the means and the end. A great work of art or architecture creates a new sense of reality, not just an unforeseen visual image.
With warmest regards,
Juhani
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Tuesday 22 September 2020
Dear Juhani,
Thank you so much for your letters. I am excited and grateful that you are open to further questions.
An encounter with a space can have a lasting impact on—as you say—“the existential sense, and our sense of self and being.” How do you think architecture can be designed to elicit a particular state of consciousness?
All my best,
Carey
Helsinki, Finland
Thursday 24 September 2020Dear Carey,
Great architecture softens the boundary between the self and the world and enables us to experience our being with a special sensitivity and existential meaning. It does not give us any specific and determined meanings, it simply sensitizes, enriches, and liberates our existential experience.
With warmest regards,
Juhani
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Thursday 24 September 2020
Dear Juhani,
When you speak of architecture’s ability to provide a “widened consciousness.” Other than a greater awareness, what more does this do for individuals and a community? Can it be used towards something greater? Can it heal?
All my best,
Carey
Helsinki, Finland
Friday 25 September 2020Dear Carey,
Architectural experience can evoke a sense of balance, belonging, and unity. Or, of equal importance, it can support one’s feeling of solitude and silence. Urban design and architecture can project a benevolent sense of community and togetherness, and an optimistic experience of human solidarity. Poorly designed buildings and urban spaces give rise to an experience of abandonment, forced loneliness, and a sense of existential meaninglessness.
With warmest regards,
Juhani
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Friday 25 September 2020
Dear Juhani,
Thank you so very much for your beautiful responses. I greatly appreciate your time and effort in contributing to this exchange. I have enjoyed our interaction during this time, it has helped me to consider how a design process can integrate one’s sense of self in order to create a healing space and support healed outcomes for inhabitants. My final question is along this line: What does it mean to you, and for you, for a building, a space, to have a spirit or a soul?
Thank you again for your timely, and beautiful, responses. I cannot begin to explain how much this means to me and what an incredible contribution it will make to the magazine.
Carey
Helsinki, Finland
Monday 28 September 2020Dear Carey,
To have a spirit or soul in architecture implies creating a feeling of unity, singularity, and integrity. We can then associate ourselves with the space and place. As we sense a strong placeness, we feel that the space or place is coherently tuned to us and it is able to address our sense of being.
It has been a pleasure. I hope my thoughts can contribute to the topics you explore in your forthcoming issue and I look forward to meeting you again.
With warmest regards,
Juhani
Bio
Carey van der Zalm is an Architect, AAA, creative director and a graphic designer. Carey’s main practice is focused on the integration of healing and architecture. As well as designing healing spaces, she has designed and published several books and magazines relating to these topics.
