On The Eyes Of The Skin By Juhani Pallasmaa

948 Words4 Pages
“The taste of the apple … lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way … poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the page of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.” J.L.Borges In The Eyes of The Skin by Juhani Pallasmaa addresses an issue that I believe is true of our contemporary “technological” era: The degradation or “impoverishment” of human perception of architectural beauty. This degradation is caused by our tendency to limit all other sensory realms outside the mere sense of sight. Drawing from the notion that our experience in the world is formulated by a combination of all senses, the author suggests that we undergo a similar experience in appreciating the beauty of an architectural work; an experience that obviously steps beyond architecture’s visual qualities. In page 14, the author records various paragraphs among which the one stated above stood out. It suggests that it is not only the “aesthetic act” that is essential in fully experiencing a particular aspect of sense but also the “almost physical emotion” that it represents. Borges’ lines are rooted in his own writings on the book ““The works of George Berkeley, D.D., bishop of Cloyne, Volume 2” by George Berkeley”. The reason I mention this book is because I found a few points that are important in the further development of my paper, and which I have resumed in one paragraph: “…the eye alone cannot see that a chair is handsome, or a door well proportioned… because the beauty or symmetry of these objects can only be apprehended by knowing their use and comparing their figure with that use which cannot be done by the eye alone, but also by the effect of judgment. It is, therefore, one thing to see an object, and another to

More about On The Eyes Of The Skin By Juhani Pallasmaa

Open Document