Pallasmaa

Pallasmaa speaks of the experience of architecture as a multisensory experience.  However, we seem to design in only one, sight.  A person’s experience is always their own, individual feeling, while we share many feelings, such as the cool, austere darkness of a cathedral, we each feel that way slightly differently and associate that feeling with a common, shared, linguistic description.  If we were to each write a poem of the same cathedral, each poem would describe a unique experience and unique place.  Your poem would likely create an image in my mind different than the cathedral it was describing.  That is all to say, one cannot wholly understand and determine the experience of another person.  Like Pallasmaa suggests, we can only design something for our own experience, but if we design that experience to our own perfection, we can move others to have a similar experience, profound in each person’s own way.  On the other hand, if we don’t design to any experience, we leave it to fate, likely to be poor.  Again if we try and design to someone else’s experience, we will likely fail in conjuring exactly what we wanted in that person, not knowing what exactly to draw upon in their memory.

Each of us is formed by our experiences of childhood up to present as well as our ideas of the future.  Pallasmaa elaborates on how his experiences as a child remain constant in his memory.  Each of us has memories such as these.  For me, the feeling of freshly rolled dough, dappled with flour, reminds me of making cookies as a child.  These memories and feeling form who we are and are directly related to anything we do or create.  Art is therefore created within the context of us, like Pallasmaa says, it emanates from the body.  True art will then reflect the importance of these places or experiences.  It’s the human energy given off by the art that draws others to it.  An empty or abandoned house gives us feelings of loneliness and silence; the lack of human energy makes it feel cold and dead.  However, these places are never without human energy, while it might be residual, it is these traces of human energy that draw us to ruins and abandoned structures.  It also gives us the drive to rebuild them and honor them.

-jd gutermuth