The Eyes of The Skin

In The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa laments architects’ tendency to preference vision over the other senses. He advocates for an architecture that is visually indistinct, that we may become sensorially immersed in our environments. Artist Olafur Eliasson seems to align himself with this thesis, creating works of spectral saturation and immersion. As the visual realm closes in, participants draw upon the other senses to understand the space they occupy. Dan Graham similarly plays tricks with reflectivity and transparency to blur spatial information, creating intriguing environments from very simple geometries.

Let the flesh, imperfect, see
What eyes, precise, forget.

An Oak Tree

There was a minor movement in poetry called Martian Poetry, which sought to ‘break the grip of the familiar’ by describing ordinary things in unfamiliar ways – the world described as if through the eyes of a Martian. Poet Craig Raine describes the act of reading a book, as if observing this strange act for the first time:

mechanical birds with many wings
perch on the hand
cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain

In An Oak Tree (pictured), artist Michael Craig-Martin attempts to jolt our conception of the world by telling us that “an oak tree is physically present but in the form of the glass of water.” His assertion forces us to come to terms with a violent disjunct between what we see and what we’re told.

These ideas hold interesting lessons for the designer who seeks to make visible those aspects of our lives rendered invisible by habits of behaviour.

Such concerns are present in the work of the Psychogeographers who, in the 1950’s, described their endeavours as “a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities…just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.”