Experience spaces through senses

8 min readNov 11, 2020

Perception of environment/architectural spaces has so many possibilities which have been ignored. Our focus has become too narrow due to a subconscious effect: the dominance of vision. Through this process, Experience remains nil.

Vision is the protagonist, taking up half of our brain’s resources to process information. Our eyes aren’t just performing a task, they are the portal through which our brain can tell us about our world, learn new things, and make wonderful memories- making it the “most important” sense.

Sight has been historically considered as the noblest of the senses, shaping its discoveries and proficiency. Plato & even Da Vinci believed that vision as “humanity’s greatest gift.

“The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature”- Da Vinci

1.Proportions of the Face and Eye. (1489) Da Vinci | 2.Proportions of the Head. (1488–9) Da Vinci | 3. Jubilee Church, Italy- Richard Meier,200

Architect Richard Meier has privileged the mind over the body. He creates space, which relies on the visual to read the surfaces surrounding the body.

Today, architecture is influenced by visual and virtual images…When we see buildings on the internet, we see two dimensional visual representations of what a building is or what the building is supposed to become. We even see buildings that do not exist in reality. Architecture — instead of being an object with different layers of experience — is reduced to the single layer of vision.

The visually impaired users reflect upon the mystery hidden in every architectural marvel…

But where is the interpersonal connectivity between man and his architectural space??

Juhani Pallasmaa through the book, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture of the Senses (which is a wonderful read about this subject) talks about the way space feels, the sound and smell of these places, has equal weight to the way things look.

Space and Sound

Hearing is a very incorporating sense. It is Omni-directional, not focused like vision. A view at a building will not show the person watching the building but a building will return the sound of a person walking in it and listening to the sound.

And still most of the time acoustics remain an unconscious background experience but in the right places it can create the right atmosphere for almost spiritual sceneries.

“We are not aware of the significance of hearing in spatial experience, although sound. Often provides the temporal continuum in which visual impressions are embedded.”

Like a soundtrack in a movie, where music is increasing the tension in a thriller or the drama in a love story, sounds in architecture can increase the intensity of its perception.

Jewish museum, Berlin : Architect Daniel Libeskind

For eg. The Jewish museum by Daniel Libeskind is playing with the same phenomenon. In the museum complex he designed special rooms called voids in which he installed different installations. In one copper plates in the shape of faces are lying on the ground of a very high room.

The visitor has to walk over the faces and a noise echoed by the high walls will fill up the room. The installation is also meant as a reminder to the holocaust and the sound should make aware of all the individuals that had to suffer.

This is a very dramatic usage but in other simple installations it can still have a nice effect also if it is a bird’s song recording in an interior garden or a ground covered with sand and it is possible to hear the sound of it while walking over it.

Aural Architecture

For example, the bare marble floors and walls of an office lobby loudly announce the arrival of visitors by the resounding echoes of their footsteps. In contrast, thick carpeting, upholstered furniture, and heavy draperies, all of which suppress incident or reflected sounds, would mute that announcement.

The aural architecture of the lobby thus determines whether entering is a public or private event. When applied to a living room, those same acoustic attributes convey a different sense: cold, hard, and barren, as contrasted with warm, soft, and intimate

Aural architecture, with its own beauty, aesthetics, and symbolism, parallels visual architecture. Visual and aural meanings often align and reinforce each other.

For example, the visual vastness of a cathedral communicates through the eyes, while its enveloping reverberation communicates through the ears. For those with ardent religious beliefs, both senses create a feeling of being in the earthly home of their deity.

Social relationships affected by aural architecture?

One of the best examples is the French villages in the 19th century. Citizenship was based on the ability of an individual to hear the bells of the town, and the distance was controlled by nature’s aural architecture of the environment.

The bells were essentially the only form of long distance communications. If you could not hear the bells, you were not part of the town. A similar pattern occurs in modern life, if the acoustics allow you to participate in a dialog with others, then you feel connected.

In fact, hearing is the dominant sensory means of emotional connection because it is the means of broadcasting emotions and attitude, not just the linguistic information in the words. Social cohesion versus social isolation is controlled by aural architecture.

Can you smell architecture?

Scents and odors have the potential to evoke emotion, memories and to facilitate orientation. Whether natural or artificial, perceived by a product or a material basis or as a mix of scent in a room or in the area, scent acts immediately and directly to the brain. We all react differently to scents. Smell, which some find pleasant, can be distracting to others. Fragrances and scents stimulate our behavior and perception. They dig deep into the long-term memory, and are thus important reminder carriers.

Even without exact designation of fragrances we respond to known smells with feelings and mental images. Conversely, call a smell in memory images and situations. Who does not know the intense smell of pine cladded space. Or we recognize the smell of a school, a hospital, the staircases of our grandmothers or smell of our own home.

All these odors are in any way acting consciously or unconsciously. Consciously controlled, they can make for a pleasant indoor climate, or else (possibly artificially enhanced) as scented advertising used for consumption purposes.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s 2010 How Wine Became Modern exhibition |“smell wall,” attempted to make tactile the sensory aspects (aroma, color, texture) of wine.

Kate McLean’s psycho-geographic urban “smell maps,” created through exhaustively logged smell-finding reconnaissance trips; and Jinhyun Jeon’s much-buzzed-about dessertspoon series, which the South Korean designer devised to enhance the pleasures of pudding.

Instead the smell of sun, flowers and new leaves indicated the welcome arrival of a late spring and chocolate power drifted in in small clouds.

Over 650 smells were detected by 44 people undertaking 10 smellwalks over a period of 4 days in April 2013. Based on written descriptions from the smell walkers, 50 broad categories were identified. Both frequently-mentioned and curious smells feature on the map.

Touch- an intimate sense

The eye is the organ of distance, whereas touch is the sense of nearness, intimacy and affection. The eye observes and investigates, whereas the touch approaches and feels. So when the light makes space for shadow our other senses are sharpened including the sensitivity to touch.

We can feel if a room is brightly lid or if it is dim. In the same way as we can feel the sunlight on our skin. So light is a good method to address touch in architecture. But the skin can sense more things. It can read texture, weight, density and temperature of matter.

1. Holocaust memorial, Berlin | 2. iWeb Pavillion- Amsterdam

Two different examples of architecture can be the holocaust memorial in Berlin from Peter Eisenman or the interior of the iWeb by Kas Oosterhuis. Both the extremely smooth concrete and the sprayed foam layer just invite to be touched. Though our vision leads us there only the touch is actually satisfying our curiosity.

In the next step this desire can be used to give further impressions. By touch associations can be inspired. Like a pebble polished by the sea is not only pleasurable to the hand, it expresses the process of its formation. It is time turned into shape.

Hands are a complicated organism, a delta in which life from the most distant source flows together surging into the great current of action. Hands have histories; they even have their own culture and their own particular beauty. We grant them the right to have their own development, their own wishes, feelings, moods and occupations. Hands are not only a sculptor’s eye but also organs for thought.

The skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter. The surface of an old object, polished to perfection by the tool of the craftsman and the assiduous hands of its users. It is pleasurable to press a door handle shining from the thousands of hands that have entered the door before us; the clean shimmer of ageless wear has turned in to an image of welcome and hospitality. The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition: through impressions of touch we shake the hands of countless generations.

Human experience is multi sensory, I believe that there are a lot more senses. We haven’t identified them and we don’t use them. I think by identifying them we would begin to turn them on, as it were. You see, I think there is a sense of pressure, a sense of balance, a sense of rhythm, a sense of movement, a sense of life, a sense of warmth, even a sense of self, which psychology is beginning to recognise….

References

Books

The eyes of the skin, Juhani Pallasmma
Spaces speak are you listening, Experiencing Aural Architecture-Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter
The concept of sound scapes- Blesser and Salter, At World Federation Acoustic Ecology Conference, Mexico City, 23 March 2009

Web links