Human Rootedness

The dominance of the eye and the suppression of the other senses tends to push us into detachment, isolation and exteriority. The art of the eye has certainly produced imposing and thought-provoking structures, but it has not facilitated human rootedness in the world. The fact that the modernist idiom has not generally been able to penetrate the surface of popular taste and values seems to be due to its one-sided intellectual and visual emphasis; modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.

–Juhani Pallasmaa, from The Eyes of the Skin

Note: I am in New York for a few days. I have queued up a few small-scale directionals, gentle proddings that shift the way to view the familiar.