In Milan, down a side street I first became acquainted with architect and philosopher Sarah Robinson in 2012 when I came across her book Nesting at one of my favorite bookstores in San Francisco. After falling under the spell of Juhani Pallasmaa‘s extraordinary book, The Eyes of the Skin, I sensed immediately that Robinson was […]
Juhani Pallasmaa
- Art/Spiritual
- ...
Enchantment Becoming Thing
Seeking enchantment—here, there, everywhere…The Great Haul, a site-specific installation by Anna Hepler at the Portland Museum of Art. The light becomes crystalline and kaleidoscopic through the layered netting of meshed plastic. _____ We have an innate capacity for remembering and imagining places. Perception, memory and imagination are in constant interaction; the domain of presence fuses […]
The Perspectival Eye
Waiting for Hurricane “My Name is Earl” to gather over the Northeast. We will be descending nonetheless on Cape Ann for a weekend of nuptial celebrating with Alexis and JP. So begins a month of wonderful wedding weekends. Life happens like that, big shifts that occur all at once, like the culmination of storm systems […]
Sensing the Flow of Water Against the Skin
My favorite thought provocateur these days (actually “these days” is actually now several months) is Juhani Pallasmaa, architect and author of The Eyes of the Skin. Here are a few more of his insights about seeing, the dominance of the eye, modes of vision. (Other great quotes from Pallasmaa that I have posted here: Focused […]
Sensory Intimacy, in Art and in Architecture
Sensuality afoot at the Metropolitan Museum The gift that just keeps giving…I don’t think there is a single page of my copy of Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin that isn’t marked up and annotated. Although Pallasmaa is an architect and writing primarily about that metier, his book is full of passages that are […]
Fully Engaged
Architect and author Juhani Pallasmaa A few days ago my friend Janet alerted me to an appreciation of Frank Kermode in the New York Times (an excerpt is posted here.) She also left a comment on an earlier post about Dorothea Lasky that asked this question: “I am curious about what your response might be […]
- Architecture
- ...
Architecture and Beauty
Another book that sounds like it is right in my sweet spot: Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about a Troubled Relationship, by Yael Reisner. Ah, beauty… It continues to be an issue of dispute in every contemporary métier—visual art, music, literature. This topic continues to engage, divide, provoke, perplex. I know a bit about […]
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 […]
Mind and Eye
If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind. Richard Rorty, from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature What a provocative quote from the philosophical giant himself, and one that I have been pondering all day after spending some time on Mind Lab, a beautifully constructed site […]
Inside and Outside, at the Same Time
Photo: From the Brooklyn Museum of Art Another evocative passage by way of Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin. (More quotes from the book here, and more will be posted in the future since I have been in a state of awe regarding this book for some time.) The role of the hand and […]