When Skin Has Eyes
In our minds, our senses are usually defined by their specific areas of the body; the nose with smell, eyes with sight, ears with sound, mouth with taste and hands with touch. But this is not always so. The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once proclaimed that ‘The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress. ’ And though his statement may seem surrealist to our ears, science has proven this to be true. Our eyes are adept at sensing light, an advanced form of photoreception, and photoreceptors have also been found in our central nervous system and in our skin. It is not therefore with the five separate senses that we respond, but with the body as a whole, these senses overlapping.
Ancient cultures have always understood this sensory overlap. The acupuncture of Chinese culture sees the whole body in the sole of a foot. The eye is felt at the bottom of the second toe, the ear at the bottom of the fourth. Vedic culture too understands pressure points in this way. Theirs is activated by piercings around the ear, the ear being a mimetic emblem of the body, and shaped just like a foetus. Many writers, artists and musicians have also voiced an overlap in the way they perceive; claiming to hear rainbows and taste symphonies, a condition called synaesthesia where senses or perceptions are blended together. Vladmir Nabakov had it, he called his, colour hearing.
And yet, in his seminal essays ‘The eyes of the skin’, Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, looks at how since the ancient Greeks, the sense of sight has taken precedence. ‘The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears’ wrote Heraclitis in one of his fragments. As Pallasmaa points out, since his time, philosophical writings have abounded with ocular metaphors to the point that knowledge has become analogous with clear vision and light is regarded as the metaphor for truth. ’
But Pallasmaa disagrees with us giving eyesight the top tier of the sensory hierarchy. In order to experience architecture in particular he asks us to experience it with all five senses and their propensity to overlap. This makes sense. A piece of architecture is ‘not experienced as a series of isolated retinal pictures’ he argues, ‘but it is fully integrated material, embodied and spiritual essence. It offers pleasurable shapes and surfaces moulded for the touch of the eye and other senses, but it also incorporates and integrates physical and mental structure, giving our existential experience a strengthened coherence and significance. ’ The structure of architecture can change our internal architecture and vice versa.
Because we spend so much of our lives in rooms looking out, or outside looking at the buildings of our landscape and the architecture of our surroundings, our five senses often activates our body’s memory. Therefore, a lot of what we see is through our past sensory experiences or is the process of a new memory being made. We lock in these sensory interactions with the man-made structure within nature, within the cycles of seasons and within a moment of time.
It is this essence of phenomenology that Ben Hosking has captured the neighbourhood of Sangenjaya and Togo Murano’s Prince Hakone Hotel. Though presented to us in a series of isolated retinal photographs, the moments in time he captures are ones of nostalgia we may not have directly experienced but one we understand. It is in the way we can feel the warmth of light coat a set of cobblestones, smell the breeze ripple through the leaves of a cluster of trees or hear the ripples of water fracture a reflection. Through his photos, we see, feel, touch, taste and hear our senses overlapping.
Pallasmaa, J. 2005, The Eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses, John Wiley & Sons, England.
Popova, M, 2019, Nabokov’s Syesthetic Alphabet: Weat
Popova, M, 2019, Nabokov’s Syesthetic Alphabet: Weathered Wood of A to the thundercloud of Z, Brain Pickings, viewed 24th May 2019 < https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/05/15/nabokov-synesthesia
photographs by ben hosking