Sensory Architecture

1. research on how deeply ingrained the sense of vision is in our understanding of the world 
2. research on architects whose practice is guided by the heightening of sensory experiences (more research on highlighted artists) (Glenn Murcutt, Steven Holl, and Peter Zumthor )
3. Research on how consumer consumption patterns influence the craft of architects, Joseph Rykwert - more research into this field of thinking
4. The Senses: Design Beyond Vision
5. Juhani Pallasmaa's book 'Eyes of the Skin' questions the dominance of visual form and the Western obsession with “ocularcentrism.” (The privileging of vision over the other senses.)
6.  Joyce Monice Malnar and Frank Vodvarka, Sensory Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). (describe the different ways we encounter architecture...We judge the scale of a building in relation to our own limbs and torsos)
7. shopping with freud

• Pallasmaa, J. (2012) The Eyes Of The Skin Architecture and the Sense. 3rd Edition. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 

This book aims to express the importance of the tactile sense for our experience and understanding of the world, The book draws links between the debated dominant sense of vision (how deeply ingrained the tyranny of vision is) and the suppressed sense of touch. And how the influx of new technologies flipped the script to where pictures controlled language, not the other way around.

Pallasmaa says architecture should embrace and envelop the body with authentic materials and tactile forms. Sensory design slows space down, making it feel thick rather than thin. An intimate room reverberates with shifting shadows and surfaces wrought from wood, wool, or stone. An atrium changes with the sun. Rough walls and dense fabrics absorb clatter and din.

'touch is the sensory mode which integrates our experiences of the world and ourselves' p12 - Pallasma argues that our sense of touch is the compass on which guides our reference, memory, imagination and integration of the world around us. And argues that all the other senses are an extension of the tactile sense, stating that 'the senses are specializations of skin tissue' p12 thus meaning that all forms of sensory interaction are modes of touching. 

He states that architecture must be set out with the task of accommodation and integration at the heart of it, through addressing all the senses simultaneously, in turn helping to amalgamate our impression of self with the experiences of the world - with the intention of reinforcing our sense of reality and self. 

Vision and Knowledge 

In western culture, sight has been regarded as the most valuable of the five senses. In classical Greek thought, certainty was centered around the sense of vision. 'The eyes are more exact witnesses than ears' p18- Heraclitus Plato regarded the sight as humanity greatest gift, stating ethical universals must be accessible to 'the minds eye'

During the Renaissance, the five senses were understood to form a heirachacle system from highest vision down to touch. (fire light - heart) - p18

'The hegemony of vision has been reinforced in our time by a multitude of technological inventions and endless multiplication and production of images' - Pallasmaa p24 

'An unending rainfall of images' - Italo Calvino p24

'The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as a picture' - Heidegger p24

'The only sense that is fast enough to keep pace with the astounding increase of speed of the technological world is sight' p24

Visual images have become commodities 'A rush of images from different spaces almost simultaneously collapsing the world's spaces into a series of images on a television screen...The images of places and spaces become as open to production and ephemeral use as any other commodity' p24

Multi-sensory experience (architecture)

Every touching experience of architecture is multi-sensory; 'qualities of space matter and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle' p45 

Steinerian philosophy assumes that we actually utilize no fewer than 12 senses.

'Vision reveals what touch already knows. we could think of the sense of touch as the unconscious of vision' p46 

'The only sense which can give a sensation of spatial depth is touch because touch senses the weight, resistance and three-dimensional shape (gestalt) of material bodies, and thus makes us aware that things extend away from us in all directions' p46

The use of body senses

The body is not a mere physical entity; it is enriched by both memory and dream, past and future. Edward S Casey argues that our capacity of memory would be impossible without a body memory. The world is projected in the body and the body is projected onto the world 

We have an innate capacity for remembering and imagining places. Perception, memory, and imagination are in constant interaction; the domain of presence fuses into images of memory and fantasy 

The multitude of sensory experiences is heightened in the work of Glenn Murcutt, Steven Holl, and Peter Zumthor 

Alvar Aalto was consciously concerned with all the senses in his architecture. - more interested in the encounter of the object and the body of the user than in mere visual aesthetics - 'Aalto's architecture exhibits irregularities and polyrhythms in order to arouse bodily, muscular and haptic experiences' p76

Aalto's architecture is based on sensory realism. His elaborate surface textures and details, created for the hand, invite the sense of touch and create an atmosphere of intimacy and warmth 

Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (book) - analyses historical connections between vision and knowledge, vision and ontology, vision and power, vision, and ethics. 

The task of architecture 

'Buildings and towns enable us to structure, understand and remember the shapeless flow of reality' p76

• Mallgrave, H & Goodman, D. (2011) An introduction to Architectural Theory 1968 to the Present. 1st Edition. Chichester. Wiley-Blackwell. 

Documenting the relevance of semiotics and the use of quasi-scientific fields of working to inform the 'meaning' within architecture and how the common thread of thinking applied to the consumer environment through advertisements can inform the way in which architecture consider the consumers' consumption activities, in the design of the environments we inhabit. 

Semiotics and Architecture 

Joseph Rykwert's 1960 essay "meaning and building"p39 called for designers to attend to architecture's emotional power - using the works of psychologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. On top of this, he urged architects to look at the works of American advertising to learn how someone defines their particular place in the world. 

Most of Rykwerts theory based on positivistic or quasi-scientific foundations 

'Through a semantic study of the environment, we can discover the means of discoursing in our buildings. Only that way we will be able to appeal to the common man' p40

Meaning in architecture 

architecture and its interpretation

The sensory design considers not just the shape of things but how things shape us—our behavior, our emotions, our truth.