The poverty of embodiment in the work of Juhani Pallasmaa

In books such as The Eyes of the Skin, architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa posits unmediated sensual encounters as the site of authentic engagement with the built environment. Such ideas are prevalent in mainstream architectural discourse today. In this article, I show that they are also highly problematic. Pallasmaa rejects visual intentionality, construing it as the instrument of an objectifying reason that distances us from our ‘being-in-the-world’. Referring to the phenomenologist philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and indebted to Henri Bergson’s concept of duration through lived experience, Pallasmaa’s theory promises a poetic inhabitation of the world, irreducible to reason and characterised by an animistic embodiment, allegedly offering a more meaningful architectural experience. Informed by contemporary rationalist thought and drawing on neuroscientific, anthropological and philosophical arguments, I first argue that Pallasmaa’s project is weakened to the point of collapse by the misunderstanding of his intellectual resources, particularly with respect to the use of incompatible concepts of embodiment in Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s works. I then show how his ideas of embodiment, disinterested vision and sensuality constitute an impoverished account of lived experience that, far from overcoming alienation, mystifies it. I specifically discuss Pallasmaa’s analysis of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, his comparisons of human- and animal-created structures and his forays into neuroscience. Finally, I dispute Pallasmaa’s claim that an immediate sensual encounter is the route to authentic engagement with the world, and question whether the unmediated lived experience he yearns for is even possible.