Between the thinking hand and the eyes of the skin: pragmatist aesthetics and architecture

Abstract

The built world, the architectural world, is, as John Dewey put it, “supremely expressive of human interests and values,” influencing the future, but also recording and conveying the past. It “records and celebrates more than any other art the generic features of our common human life.” Buildings, he writes, among all art objects come the nearest to “expressing the stability and endurance of existence. They are to mountains what music is to the sea.” I sketch some novel links between a pragmatist experiential aesthetics and the rich work of the Finnish philosophically sophisticated practicing architect, Juhani Pallasmaa. In his The Eyes of the Skin Pallasmaa takes up the theme of ‘architecture and the senses’ and fleshes out in the case of architecture a central Deweyan claim: the built world should be held to the measure of how well it is so constructed that we are activated on all these levels of our bodily being. Pallasmaa gives an architect’s ‘take’ on this with the help of different, yet complementary, philosophical tools. In The Thinking Hand he focuses on the heuristic fertility and exemplificational value of the ‘handed’ or ‘hand-guided’ processes involved in the creative design of the built world as opposed to privileged use of the computer. Pallasmaa sees the thinking hand as a kind of mediating device overcoming the divide, which Dewey also wanted to do, between the shaping and the automatic arts, allowing a central role for body-based imagination. Pallasmaa’s focus on the haptic dimension of perception and the ‘thinking hand’ is, like Dewey’s focus on “total organic resonance,” not just descriptive but normative. Their analyses and concepts are of universal relevance for our understanding not just architecture but the aesthetic dimension of life quite generally.