“I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Only a little part of human activities has the privilege of aiming at pleasure. Even less of them direct their ambition toward achieving sensual pleasure. Most of these are illegal. Or are fattening. Architecture can aim at sensual pleasure. Architecture is legal. Architecture is not fattening.
This is a passionate manifesto in defense of sexiness in architecture.
Architecture defines the materials that our bodies will touch, it choses the colors that our eyes will see, it provokes (or eliminates) the sounds that our ears will hear, it causes the odors that our noses will smell. Architecture has, by now, no taste (this is one of its weaknesses). Architecture touches you, illuminates you, whispers to you, inebriates you.
Sensual pleasure in a space is behind comfort and well-being: it is the shudder entering a room, it is the irresistible desire of touching upon a wall, it is yearning for a place as soon as you leave it. Architecture “bridges the yawning gap between the intellect and senses of sight, sound and touch, between highest aspirations of thought and the body’s visceral and emotional desires” (Holl, 1994).
Pleasure-giving architecture must actively stimulate (one or more of) the five senses to pursue his aims. Sense stimulating is a subtile art, the response of every individual is unpredictable. Architecture is a bet: you can study sciences, you can be rational (or at least reasonable), you can count on your experience, but you win hands down only if you dare.
According to Peter Zumthor (1999) “to experience architecture in a concrete way means to touch, see, hear and smell it. To discover and consciously work with these qualities.” As a first attempt, we can enumerate the themes of architecture by their relation with the five senses.
Is interiors the dark side of architecture?
Sight is, presumable, the sense more involved in architecture, but this is not automatically related with pleasure. Today more then ever, (sensual) architecture likes shadow, maybe as a reaction to the mystification of the architectural image, mostly converted in two-dimensional advertising. Shadow and light transform each other in a palpable matter, in shadow the eyes feel the shiver of grazing, the body keeps the pleasure of discovery. The play of volumes under the shadow is much more subtile and complex: as japanese “lacquerware decorated in gold (…) made to be seen in the dark” (Tanizaki, 1977), architecture seduces us in penumbra, defining the space with sudden dazzles. Architecture does “find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing another creates” (Tanizaki, 1977).
Don’t look at me, listen to me.
This is not about acoustic: this is not about architecture transmitting, reflecting, absorbing, modeling the sound. This is about architecture emitting the sound. It’s quite normal for a german engineer to work on the car door sound, this is great part of the impression that a buyer gets from a car. Why should not architects work on their architecture sounds? The idea that the absence of sound is equal to comfort is a big misunderstanding. The sound of heels tapping in an empty hall, the gravel creaking under the car wheels, the key turning in the middle of the night (somebody expected is back): this sounds grabs our memory. The fine-tuned sound of the resonant concrete stairs in Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Cemetery or the imperceptible rustle of the ascending breeze enjoying the openness of Mies’ German Pavilion: in architecture the floor, the door, the building are the instrument, body and nature are the player.
Sound is mostly produced by the contact between architecture and his user.
Giving pleasure by touch requires, first of all, the maximization of the contact surface. The hierarchy of body-parts related with architecture is subversive: architecture gets in touch mostly with prosaic or neglected parts of the human body. Hands, bottoms, feet, even knees, are the privileged interfaces between architecture and body.
In architecture history, a lot of important spaces are used barefoot. This is made (apparently) for hygienic or symbolic reasons, but it permits, as a result, to establish a continuos contact between body and architecture. This tradition requires a dedicated space for becoming barefoot, the transformation-space needed to prepare a person for a new spacial experience: the vestibulum, the genkan, the zaguán too often forgotten in contemporary architecture. Inside the barefoot space, appropriated materials are needed; every minimal change, every fold, every crease, every ridge of the space is perceptible.
More over, the paradise of every architect should be the project of thermal baths, where architecture is made to host naked bodies: no clothes, no furniture, no objects: only body and architecture; see Zumthor’s Therme Vals as a confirmation.
Walk in the steam bath corridor, stop, inhale.
According to Lao Tse “clay is fired to make a pot. The pot’s use comes from emptiness. Windows and doors are cut to make a room. The room’s use comes from emptiness”. We can define the essence of architecture as the empty inside, the mass of air filling a room. By breathing, we inhale architecture. Architecture does not smell, it is a smell. The scents of materials, the freshness of the air, the percentage of oxygen, the others. A small can, in seconds, rebuild in our mind any space we have visited, anytime. Shaping the smell of a place permits us recording our project in the mind of a visitor for a long time.
By the moment I have to admit that i do not know anybody used to lick walls, at least on a regular basis; so I don’t really know if is possible or not to establish any relation between architecture and taste, but I’m sure that with a little more of serious research, maybe starting from Hansel and Greatel gingerbread house, we will clarify also this aspect.
In an age characterized by commercialized sexuality, with the urban landscape build of half-naked peoples billboards and mystified beauty used to sell even encyclopedias, the sexiness of architecture can be the answer to the real needs of human beings, a trip back to reality. Architecture can be the place to meet again ourself, our body, our sensations. And build the space to encounter the other, truly, directly, in the space of a gesture.
In contemporary society sensual architecture can be a declaration of intent, its physicality a manifesto, its pleasure-giving attitude a revolution. Architecture explores tectonic by touch, paints the light, composes sounds, scents.
Architecture is not only about building, it’s about the body, it’s the one giving pleasure. Architecture is sexy.
Originariamente pubblicato in: Lizieres, 01/2011, sometimeStudio, Paris, 2011.
References
Iñaki Ábalos, La Buena Vida, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2000.
Steven Holl, Steven Holl – Bordeaux: Arc en reve centre d’architecture, Artemis, Zurich, 1994.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Nonsense, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1964.
Juhani Pallasmaa, The eyes of the skin: architecture and the senses, Wiley-Academy, London, 2005.
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, Leete’s Island Books, Sedgwick, 1977.
Peter Zumthor, Thinking architecture, Birkhauser, Basel,1999.