Habitar desde el tacto: Juhani Pallasma y la superación del oculocentrismo en la teoría arquitectónica

Abstract

The phenomenological approach in Juhani Pallasmaa’s (Hämeenlinna, Finland, 1936) theory of architecture derives from his criticism of the dominant pan-visual model. Architecture, understood as a constructive amendment of the immediate spatial reality, is grounded on hapticity. In contrast with the traditional oculocentrism —and its conceptual premises: the moral hierarchy of the senses, the pre­dominance of analysis, the legitimacy of instrumental rationality, technophilia, objectivity...— Pallasmaa stresses the value of holistic, comprehensive and simultaneous perception, a perception which does not merely correspond to an expanded sense of the scopic. Because of this, the author proposes a multi-sensory re-use in the architectural and urbanistic field, enabling, from a de-visualized approach, a tactilized reading of this field. Perceiving is not just seeing, but also apprehending «the flesh of the world»: the retina —on which focuses a model which recalls the panoptic vision analyzed by Foucault— generates, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, «a Cartesian perspective scopic regime» that facilitates the disembodi-ment of the subject, a subject which, in an idealistic fashion, tears itself from the world, splits from it. This entails the reduction of architecture to a retinal imposition, to image. A constraint that suppresses the materiality of the world and, in doing so, transforms us into consumers of urban icons and bulimic custodians of a false memory.