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.