Tactility. WP#14

The body in the center

«All the senses, including vision are extensions of the tactile sense; the senses are specializations of skin tissue, and all sensory experiences are modes of touching, and thus related to tactility. Our contact with the world takes place at the boundary line of the self through specialized parts of our enveloping membrane.
The eye wants to collaborate with the other senses. All the senses define the interface between the skin and the environment, between the interiority of the body and the exteriority of the world.»
(from the book: «The eyes of the skin». Juhani Pallasmaa. Year 2005)

Touching the world. What is hard and what is soft; hot and cold, smooth and rough, dry and wet, light and heavy. Intuition. Designing from the body, from the corporeal perception. Designing is more than a mental and visual action; all the senses are involved in designing objects and spaces that shape the acts of life. The body as means. The body as size of all things, as the space of creation. The skin as means of comprehension of the spatiality that surrounds us, to develop the ability to perceive space, to develop all the senses to assimilate the body of the world, to develop the peripheral vision to make contact.
The sense of touch. The skin as bridge, membrane, limit, body, skin, water, space. The body in relation to the skin. The skin as shelter. Architecture as shelter. Architecture as filter between the inside and the outside. The connection, the climate, the bridge.
Body and landscape.
Shelter from the climate or opening towards the climate. To design from proximity.

Wideprint 14 takes us on a journey from the Entrevero Project created in Argentina by designers Cristian Mohaded and Josefina Roca to the interior scenes captured by Slovak photographer Maria Svarbová, the pedestrian bridge in Czech Republic built in the wilderness, the shelter in a remote site designed by architects Haugen and Zohar on the coast of the Norwegian Sea all the way through Eero Aarnio’s works conceived from optimism, curiosity, and intuition.
The joy of creation.

On design and the body; and sensuality as threshold to the creative universe.

Arq. Paula Herrero – Editorial published in Wideprint Magazine #14 – February 2020