Public Senses
2024
“Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it sees and moves itself, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of my body; they are encrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body. These reversals, these antinomians, are different ways of saying that vision is caught or is made in the middle of things, where something visible undertakes to see, becomes visible for itself and through the vision of all things, where the in division of the sensing and the sensed persists, like the original fluid within the crystal.” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’OEil et l’Esprit)
Can a city be translated into a language of the senses?
We open ourselves to space and time, allowing our senses to absorb and surrender to the experience. In this process, we explore the unique ways we encounter the city and aim to harness them.
To see, hear, taste, touch, and smell—these are the layers we seek to engage through the workshop, interacting with the public sphere and overlaying a sensory map onto the geographical one.
“Modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.”
(Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses)