Juhani Pallasmaa
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
—Hermann Weyl1
The call for an ecological ethics, lifestyle, and mindset of sustainability is surely the most important force of change in the field of architecture since the breakthrough of modernity a century ago. Architectural history is seen as a succession of varying stylistic canons, but today’s challenge calls for a new understanding of the very essence of architecture. We continue to see ourselves and our artifacts as independent of nature, but the challenge of today is also likely to alter the received polarity between nature and the human artifact. I have elsewhere described this paradigmatic change as the shift from metaphorical functionalism to ecological functionalism.2 This challenge calls for a new understanding of goals and processes, aesthetics and performance, form and function, rationality and beauty, artistic objectives and ethics, and, finally, of ourselves as children of Mother Earth.
Functionalist thinking has regarded functional and technical performance mainly in terms of the aestheticized mechanical metaphor. The mechanized object even became an ideal in the arts: “The object has to become the main character of modern painting and it has to throw the human figure from the throne. If the person, the face or the body turn into objects, a great freedom opens up to the modern artist…to me the human face or figure does not have more meaning than a bunch of keys or a bicycle,” wrote Fernand Léger.3 Ever since that era, architecture has been dealt with primarily in terms of problem solving, functional equations, and the design of aestheticized metaphoric machines, as exemplified by Le Corbusier’s influential credo of 1923, “A house is a machine to live in.”4
Today’s ecological imperative calls for an architecture whose performance is credibly identifiable and measurable, not just metaphoric or symbolic. This requirement suggests a nonautonomous architecture that becomes part of natural processes and cycles. Yet visual dominance in architecture continues to prevail. In fact, the purely visual understanding of the art of architecture may never have been more dominant than in today’s architecture of the commercialized image, reinforced by digital media and worldwide journalism. Even sustainability is most often judged by the eye as an aesthetic and symbolic aspiration rather than through an analysis of actual performance. In the age of ecology, the concept of “form” has to be seen as a temporal process or emergent situation, rather than a closed and finite aesthetic entity.
During the past decade, images of “sustainability” have become symbolic of progressive and responsible design, and various technical devices are frequently added onto rather conservative projects to create the desired progressive image. Sustainable design has also become a new marketing strategy both among designers and developers. Regrettably, the established methods of evaluating sustainable qualities of design tend to support this superficial view, rather than stimulate profoundly valid ecological thinking, lifestyle, and ethics. This opportunistic way of using “sustainable” design as a shrewd means of commercial manipulation hides the real issues. The emotionally and ethically appealing concept of sustainability can even undermine true sustainability, as it makes us believe that we are already doing our share in this big task. By designing a LEED-certified building, we justify not only the continuation of our suicidal economic ideology, but also its continued acceleration.
The true criterion of sustainability implies the evaluation of projects as entire processes: harvesting and producing the materials; the processes of manufacture, transportation, and construction; use and maintenance; and eventual dismantling and demolition of the structure. Equally important are the reuse of materials and components, and analysis of the overall material and energy consumption, as well as the toxic and otherwise harmful side effects and products. The processes have to be analyzed and evaluated in relation to the continuum of time, not merely through the momentary judgment of the aesthetic eye or short-term balance sheet. As the entire life cycle is added to the already complex logistical equation of architecture, nobody seems to be able to grasp the entirety with scientific certainty.
I have called architecture an “impure” and “messy” discipline because it contains inherently irreconcilable ingredients, such as metaphysical, cultural, and economic aspirations; functional, technical, and aesthetic objectives, etc. In fact, I cannot think of a more complex human activity or artifact than architecture. The conflicting aspirations that are an inseparable part of human architecture tend to turn our constructions toward irrationality. The great Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn once said to me: “The bird’s nest is absolute functionalism because the bird is not conscious of its death.”5 Our human actions, however, are deeply motivated by our suppressed fear of death. To condense the “illogical” nature of architecture, we can say that architecture is at the same time the means and the end.
As Alvar Aalto claimed in the 1950s, only artistic vision can bring the thousands of conflicting ingredients in an architectural problem into a harmonious synthesis.6 Yet, from the perspective of sustainability, the various crucial qualities of this synthesis have to pass critical evaluation and measurement. I am not preaching of a “scientific architecture”; I suggest an architecture that is grounded in the full existential understanding of human destiny, and this view certainly calls for a deeply lived vision more than scientific formulations. Our task is more ethical than technical. Architecture is not only engaged with today, it also expresses what we want to become tomorrow. We build and dwell in accordance with our thoughts, fears, and dreams.
We architects are used to thinking in terms of space and material form; we think of objects rather than systems, aesthetics rather than processes, visual qualities rather than existential issues, and the present rather than the temporal continuum. As philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have convincingly shown in their book The Metaphors We Live By (1980), language, thought, and action are metaphorical: “Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual systems, in terms of which we both think and act, are fundamentally metaphorical in nature,” the authors claim.7 Psychiatrist Arnold H. Modell argues similarly that we are not even aware of the metaphors that guide our thought: “Metaphor is primarily a form of cognition rather than a trope or figure of speech. Further, metaphor as a cognitive tool can operate unconsciously, so that a metaphoric process is one aspect of the unconscious mind.”8 This psychiatrist-philosopher suggests that we are guided by our own metaphors as much as we consciously mold them. Indeed, Aristotle acknowledged in his Poetics: “The greatest thing by far is to be master of metaphor, [which is] the one thing that cannot be learned from others, and it is also a sign of genius.”9 Along with metaphor, analogy and synecdoche are our essential tools of thought. Like verbal and poetic thinking, architectural thinking is engaged in metaphors and analogues. In fact, we can think of buildings as material, embodied, and lived metaphors.
We live in metaphors. Buildings, structures, and cities are constructed material images of our view of the world, belief systems, and fears, as well as of ourselves, as much as they are practical devices. The interplay or, better, total fusion of the mental and material dimensions of life is usually disregarded when thinking of architecture. We tend to forget that every human construction, beautiful or ugly, reasonable or outrageous, always originates in the human mind. One of my personal missions as an architectural writer has been to emphasize the total interpenetration of these two worlds. In the words of Robert Pogue Harrison: “In the fusion of place and soul, the soul is as much a container of place as place is a container of soul, and both are susceptible to the same forces of destruction.”10 When building structures of concrete and steel, we also build immaterial and imaginary structures of ideas, percepts, and ideals. The essential task of architecture is to improve the world that we live in, to make it a better place for ourselves to be in. As Rainer Maria Rilke beautifully writes: “Art is not a little selective sample of the world, it is a transformation of the world, an endless transformation towards the good.”11 In his inspiring book on Venice, Watermark, the Nobel Laureate poet Joseph Brodsky states: “In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.”12
The guiding metaphors of building have shifted, historically, from images of shelter to mechanistic images to today’s electric, electronic, and digital models of invisible performance. Tomorrow, we may turn to the staggering complexity and precision of biological phenomena. Edward O. Wilson, the biologist, defines the new attitude of biophilia “as the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.”13 The currently prevailing globalized architecture of alluring and memorable images usually flattens architecture into three-dimensional pictures—spatial advertisements, as it were. It is evident that the new Brave Digital World, to paraphrase the title of Aldous Huxley’s gloomy book, has so far facilitated questionable processes of globalization more than it has genuinely helped the cause of architecture.14 I venture to say that the computer has been largely misused from the ethical point of view to advance instant and fluid commerce and control the world over.
It is most likely that the future models and metaphors of thought and design, from everyday technology to computer and material sciences, and from economics and medicine to architecture, will increasingly be based on biological imagery—not biomorphic forms, but the often incredible subtlety and complexity of biological systems of interaction, dynamic balance, and emergence. This approach, inspired by models of biological performance, has already emerged in such areas of investigation as bionics and biomimicry. The single argument by Wilson, the world’s leading myrmecologist and spokesman for biophilic ethics, to the effect that the “superorganism” of the leaf-cutter ant’s nest alone is a more complex system in its performance than any human invention and is unimaginably old, should convince anyone that the biological world offers exciting models for the refinement of human artifacts and systems.15 Indeed, complex traffic systems are today designed based on the traffic systems of ants, and self-cleaning glass and numerous other inventions have been made through the study of biological precedents. New revolutionary carbon computers are also being developed based on the computing principles of our own neural nets.
Permit me to say firmly: I do not support any romantic biomorphic architecture. I advocate an architecture that arises from respect for nature in its complexity, not only its visual characteristics, and from empathy and loyalty to all forms of life and from a humility about our own destiny.
Indeed, architecture cannot regress; all life forms and strategies of nature keep developing and refining. The magnitude of our problems calls for extremely refined, responsive, and subtle technologies. That is the kind of technology nature uses, from the smallest parts to the most complex entities. Nature uses self-repairing materials, such as the rhinoceros’ horn, which is not live tissue yet repairs its wounds, and the inner shell of the abalone, which is twice as tough as high-tech ceramics and deforms under stress like a metal, instead of breaking.
I have myself been interested in animal constructions since my early childhood at my grandfather’s humble farm in Finland during the war years, and the more I have studied this subject matter the more amazed I am. Many readers are surely familiar with the fact that the dragline of the spider is the toughest material yet known; its tensile strength is more than three times that of steel. Spider silk consists of small crystallites embedded in a rubbery matrix of organic polymer—a composite material that evolved tens of millions of years before our current age of composite materials. The spider silk line is even tougher than polyaramid Kevlar, the material used for bulletproof vests and facial masks for riot police. Significantly, the spider produces its line at body temperature with no poisonous side products, whereas Kevlar is produced in pressurized vats with concentrated sulphuric acid at very high temperatures, in a process that creates problematic toxic by-products.16 Readers may also know that the African termite Macrotermes bellicosus seems to be able to choose between two theories of physics in the construction of the collective artificial lung in its nest community of ten million inhabitants, depending on whether they happen to live in the moist coastal areas or arid central regions of Africa.17
It is becoming evident that we have distanced ourselves too far from nature, with grave consequences. The research of the Finnish allergologist Tari Haahtela has shown convincingly that many of the so-called civilization diseases, such as allergies, diabetes, depression, many types of cancer, and even obesity, are consequences of living in environments that are too sterile and “artificial.” We have destroyed the natural bacterial habitats in our intestines. This specialist in allergies tells us that he has never met an allergy patient “with earth under his fingernails.”18
I believe that the view of ourselves that prevails in Western thinking, daily practices, and education has to be fundamentally reevaluated. Wilson argues: “All of man’s troubles may well arise…from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to become.”19 We first need to give up the hubris of regarding ourselves as the center of the universe, and as the Homo sapiens, the species that knows. We should also stop seeing ourselves as the image of God. We are not the image of God; the grand systems of the universe and nature are.
Without going too far into philosophical and ethical judgment as well as recent scientific thought, I want to mention some aspects of our own humanity that need to be reconsidered. These suggestions have direct implications for architecture.
Firstly, we need to accept the essentially embodied essence of human existence, experience, cognition, and memory. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes, “The painter takes his body with him, says [Paul] Valery. Indeed, we cannot imagine how a mind could paint.”20 We can say the same about architects; architecture is constituted in our embodied way of being in the world, and it articulates that very mode of being. Besides, buildings unconsciously represent the body.
Secondly, we are fundamentally sensory and sensual beings. Architecture is possibly engaged with a dozen different but integrated sensory systems, not just the five Aristotelian senses. Steinerian philosophy, in fact, identifies twelve senses.21 The senses especially central in architecture are the existential sense, the sense of self, and the sense of temporal continuum and causality.
Thirdly, perception, thinking, and memorizing are complex activities that are fundamentally based on embodied processes and mental or neural images, rather than words and language. Language is a secondary articulation of these neural patterns. The language of architecture is primarily a nonconscious embodied and existential dialogue. This is where the logocentric theories of architecture go astray. Colin St. John Wilson writes about this archaic and existential language:
Fourthly, human intelligence is routinely described by IQ, but this is a very crude and uninformed view of intelligence. In accordance with psychologist Howard Gardner’s current studies, there are ten categories of human intelligence. He first lists seven categories of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Later, he suggests three more categories: naturalistic, spiritual, and existential intelligence.23 I would add the categories of emotional, aesthetic, and ethical intelligence to the list of human cognitive capacities. Emotional intelligence, in fact, could well be the most instant, synthetic, holistic, integrated, and reliable of our systems of reacting to complex environmental and social situations. By emotions, we judge complex life situations, such as the ambience, mood, or atmosphere of a space, or place, whereas the scope of IQ intelligence is limited. Mood may well be the most synthetic of architectural features, but it has hardly been consciously analyzed or theorized. Indeed, as architects, we need to sharpen at least twelve categories of sensing and the same number of modes of intelligence in order to do our job well.
We tend to think of our behavior in terms of our conscious faculties, but consciousness accounts for only a tiny fraction of the ways in which we relate to the world. According to Matti Bergström, a Finnish neurologist, the information capacity of a single nerve fiber, and also of our consciousness, is about one hundred bits per second. On the basis of the human brain’s synapses, he calculates that the information-handling capacity of our entire brain is in the category of ten to the seventeenth degree.24 This dizzying figure helps to explain why our surroundings can have a dramatically stronger impact on us than we can consciously identify and analyze, not to speak of being able to describe these interdependences verbally.25 As I said earlier, we have great capacity to decipher atmospheres or ambiences, which are very complex environmental situations.
Recent research in neurobiology promises a new understanding of our own brain activities in general, and more particularly the meaning of aesthetic judgment and pleasure. In his pioneering book Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, neurologist Semir Zeki suggests the possibility “of a theory of aesthetics that is biologically based.”26 I personally have no doubt about it; what else could beauty be than one of nature’s powerful instruments of selection? A culture that is losing its sense of beauty is already declining. Zeki also argues that “art [is] an extension of the functions of the visual brain in its search for essentials.”27 No doubt, architecture is similarly an extension of our neural system to facilitate our constant search for meaning and a satisfactory relationship with the world. Architectural structures decisively increase the order and predictability of the environment.
“Most painters are also neurologists…they are those who have experimented upon and, without ever realising it, understood something about the organization of the visual brain, though with techniques that are unique to them,” Zeki writes.28 We can undoubtedly make the same assumption about profound architects. They grasp the essence of human nature in addition to being sensitive to the characteristics of space and form. Great architects are able to create atmospheres that make us feel safe and comfortable. As Gaston Bachelard suggests, “The chief benefit of the house [is that it] shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”29
Modern architecture has been largely future oriented. Yet we are primarily historical and biological beings whose neural systems, senses, and reactions have developed over millions of years. Time in biology has different scales than in human culture, such as organismic time, biochemical time, ecological time, and evolutionary time. Architecture deals with the dimensions of time as essentially as with space. “Architecture is not only about domesticating space, it is also a deep defence against the terror of time. The language of beauty is essentially the language of timeless reality,” Karsten Harries, the philosopher, writes.30 Architecture articulates our experience of time and the historical dimension, and it also reconnects us with our past.
The modernist poet Ezra Pound argues that the arts need to maintain their umbilical cord to their own archaic origins: “Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance…poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.”31 I wish to add that, in my view, architecture withers when it departs too far from the primary experiences and images of dwelling.
Along with the inspiration brought about by biological models, a deeper understanding of our own biological and cultural historicity is needed. We have the tailbone as a reminder of our arboreal life, the remains of a horizontal plica semilunaris of our saurian phase, and traces of gills from our fish life, and we must have similar mental remnants in our collective memory. In fact, Freud assumed the existence of “archaic remnants” as he theorized the unconscious human mind. The origins of architectural pleasure, such as the opposite notions of ‘prospect’ and ‘refuge,’ or the pleasure of open fire, can similarly be traced back to our evolutionary history. To head enthusiastically into a digital, computer-generated virtual world, forgetting where we have come from, seems careless to me. I see the defense of our biological and historical essence and of the authenticity and autonomy of experience as crucial tasks of art and architecture. A “mental ecology” is needed to expand the notion of ecology into the human mental world, as ecology and sustainability cannot be dealt with merely in technical terms.
It is shocking to notice that during the recent worldwide recessions, no major political figure or economic expert has touched upon the obsessive ideal of perpetual growth, which undoubtedly is the basic cause of our escalating environmental—and I would say also our social—problems. The unanimous concern worldwide has been to get the wheels running again, at least at the same pace as before the financial collapse. Unless we face the real issues related to our biased beliefs and objectives, no sustainable architecture can decisively change the suicidal course of industrial civilizations. Shouldn’t we follow the example of social insects who have happily refined their constructions during tens or hundreds of millions of years and who will undoubtedly continue to do so after the human species is gone?
City planning, construction of infrastructures, and architecture form the core concern in orienting human destiny toward a sustainable and more dignified future. Gardening and landscape architecture already provide models for a softer, fragile, and time-conscious design practice. Ethical changes in thought and values are bound to arise from individuals, as societies do not seem to be capable of learning. As architects, the wise development of a sustainable attitude to life is our ethical share in this enormous task. In today’s consumer culture, architecture is mostly seen as the design and production of aestheticized commodities. I wish to argue firmly that architecture is too deeply biologically, culturally, existentially, and mentally grounded in our historicity—and I am here referring primarily to our biohistoricity—to be merely a realm of aesthetics or commerce. Or, rather, even our aesthetic desire and longing for beauty have to be seen in an existential and biological perspective, not as mere pleasure or marketing strategy.
As Brodsky argues, “Man is an aesthetic being before becoming an ethical being.”32 Sustainable architecture has a future only if we can make it aesthetically exciting and seductive. Paradoxically, sustainability has to be turned into a new concept of beauty. For me, the best examples of architecture that arise from a deep understanding of place and its climatic and natural characteristics—such as Glenn Murcutt’s buildings and the humane high-tech buildings by Renzo Piano, which exploit refined construction methods and new material technologies for the purposes of dynamic energy efficiency—project a special beauty, the beauty of human reason and ethics. Brodsky assures us with the conviction of a poet: “Believe it or not, the purpose of evolution is beauty.”33
1 As quoted in Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 61. Weyl, a mathematician, perfected quantum and relativity theory.
2 Juhani Pallasmaa, “From Metaphorical to Ecological Functionalism,” in Juhani Pallasmaa, Encounters: Architectural Essays, ed. Peter MacKeith (Helsinki: Rakennustieto Publishing, 2005), 177–89.
3 Fernand Léger, Maalaustaiteen tehtävät [The tasks of painting] (Jyväskylä, Finland: K. J. Gummerus, 1981), 63, 69.
4 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: The Architectural Press, 1959), 89.
5 Sverre Fehn, conversation with the author in the Villa Mairea, 1985.
6 Alvar Aalto, “Art and Technology” (1955), in Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, ed. Göran Schildt (Helsinki: Otava Publishing Company, 1997), 174.
7 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3.
8 Arnold H. Modell, Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), xii.
9 Aristotle, Poetics 59a 8–10, as quoted in Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992), 73.
10 Robert Pogue Harrison, “Sympathetic Miracles,” in Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 130.
11 Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Jakob von Uexküll, Paris, August 19, 1909, “Lukijalle” [To the reader], Rainer Maria Rilke, Hiljainen taiteen sisin: kirjeitä vuosilta 1900–1926 [The silent innermost core of art; letters 1900–1926], ed. Liisa Enwald (Helsinki: TAI-teos, 1997), 8.
12 Joseph Brodsky, Watermark (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 61.
13 Wilson, Biophilia, 1.
14 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932; repr., New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006).
15 Wilson, Biophilia, 37.
16 Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Invention Inspired by Nature (New York: Quill William Morrow, 1997), 132.
17 Karl von Frisch, Animal Architecture (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 142.
18 Tari Haahtela, in a lecture during “Science Days” at Helsinki University, January 15, 2011.
19 Wilson, Biophilia, 20.
20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 162.
21 Albert Soesman, Our Twelve Senses: Wellsprings of the Soul (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Hawthorn Press, 1998).
22 Colin St. John Wilson, “Architecture—Public Good and Private Necessity,” RIBA Journal (March 1979).
23 Howard Gardner, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
24 Mind you, this is a figure followed by seventeen zeros. Matti Bergström, Aivojen fysiologiasta ja psyykestä [On the physiology of the brain and psyche] (Helsinki: Porvoo, 1979), 77–78.
25 According to Edward O. Wilson, English words average two bits per letter. A single bacterium possesses about ten million bits of genetic information, a fungus a billion, and an insect from one to ten billion bits depending on the species. If the information in a single insect were translated into a code of English words and printed in standard size letters, the string would stretch over a thousand miles. Wilson, Biophilia, 16.
26 Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1.
27 Ibid., 22.
28 Ibid., 2.
29 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 6.
30 Karsten Harries, “Building and the Terror of Time,” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 19 (1982).
31 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions Publishing Company, 1987), 14.
32 Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), 208.
33 Brodsky, “An Immodest Proposal,” in On Grief and Reason, 207.