Juhani Pallasmaa

Architecture is presented as a bodily and sensory experience rather than a purely visual one, emphasizing how space is understood through the entire human sensorium. Pallasmaa

Retinal Architecture and Loss of Plasticity

An overemphasis on vision reduces architecture to images, weakening tactile, spatial, and emotional engagement and limiting the adaptability of human perception.








Sound and acoustics define spatial boundaries and atmosphere, shaping how close, distant, open, or enclosed a space feels.








Smell anchors memory and emotion to place, creating strong, often unconscious connections between space and personal experience.









Architecture is experienced through movement, balance, and posture, engaging the body’s sense of motion and structural awareness.









Taste operates metaphorically, suggesting the sensory richness and cultural character of materials, spaces, and atmospheres.

Meaningful architectural experience arises from the interaction of all senses, allowing space to be felt, heard, smelled, and inhabited rather than merely seen.







Silence in architecture slows perception and deepens awareness of time, enabling reflection, solitude, and a sense of inner presence.








Through touch, materials reveal texture, temperature, weight, and age, establishing an intimate and physical relationship between body and space.








Spatial understanding is grounded in bodily presence, as the body becomes the measure through which scale, proportion, and orientation are perceived.








Architecture should reinforce human existence by creating spaces that support sensory depth, memory, identity, and meaningful human experience.

Acoustic Intimacy

Space of Scent

Images of Muscle and Bone

Taste of Architecture

Architecture of the Senses

Silence, Time and Solitude

The Shape We Touch

Bodily Identification

The Task of Architecture

"Interior details embody a collection of stories" - Juhani Pallasmaa

"What a delight it is to move from one realm of odor to the next in the narrow streets of a small town"
- Juhani Pallasmaa

"The eye is the sense of separation and distance, where touch is the sense of nearness, intimacy and affection"
- Juhani Pallasmaa