Inseminations. Juhani Pallasmaa
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it articulates limitless natural space and gives endless time a human measure. Architecture helps us to overcome ‘the terror of time’, to use a provoking expression of Karsten Harries, the philosopher.42
Art vs Science I
→ architecture as impure discipline; modes of thinking
Embodied Experience and Sensory Thought: Lived Space in Art and Architecture (2006)
The prevailing view in our culture makes a fundamental distinction between the worlds of science and art; science is understood to represent the realm of rational and objective knowledge, whereas art stands for the world of subjective sensations. The first is understood to possess an operational value, whereas the world of art is seen as a form of exclusive cultural entertainment.
Landscapes and Horizons of Architecture: ‐ Architecture and Artistic Thought (2007)
The relation between scientific and artistic knowledge, or instrumental knowledge and existential wisdom, requires some consideration. The scholarly and literary work of the unorthodox French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who has been known to the architectural profession since his influential book The Poetics of Space (first published in French in 1958), mediates between the worlds of scientific and artistic thinking. Through penetrating philosophical studies of the ancient elements, earth, fire, water and air, as well as dreams, day‐dreams and imagination, Bachelard suggests that poetic imagination, or ‘poetic chemistry’,43 as he says, is closely related to pre‐scientific thinking and an animistic understanding of the world. In The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind, written in 194044 during the period when his interest was shifting from scientific phenomena to poetic imagery (The Psychoanalysis of Fire was published two years earlier), Bachelard describes the historical development of scientific thought as a set of progressively more rationalized transitions from animism through realism, positivism, rationalism and complex rationalism to dialectical rationalism. ‘The philosophical evolution of a special piece of scientific knowledge is a movement through all these doctrines in the order indicated’, he argues.45
Significantly, Bachelard holds that artistic thinking seems to proceed in the opposite direction – pursuing conceptualizations and expression, but passing through the rational and realist attitudes towards a mythical and animistic understanding of the world. Science and art, therefore, seem to glide past each other, moving in opposite directions.
Embodied Experience and Sensory Thought: Lived Space in Art and Architecture (2006)
In an interview in 1990 concerning complexities and mysteries of new physics, Steven Weinberg, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1979 for his discovery of the relationship between electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, was asked: ‘Whom would you ask about the complexity of life: Shakespeare or Einstein?’ The physicist answered quickly: ‘Oh, for the complexity of life, there's no question – Shakespeare’. And the interviewer continued: ‘And you would go to Einstein for simplicity?’ ‘Yes, for a sense of why things are the way they are – not why people are the way they are, because that's at the end of such a long chain of inference…’46
Landscapes and Horizons of Architecture: Architecture and Artistic Thought (2007)
In addition to animating the world, the artistic imagination seeks imagery able to express the entire complexity of human existential experience through singular condensed images. This paradoxical task is achieved through poeticized images, ones which are experienced and lived rather than rationally understood. Giorgio Morandi's tiny still lives are a stunning example of the capacity of humble artistic images to become all‐encompassing metaphysical statements. A work of art or architecture is not a symbol that represents or indirectly portrays something outside itself; it is a real mental image object, a complete microcosm that places itself directly in our existential experience and consciousness.
Embodied Experience and Sensory Thought: Lived Space in Art and Architecture (2006)
Art articulates our existentially essential experiences, but also modes of thinking, that is, reactions to the world and processing of information take place directly as an embodied and sensory activity without being turned into concepts, or even entering our sphere of consciousness.
Landscapes and Horizons of Architecture: Architecture and Artistic Thought (2007)
Although I am here underlining the difference between scientific and artistic inquiry, I do not believe that science and art are antithetical or hostile to each other. The two modes of knowing simply look at the world and human life with different eyes, foci and aspirations. Stimulating views have also been written about the similarities of the scientific and the poetic imagination, as well as of the significance of aesthetic pleasure and embodiment for both practices.
Art vs Science II
→ limits; limits and immensity
Infinity and Limits: Infinitude, Eternity and Artistic Imagination (2017)
In Renaissance time, architecture aspired to mediate between the worlds of gods and mortals, and aimed at giving the act of building a new authority by giving it a mathematical grounding. ‘The belief in the correspondence of macrocosm and microcosm, in the harmonic structure of the universe, in the comprehension of God through the mathematical symbols of center, circle and sphere ‐ all these closely related ideas which had their roots in antiquity, and belonged to the undisputed tenets of medieval philosophy and theology, acquired new life in the Renaissance’.47 ‘There was an unbroken tradition coming down from antiquity according to which arithmetics (the study of numbers), geometry (the study of spatial relationships), astronomy (the study of motions of celestial bodies), and music (the study of motions apprehended by the ear), formed the quadrivium of the “mathematical arts”. By contrast to these, the “liberal arts” of painting, sculpture and architecture, were regarded as manual occupations’,48 Rudolf Wittkower informs us. In order to raise architecture from the level of a mechanical to that of a mathematical art, it had to be given a firm theoretical, i.e. mathematical foundation, and that was to be found in musical theory based on the studies of the Greek geometrician Pythagoras.
The relationships and interactions of science and art are still an ongoing issue. Science is usually judged to have a higher truth value, but there are voices that see the meaning of art being closer to lived human reality. Vittorio Gallese, one of the four discoverers of the mirror neurons 30 years ago, which have opened exciting views into our unconscious interactions with the world, expresses an unexpected view of the relationship between science and art: ‘From a certain point of view, art is more powerful than science. With much less expensive tools and with greater power of synthesis, artistic intuitions show us who we are, probably in a more exhaustive way with respect to the objectifying approach of the natural sciences. Being human squares with the ability to ask ourselves who we are. Since the beginning of mankind, artistic creativity has expressed such ability in its purest and highest form’, Gallese writes.49
Certain modern and contemporary artists, especially of the conceptual orientation, have produced purely cerebral artistic works, that rely more on thought processes and intellect than sensory perceptions and emotive identifications, approaching thus the realm of science. The work of the Islandic‐Danish artist Olafur Eliasson is frequently suspended between the realms of science and art. Usually, his works have a meticulously considered scientific ground, based on a theoretical knowledge of physics and perceptual psychology. This background gives rise to his perfectly executed technical constructions, which lead the viewer to personal sensory observations and, often unnoticeably, also from the realm of objectivity into that of the subjective. Frequently the experiences have the nature of miracle or magic. The viewer's experiences are evident