Preface

I never intended or deliberately decided to become an architectural writer, critic or theorist. I have unnoticeably drifted from my architectural practice into thinking and writing about this art form, and for almost one decade since I closed the design activities of my office, I have found myself writing practically full time.

      I wrote my first article in 1966 and during the past years I have written an essay, lecture, or preface to a book by someone else roughly every second week. I have now published over 60 books and over 400 essays. I confess that I have gradually developed a way of writing that is similar to my way of designing. I write spontaneously without an outline or clear plan, in the same way that I used to sketch my architectural projects. I feel that I have not really changed my craft, as I continue to do the same thing, to imagine architectural situations, encounters and experiences, now in words instead of form and matter.

      In the late 1970s, I read Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space¹ (the book was pointed out to me by Daniel Libeskind in the book shop of the Cranbrook Academy), and it opened up a new world to me, the realm of poetic imagination and imagery, a world where perception, thought, imagination and dreams are united. I realized that the world is not out there objectively, as it is fundamentally of our own perceptual and mental making. I became aware of the existential and poetic ground of architecture as opposed to visual aesthetics, compositions or utilitarian issues. I began to read philosophers, psychologists of creativity, scientists, mainly physicists and natural scientist and later also neuroscientists. I have also eagerly read novels and poetry. Books open up marvellous worlds, those of imagination, the most significant worlds for me.

In 1985, I wrote an essay entitled ‘The Geometry of Feeling’,² which has later been republished as an example of architectural phenomenology in some anthologies on architectural writing and theory. I must say honestly, that only while working on that essay I became aware of phenomenology as a line of philosophical enquiry, and I added a short chapter on this philosophical approach in this essay, mainly for the purposes of clarifying my own view. Yet, even today, I do not claim to be a phenomenologist, due to my lack of formal philosophical education. I would rather say that my current views of architecture and art are parallel to what I understand the phenomenological stance to be. My ‘phenomenology’ arises from my half a century of experiences as an architect, teacher, writer and collaborator with numerous artists, as well as my excessive travels around the world and my experiences of life in general.

      The Dutch phenomenologist JH van den Berg argues surprisingly: ‘Painters and poets are born pheneomenlogists’.³ The neurobiologist Semir Zeki, who studies the neurological ground of art and aesthetics, makes a parallel argument: ‘Most painters are also neurologists’, in the sense of intuitively understanding the neurological principles of brain activities.⁴ These statements speak for the power of the artist's intuition. I believe that I am similarly a ‘born phenomenologist’ through my formative childhood experiences and observations at my farmer grandfather's humble farm house in Central Finland during the war years of 1939–1945. My thinking is essentially ‘a farm boy’s phenomenology' refined by my later engagement in the artistic world. Yet, in recent years, I have had the opportunity of lecturing with some of the leading phenomenologists in several countries.

I understand phenomenology in accordance with the notion of the founder of the movement, Edmund Husserl, as ‘pure looking’, an innocent and unbiased encounter with phenomena, in the same manner that a painter looks at a landscape, a poet seeks a poetic expression for a particular human experience, and an architect imagines an existentially meaningful space.