Читать книгу Inseminations - Juhani Pallasmaa - Страница 57

I have become so impressed with the power of our atmospheric judgment that I want to suggest that this capacity could be named our sixth sense. Thinking only of the five Aristotelian senses in architecture fails to acknowledge the true complexity of the systems through which we are connected to the world. Steinerian philosophy, for instance, deals with twelve senses,⁸¹ whereas a recent book, The Sixth Sense Reader, identifies more than 30 categories of sensing through which we relate to and communicate with the world.⁸² This idea of a wider human sensorium underlines the fact that our being‐in‐the world is much more complex and refined than we tend to understand. That is why understanding architecture solely as a visual art form is hopelessly reductive. Besides, instead of thinking of the senses as isolated systems, we should become more interested in and knowledgeable about their essential interactions and crossovers. Merleau‐Ponty emphasizes this essential unity and interaction of the senses: ‘My perception is […] not a sum of visual, tactile, and auditive givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being. I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once’.⁸³ This flexibility and dynamic of our interaction with the world is one of the important things that neuroscience can illuminate for us. The craft of architecture is deeply embedded in this human sensory and mental complexity. This criticism of the reductive isolation of the senses also applies to the common understanding of intelligence as a singular intellectual capacity. Contrary to the common understanding of intelligence as a definite cerebral category, psychologist Howard Gardner suggests seven categories of intelligence, namely linguistic, logical‐mathematical, musical, bodily‐kinaesthetic, spatial, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences, to which he later adds three further categories: naturalistic, ethical and spiritual intelligences.⁸⁴ I would add four further categories to Gardner's list: emotional, aesthetic, existential and atmospheric intelligences. So, we may well have a full spectrum of a dozen modes of intelligence instead of the single quality targeted by IQ tests. The complex field of intelligence also suggests that architectural education, or education at large, faces a much wider task, and at the same time, possesses far greater potential, than standard paedagogy has thus far accepted. Education in any creative field must start primarily with the student's sense of self, as only a firm sense of identity and self‐awareness can serve as the core around which observation, knowledge, and eventually wisdom can evolve and condense.