“Shifts in Perception through Tactile Sensations”
Brandon Stone
The bias that vision holds over the profession of architecture suppresses all of the other senses. In Greek antiquity, optical refinements were implemented to create the illusion that a structure was visually “perfect”. The hegemonic eye, with its ability to absorb information faster than any other sense, has allowed designers to create buildings that “look” good, but might not necessarily “feel” good. Pallasmaa once stated that “touch is a parent of our eyes, ears, nose and mouth.” Tactile sensations can affect a person’s social behavior, self-perception, enjoyment and comfort within a building. Tactility does not only refer to one’s sense of touch through material contact, but also touch through atmospheric conditions. Three dimensional space can be deceiving through our lens of vision. However, the tactile and haptic sensations that we experience do not misguide us. It is important to explore how tactility can be leveraged to enhance our perception of space, while diminishing the ocular-centric bias that we hold today.
Providing a context is important when determining how tactility plays an integral role to a user’s experience within a space. A thermae bath or natatorium leverages materiality to alter atmospheric and tactile conditions as a means of affecting one’s comfort. This provokes us to ask questions such as; “how does the foot interact with the ground?” and “how does the body react to changes in temperature?” Can edge and surface conditions become altered at multiple scales to potentially change one’s perception of space? Atmospheric conditions within a thermae vary greatly. Some spaces may be hot, while some are cold. Some may be humid while others dry. The advantage of a space like this is that the method by which one “touches” space is in solid, liquid and gas form. These three states of matter provide us with an opportunity to alter certain functions within a building to serve new purposes.
One approach might be to implement materials at different scales to suggest different programmatic functions. Could a material at one scale suggest a boundary condition around the edge of the bath, while a different but similarly scaled material invite one to sit upon it? Could a material at a certain scale provide stability for the foot when walking on a slippery surface, whereas at a different scale that material might serve as a warm entity for one to lay upon, assisting in drying off? The extrapolation of this idea demands that studies be done both at the material and programmatic level. The exploration of a material through different shifts in scale would allow one to experiment and allocate a certain programmatic function to each object being scaled.
The goal/result of this research is to ultimately create a space that does not rely on ones sense of sight as a major sensory component. The thermal bath is a program of pure function. It is focused on touch and one’s skin coming into direct contact with very warm or very cold elements. By transmuting materials and their scale, I hope to learn how one’s perception of space could become enhanced, or even completely changed purely through tactile sensations.
