In the 13th episode of  A is for Architecture’s third series, I spoke with the remarkable architect and writer, Juhani Pallasmaa, former professor of architecture and dean at the Helsinki University of Technology, now incorporated as Aalto University.

Pallasmaa’s work has been of huge importance to architects now active in the transformation of our towns and cities, with his description of a tactile, material and immanent embodiment visible in the work of almost all good, urban work now being built. His written work particularly stands, in a way, in counterpoint to the superficial and the visual, that occularcentric tendency born of late capitalist starcitecture, and the preferencing of the image over depth and the experiential. Central to our discussion were two of Pallasmaa’s great works – The Eyes of the Skin (John Wiley & Sons, 1996) and The Thinking Hand (John Wiley & Sons, 2009), both of which are worthy of continued study. You can listen to Jonathan Hale speak about Juhani’s inspiration, the phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on A is for Architecture here.

Before he and I recorded this episode, Juhani had received a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Paimio Sanatorium Foundation, at the Sanitorium itself, where he also gave a talk entitled "The Ethical Meaning of Architecture: The relational and existential essence of art".

A joy and an undeserved privilege, getting to speak to a hero like this.

Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.

Thanks for listening.

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Music credits: Bruno Gillick

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