Our Narcissistic Eyes and The Architecture Of Visual Images

-Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1601. 'Regardless of our prioritisation of the eye, visual observation is often confirmed by our touch...'-Juhani Pallasmaa.

A sprouting and deadly habit of ocularcetrism is approaching, posing greater and greater threat to the survival of architecture. The misleading confusion of an Western classical thought, started from Plato's time, has narcotically spread through the entire world, pushing the art of architecture to its end. It is the over-dominant of the sense of vision over the other four senses of our human body, architecture now are made and appear in front of us as mere visual journey of artificially generated images, short of plasticity, aura and the authority of presence...called it the 'retinal architecture'.

I had once argued with architectural instructors on my building design's visual impact in contrast with the surrounding context, they remained unmoved and defended the importance of visual scale and set a set of rules of how building must look, over-stressing the importance of its visual presence than of its functions. This proves unquestionably even the educational system has fallen into the addiction to the Architecture-Of-The-Eye.

As philosopher Martin Heidegger observed, the modern world has plunged into a highly nihilistic and narcissistic expression of pleasing the dominanting sense of eye. Our narcissistic eye views and demand architecture to be solely as a means of selfish self-expression, detached from its original mental, social and organic connections with real people and real culture. The nihilistic eye see everything as a set of images, disengage and isolate our soul from the real intimacy, materiality and tactile aspect of true architecture. The postmodern world have since becomes a meaningless visual journey of fake images, brought about with the help of technology like CAD and 3D imaging computer software, symbolically reinventing the misleading cultural signifiers, rather than was born as integral part of it. The senses of touch, smell and hearing are now the secondary routes of evaluating everything including architecture.

Juhani Pallasmaa in his writing 'The Eyes of The Skin' states: 'The cancerous spread of superficial architectural imagery today, devoid of tectonic logic and a sense of materiality and empathy, is clearly part of this process.' (the process of the cancer of treating architecture as mere visual images). The hegemony of the eye is deadly, as it increasingly separate the 'self' from the real world, the relationship and distant between people and his habitat now are confined between his eye and artificial graphic, and not the tectile, close and unconscious way we experience architectural space traditionally using the 5 senses. We are now unable to generate architecture that is truly speak for the majority people and needs (the interior world). We are now merely the 'spectators' of architecture, and are not inseparably belonged to it.
-The cancer tumor of the architecture of images and graphics has invaded education institutions.

For me, the death of architecture starts with the detachment of human bodily senses (not only the visual) from the physical materiality of it. This is because the term 'architecture' was a specific term, historically referring to a human culture that is guided by their bodily made craft, driven by the 5 senses, creating poetic beauty out of the chemistry between each of them, the same way a bird shapes its nest by its bodily movements, bees shape their honeycomb by their teamwork, or our indigenous mud architecture shaped by the very organic haptic and muscular craft of the local people...These are architecture.
-Architecture of People, by the People, for the People...Intimate, existential, true, functional, the articulation of 'fit' as the real beauty of architecture. Whatsoever, the connectedness between the human's self and the worldly incarnated environment has ever be so close before the invention of our narcissistic eye and of course the computer imaging.

Since the time of Renaissance Alberti's jugment of architecture as visual perception, proportion and harmony, the sense of eye has suppressed the other senses as the dominant yardstick of testing the good and bad of architecture. This classical thought inherited until our time culminated in Corbusian modernism in which he once wrote: I exist in life only if I can see; One need to see in order to understand; Man looks at the creation of architecture with his eye,...plus his famous etho: 'Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light'. These undeniably set and define and resulted in our time's preoccupation with the 'architecture of the eye'.

Now, they are the architecture of the eye, plan of the eye, elevation of the eye, city planning of the eye (le regard surplombant), they pursuit the 'Hygiene of the Eye', where pleasing the sensory pleasure of the eye has push the importance of our cultural, emotional and utilitarian participation in making architecture, to death. The existential plastic and spatial experience had gave way to the hyperbolic advertising and psycological persuasion of fake but striking visual computerized images. They are the dead instantaneous impact of our narcissistic self-expression, these architecture unable to sustain the test of time.
-'le regard surplombant' or architecture of Seen Above. Its 'spectators' are among people standing in front of the presentation graphics or birds and...flight passengers maybe? but certainly cannot be appreciated by users standing in front of the wall.

Architecture of the Eye alienate people, they are isolated in the selfish distant realm of vision and illusion, lack in tactility, more of a scenography than as the mother of all art and science. Architecture is DEAD!
-The persecution on the murder of architecture must start with the trial of her, as the forerunning advocator of 'visual architecture'. Most of the 21-th century ego-centric and narcissistic styling in architecture are desasterous to the sustainability of human as an organic being. Dictionary define narcissism as 'Excessive love or admiration of oneself' and 'A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem'.


"The taste of the apple...lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way...poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading." -Jorge Luis Borges


"The dancer has his ear in his toes." -Friedrich Nietzsche