ArchitectureoftheSensesdocWord文件下载.docx

1、sensory model as a cultural and historical formation:When we examine the meanings associated with various sensory faculties and sensations in different cultures we find a cornucopia of potent sensory symbolism. Sight may be linked to reason or to witchcraft, taste may be used as a metaphor for aesth

2、etic discrimination or for sexual experience, an odour may signifY sanctity or sin, political power or social exclusion. Together, these sensory meanings and values form the sensory model espoused by a society, according to which the members of that society make sense of the world, or translate sens

3、ory perceptions and concepts into a particular worldview. There will likely be challenges to this model from within the society, persons and groups who differ on certain sensory values, yet this model will provide the basic perceptual paradigm to be followed or resisted. 2The emergence of sensory st

4、udies, as this dynamic new area of inquiry could be called, has come at the end of a long series of turns in the human sciences. For instance, in addition to the openings described in the text Sensory Stirrings, （p. 332） there was the linguistic turn of the 1960s and 70s inspired by Saussurian lingu

5、istics （and Wittgensteins notion oflanguage games） that gave us the idea of culture as structured like a language or text and of knowledge as a, function of discourse. This was followed by the pictorial turn of the 1980s, which emphasized the role of visual irnagery in human communication-particular

6、ly in our civilization of the image-and gave r:se t.o the ever-expanding field of visual culture studies. The 1990s witnessed two new developments: the corporeal turn, which introduced the notion ofernbodiment as a paradigm for cultural analysis, and the material turn, which directed attention to th

7、e physical infrastructure of the social world, giving birth to material culture studies.While these different turns represent important shifts in models of interpretation, the emergent focus on the cultural life of the senses is more in the nature of a revolution. That is, the sensorial322revolution

8、 in the human sciences encompasses and builds on the insights of each of these approaches, but also seeks to correct for their excesses-offsetting the verbocentrism of the linguistic turn, the visualism of the pictorial turn, the materialism of the material turn, for the latter shift occludes the mu

9、ltisensoriality of objects and architectures eveR. as it stresses their physicality-by emphasizing the dynamic, relational （intersensory, multimedia） nature of our everyday engagement with the world. In this essay, I would like to trace some expressions of the sensorial revolution in the fields of h

10、uman geography, social history, urban anthropology, and fially architecture,in order to show what a focus on the senses can contribute to .ourunderstanding of the physical and built environment. In place of readingvisualizing the city （or analyzing it as the materialization of a given set of social

11、values）, this essay delves into the significance of sensing the city through multiple sensory modalities.Geography of the SensesIn Landscapes of the Mind, geographer J. Douglas Porteous notes that: Notwithstanding the holistic nature of environmental experience, few researchers have attempted to int

12、erpret it in a holistic or multisensory manner.3 He is critical of the planning literature that pays lip service to the notion of the multisensoriality of the urban landscape, but then quickly descends into a discussion of merely visual aesthetics, and he is particularly critical of the trend toward

13、s satellite-generated data produced by remote-sensing. Porteous himself advocates a return to a ground-truthing mode of exploration for geoscientists and travellers alike, which he calls intimate-sensing.Remote sensing is clean, cold, detached, easy. Intimate sensing, especially in the Third World,

14、is complex, difficult, and often filthy. The world is found to be untidy rather than neat. But intimate sensing is rich, warm, involved. . and the rewards involve dimensions other than the intellectual. 4Porteous discloses, in intimate detail, how our sense of space and the character of place are co

15、nditioned by the diverse deliverances and interplay of the senses. Different senses produce different takes on the same space, and while auditory and olfactory perception are discontinuous and fragmentary in character, tactile perception is aggregative, and visual perception is detached and summativ

16、e. Breaking up the idea of landscape into a multiplicity of sound-, smell- （and other sensory as well as imaginary） scapes, Porteous presents an analysis of the acoustic ambience of the city of Vancouver, and a redolent （if stereotypical） description of the peculiar smell ofIndia:half-corrupt, half-

17、aromatic, a mixture of dung, sweat, heat, dust, rotting vegetation, oil and spices. 5323Landscapes of the Mind is indeed rich in non-intellectual rewards, though Porteouss account remains open to criticism for the way in which it essentializes the senses by failing to inquire into how the sensorium

18、is constructed in the actual cultures of the geographic areas on which he trains our attention. For example, while the Western observer who walks down a swampy Bangkok slum lane will find his or her nostrils assailed by the stench of rotting refuse, local residents find meaning in such effluvia, bec

19、ause they understand the smells in cyclical, rather than purely spatial, terms. That is, those inhabitants who have migrated to the city from rural areas relate to the garbage and to its smells in terms deriving from the olfactory cycle in the rural environment, where the odious smell of refuse, thr

20、ough ecological recycling, . becomes the pleasant smell of the life-giving fertilizer. 6The Senses in HistorySensory history seeks to enliven the dry bones of history and put us in touch with the past through the analysis of the sensory practices and ideologies that produced the distinctive sensibil

21、ities of different historical periods. For example, one leading study reconstructs the acoustic world of Elizabethan England, another explores the varieties of haptic experience in Renaissance culture, while a third, entitled The Foul and the Fragrant, gives us a whiff of pre- and post-revolutionary

22、 France. 7One of the most prominent themes of this literature is the separation of sight from the other senses in the sensory model of modernity. In premodernity, the senses were considered as a set, and each sense was correlated to a different element: sight to fire and light, hearing to air, smell

23、 to vapour, taste to water, and touch to earth. 8 All of the senses, like all of the elements, were integral to the epistemology and ontology of the universe. This elemental understanding of the architecture of the senses came undone during the Enlightenment, when the association of vision with reas

24、on became entrenched, and the progressive rationalization of society became identified with the increasing visualization of society and space.In Seeing Like a State, social theorist James Scott exposes how modern statecraft depends on rendering complex living realities legible through the use of cad

25、astral maps and miniature models of towns and cities. 9 These maps and models have the effect of simplifying and remaking that which they represent in the interests of large-scale social engineering. Formal, geometric simplicity and functional separation and efficiency （i.e., zoned spaces） would bec

26、ome the new standard for urban design, marginalizing all of the spontaneous ways in which actual human subjects create order and make sense of the city. It is one of the grand ironies of modernity that the grand plans rarely achieved their intended effects, and often324contributed to disorder instea

27、d of curbing it. This is because the tunnel vision of the modern state is no substitute for the eyes on the street of neighbourhood residents, as Jane Jacobs exposed in her well-known treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 10 Multiple or cross-uses of spaces, rather than single-purpo

28、se zones, represent a far more effective means of promoting informal social order because of the foot traffic they generate and concomitant opportunities for monitoring the conduct of ones fellow citizens, not to mention enjoying their company. Jacobs achieved her insights by sensing the city as a p

29、edestrian would, rather than seeing it from an airplane as God and the planners are wont to do.According to Scott, the:. paradigm case of modernizing vision imposing its logic on the organization of urban space is Brasilia, the administrative city par excellence. With its great voids between superqu

30、adra, and strictly geometric and egalitarian facades, Brasilia realized the formal order and functional segregation envisioned by its planners . at the cost of a sensorily impoverished and monotonous environment. 11 First-generation residents of this model city coined the term brasilite, meaning roughly Brasil（ia）-itis., to connote their traumatic. reaction to-and rejectio