Synesthesia

The paper is conceived as a chain of images in a world dominated by images. Even if Juhani Pallasmaa in 2005 published The Eyes of the Skin offering a new way to interpret perception in Architecture, and Peter Zumthor suggestion to students in architecture is to build atmospheres, this paper deals with an ancestral way to communicate ideas (particularly compositional ideas) through symbols, evocations, traces of images, shades of memories. Arch & Anthropol Open Acc Copyright © Alessandra Capanna 2/2 How to cite this article: Alessandra C. Synesthesia. Arch & Anthropol Open Acc. 2(2). AAOA.000532. 2018. DOI: 10.31031/AAOA.2018.02.000532 Volume 2 Issue 2 For possible submissions Click Here Submit Article Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Archaeology & Anthropology: Open Access Benefits of Publishing with us • High-level peer review and editorial services • Freely accessible online immediately upon publication • Authors retain the copyright to their work • Licensing it under a Creative Commons license • Visibility through different online platforms the absence of the limit itself. The gaze crosses transparent walls or multiplies images, bumping into its reflection that is produced by shiny and two-dimensional surfaces [3]. The architecture of the computer age experiments the Synesthetic potentialities of a kaleidoscopic and multisensory perception that goes beyond the synthesis of the arts [5]. This last was one of the main topics for the Modern Movement masters, who argued about the geometric boundaries of the architecture and drew walls, designed as opaque scenes, cropped, solid and at the same time abstract and allusive. In the Iidabashi station of the Tokyo underground, Makoto Sei Watanabe sows trans-sensory clues that intertwine in a sort of interstitial oscillation between memory and physical sensation: part of the wall along the pedestrian walkway is treated with a texture borrowed from the Braille alphabet, to enhance the sense of connection of touch and sight. With the fingertips you can “read” on a metal surface, the phrase “wooden surface treatment” [6]. In this way two sensations overlap, or rather three: the sense of touch, that of sight and that of sight through touch. The knowledge that one has of the different characteristics of the materials and their sensory effects is translated into words, triggering in the mind a process of transferring information from consciousness to sensation and vice versa as in a “perceptual oxymoron”. The surface is not made of wood and you can feel on your fingers the cold and smooth metallic material that makes fun of us denouncing what is not [7]. Synesthetic is an allusive architecture, like the Monsoon restaurant, built in Sapporo in 1990 by Zaha Hadid, with the ice colour bar at the entrance, icy just like the cocktails prepared inside, a perfect image of architecture as petrified music; with the restaurant in the innermost part, enveloped in darkness, torn from above by a fiery red metal spiral band, an allegory of taste that transfers the familiar image of the domestic place of cooking food to the limit of the infernal metaphor of the sin of throat. Synesthetic is the architecture of the new Department of Philosophy at New York University, completed by Steven Holl in late 2007. For this project, from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories set out in the “Observations on colours”, the architect takes the opportunity to experience the capabilities of light to modulate changeable colour send tactile effects crossing the white perforated metal sheet that unrolls in the large central void of an emptied building revived by the new white “porous” staircase connecting the six floors changing direction to each level [8]. Synesthetic was the Dutch experience of “Material Experience”, the multidisciplinary and multisensory exhibition, curated by the interactive platform set by Material, which attracted more than 3,000 creative designers in the Netherland to exhibit concentric objects and materials in the concentric rings which had to be touched, smelled, photographed, organized in information and disseminated on the web [9].