The Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery in Architecture

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John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK, 2011, English

Nonfiction, Architecture

6.8 x 0.4 x 8.7 inches, 152 pages, paperback

ISBN: 9780470711903

Suggested Retail Price: $45.00

From the Publisher. All artistic and architectural effects are evoked, mediated, and experienced through poeticized images. These images are embodied and lived experiences that take place in ‘the flesh of the world," becoming part of us, at the same time that we unconsciously project aspects of ourselves on to a conceived space, object, or event. Artistic images have a life and reality of their own and they develop through unexpected associations rather than rational and causal logic. Images are usually thought of as retinal pictures but profound poetic images are multi-sensory and they address us in an embodied and emotive manner.

Architecture is usually analyzed and taught as a discipline that articulates space and geometry, but the mental impact of architecture arises significantly from its image quality that integrates the various aspects and dimensions of experience into a singular, internalized, and remembered entity. The material reality is fused with our mental and imaginative realm.

The book is organized into five main parts that look at in turn: the image in contemporary culture; language, thought, and the image; the many faces of the image; the poetic image; and finally the architectural image. The Embodied Image is illustrated with over sixty images in pairs, which are diverse in subject. They range from scientific images to historic artistic and architectural masterpieces. Artworks span Michelangelo and Vermeer to Gordon Matta-Clark and architecture takes in modern masters such as Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Alvar Aalto, as well as significant contemporary works by Steven Holl and Daniel Libeskind.

On 2 book lists

John Hill

On John Hill’s Notable Books of 2011 list

Finnish architect, educator, and writer Juhani Pallasmaa wraps up his trilogy of books on the senses in architecture—Eyes of the Skin and The Thinking Hand are the first two—by focusing on images at a time when they saturate our mediated lives. He skillfully argues for reconsidering image based on experience rather than image based on novelty.

Juhani Pallasmaa

On list of Books by Juhani Pallasmaa

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