Juhani Pallasmaa's The Eyes of the Skin argues for the whole-body experience of a building – and, read one way, for comfort as the most basic measure of a sustainable home.
The Eyes of the Skin, which was first published in 1996, is one of architectural theory’s most-cited slim volumes; the book lays out the case for phenomenology in architecture – design that engages all of the senses. It rarely comes up in a conversation about sustainability, but read a certain way it should.
Pallasmaa’s argument is a case against the dominance of vision. Modern architecture, he writes, has been made to be looked at – photographed, published, admired from across a room – while a building is experienced with the whole body. The temperature of a room, the acoustics of a space, the way objects and handles feel when they’re touched: the body registers all of it, most often without even noticing. A culture raised on images has trained itself to design for one sense and forget the rest.
One reading of this argument maps directly onto sustainability. A building that forgets the body is the one that is cold in winter and stifling in summer. Its inverse, a home that holds its warmth when the weather turns and stays cool when it doesn’t, without the occupant fighting it every day, is at the most basic level a sustainable one. Comfort, in this plain thermal sense, is at its essence that of sustainable design.
There is a line in the book that carries the point:
“Modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.”
A home that keeps a stable internal temperature through its fabric rather than its machinery does less work, and asks less energy of the people in it, across every year it stands. The comfort is not a finish applied over performance; the comfort is the performance, felt. Passive design – orientation, thermal mass, glazing, insulation, the movement of air – is the discipline of producing that condition.
Pallasmaa is asking for more than a steady thermostat. Comfort in his fuller sense is atmosphere, acoustic softness, the feel of a material under the hand, a building that is good to be inside for reasons a reading in lux or degrees won’t capture.
A sealed, airtight envelope can deliver the low bills and the even temperature while resisting the very things – repair, weathering, the honest ageing of a material – that let a space feel alive across decades.
Comfort also resists measurement, which is much of why it needs to be baked into a design from the beginning. It is more nebulous to argue than form or structure or concept, and it is often the first quality to slide off a brief once the drawings have to be resolved.
All of which is why comfort is the hardest test a building can be set. It can be faked in a photograph, and left off a project statement. It’s something that you simply experience when walking into a room, or it isn’t.
