A tactile awareness

Greek philosopher Aristotle deduced in his major treatise De Anima that without the sense of touch there could be no other senses “The first sense, the root and ground as it were of the other senses... the one which entitles a living thing to be called sensitive”.1 Our sense of touch has had a varied past, often underestimated; it has fallen in and out of favour though out history.2 Modern sense of touch is suppressed under the hegemony of visual advertising and consumer culture. My thesis attempts to address the idea of a new haptic age, in the context of the built enviroment. The hand has become a mere tool for flicking from screen to screen disconnected, as the mind is to physical reality; this to me is profoundly disturbing. The sense of touch has fundamental significance to humans deriving from its epistemological function, making possible an awareness of surroundings and a consciousness of self. 3 We must re inhabit the built environment with a new physicality and tactility in order for the body to reclaim its place as the centre of experience. Born in 1908 Maurice Merleau Ponty was a French philosopher, in his landmark book Phenomenology of Perception he refers to a ship that has run aground. From a distance Merleau Ponty doesn’t perceive the different parts of the ship and instead sees the ship as a whole, “As I approached I did not perceive resemblances or proximities which finally came together to form a continuous picture of the upper part of the ship”. Merleau Ponty felt, that the ship was “on the point of altering”4. If one was to think of the ship as a building and this point of alternation, this moment of flux, as the point at which the building detail is perceived, then perhaps rather than this moment being an entirely visual experience, it could become much richer with the emphasis of tactile stimulus.