Retinal Architecture and Loss of Plasticity by Juhani Pallasmaa

The architecture of our time is turning into the retinal art of the eye.
Architecture at large has become an art of the printed image fixed by the hurried eye of the camera. The gaze itself tends to flatten into picture and lose its plasticity; instead of experiencing our being in the world, we behold it from outside as spectators of images projected on the surface of the retina.

As buildings lose their plasticity and their connection with the language and wisdom of the body, they become isolated in the cool and distant realm of vision. With the loss of tactility and the scale and details crafted for the human body and hand, our structures become repulsively flay, sharp-edged, immaterial, and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, devoid of the authenticity of material and tectonic logic.
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The current over-emphasis on the intellectual and conceptual dimensions of architecture further contributes to a disappearance of the physical, sensual embodied essence of architecture.

In “Questions of Perception; Phenomenology of Architecture”
by Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez-Gómez