Opening
Almost everything is designed for the eye, and lived through the skin.
A room is chosen from a photograph and then inhabited at 3 a.m. in bare feet. A garment is bought from a screen and then worn for eleven hours against the inside of an arm. A meal is planned by its name and eaten by its temperature. The decision is made by one sense and the life is had by all of them.
This is a study of the other senses — the ones that were present the whole time and were never asked. It is written slowly, in public, as it is worked out.
Close your eyes in the sun.
What you are looking at is yourself.
Six ways in
Six senses, and none of them optional.
Five as they are usually counted, and a sixth that does most of the work and has no common name — the body's continuous report on its own weight, breath and balance. Then, after them, four things the six are for.
01
Skin
Texture, temperature, pressure, and the sense that has no single organ because it is all of you.
02
Taste
The mouth as a room the day passes through several times, and is rarely designed for.
03
Scent
The only sense wired straight into memory, and the one no building is ever designed around.
04
Sound
What a place sounds like when nothing in it is happening — the floor of every day.
05
Light
Not what you can see by, but what the light is doing to you while you see by it.
06
Weight
Breath, balance, and the body's own quiet account of where it is and how it is.
One
Skin
two square metres,
awake for every one of them
Touch is the first sense to develop and the last to go. It is also the only one you cannot close: there is no eyelid for the skin, no way to stop feeling the chair, the seam, the cold handle. Whatever a room is doing to a body, it is doing continuously.
Almost none of this is specified. A tap is chosen by its finish in a photograph and then held four hundred times a year. A sofa is chosen by its shape from across a shop and then met, mostly, by the back of a neck. The photograph and the hand disagree, and the photograph wins.
What would a room look like if every surface had been chosen at the temperature and the pressure it is actually met with?
Two
Taste
a room the day passes through
three or four times
Most of taste is not taste. It is smell, temperature, texture and sound — the crack, the give, the heat at the back of a spoon. Which is why food described only by its ingredients is described in the one language that leaves out how it will be.
And taste is trainable in both directions. It widens with what it is given time to meet, and it narrows just as reliably. Almost nobody designs for the widening.
What does a year of eating look like if it is designed to widen a taste rather than satisfy the one already there?
Every sense is a way of being touched.
Some of them just have further to travel.
Three
Scent
the sense that arrives
before you have decided anything
Smell is the only sense that reaches memory and feeling without being checked on the way. You are somewhere else before you have identified what you smelled. Nothing else in a body works like that.
And nothing in a building is designed around it. A house has a lighting plan, an acoustic plan if it is lucky, and no scent plan at all — so its smell is an accident of its materials, its damp, its cleaning products and its last occupant.
What would it mean to design what a home smells like in February, on purpose, from the materials up?
Four
Sound
what a place sounds like
when nothing is happening
Every room has a floor of sound it never drops below — a fridge, a fan, a road, a hum. It is the thing you stop hearing in a week and go on being affected by for years.
Above that floor sits everything a place does when it is used: a door, a drawer, a chair on stone, water arriving. These are not noise. They are the sound of a life happening, and they can be tuned like anything else.
If a house were tuned the way an instrument is tuned, what note would it be, and who decides?
Five
Light
not what you see by —
what it is doing to you meanwhile
Light is treated as a utility: enough of it, or not enough. But the body reads light as time. Colour and angle tell it what hour it is, and it sets its temperature, its appetite and its sleep accordingly, whatever the clock says.
Which makes a light fitting a clock the room is showing the body. Most rooms are showing the wrong time all evening.
What would a day of light in one house look like if the hours were designed rather than switched?
Six
Weight
the sense with no name,
reporting without being asked
Underneath the five there is a sixth: the body's continuous account of its own position, weight, breath and effort. It is what makes a stair comfortable or exhausting at exactly the same height, and it is running all day without a word.
It is also the sense most easily designed for, because it responds to numbers — a riser, a seat height, a door's swing weight, the distance between the two things you use together forty times a day.
Which measurements, if they were got right once, would never have to be thought about again?
Part two
The senses are not the point. What they are for is the point.
The six are channels — ways the world gets in. What follows are not more channels. They are what the channels are for: another person, a distance, a wanting, a stopping.
Mode
Eros
the same six senses,
turned toward another person
Nothing new is added. Eros is skin, taste, scent, sound, light and weight, all of them at once and all of them pointed at someone. Which is why it is the hardest thing here to design for, and the easiest to ruin without noticing: every decision already made about a room is a decision about this, whether it was made on purpose or not.
And it is designed for badly, by default. A ceiling light that stays white until midnight. A bedroom laid out around the bed as furniture rather than around two people getting into it. A wall that carries a conversation to the next room. None of these were meant as decisions about eros. All of them are.
What would a house look like if the rooms people are most themselves in had been designed first, rather than last and from a catalogue?
Mode
Nearness
how close another body is,
and who decided that
Every room sets a distance. A bench for two is a decision about whether shoulders touch. A kitchen aisle at 900 mm makes two people pass close; at 1200 they never have to. A doorway is a place where one person waits for another to go through it, or does not.
These are numbers, and numbers can be got right. It is the most measurable thing in this study and the least often measured — a plan is drawn for circulation, which is the art of keeping people apart, and almost never for the opposite.
Which measurements in a house decide how often two people who live in it touch by accident?
Most of what happens between two people
is decided by the furniture.
Mode
Appetite
wanting,
and the not-yet
The smell of dinner is often better than dinner. Anticipation is not a preface to the experience; it is a large part of the experience, it has its own length, and that length can be shortened or protected.
Most design shortens it. The thing arrives before you have finished wanting it, and the wanting — which cost nothing, and was pleasure — is spent. A kitchen that lets a meal be smelled for an hour is doing something a faster kitchen cannot.
Which of the day's pleasures are being ruined by arriving too quickly?
Mode
Rest
the pull
toward the horizontal
The body spends a third of its life lying down and is given one piece of furniture for it. Everything between upright and asleep — the half-lying, the reading, the not-quite-napping — happens on furniture designed for one of the two ends and neither of the middle.
Rest is a sense too, in that the body reports it: a weight behind the eyes, a warmth, a reluctance in the legs. It arrives at about the same time every day, and is almost always overruled by a room still lit for work.
What is the piece of furniture between a chair and a bed, and why does almost no house have one?
The ledger
What the study has decided so far.
A fact, and what a body does about it. Nothing here is an opinion; anything that turns out to be one is removed.
- Skin reads temperature before texture. So the handle you meet first thing in the morning is wood or cork, never metal — the difference is roughly eight degrees at the fingertip, and it is the first thing the day tells you.
- Smell arrives ahead of thought. So the entrance is the one place where the material is chosen for what it will smell like in a damp week, and not for what it looks like on a dry one.
- A room's sound floor is set by its quietest machine. So the fridge does not share a wall with the place anyone sits still. It costs nothing at the plan stage and cannot be fixed afterwards.
- The body reads light as the hour. So after sunset no light in the house sits above eye height, and none of it is white. The ceiling is left dark on purpose.
A life is not experienced in summary.
Write to the studio
If you are working on any of this, write.
The study is published as it is worked out rather than when it is finished, which means it is wrong in places and will say so. Corrections, measurements and arguments are all welcome — particularly the arguments.
hello@girijaregmi.com →