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Architecture as Participation 
in the World: Merleau-
Ponty, Wölfflin, and the 
Bodily Experience of the Built 
Environment
brian irwin

Introduction

Many discussions of  Merleau-Ponty’s treatment 
of  the bodily experience of  space turn to his opus 
Phenomenology of  Perception, where he most explicitly 
takes up the theme. Yet in Merleau-Ponty’s own 
view this treatment, while providing rich and 
valuable insights into spatial experience, remains 
unsatisfying: ultimately Phenomenology of  Perception 
does not escape a dualism that, despite the work’s 
inestimable contributions to the philosophy of  
embodied experience, situates it within a flawed 
tradition running back through Husserl, Kant, and 
Descartes. As Merleau-Ponty himself  puts it, “The 
problems posed in Ph.P. are insoluble because I start 
there from the ‘consciousness’-‘object’ distinction.” 
1 Only in his later philosophy, particularly with his 
development of  the ontology of  the flesh, did he 
approach the fulfillment of  his goal to leave this 
distinction and all its Cartesian corollaries behind 
once and for all. If  we want to derive from his work 
an approach to architecture that doesn’t recapitulate 
these Cartesian assumptions, that instead seeks to 
understand architectural practice and experience as 
important ways in which we belong to the world, 
then it is to his later philosophy that we should turn. 

     In this essay I want to emphasize in particular 
that our mode of  engaging with the world, in 
Merleau-Ponty’s later writings, can be understood 
as one of  participation, as I argue in the first section. 



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In considering how this principle might apply to architectural theory in 
practice, I turn to Heinrich Wölfflin, whose “Prolegomena to a Psychology 
of  Architecture” suggests a way of  thinking about architecture in 
participatory terms. I conclude with a few remarks about how these ideas 
may be applied to the contemporary world of  architectural theory and 
practice.

Drawing out the theme of participation in Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy

     It is a bit ironic that vision figures so prominently, even in the very titles 
of  two of  Merleau-Ponty’s last works —The Visible and the Invisible and 
“Eye and Mind”—considering that in these writings he makes a radical 
departure from the ocular-centrism that has for so long characterized the 
Western philosophical tradition. In Merleau-Ponty’s use, though, vision 
functions as a synecdoche for sensing in general. In the ontology of  the 
flesh, the visual and the tactile are bound up in a general sensing which 
is embedded in the “flesh of  the world,” the term Merleau-Ponty uses to 
signify that element in which sensing and sensible, subject and object, occur 
together, wherein “between the seeing and the seen, between touching and 
the touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand, a 
blending of  some sort takes place – then the spark is lit between sensing 
and sensible, lighting the fire that will not stop burning.”2 Indeed, the 
tactile can be taken as primary insofar as it is by means of  the tactile 
that the embeddedness of  vision in the world is explicated. The visible 
“envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things.”3 Merleau-Ponty asks:

What is this prepossession of  the visible, this art of  interrogating it according to 
its own wishes, this inspired exegesis? We would perhaps find the answer in the 
tactile palpation where the questioner and the questioned are closer, and of  which, 
after all, the palpation of  the eye is a remarkable variant. …

[B]etween my movements and what I touch, there must exist some relationship by 
principle, some kinship, according to which they are not only, like the pseudopods 
of  the amoeba, vague and ephemeral deformations of  the corporeal space, but the 
initiation to and opening upon a tactile world. This can happen only if  my hand, 
while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself  tangible, for my 
other hand, for example, if  it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a 
sense one of  them, opens finally upon a tangible world of  which it is also a part.4

Compared to vision, the immediacy and density of  contact with things 
through touch better reveals the common dimension of  the sensing and 
the sensed. For the hand that touches is manifestly a thing in the world – a 
thing we can see, and indeed a thing we can touch (with the other hand). 
It meets resistance when it slaps against the table in the same way that 



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the ball meets resistance when it lands in the palm.5 

This commonality of  touching and touched – their 
mutual embeddedness in the place of  contact – 
is what makes it possible for the tactile world to 
open up to sensing. This phenomenon, in fact, is 
enough for us to overthrow our naturalistic idea 
of  the thing as object, as essentially separate from 
ourselves, since we find ourselves suddenly among 
the world of  objects, and this, as he says elsewhere, 
“results in an ontological rehabilitation of  the 
sensible.”6 This is the crux of  Merleau-Ponty’s later 
ontology – or not crux but what he terms chiasm: 
the flesh of  the world finds expression in both 
sensing and sensible as two sides of  the same coin. 
While there is a gap (he uses the term écart) between 
these two sides, they are nonetheless characterized 
by “overlapping or encroachment, so that we may 
say that the things pass into us, as well as we into 
the things.”7 It is a relation of  intertwining, such 
that there is not an ontological separation between 
the self  and the world, but an emergence of  self  
from the world (and of  the world from self). As he 
says in a working note to The Visible and the Invisible 
with the header “The chiasm,” “A relation to Being 
is needed that would form itself  within Being.”8 The 
experience of  tactility is the best example of  this 
relation because it most clearly depends on our 
moving about within the world, discovering its 
resistances and textures through grasping, stroking, 
or palpating actions, and providing resistances of  
our own through our acts of  touch. Given the 
nature of  this bodily engagement with the world, 
it is very difficult to imagine that we simply represent 
the world through touch, or that a world of  objects 
is translated by touch into a tactile representation. 

     Only once we see this do we see that vision 
and the visible operate according to the same 
principle; that, in fact, “the palpation of  the eye 
is a remarkable variant” of  the tactile encounter 
with things, and vision does in fact participate in 
the sensible world as surely as does touch. For at 

   In the 
ontology of 

the flesh, the 
visual and 
the tactile 

are bound up 
in a general 

sensing which is 
embedded in the 

‘flesh of the 
world’

“

”



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a fundamental level, as the example of  tactility demonstrates, this is just 
what it is to sense: to make contact with the world, to be among things 
rather than before them. After all, I am visible as a seeing thing, even if  
by physiological circumstance I am not directly visible as a seeing thing 
to myself; as Merleau-Ponty notes, “[i]t is a marvel too little noticed that 
every movement of  my eyes—even more, every displacement of  my body 
—has its place in the same visible universe that I itemize and explore with 
them.”9 Just as it is only by belonging to the world of  touchable things that 
the hand is able to feel, so the eyes can only see by virtue of  their being 
within a visible world.

     So we see that this sort of  belonging is characteristic of  sensing in 
general; that the sensible world is open to us as sensing beings because 
of  our chiasmic relation to it from within—an active participation, a 
movement that always takes us beyond ourselves in the incessant palpation 
of  our surroundings. And, as actions are carried out by our whole moving, 
sensing body, rather than merely any isolated sense, the unity of  the body 
is entailed in any sensory experience. The senses interpolate each other, 
and operate according to each other’s modes. Thus we see the tactile 
qualities and feel the visible qualities of  things; or as Merleau-Ponty puts 
it “there is encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched 
and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible, which is 
encrusted in it, as, conversely, the tangible itself  is not a nothingness of  
visibility, is not without visual existence.”10 The chiasm, in which sensing 
and sensible are intertwined, also allows for the intertwining of  the senses 
with each other. As he notes elsewhere, “Cezanne said that one could see 
the velvetiness, the hardness, the softness, and even the odor of  objects. 
My perception is therefore not a sum of  visual, tactile and audible givens: 
I perceive in a total way with my whole being; I grasp a unique structure of  
the thing, a unique way of  being, which speaks to all my senses at once.”11

     To “see,” then, is to be intertwined through all our senses with the 
world around us. Vision therefore does not involve rendering a picture 
or representation of  the world, which would entail standing outside of  
it, at a distance. Merleau-Ponty takes Descartes’ Dioptrics as paradigmatic 
of  “thought that wants no longer to abide in the visible and so decides 
to reconstruct it according to a model-in-thought.”12 On the Cartesian 
view, there is a separation between “the thing itself ” outside us and that 
which occurs for the mind, “that other thing which is only reflected light 
rays and which happens to have an ordered correspondence with the real 
thing.”13 Such a conception leads Descartes to hold outline and form as 
most essential in engravings, for they “present the object by its outside, or 



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its envelope” in contrast to which coloring is merely 
incidental decoration.14

     But we don’t perceive the world from the 
outside, we perceive it—and can only perceive it— 
by participating in it. In being “[i]mmersed in the 
visible by his body, itself  visible, the see-er does not 
appropriate what he sees; he merely approaches it 
by looking, he opens onto the world.”15 In contrast 
to Cartesian representationalism, “I do not see 
[space] according to its exterior envelope; I live 
it from the inside.”16 For the painting that moves 
us is not the one that most accurately renders the 
form of  the object, but that which binds us with the 
things of  the world, in which the world has been 
allowed to express itself  through the expressive 
body of  the painter. Merleau-Ponty quotes Klee, 
who says of  artistic expression, “A certain fire wills 
to live; it wakes. Working its way along the hand’s 
conductor, it reaches the canvas and invades it; then, 
a leaping spark, it arcs the gap in the circle it was to 
trace: the return to the eye, and beyond.”17 Being 
expresses itself  in a gesture that ties together the 
individual and the world such that “it is impossible 
to say that here nature ends and the human being 
or expression begins.”18 It is in the resonances that 
leap from the world to inhabit the artist, course 
through her and emerge back into the world again, 
that artistic expression is achieved. Though the 
thought is inspired by painting, the principle applies 
to experience generally: it is through chiasmic 
participation in the world through moving acts 
of  perception and gestures of  expression, that 
meaningful inhabitation is accomplished.

Heinrich Wölfflin and architecture as participation in the 
world

If  we don’t presuppose, as so much of  Western 
thought has, a representationalism that places the 
subject and the world in ontological opposition 
to each other, and instead start from the 

we see the 
tactile 

qualities and 
feel the visible 

qualities of 
things

“

”



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Merleau-Pontian perspective that, as fleshy beings, we are part of  the world 
and belong to it, what will be the consequences for how we conceive the 
built environment? Rachel McCann, in applying the lessons of  Merleau-
Ponty’s later philosophy, speaks of  architecture as a “carnal echo,” which 
emphasizes that the power of  an architectural work emerges from the 
intertwining of  human beings with their surroundings.19 We can see in the 
analysis by the 19th century art historian Heinrich Wölfflin that, in fact, 
traditional Western architecture has been motivated, consciously or not, 
by a logic of  carnality.

     In “Prolegomena to a Psychology of  Architecture,” Wölfflin argued 
that the forms that had defined traditional architecture since classical times 
reflected the ways in which we relate to the world as embodied beings, 
especially through what we would now call a proprioceptive sense. What 
had sometimes been reduced, in Wölfflin’s estimation, to a question of  
being “pleasing to the eye,” was in fact a question of  how we relate to 
structures as motile upright creatures. As he wrote, “physical forms possess 
a character only because we ourselves possess a body. If  we were purely 
visual beings, we would always be denied an aesthetic judgment of  the 
physical world. But as human beings with a body that teaches us the nature 
of  gravity, contraction, strength, and so on, we gather the experience that 
enables us to identify with the conditions of  other forms.”20

     Wölfflin is giving expression here to an idea that is consonant with the 
fact that we do not stand before the world as cognizing observers, but 
belong to it as participants. For our manner of  understanding structures 
is not purely conceptual; rather, it proceeds from our own experience as 
fleshy beings with our own mass and weight. As he writes, “we read our 
own image into all phenomena. We expect everything to possess what we 
know to be the conditions of  our own well-being.”21 We understand the 
physical world in terms of  the categories we share with it; so, for instance, 
we “have carried loads and experienced pressure and counterpressure, we 
have collapsed to the ground when we no longer had the strength to resist 
the downward pull of  our own bodies, and that is why we can appreciate 
the noble serenity of  a column and understand the tendency of  all matter 
to spread out formlessly on the ground.”22

     This natural experience of  weight, of  the downward pull that roots 
us and that is both condition and constraint for our upright, vertical 
postures, is expressed in traditional architecture not just in the column, 
but also, for instance, in the use of  rustication at the lower portions of  
buildings. By emphasizing the mass of  materials, rustication produces a 
sense of  bottom-heavy stability, a sense that is not just established visually, 



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but proprioceptively, involving our own sense of  
balance, and a sense of  movement as well. Similarly, 
arches over doors and windows discharge the 
weight of  materials around the apertures so that 
they protect movement (entrance and egress of  our 
bodies, or even just of  our line of  sight) without being 
oppressive, while elements conveying a freer sense 
of  movement, expressiveness, and even whimsy are 
typical of  the upper portions of  buildings built in 
traditional Western styles. This logic is expressed 
in Louis Sullivan’s prescriptions for office building 
design, for instance, which Kent Bloomer describes 
as “an expression of  taut firmness at the bottom, 
an expression of  efflorescence and ornament at the 
top,” allowing the building as a whole to express an 
“upward awakening.”23

     For Wölfflin, “[o]ur own bodily organization is 
the form through which we apprehend everything 
physical.”24 This apprehension, he claims, is a sort 
of  empathy, and it is self-evident in our relations 
to others: children can’t see someone cry without 
bursting into tears themselves; people adopt the 
expressions of  strangers around them; a person 
who is hoarse speaks and we clear our own 
throats.25 But it extends as well to our interactions 
with objects, structures, and everything else in our 
world as a general characteristic of  our experience. 
Hence, for instance, an architectural asymmetry “is 
often experienced as physical pain, as if  a limb were 
missing or injured.”26

    There is thus an anthropomorphism that is 
essential to the meaning of  structural forms – an 
anthropomorphism that is present whether we 
will it to be there or not.27 We read the relation 
of  height to width in a building, for instance, as 
a relation between a sense of  ascent and repose. 
This kinesthetic sense in turn connotes a whole 
personality: an upright orientation is vital, active, 
dignified. A horizontally-oriented building, on the 
other hand, may connote restfulness or calm (or 

        There 
is thus an 

anthropomorphism 
that is essential 

to the meaning 
of structural 

forms – an 
anthropomorphism 

that is present 
whether we will it 

to be there or not”

“



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perhaps inertia and sloth – and whether the former sense is evoked or the 
latter we might chalk up to the quality of  the design). The perfect square, 
meanwhile, is distinctive for lacking a clear anthropomorphic orientation: 
it “is called bulky, heavy, contented, plain, good-natured, stupid… We can 
not tell if  the body is reclining or standing.”28

     Think of  what it means, in this light, to say that a building “faces” the 
street, or that we stand at the “foot” of  the stairs leading up to the entrance, 
or that, as Juhani Pallasmaa says, “[t]he door handle is the handshake of  the 
building.”29 Structures lend themselves to these metaphors because they 
reflect us back upon ourselves through a close and profound resonance. 
A door or window that has a vertical orientation, for instance, frames 
the upright form of  the human body, an effect that may be emphasized 
through the use of  arches or transom windows that extend and emphasize 
headspace: every aperture is a kind of  potential aedicule. The picture 
windows that became popular in the postwar period, on the other hand, 
suggest a supine form, and thus bear a sensation of  inertness. Or think 
again of  how the freest movement of  energies—the rhythmic and organic 
character of  foliated ornamentation, for instance—are natural to the 
upper portions of  buildings in traditional architecture, a reflection of  the 
fact that, as Wölfflin points out, the most expressive part of  the human 
body is the head.30 If, on the other hand, a design is indifferent with regard 
to this anthropomorphizing tendency, we may read it as “turning its back 
on us,” seeming “cold” or “lifeless,” being orientationally “indecisive,” 
as the form of  the square is for Wölfflin; that is to say, we imbue the 
meaning of  structures with human characteristics, even if  they are only 
notable for their absence. Whatever these characteristics might be, they 
solicit us to respond in an embodied way, much like a person who engages 
us in a conversation, with their particular tone and body language and so 
forth. The question of  whether a structure solicits a disposition in us that 
enhances our sense of  bodily well-being is the question of  whether that 
structure is dignifying.

     We can reflect again on the flesh of  the world from the Merleau-
Pontian perspective. Consider the flesh of  buildings: in their weighty mass, 
their anthropomorphic form, and not least their function as places of  
human inhabitation, they are chiasmically intertwined with our own flesh. 
They are organic in this sense, and organic in this specifically human way: 
as products of  thought and language (which are themselves expressions 
of  bodily capacities, from the Merleau-Pontian perspective), they 
express human ideas, the carnal existence of  those ideas made manifest 
in the material world, and made manifest precisely for the sake of  our 



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own inhabitation in the world. For 
this reason, the flesh of  architecture 
perhaps gives clearest expression to 
what it means to belong to the world, 
to participate in it, to continue into it 
and to be a continuation of  it. 

     The architect Peter Zumthor 
describes architecture as “a kind of  
anatomy... Really, I mean the word 
<body> quite literally. It’s like our own 
bodies with their anatomy and things 
we can’t see and skin covering us—
that’s what architecture means to me 
and that’s how I try to think about it. 
As a bodily mass, a membrane, a fabric, 
a kind of  covering, cloth, velvet, silk, all 
around me. The body! Not the idea of  
the body – the body itself! A body that 
can touch me.”31 Zumthor conceives 
of  architecture as an extension of  our 
bodily organization into the world. 
(Figure 1) But architecture is also the 
manner in which the world draws us to 
inhabit it. And in this intertwining of  
body and world is the possibility of  a 
certain kind of  expression, an elevation 
of  the experience of  inhabitation as such.

Concluding remarks

  The chiasm, Merleau-Ponty says, is “an 
exchange between me and the world, between the 
phenomenal body and the ‘objective’ body, between 
the perceiving and the perceived,”32 and the flesh is 
the “element”33 in which the chiasmic intertwining 
between the body and the world takes place. Such an 
ontological perspective lends credence to Wölfflin’s 
analysis of  the bodily logic of  traditional Western 
architecture: if  our bodies participate in the world 
from within, rather than across the distance that 
would separate an ontologically distinct subject and 

Figure 1: Wachendorf 
Feldkapelle interior, by 

Peter Zumthor



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object, then it would make sense to understand architecture – the practice 
of  providing the means of  inhabitation for human bodies – as expressing 
the “basic conditions of  organic life;”34 that is, as being organized 
according to the same principles as those by which our bodily experience 
is organized. Moreover, when Wölfflin’s treatment of  architecture is cast 
in terms of  Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology (a philosophical project which, 
of  course, he antedates by more than half  a century), it can help us to 
conceive just what it would mean to think about – and do – architecture 
from such an ontological orientation.

     This orientation can help to diagnose a particular peril of  contemporary 
architectural practice: the emphasis on the conceptual over the concretely 
material. Pallasmaa has argued that over the last century, architecture has 
increasingly become “an art form of  instant visual image.”35 In adopting 
this purely visual disposition, we are rendering our structures “repulsively 
flat, sharp-edged, immaterial, unreal.”36 This disposition is expressed 
especially in a commitment to abstract form, an uncanny echo of  the 
Cartesian “model-in-thought” that Merleau-Ponty criticizes.37 The over-
emphasis on the visual, absent a synesthetic engagement with the other 
senses, is emblematic of  a dualistic separation between the object outside 
of  us and our mental experience of  that object. What leads Descartes to 
regard outline and form as the most essential elements in engravings also 
leads architects toward the supremacy of  the purely visual. 

     Consider, as an example of  the trend, Rafael Viñoly’s comment that 
his recent prominent addition to the New York skyline, 432 Park Avenue, 
(Figure 2) is based on “the purest geometric form: the square… The body 
of  432 Park Avenue remains abstract and radical – a pure product of  
the grid.”38 The elevation of  geometrical abstraction as an aesthetic ideal 
stands in telling contrast to Wölfflin’s characterization of  the square as 
“bulky, heavy, contented, plain, good-natured, stupid.” What appeals to 
Viñoly from a perspective of  intellectual abstraction is indecisive and 
“stupid” when considered from a perspective of  embodied engagement.

     This tendency is exacerbated by something Loureiro has pointed out: 
that the technologies employed in architectural design have increasingly 
subsumed the creative and poetic craft of  the architect in such a way 
as to elevate the visual image of  the architectural work above the built 
work itself. “Now,” he writes, “it is the picture that generates the building. 
Photo-realistic 3D renderings… are ‘models for photographs,’ and not 
depictions of  architectural ideas.”39 Meanwhile, Rob Imrie has found that 
discussion of  the body is all but absent in architectural education, and in 
the thinking of  many contemporary architects.40 



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     But if  we regard the human 
body as participating in the 
flesh of  the world, and thus 
as intertwined with things, 
including architectural works 
which are so essential to our 
experience of  inhabitation in 
the world, we will acknowledge 
that this intertwining occurs 
through all the senses, and 
that these senses seek out, 
in Wölfflin’s phrase, “the 
conditions of  our own well-
being.”41 We might find the 
conditions for well-being in 
ornament, for instance, which 
can play such an important 
role in the kinesthetic sense 
of  an “upward awakening” in 
a building, to use Bloomer’s 
phrase. We might find it, as 
well, in the use of  natural 
materials which integrate a 
haptic sense; as Pallasmaa 
says, “stone, brick, and 
wood… allow the gaze to 
penetrate their surfaces and… enable us to become 
convinced of  the veracity of  matter.” The textures 
of  these materials are of  the natural world. They 
have a depth that is lacking in concrete and glass: 
“Natural material expresses its age and history as 
well as the tale of  its birth and human use.”42 These 
materials take us beyond the visual, beyond the 
bird’s-eye view of  the tabletop architectural model 
and the flat forms of  geometrical abstraction, into 
that synesthesia that characterizes our sense of  
belonging as participants in the world.

     Of  course, Wölfflin was writing in the 19th 
century, and could speak of  the principles of  Western 
architectural design as adhering to a generally 
continuous tradition going back to classical times. 

figure 2: 432 Park Avenue, 
New York



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But I am not sugggesting that the lesson to draw here is that architecture 
needs to return to its traditional forms to recoup a sense of  multisensory 
engagement and of  participation between human beings and the built 
environment. If  the various modernisms and post-modernisms that have 
arisen since Wölfflin’s time have tended toward obliviousness with regard 
to this function of  architecture, by ceaselessly challenging convention they 
have also opened up the field to as many new architectural possibilities as 
can be imagined. Architects like Pallasmaa, Zumthor, Steven Holl, and 
many others have found in this realm of  possibilities new ways of  giving 
expression to the idea of  architecture as participation in the world. As 
varied and heterogeneous as embodied experience is, these possibilities 
will surely never be exhausted.

     So, finally, we might find the conditions for our well-being by asking a 
new range of  questions. Rather than asking what a work of  architecture 
represents, we can ask: what spirit of  participation in the world does it 
elicit, and how does this relate to the purpose of  the structure?  How does 
it engage us through all of  our senses? What ideas are expressed through 
the body? To ask such questions is to ask how architecture performs its 
essential function: to structure our inhabitation of  the world. It is also, 
notably, to acknowledge an ethical dimension intrinsic to architecture. For 
if  architecture is properly attentive to this function, then it is attentive to 
producing well-being for every human. There could be no more ethical a 
task. 

Endnotes

1. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis, 
trans (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 200.
2. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics 
Reader, Johnson, Galen A. and Michael B. Smith, eds. (Evanston: 
Northwestern University Press, 1993), 125.
3. Ibid., 133.
4. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 133.
5. Perhaps we only understand the notion of  resistance in things in the 
world because we experience it as bodies. Merleau-Ponty describes the 
body as an “exemplar sensible, which offers to him who inhabits it and 
senses it the wherewithal to sense everything that resembles himself  on 
the outside” (Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 135). These comments 
suggest a kind of  bodily logic which we extend or project onto the world, 
and by which we come to understand the world, an idea that resonates with 
Wölfflin’s theories on architecture.



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6. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Philosopher and 
His Shadow,” in Signs. (Chicago: Northwestern 
University Press, 1964), 166-7.
7. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 123.
8. Ibid., 215.
9. Ibid., 134.
10. Ibid.
11. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Film and the 
New Psychology,” in Signs, Richard C. McCleary, 
trans. (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 
1964), 49-50.
12. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 130.
13. Ibid., 131.
14. Ibid., 133.
15. Ibid., 124.
16. Ibid., 138.
17. Ibid., 147. 
18. Ibid.
19. McCann, Rachel. “Entwining the Body and 
the World: Architectural Design and Experience 
in the Light of  ‘Eye and Mind’,” in Intertwinings: 
Interdisciplinary Encounters with Merleau-Ponty, Gail 
Weiss, ed. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 267.
20. Wölfflin, Heinrich. “Prolegomena to a 
Psychology of  Architecture,” in Empathy, Form, and 
Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873-1893, Harry 
Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, trans. 
(New York: Getty Center for the History of  Art and 
the Humanities, 1994), 151.
21. Ibid., 152.
22. Ibid., 151.
23. Bloomer, Kent. The Nature of  Ornament. (New 
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), 83. 
Ironically, the modernists’ cri de coeur that form must 
follow function derives from Sullivan’s declaration 
that “shape, form, outward expression, design, or 
whatever we may choose of  the tall office building 
should in the very nature of  things follow the 
functions of  the building” (Sullivan, Louis. “The 
Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” in 
Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings, (New York: 



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in

Dover, 1979), 208.). Sullivan’s point was that visual functionality could 
be enhanced by ornament, not that any expression that wasn’t structurally 
necessitated ought to be suppressed.
24. Wölfflin., “Prolegomena,” 157-8.
25. Ibid., 156.
26. Ibid., 155. So ubiquitous is the desire to find symmetry in things, Wölfflin 
observes, that in the case of  that rare object that on the face of  it defies 
symmetry – the one-handled mug – we unconsciously treat the handle as 
the “back” of  the mug, so that a lateral symmetry is maintained (Ibid., 164).
27. This anthropomorphism extends to other objects as well, and even to 
geographical regions: Yi-Fu Tuan notes that cities give the impression of  
having a front and a back, and “[m]ost people in the United States probably 
regard the northeastern seaboard as the nation’s front” (Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space 
and Place: The Perspective of  Experience. (Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota 
Press, 1977), 42).
28. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena,” 168.
29. Pallasmaa, Juhani. “An Architecture of  the Seven Senses,” in Questions of  
Perception: Phenomenology of  Architecture, Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Alberto 
Perez-Gomez. (New York: William Stout, 2006), 33.
30. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena,” 176.
31. Zumthor, Peter. Atmospheres, 11. Accessed 
July 11, 2015. http://ebookbrowsee. net/gdoc.
php?id=466463785&url=982c587b925fe3103a612676616e5bd.
32. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 215.
33. Ibid., 139.
34. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena,” 160. Though Wölfflin is concerned with 
Western architecture, it would be interesting to apply his insights to non-
Western traditions.
35. Pallasmaa, Juhani. “Hapticity and Time,” Architectural Review 207 (2000). 
See also his argument in Eyes of  the Skin (London: Academy Editions, 1996).
36. Pallasmaa, “Seven Senses,” 29.
37. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 134.
38. Garutti, Francesco. “Rafael Viñoly/432 Park Avenue/New York,” 
Abitare, June 2013.
39. Loureira, Felipe Guimarães de Souza Fernandes. “The Image in Power: 
Vilém Flusser and the Craft of  Architecture,” Architecture Philosophy 1(2) 
(2015): 222.
40. Imrie, Rob. “Architects’ Conceptions of  the Human Body,” Environment 
and Planning D: Society and Space, 21 (2003), 47-65.
41. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena,” 152.
42. Pallasmaa, “Seven Senses,” 29.


