Something "old" and something "new"

In this post, two quite crutial short books or pamplets are introduced: Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook and Juhani Pallasmaa's The Eyes of the Skin. Both works are foundation knowledge in architectural studies, so if you have not yet been aquainted to them yet, this semester gives a possibility for re-viewing.

The Pedagogical Sketchbook by Paul Klee is an intuitive art investigation of dynamic principles in visual arts from his teaching at the Bauhaus Shool in the 1920's. Klee takes his students on an ‘adventure in seeing’ guiding them step-by-step through a challenging conceptual framework. Objects are rendered in a complex relation to physical and intellectual space concepts. It is an exercise in modern art thinking. In her introduction to the book, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy divides the book into 4 different parts corresponding to the 4 conceptual frameworks. Each framework is illustrated by intricate drawings (mixture of what looks like creative arithmetic or geometry sketches, scribbles and mental notes).

The Eyes of the Skin is the "gentle manifesto" that grew out of the Finnish architect, teacher, philosopher, and designer Juhani Pallasmaa's concern about the "dominance of vision and the suppression of other senses in the way architecture was taught, conceived and critiqued." Originally published in 1996, this influential pocket-sized book ( 12 x 21 cm, Pallasmaa's essay is only 60 pages). Pallasmaa's call for a non-ocular-centric architecture that responds to existential human questions—rather than one weighted down by discourse for its own sake—is timeless.

Both books are available at the BAS library. Otherwise below are two links to .pdf downloads, reachable here (Klee) and here (Pallasmaa)