Multisensory Landscape Design

A Designer's Guide for Seeing

Daniel Roehr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780429996733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Design

The interaction of our bodies in space is intrinsically linked to the ways in which we design. In spatial design we tend to focus on solely the visual, often treating it as the dominant sense while ignoring the other four senses: touch, sound, smell, taste. While research has been carried out on the perception of multisensorial experiences and design in the last two decades, there is no combined resource on how to address multisensory design in landscape architecture, architecture, urban and environmental design. This is a textbook for design students, professionals, and educators to develop multisensorial literacy. This book is the first of its kind, providing introductions on each of the five senses, along with exercises that demonstrate how to observe, record, and visualize them. It explores current design school pedagogy, and how we might imagine a more mindful way of teaching. The book is a foundational resource for students, professionals, and instructors to understand and ultimately create multisensorial spaces that are inclusive for all. This book imagines a world where seeing is redefined in a way that encompasses all of the senses—not just the visual.

Chapter 1 From Visual to Multisensorial Literacy

A Redefinition of Seeing

The ways one moves and interacts in space are inherent considerations in spatial design. When first learning about spatial design, it is imperative that students begin to understand the spatial experience. Visual literacy and multisensorial literacy are key to deeply understanding spatial design, and the advent of digital technology in design disciplines has led to a de-emphasis in the teaching of these skills in current design pedagogy. Technology has been immensely powerful in the ways that designers can analyze and represent the world, but it has also arguably numbed us from using our bodies and senses to design. While we recognize the importance of digital technology to designers today, we are calling for new and seasoned designers to learn to be physically present again—to let our bodies be the recording devices. We are also calling for a renewed definition of seeing, one which encompasses all of the senses—not just the visual.

Why is it that we have become singularly focused on the visual? Sight has dominated the hierarchy of the senses in Western thought since ancient Greece, where philosophers elevated it as the highest sense. Greek architecture was designed for the “pleasure of the eye” (Pallasmaa, 2005, p. 26). This train of thought continued throughout the Renaissance, when the five senses were ranked, with vision being the paramount sense and touch considered of “least importance” (Pallasmaa, 2005, p. 15). The invention of linear perspective drawing during the Renaissance made the eye the “center point of the perceptual world” (Pallasmaa, 2005, p. 16). Prior to the Renaissance, the architect was heavily involved in a project from its conception to its construction. This practice shifted during this period, when a separation was made possible between the drawing and the construction, allowing “for more abstract thought and experimentation, as clearly risks are straightforward on paper” (Biddulph, 2014, p. 282). The constructed visual representation of art and architecture during the Renaissance enforced the dominance of sight over the other senses. The observer was viewing intricately constructed images, but not feeling them—there was no reference to, or space for, the other senses. We are still heavily influenced by the eye today—as our entire world is essentially mediated by screens—in advertisements, maps, and the printed word. We are completely immersed in the visual. Our other senses continue to play a more subconscious and inhibited role in the Western world, with some exceptions.

1.1 Gestural drawings, drawn by the author, 2019

A child first learns to “see” through touch before using their eyes, oftentimes grabbing and placing a new object in their mouth to experience how it feels. They learn to “see” visual images later on, and later still can begin to synthesize and express these sensory feelings. The art critic John Berger wrote “seeing comes before words, the child recognizes before it can speak” (1972, p. 7). Our bodies are vessels that hold immense power to perceive and engage with the world in a myriad of ways. They have the capacity to physically store emotions and memories, and vividly connect us to space through many senses if we are mindful enough to allow for it. It is for these reasons that seeing should be re-framed as a multisensorial experience. Our bodies should be treated as the first recording device of our design process. The architect Juhani Pallasmaa wrote “every touching experience of architecture is multi-sensory; qualities of space, matter and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle” (2005, p. 41). A well-designed space will engage with all of the senses—but how can we do that when we are taught only to see with our eyes?

After the multisensorial experience comes perception, which is the conscious outcome of this experience. Many designers, scientists, and scholars have written on seeing and perception, and it becomes apparent that it is not the act of sight alone which makes us physically perceive the world, but a holistic multisensorial process. In Christopher Tilley and Wayne Bennett’s book Body and Image, the authors note how perception “is a recording of sensations brought about by objects that are external to the mind” (2008, p. 22). Perception also has an element of memory and emotion to it—as our bodies engage with a space, our minds are recalling memories and sensations (Tilley & Bennett, 2008, p. 22; Swailes, 2016, p. 23). All acts of perception are deeply personal, as they involve our corporeal experience. With our perceptions and memories come emotions (Swailes, 2016, p. 34). For example, the experience of certain smells on a site can affect us emotionally, recalling a past memory of the same smell during a happy or sad time.

Thus, seeing is not only the sight of the visual image, or a “retinal journey” as Pallasmaa describes it (2005, p. 12). Seeing is a corporeal, multisensorial experience that embodies the sensation of the present environment, combined with memories of previously experienced sounds, smells, touch, tastes, and visuals. Seeing is a complex and holistic bodily experience and should be acknowledged as such in design practice and education.

1.2 Memory drawing of the Okanagan Valley, Canada, drawn by the author, 2019

The Importance of Seeing for Designers

Seeing the environment and understanding our perceptions of it are important in the design process. It is the foundation of designing, and it can be learned and practiced. But as suggested above, the visual experience should not be the only consideration. All five senses should create a holistic multisensorial experience and process of perception for designing.

Juhani Pallasmaa has been an advocate for understanding multisensorial perception in teaching and practicing architectural design throughout his extensive professional and academic career. He recognizes that as designers our body and mind are at the forefront of how we design—our senses piece together a framework to understand the world. Our relationship with the world cannot be removed from how we design spaces. Good design “integrates physical and mental structures” (Pallasmaa, 2015, p. 12). It is important for us as designers to recognize that our bodies, and in particular our senses, are recording mechanisms that can help guide us as we absorb and create. Therefore, it is important that educators develop more opportunities to practice this mindfulness in design education.

Doing fieldwork has not only been on the decline in design, but also in other disciplines such as archeology and anthropology “due to [expanded possibilities for] desk work and remotely gathered and interpreted information” (Swailes, 2016, p. 24). At the time of writing this book, during a global pandemic, this dynamic has increasingly become the norm. Photography and video have become the visual observation and recording tools in the field for landscape architecture, architecture, and urban design, “shifting the field emphasis from analytical sketching to visual survey” (Swailes, 2016, p. 24). What is missing is the bodily experience; the conscious engagement of the five senses. Being in the field initiates a wider range of sensations apart from visuals, and “a multisensorial experience informs perception” (Swailes, 2016, p. 34).

Site immersion consciously uses all the senses to engage deeply with a site. This could include spending extensive periods of time observing and listening to the sounds of different birds to determine if the site is ecologically healthy, or analyzing the smells of a specific area and their source to determine if the site is pleasant to use. Remote observation often misses out on the personal perception and emotional interpretation of a site. Field experience and notation (visual notes diagrammed or drawn, written, photographed, or sound and video recorded) initiates a deliberate thinking process on site and when processing recorded information at the desk (Swailes, 2016, p. 37). Site immersion in the environment, writes Swailes, “is inevitably accompanied by factors we cannot predict, and it is this engagement with chance, as well as degrees of control, that makes fieldwork a good proxy for the lived landscape experience of others” (Swailes, 2016, p. 35). Site immersion is multisensorial and initiates unforeseen sensations, experiences, and emotions, leading to a holistic site understanding.

Visiting a project site and its context regularly before and during the design process is important; with every visit new experiences, sensations, and conditions will be discovered. Those discoveries might change the initial perception of the site and alter the problem-solving strategies during the design process. Site immersion is part of the design process—allowing for early design thoughts to form immediately or be picked up later. Chapter 5 describes in detail why this is important when teaching design studios.

Teaching Seeing in Today’s Context

When learning to design for the environment, students need to gradually understand the spatial experience—how to move through, interact with, and read space—from small to large scale. The ability to read space is paramount in early design education. In contemporary design pedagogy, we teach this skill through visual literacy, where students are taught to see the world around them and to understand, analyze, and interpret these observations visually. The visual meaning is normally recorded by referential and analytical annotated sketches and drawings (see Chapter 3), diagrams, collages, and cardboard models. However, in the packed syllabi of design programs today, multisensorial literacy—especially through hand drawing, is on the decline.

This book suggests an all-senses, inclusive, pedagogical point of view acknowledging that sight has historically been the main sensory focus in design teaching. Past research and publications on visual literacy in design focus mainly on referring to what we see before us, recording it through drawing and visual note taking. Designers have established definitions for visual, but not for multisensorial literacy. In Visual Notes for Architects and Designers, Norman Crowe and Paul Laseau view visual literacy as both “visual acuity and visual expression” where “visual acuity is an intense ability to see information or multiple messages in one’s environment with clarity and accuracy” and “visual expression is the ability to initiate visual messages” (2012, p. 7). The ability to see information or multiple messages includes hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching, but this has not explicitly been taught in design education nor has it been addressed in their book. Catherine Dee’s influential Form and Fabric in Landscape Architecture is one of the first books in landscape architecture which expands its focus beyond sight alone. Dee acknowledges what others take for granted; that “we tend to underestimate the strength of influences of other senses on our experience of landscape” (Dee, 2001, p. 191). She suggests that “the senses together enable us to make sense of place” (Dee, 2001, p. 191). Despite these observations being made about the predominance that the visual holds, design education continues to focus on sight (Have & van den Toorn, 2012, p. 74). In this book, we suggest removing this hierarchical thinking and paying equal attention to each of the main senses while recording and analyzing a site. This strategy will reduce visual presumptions and treat every design problem as a lived experience and not just a series of visual compositions.

Exploring the use of hand drawing to develop visual literacy is no longer emphasized in design schools in the same way that it was during the times of the Bauhaus or the École des Beaux Arts. Current theory has developed two reasons for why this is: 1) hand drawing and visual literacy are both skills that are now treated as “innate skill” (Moore, 2003, p. 34), and 2) the advent of new technology has led students and educators to emphasize the learning of new software over learning more conventional modes of design like hand drawing, and many design programs have shifted their curriculum to accommodate for that.

Design instructors perceive visual literacy as something that students are expected to have before entering the design world. This belief has created a system in which new design thinkers can be overwhelmed when attempting to teach themselves a skill that is no longer extensively taught in the architectural curriculum. The ability to draw has been seen by designers in tandem with visual literacy, and with it the notion that a student inherently knows how to draw prior to even entering a design program. While sketching will take place in...