The Ambiguity of Visual Perception and Cloudiness in SANAA’s Architecture

Abstract

A new strand of distinctive contemporary Japanese architecture represented by SANAA’s work is recognized as an extreme expression of materiality and formal austerity. SANAA’s architecture could easily be misunderstood as merely dematerialized abstract space, the outcome of an idealized vision. By analyzing the materiality and luminance quality of the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland (2010) and the Louvre-Lens Museum in Lens, France (2012), this paper investigates the visual experience in SANAA’s work. It argues that visual perception within the buildings is profoundly ambiguous, and the ambiguous perception of space encourages active bodily engagement to explore and confirm that perception.

Keywords:

• SANAA
• visual system
• cloudiness
• materiality
• whiteness
• thinness
• luminance
• ambiguity
• embodied experience

Notes

1. Hugh Campbell, “Artists of the Floating World: SANAA, Niedermayr and the Construction of Atmosphere,” Architectural Design: Interior Atmospheres 78, no. 3 (2008): 92–95.

2. Cristina Diaz Moreno and Efren Garcia Grinda, “océano de aire”, El Croquis Sanaa, Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, 1998–2004 122 (2004): 31.

3. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 12.

4. Christian Borch, ed., Architectural Atmosphere (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 2014), 39.

5. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London, UK: Continuum, 2003).

6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 493.

7. Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (New York, NY: Abrams, 2002), 38.

8. Moreno and Grinda, “océano de aire”, 27.

9. Mark Wigley, “How Thin is Thin,” El Croquis SANAA 2011–2015, vol. 179–180 (2015): 37.

10. Campbell, “Artists of the Floating World,” 92–95.

11. Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, JA 35-Autumn 1999 Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nichizawa (Tokyo, Japan: Shinkenchiku-Sha, 1999), 4.

12. Beatriz Colomina,“Unclear Visions,” El Croquis SANAA 2011–2015, vol. 179–180 (Madrid: El Croquis Editorial, 2015), 395.

13. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London, UK; New York, NY: Routledge, 1962), 322–323.

14. Jonathan Hale, Merleau-Ponty for Architects (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 21.

15. David Morris, The Sense of Space (New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), VIII.

16. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986), 227.

17. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas, TX: The Pegasus Foundation, 1983), 1.

18. Wigley, “How Thin is Thin,” 26–39.

19. Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today (London, UK: The Architectural Press, 1987), 207.

20. Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA; London, UK: MIT Press, 1995), 15.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of the Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions of China under Grant [18KJB560018].

Notes on contributors

Jing Yang

Jing Yang is a lecturer at the Department of Architecture, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China. She holds a PhD in architecture at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on architectural theory and criticism; the relationship between architecture and the body; materiality and perception. Besides academic work, she practiced in the China Southwest Architectural Design and Research Institute Corp. Ltd. in Chengdu and Zhong Dekun Studio in Southeast University, Nanjing.