The Finnish architect and thinker Juhani Pallasmaa has established himself as one of the significant figures in the field of architectural practice and theory. The Twelve Essays on Man, Art, and Architecture is a collection of his representative texts that spans four decades, capturing the key axes of his thought: Pallasmaa becomes an advocate of a phenomenology of architecture, viewing architecture through the consciousness that experiences it, as a method that seeks the inner language of the building.
He advocates for an architecture that humans experience with all their senses, and not just with their sight; opposing the addictive and hegemonic function of the eye, he proposes a broader physical dimension, according to which even the gaze touches, caresses, embraces, and captures.
Pallasmaa criticizes the dominant trends of contemporary architecture—the commodification of buildings, the obsessive pursuit of originality and avant-garde, the hegemony of the market image—emphasizing the necessity of experiential dialogue with tradition, the quest for existential depth and spirituality, interaction with the environment, and extolling concepts such as memory, empathy, solidarity, spatiality and locality, structure, emotion, and experience.
