Sensory perception

In the introduction to Architectural Design and Composition, Steenbergen, Mihl and Reh observe that “the
architectonic composition is determined not only by physical, technical or constructional characteristics. The
composition must also be observable by sensory perception.”1 Why then, does sensory perception play such a
minor role in spatial design?
Again, a brief excursion in history can shed a light on this exclusion. Since Classical Greece, Western
culture associates experience primarily with seeing, and vision with intellect. Already Aristotle—the first to
differentiate between the five senses—did not hold sensory perception in high esteem. Of the senses, vision
was by far the most important, followed by hearing, and all senses were thought to be inferior to cognition. The
“lower” senses of smell, taste and touch were deemed too base to hold any significance. Sight and hearing,
more abstract as senses, are more conducive to mental processes. The 18th-century philosopher Alexander
Baumgarten introduced the concept of aesthetics, a word derived from the Greek aesthesis [sensation].
Baumgarten reversed the hierarchy of sensory perception and cognition. For him aesthetics had primarily to do
with perception and sense perception was superior to the cognitive power of reason. However, his emphasis on
the sensuous disposition was quickly replaced by a taxonomy of “the five arts” —architecture, sculpture,
painting, music and poetry—the scope and criteria of which were delimited in terms of a dualism of vision and
hearing. In his Critique of Judgment (1790) Immanuel Kant replaced this dualism of vision and hearing by a
division into the arts of space and the arts of time and divorced aesthetics from perception altogether.2
Following Kant's definition of aesthetics, the apparent objectivity of visual perception has become the
standard, in as much that we scarcely even pay attention to any other perceptual paradigms. The methods of
the natural sciences remained leading in the aesthetic evaluation of the environment and in the thinking about
(landscape) architecture through most of the 20th century.3 The modernist view of architecture is abstract and
objective, and it is only a recent development to consider the sensory aspects of equal value.

Expressing the haptic properties of place

In the tale of Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, the blind Oedipus is led by his daughter Antigone. When he asks
where they are, she replies that where they now stand “… is surely sacred ground, where vines and laurels and
olive trees grow wild; a haunt of birds, where nightingales make music in the coverts.”4 In the ensuing

1 Clemens Maria Steenbergen, Henk Mihl and Wouter Reh. “Introduction: Design research, Research by Design.” In Architectural Design and
Composition, edited by Clemens Maria Steenbergen, Henk Mihl, Wouter Reh and Ferry Aerts (Bussum: THOTH Publishers, 2002), 17.
2 David Howes, Empire of the Senses; the sensual culture reader (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005), 245.
3 In this light a note on the notion of typology is in place. Originating in the 18th century as an attempt to ground architecture as a science

rather than an art, typology is based on the abstract, impersonal character of formal characteristics, bypassing the difficulty in verifying or
codifying the principles of sensory response. It is, however, exactly the sensory response, which determines the spatial typology of the garden.
A typology of the metropolitan garden is not complete without its sensory dimension.
4 Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, ed. and trans. Peter D. Arnott (Northbrook, Ill.: AHM Publishing, 1975), 5.
conversation it becomes clear that although she did not know the precise location, this combination of image
elements convinced her it was a sacred place: a temenos. She recognised the landscape archetype of the locus
amoenus, or pleasance: a beautiful, shaded natural site, with a spring or brook, tree grove, a flower meadow,
birdsong, breeze and shade5. In Greek as well as Roman literature a place with these characteristics would be
immediately recognised as being divine or special. It was a place of delight, in which smells, sounds, taste and
touch play a role alongside the visual aspect. Landscape is understood here as abundance, and the perception of
this fullness is multisensory, by means of immersing oneself in it. Landscape is associated with qualities that do
not belong to our eye-minded worldview: sound, smell, taste.
Experience of place is sensory experience, and is an essential component of landscape architectural
design. How can the sensorial qualities of place inform a designed composition? And vice versa, how can
composition inform the narrative of the place?
The interrelated and interdependent union of people and place that exists in enclosed spaces, together
with their reciprocal processes, is one of experience. Perceptual experience—which includes sensory elements,
as well as memory, knowledge, and the conditioning and habits of the body—affects the range as well as the
character of any environment.6 Whether or not people are aware of the sounds or smells that surround them, or
of the quality of the light, these are part of their habitat and enter into their perceptual experience. They are
constantly filtering the sensory input they receive, translating it into information and constructing meaning.
People read places through engaging all senses, sight as well as sound, smell, taste, balance and touch;
knowledge of place is a fact of (sensory) perception.7 Through the sensuous relationship of body-mind-
environment, multi-sensory perception creates an awareness of place. The perception of place is a complex
facility where one employs modes of perception ranging from the more direct and passive senses of smell, taste,
touch and sound to active visual perception combined with the indirect mode of symbolisation. People relate to
environments through all of their senses.8
This means that sensory conditions, the organisation of sensory experience, are inherent attributes of a
place. They contribute to the perceptual unity of the composition: they enhance the experience of the routing,
connecting and distinguishing the garden and its context, while tactile information supports, and is inextricably
part of, the image of the garden as a representation of the landscape.

Sensory super-nature
Multi-sensory quality is also an inherent aspect of the perception of super-nature. When creating conditions for
super-nature, these aspects are emphasised and the eye as the primary perceptive instrument seems to
become, not so much replaced, but rather supplemented by the other senses. The articulation of sound, light,
humidity, colour, texture, and height differences can create a multi-sensory experience, which emphasises the

5 The term locus amoenus was introduced by Virgil. Between 42 and 37 BC he wrote his Eclogues, a collection of ten pastoral poems. One of
these was Bucolics, where he describes the locus amoenus – literally “delightful place” – a glittering field of flowers, surrounded by trees
and graced with a limpid stream.
6 Arnold Berleant, Living in the Landscape (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 2-18.
7 Malcolm Quantrill, The Environmental Memory (New York: Schocken Books, 1987), 46.
8 For example, the 19th-century American philosopher Henry David Thoreau sought to understand his surroundings by “digesting” them with

all his senses, sampled through tasting fruits as well as roots, water, wood and resin, and even now soil scientists taste the difference
between soil types.
image of nature and involves a “feeling of being surrounded by or infused with an enveloping, engaging
tactility.”9 To be fully engaged with nature, means to do more than look and listen: we come into more visceral
and immediate contact with it. Addressing the proximate senses like smell and touch reduces the physical
distance between us and nature to zero, and nature, as the object of appreciation, dissolves as a separate and
distant thing, and becomes inextricably intermingled with the perceiver.10 Thus, stimulating a multi-sensory
perception of place and nature becomes a critical aspect of landscape architecture.

Perceiver and perceived

The object of landscape architectural design is the physical environment. Experiencing an environment is the
action of perceiving the physical and perceptual cues offered by the environment. Therefore, in order to include
sensory properties in design, it is instrumental to move from the subjective sensory perception to the sensory
properties of the designed space. The subject of design is not so much sensory perception—an asset of the
perceiver—but these sensory cues—an asset of the perceived environment.

Sensory perception
The physical environment can be considered a reservoir of sensory possibilities, giving substance and shape to
human relations and activities. Sensory experience is not to be separated into different senses, but takes place
through interrelated sensory systems.11 Space is perceived not only visually, but also—at least on the scale of the
garden—is a multi-sensory experience, where visual understanding of space is aided and complemented by
auditory, basic-orienting and haptic stimuli. For example, the reflection of sound provides basic information
about size and form of spaces (acoustics), and the amount of sound to enter from the surroundings discloses the
measure of enclosure of a space. Therefore, the task for design in the metropolitan environment becomes to
create conditions where perceptual awareness deepens our understanding of place.
Current architectural discourse has plentiful justification for taking into account a range of perceptual
sensibilities as informants for design. However, this accounting is difficult because the emphasis of (landscape)
architectural training is visual. “As opposed to the formal structures of cognition, the senses seem unreliable as
design parameters.”12 They are ephemeral, taking place in a moment in time and require human presence, and
are thus of a different order than the visual experience. In order to include the senses in any way in design, they
need to be linked to the formal/physical components, to be translated from attributes of the perceiver to
attributes of the perceived. After all, all experiences—smells, sounds, weight, temperature, texture—can be
localized in one perceptual space. Therefore, sensory conditions must not be seen separately, but are inherent

9 Cheryl Foster, “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56 (1998), 133.
10 Glenn Parsons, Aesthetics & Nature (Cambridge UK: Continuum, 2008), 86-87.
11 A significant step in dissolving the hierarchic relationship between the senses was made by James Gibson, a psychologist working in the

field of environmental perception, who broadened and refined the understanding that people perceive the world through five separate
senses into interrelated perceptual systems: the visual, the auditory, the taste-smell, the basic-orienting, and the haptic system. James J.
Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1966).
12 Joy Monice Malnar and Frank Vodvarka, “Introduction” in Sensory Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), x.
attributes of design, which serves as a sort of stimulus or catalyst for the transaction between people and the
landscape. The role of the design is to structure, serve and enhance experience.

Tactile scale
There exists a defined relation between space, distance and sensory perception. Each sensory system has a
different reach, and a different focus; some senses are “proximate,” others “distant.” Aural cues do give a sense
of distance, but sound presents a smaller world than what eyes can potentially see. In open space sounds do not
carry as far as light, and smell has an even narrower scope. Taste and touch can only be experienced upon direct
bodily contact. Because weight, pressure, and resistance are part of the habitual body experience, people
unconsciously identify with these characteristics in the forms they see.
In 1929, geographer Johannes Granö defined two realms of perception, the Fernsicht and the Nahsicht.
According to Granö, Fernsicht [distant view] is the part of our environment we mainly experience by vision: the
landscape, determined by the horizon. Nahsicht [proximity] is the environment we can experience with all our
senses.13 Bernard Lassus consistently makes the distinction between the tactile scale and the visual scale,
suggesting that the difference corresponds in many respects to the distinction between garden and landscape.14
Proximity makes one attentive to the material reality of earth, plants and water, like mass, grain,
fragility or suppleness. Visual experience on the other hand, distances us from tactile experience, it
dematerialises the world. When objects are out of reach, they lose their tactility and the world becomes pure
spectacle.15 In landscape architecture, the emphasis is on the Fernsicht: the part of our environment we mainly
experience by vision. Instead of the spatial system that reproduces the regime of monocular perspective, the
garden on the other hand, is a multisensory object, a space seen as well as felt, touched and heard. The
enclosure and proximity of the garden space puts an emphasis on its materiality, and the perception thereof:
haptic perception.

Haptic perception
The word “haptic” stems from the Greek verb haptein, which can be translated by “grasping”, to lay hold of
something—to touch, to cling, to fasten, to latch on to. It refers to the sense of touch, but it suggests a wider
experience of clutching and holding that does not stop with the hands but involves the entire body, and includes
temperature, pain, pressure and kinaesthesia (body sensation and movement of the muscles, tendons, and
joints, as in walking, climbing, swinging or rocking). Thus, haptic perception is the active exploration of surfaces
and objects, the result from how various sensibilities of the body respond to the body’s position in the physical
environment. The term evokes many different ways of contact, involvement, and participation, which can be
divided in two distinct faculties. It refers to pressure to the skin, or literally the contact between the body and its

13 Johannes G. Granö, Pure geography, ed. Olavi Granö and Anssi Paassi, trans. Malcolm Hicks (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins
University Press, 1997).
14 Bernard Lassus, The Landscape Approach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
15Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 119; Geoffrey Scott, The

Architecture of Humanism; A Study in the History of Taste (London: The Architectural Press, 1980), 230; Michel Conan, The Crazannes
Quarries by Bernard Lassus; An Essay Analyzing the Creation of a Landscape. Dumbarton Oaks. Contemporary Landscape Design Series I.
(Washington: Spacemaker Press, 2004), 19.
environment, and also to kinesthesis, the ability of the body to perceive its own motion. The haptic is, therefore,
about both an awareness of presence and of locomotion—a combination of tactile and locomotive properties,
engaging in feeling and doing simultaneously. This action/reaction characteristic of haptic perception separates
it from all other forms of sensing which, in comparison, come to seem rather abstract. Since touch is
participatory, active and passive at the same time, it reminds us that we are not only observers of the world, but
actors in it.
In architecture, it is recognized as “the way the whole body senses and feels the environment
[including] our feelings of rhythm, of hard and soft edges, of huge and tiny elements, of openings and closures,
and a myriad of landmarks and directions”.16 The corporeal and embedded experience of haptic perception is
primarily responsible for our understanding of three-dimensional space. Space is perceived by the visualisation
of its limits and by kinaesthetic experience, the sensation of movement. Not only is haptic perception primary to
perceive space, haptic cues are also the most straightforward. There is no distance between that what is sensed,
and the human body. To touch something, to come up against a surface or object, is the guarantee that
something is real. Thus, it refers to both space and substance, making the quality of the material a vital subject
of landscape architecture. Haptic geography is perhaps the most fundamental and basic geographical
experience, it provides a location and orientation in relation to the place we perceive.

Extracted from: De Wit, S.I., Hidden Landscapes; the metropolitan garden as a multi-sensory expression of place
(Amsterdam: Architectura&Natura 2018), p. 46/47 and 403/407.

16 Kent C. Bloomer and Charles Moore, Body, Memory and Architecture (1977), 34-36 and 44.