Juhani Pallasmaa's Reading List

"I used to send a list of 40 books of novels and poetry to the newly accepted students." — Juhani Pallasmaa, Designers & Books This morning I woke up reading a passage from Desiderare, a novel by the Italian neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara. In the passage, two characters are waiting for a bus near the ancient Temple of Segesta in Sicily. One of them begins describing an imaginary garden. The passage brought me immediately back to Juhani Pallasmaa. As he wrote in The Atmospheric Sense: "When reading a novel, we create entire buildings, places and cities with their inhabitants, activities and narratives in our imagination." Pallasmaa is a Finnish architect and architectural philosopher whose book The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses I quote regularly during my architecture tours at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler. But today I discovered something about him. In 1992, while serving as dean of the School of Architecture at Helsinki University of Technology, Pallasmaa…