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Tactility, 2022Our contemporary living environment suffers from a profound sensory impoverishment. In The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, the Finnish theorist Juhani Pallasmaa diagnoses a fundamental crisis in the Western understanding of design. He criticizes the dominance of the eye – an ocularcentrism – that transforms the physical environment into fleeting, two-dimensional images. This disembodiment affects furniture design to a particularly high degree. Consumer goods, optimized for mass media, are staged primarily for a fleeting glance on screens. In doing so, they neglect the existential encounter between human and object. Pallasmaa notes: »Modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.« This argument for a multisensory design rebels against this homelessness of the body. It demands a phenomenological turn in practical manufacturing – a return to sensory perception, craft-based experiential knowledge, and the bodily interaction of the human being with material and tool. 

To understand the depth of Pallasmaa's approach to furniture design, one must look at its philosophical foundation: the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty breaks radically with the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, res cogitans and res excelsa. Instead, he introduces the concept of the lived body – the body not as an anatomical object, but as the actual medium through which we experience the world in the first place. Merleau-Ponty argues that the subject does not possess a body, but is a body. 
Applied to furniture design, this means: an armchair or a table does not present itself to us as a geometric abstraction, but addresses our body's pre-rational, motor potential. When we look at a piece of furniture, our lived body already drafts the movement of sitting or grasping. Pallasmaa's dictum that the eye touches is rooted directly in Merleau-Ponty's concept of synesthesia. The senses do not operate in isolation; the sight of a rough wood texture or a cool stone slab immediately activates the body's tactile memory. A design that addresses the senses, therefore, does not target a detached, cognitive consciousness, but rather this inherent, bodily dialogue. 

In his late work, Merleau-Ponty develops the concept of the flesh of the world, la chair du monde. With this, he describes a fundamental interweaving and community of being between the perceiving subject and the perceived world. Human beings do not confront matter as detached observers; rather, an ontological kinship exists. The body is made of the very same substance as the world. 
A sensitive approach to furniture design harnesses this interweaving. It conceives the piece of furniture as a relational membrane where the flesh of the body and the flesh of the world touch. When a carpenter leaves a wooden surface untreated, or a stonemason preserves the irregularities inherent to the stone, this is not a decorative choice; rather, it offers the lived body a surface through which it can enter into an exchange with the world. In contrast, sterile, high-gloss, artificial surfaces function as phenomenological barriers. They deny the exchange of warmth, moisture, and texture – they separate the subject from the flesh of the world. 

A crucial aspect of this phenomenology concerns the relationship between design and time. Industrial standardization favors artificial, uniform materials that appear immune to aging, in order to simulate an eternal, static present. Pallasmaa recognizes in this an attempt to banish human transience from everyday life. A multisensory design, on the other hand, integrates the factor of time through materiality. Solid wood, natural stone, and vegetable-tanned leather possess what Merleau-Ponty calls temporal depth. They accumulate signs of use and develop a patina. The patina is the physical inscription of bodily interaction. It bears witness to repeated touch, the pressure of the hand, and the warmth of the body. As the piece of furniture ages, it documents the lived experience of its user. This emotional longevity forms the foundation of a natural, material-based sustainability: the vulnerable, aging object is not discarded, but cherished as a repository of memory and lived time. 

The synthesis of Pallasmaa's sensory approach and Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the lived body demands absolute constructive honesty in practical manufacturing. For if the body is the primary tool for understanding the world, any faked or concealed material undermines human bodily orientation and pre-rational judgment. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is not a passive recipient of stimuli, but rather interrogates the world through movement and resistance. It anticipates the weight, density, and temperature of a material before we even think about it. Constructive honesty ensures that bodily expectation and physical reality align. Pallasmaa describes the encounter with objects as profound, intimate experiences: »The door handle is the handshake of the building.« Transposed to furniture design, every armrest, every table edge, and every wood joint is this handshake. 
A design that appeals to the senses dispenses with synthetic surface treatments. The way a piece of furniture is joined must be legible to the eye and tangible to the hand. This honesty explicitly includes the invisible dimensions of space – sound and smell. The acoustic feedback of a closing wooden door, or the scent of natural wax, are structural components that constitute the atmospheric stillness of a room. In manufacturing, this leads to a re-evaluation of what is perceived as a defect. In contrast to automated industry, the natural irregularity or non-standardized nature of raw materials is not a problem in craftsmanship; rather, it is the very essence that dictates the object's form. The natural swelling and shrinking of wood, or texture irregularities in stone, are deliberately deployed as sensory intensifications to counteract the lifeless smoothing of our living environment. 

Juhani Pallasmaa, The eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses, 1996.
Maurice Marleau-Ponty, Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung, 1966.
Maurice Marleau-Ponty, Das Sichtabe und das Unsichtbare, 1966.