Pick 1 building in Kuala Lumpur, visit it, and document how that building perfectly plays with 1 or more human senses.
Tropical Box House
Malaysian studio WHBC Architects wrapped this house with a gridded concrete facade, designed to create privacy while providing a frame for tropical plants to grow around the building. Called Tropical Box, the 670-square-metre house was built on a sloping site behind the condominiums and private houses of Demansara Heights in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia's capital city.
I think that this building has perfectly plays with several human senses, which is sight, touch, smell and sound.
This building is created for a family, the house needed to provide privacy, but the architects also wanted it to "embrace the jungle" with openings providing views of the surrounding trees, as well as a frame for the surrounding plant life to grow into over time. To achieve this, they created a 900-millimetre-deep irregular concrete grid, which creates a double facade around two sides of the house.
The Eye Of The Skin
Sight Sense
Interior climate control is an important factor when designing homes for the tropical heat of Kuala Lumpur. In order to combat the blistering sun sustainably and economically, WHBC designed a gorgeous concrete skin of mismatched rectangular grid shapes. The grid acts as a sun filter, blocking direct rays while also allowing daylight to naturally illuminate much of the interior. With varying sized rectangles and squares, the light intensity fluctuates for different shared spaces throughout the home. Thus, sight and touch senses have created.
" Every touching experience of architecture is multi-sensory. All senses, including vision can be regarded as extensions of the sense of the touch. Image of presence give rise to images of memory, imagination and dream. " - Juhani Pallasma
By tracking image, eye receives its effects. Elements with similar or repeated distances are known by eyes as beats or rhythms that receiving them is similar to receiving the sound from music by ear; Architecture is frigid music.
The facade of the house that is irregular concrete grid create a very sharp visualization to the human's eye sight. It is because that is huge with 900-millimetre-deep that shows spectacular and the grid facade has become a symbol of this building. When the light intensity fluctuates for different shared spaces throughout the home, it creates a sense of space. Criss crosses of patterned shadows are cast across the pool room as light filters through the concrete shell. Looking beyond the pool and the garden, one is greeted with a clear and extended panoramic view of the forest. On upper floors, windows are specially designed to capture views of big beautiful trees. Hence, those combination has created a stunning effect and eye-catching.
Touch Sense
" Tactility is more accurate than eyesight and is less exposed to mistake. " - Juhani Pallasma
Tactility is the sense of closeness, proximity and effect. It is because eye touches the distance but tactility sees the closeness.
" While the tactile space separates the observer from the objects, the visual space separates the objects from each other...the perceptual world is guided by the touch, being more immediate and welcoming than the world guided by sight. " - Peter Zumthor
Smoothness and roughness, bumps and hard, contact and touch, texture, weight, density, heat or material temperature are related to the sense of touch. Therefore, the concrete skin, the texture of the facade, structure as well as the sunlight that is cast cross through the concrete shell makes touch sense to people.
Sound Sense
“I remember the sound of the gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of the waxed oak staircase; I can hear the heavy front door closing behind me as I walk along the dark corridor and enter the kitchen, the only really brightly lit room in the house3.” - Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture
As this, we can know that every space has aural sense through air element or the vision even through the imagination. Sound sense can be created by the foot steps, the friction between two objects such as chairs and the floor. And the sound of water from the pool.
Ear is more closer than eye. People can hear the sound through hearing or viewing and then imagine in the brain. For instance, looking to the nature environment and then imagine to the sound of wind and birds.
Smell Sense
Olfaction is more active in silence and lack of light. As Juhani Pallasmaa believes nose can remember better than eyes and understands the space deeper and sharper and realizes the difference. For instance, the smell of the water pool is different than other water due to the chemical is added to the pool. Thus when people smell it, they will know that it is a water pool without eye view. Or they can smell the soil and the fresh air when they get into the kitchen which with an open wall that overlooks the garden below or when they get into the adjoining garden.
Conclusion
Human percepts and reminds the environment through the senses, conscious or unconscious. Examples to experience playing senses in architecture were given above in order to pay more attention to senses conscious so a better perception of all environments will be the result. Besides existing of these spaces as a building helps improving perception and consciousness and could have benefits for all people.