Pick 1 building in Kuala Lumpur, visit it, and document how that building perfectly plays with 1 or more human senses.
The building I choose to study is Starhill Gallery which is located in Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur. Starhill Gallery is perhaps the most iconic shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur, featuring an extraordinary array of luxury shops and fine dining restaurants. Spark's design proposal dealt with the reinvention of the existing facade of Starhill Gallery facing Bukit Bintang. This reinvention of Starhill Gallery is designed by Stephen Pimbley, founding director of Spark and the architect behind Singapore’s hugely popular Clarke Quay.
Facade
The sense I take for granted most about Starhill Gallery is 'sight'. This is because the facade of the building is in angular forms with a lots of sharp edges which create a very sharp visualization to the human's eye sight. The angular forms facade creates a stunning effect to us because we seldom experience this kind of unusual building form in our daily life.
Besides that, its angular form helps to create different visions or views when we watch the building from different angles too.
Therefore, Starhill Gallery has successfully grabbed the attention from the public from its unique appearance. Starhill Gallery is firmly engaged with the public realm and generates valuable visual connections along the section of Bukit Bintang via the heavy footfall. The architect has designed a beacon for Starhill Gallery that celebrates its relationship with the city.
Materials
The materials used in Starhill Gallery are different from the surrounding building as the neighbourhood buildings are mostly use concrete as their main materials. Starhill Gallery used the materials of light weight steel, stone panels and glass for the facade. Therefore, different kinds of materials which used in the facade have also created different visualization to our sights. A high contrast in visualization has created between Starhill Gallery and surrounding buildings.
Spark's design has opened up the facade which provides a lot of visual interest via a continuous shop front that wraps the existing building in a crystalline skin of glass and stone panels. The fractured variation of solidity and transparency transforms the street facade of the existing building entirely, giving it a new contemporary classic identity that stands out among the quick-fix, ubiquitous shopping mall facades of many of Starhill Gallery’s neighbours.
The sense of 'touch' can be stimulated by experiencing different textures of materials used in the building. For instance, the glass gives a smooth feeling whereas the stone panels create rough feeling when we use our bare hands to touch on the materials.
The video below shows the information about the materials use in the facade of Starhill Gallery.
Space
The interior with high ceilings create a larger feeling on its own and create a space with added visual interest. High ceilings capture our visual attention and engage our desire to observe our surroundings. On a subliminal level, lower ceilings support feelings of confinement and limitation, whereas higher ceilings assist an overall sense of freedom and independence. It has been proven that higher ceilings promote clearer thinking, increased energy levels and an overall sense of happiness. The high ceilings which coupled with lighter paint colours help to enhance this illusion of additional space even more inside the building. The space become more elegant from our visualization.
Personal Review
Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are the sensory modalities that play a dominating role in spatial perception in humans. For instance, the ability to recognize the geometrical structure of the surrounding environment, awareness of self-location in surrounding space and determining in terms of depth and directions the location of nearby objects. Information streams from these senses are continuously integrated and processed in the brain so that a cognitive representation of the three dimension environment can be accurately built whether stationary or in movement. Each of the five senses uses different cues for exploring the environment and features a different perception range. Touch, smell and taste provides information on the so called near space (haptic space) whereas vision and hearing are capable of yielding percepts representing objects or events in the so called far space. The role of the body is essential to understand the spatial formation.
“Our bodies and movements are in constant interaction with the environment the world and the self informand redefine each other constantly.”
- Juhani Pallasmaa
With the interactions between body, imagination and environment in the architectural experience, one will eventually gain some memories in every place he or she has visited. As the eye collaborates with the body and the other senses, one’s sense of reality is strengthened and articulated by this interaction of the senses. In other words, when the architectural experience becomes multi-sensory, all the senses are equally experiencing the quality of the space, which will strengthen the existential experience.
‘’Architecture is essentially an extension of nature into the man-made realm, providing the ground for perception and the horizon to experience and understand the world. It is not an isolated and self-sufficient artifact.It directs our attention and existential experience to wider horizons.’’
Juhani Pallasmaa