a child's sense of being; potentiated

The orphanage is a societally functioning place of transition for the parentless child to live until an alternative situation may arise. And the child, through the phases of moving, transitioning, and being handled has the possibility of being objectified. No doubt then, their objectification may lead to a continual sense of ephemeral existence and to their own experience of themselves as temporal beings.

Here the asylum for orphaned children enters into an opportune juncture. Let the orphanage present, as a construct, conditions for the parentless child that stimulate on the highest of levels a sense of Being as they are, wherever they are. The orphanage is not to be a transitional element, in the life experience of the child – but it is to be an entity of its own. The child is an entity of its own and the two relate to each other in this way. Here, the child is a Being and with this re-cognition may continually experience life in a perpetual state of presence – not transience.

The orphanage as envisioned will nurture through the inter-sensory experiences of synesthesia a present awareness of self. This subjective consciousness offers a disconnect from the objectified state and encourages their apprehension of themselves as personal entities that may Be wherever they are. The cross modal associations of synesthesia provide a subjective experience wherein one does become aware of inner thought (consciousness), of particular place and duration, and further reveals memory, making it a purely self-experience. It should also be said that all people experience synesthesia in their early development, when the mind has not yet configured its way of filtering stimuli. This is a great openness, and as an orphan may be too quickly introduced to maturity, synesthetic experience may also allow them to revisit this beginning and reconcile their foundation and place in the world.

Hegel “claimed that the only sense which can give a sensation of spatial depth is touch, because touch ‘senses the weight, resistance, and three-dimensional shape (gestalt) of material bodies, and thus makes us aware that things extend away from us in all directions’”.1 The haptic experience is a phenomenological event that situates us in space and time and relates Being. Therefore to take it further, synesthesia invoked through the sense of touch will help to provide a more meaningful and therapeutic orphanage for the child.



Pallasmaa "Eyes of the Skin" p. 42

first draft