Touch Me: The Mystery on the Surface

by Gregor Eichinger, Eberhard Troger, Thomas Skelton-Robinson (Translator)

Like a living skin, the architectural surface provides an impression and expression of human needs, moods and time-related commitments of our designed environment. The surface is what we perceive with all our senses at the same time as spontaneous, synaesthetic, multi-dimensional experience. Working on the basis of his work in his department at the ETH in Zurich, in this publication Gregor Eichinger therefore shifts emotional relationships between people and architecture into the centre. Touch Me's associative switches between interdisciplinary texts and pictorial sequences create a cosmos of our perceptions of the built and designed environment.

180 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2011

Reviews

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We live in an age in which the user invariably wants a perfect world, one that does not age, that remains forever stable, and which produces a gleaming home free of scratches or wrinkles. But the world of architecture conditioned by the handcrafted allows for aging. Indeed, it works with and anticipates the aging process. This is precisely what gives things density and emotionality, and by which the thing we understand as atmosphere is created. Time bestows to rooms and objects the bearing of personal use.”

Austrian designer Gregor Eichinger holds forth on the virtues of pursuing authentic Benutzeroberfläche (something like "user interface," but for buildings). A charming Q&A ensues and ends with some great multidisciplinary pull quotes on the subject at hand (Tanizaki, Shonagon, Duras, Godard, Thoreau, among others). Inspiring fodder before our trip to Vienna.