Fluidity In Juhani Pallasmaa's The Power Of

Stability and Fluidity of Individuals Individuality consists of stable traits and fluid characters. Stable traits decide how people behave consistently. They are the core values of individuals. Fluid characters change in accordance to distinctive circumstances. Juhani Pallasmaa’s “Excerpts from The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses,” and Azar Nafisi’s “Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran,” present individuals who actively involve in their environment. Such interactions shape the core value of each individual. However, Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Power of Context” focuses his attention on the fluid characters of human beings. Sometimes people do
Individuality, if understood as fluid characters under different circumstances, is founded by the situational environment. People are shaped by the events happening around them whether they pay attention to such things or not. According to Gladwell, “People who watched Peter Jennings on ABC were more likely to vote Republican because, in some unconscious way, Jennings was able to signal his affection for Republican candidates” (160). News reports, like graffiti and farebeating in the subway could have huge impacts on individuals, since people tend to believe and follow what they hear or perceive time and time again. Admittedly, neither news reports nor misdeeds in the subway significantly influence people’s lives since people are never fully attentive to issues that are seemingly trivial to them. However, such small issues can have tremendous effects on one’s behaviours because people tend to take the general trend, even the wrong one, as what they perceive unconsciously. Gradually, they change their behaviors to catch the trend as most people tend to agree with the actions of the majority. People believe their individual transgressions will be overlooked, and thus acceptable among a large number of other misbehaviors. However,
Introspective environment should consist of families or peers instead of passerby or news reporters. Since people are interacting in a small and intimate community, they tend to think and then form their own ideas after the admittance of outside information. In this way, the information is consciously processed in people’s mind, and thus people are more likely to behave in accordance to the social expectation and find their places in history and society. Pallasmaa writes, “A powerful architectural experience silences all external noise; it focuses our attention on our very existence, and as with all art, it makes us aware of our fundamental solitude” (290). A powerful environment with deep-seated culture or history helps people focus on their hearts instead of outside trivia. As a contrast to inattentive influences by the graffiti and farebeating, fundamental solitude is a status where people are hardly distracted by outside forces. According to Confucius, a famous Chinese philosopher, “Men at their birth are naturally good”. However, environment changes them later on. Focusing on true hearts, people stick to their stable traits, honesty, sincerity and kindness. However, under the arbitrary environment described by Nafisi, people need to create separate worlds to rely on their spirits in order to keep their