Any building —especially those that offer a human scale— has to deal with the “problem” of monumentality; it has to consider how it lands in the public space and in the memory of places.

Because although it seems that cities can take everything, that they are a kind of patchwork of good and bad solutions, of failed and successful attempts, there are, increasingly, more emphatic ways of expressing empathy or absenteeism in the constructive landscapes that surround us.

In his celebrated essay The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa challenges the dictatorship of the optical as the foundation of architecture, calling for a haptic experience that values other types of senses, fundamentally hearing and touch. To illustrate this, the Finnish architect draws an ingenious comparison between the trademark value accorded to façades and the real relevance of handles, knobs and pulls, which can be seen as shaking the hand of buildings for their occupants or those who visit them.

Cities resist or are destined to be architecture theme parks. High-tech lives alongside historical residue, functional housing alongside the mass devoid of quality.

Apart from being photogenic and important in the physical morphology of cities, constructions create a narrative that impacts both the symbolic and the everyday, they bring the latest in material technologies to the here and now of daily experience, and are capable of establishing alliances or alienating.