1. Rida Ilyas 1
Rida Ilyas
Architecture Design
October 7, 2013
The Working Hand –Juhaani Pallaasmaa
An Analysis
The human hand is undeniably a work of wonder. Mankind is the only creation of God to possess
such a perfect arrangement of bones, muscles, tendons and nerves. What is it going to take to
recreate or duplicate a human hand? Or is it even possible to do so? Julio Ramon Riberyo talks
about hands in his Marginal Voices,
“...we find only one tool, neither created nor invented, but perfect: the hand of man.”
The human hand is the single best tool that enables you to build with it, dig with it, grasp with it,
draw with it, write with it, think with it and express yourself with it. Human hand is our best
technology.
The hand, as I see it, is an extension of human brain and heart. It does what the brain tells it to do
and it takes a heart to make it do that successfully. Hands consist of delicate fingers, delicate but
strong, soft but tough, brittle but flexible. 5 of these are intertwined together to give the hand its
unmatchable power.
When I touch with my hand, the tactility of it makes me feel that touch. It is due to my hand’s
tactility that enables me to understand the difference between the vast and infinite variety of the
world’s materials and elements. It is the reason to the existence of Texture. It is how our brain
interprets an element as soft, smooth, hard, rough, gritty etc.

2. Rida Ilyas 2
Pallasmaa talks about a working hand and the tools that aid it. I believe, that the form of every
tool is dictated by the hand itself in collaboration with the brain in the presence of a requirement.
Tools are like extended adjustable parts of a machine that can be fixed and removed to achieve
their own specific purpose. Tools are created by the hands themselves so that they can fit in them
and work with them in perfect harmony. At the same time, I feel that when a tool comes between
the hand and its object, the intimacy with the work is somewhat lost. That connection between
me and my work becomes less strong. With overpowering technology, latest tools are
approaching the world, tools that when meet with the hands, complete them and technologies
that have now compiled that vast variety of tools in a compact device as computers, ipads,
Smartphones and notebooks.
This lessens the level of craziness and madness that we used to have with the work using our
bare hands. We are losing the older techniques of purity and simplicity. We are creating 3D
spaces on a 2D screen. You wake up one Sunday morning, have a charming breakfast and take a
warm cup of tea and then march towards your room, drag the chair and sit yourself down to start
working on a pretty design on AutoCAD. Gone are the days when you would take your crafting
materials down into your garden or a nearby lake and spend the entire Sunday, crafting with your
hands into the wet material sculpting the details in it with your dirty fingers and the smaller
details with the nails of those fingers? The fun of it is incomparable and so much more than just
sitting next to a screen and pressing some keys and moving the mouse around on the desk.
However, this is the new reality and it shall be accepted. To stay up at the front, in those leading
the race of the world, we have to leave that beautiful culture behind and move on with the fast
and the new technological tools. Those, that still would not have been possible to achieve
without human hands.
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