ABSTRACT
The sensitivity of the fictional protagonists is variously presented as a gift or an affliction, and frequently a combination of both. They reflect an ambivalence between, on the one hand, a view of the sensory as too romantic, temporary, and fragile to be trusted, and on the other hand, a conviction that the senses are inseparable from ideas, which are not innate but instead flow from perception. Design could be said to be a process of making sense of the world through forms and systems. It is also a process and a means of making the world knowable through appeals to our senses. But making sense and sensing are odd bedfellows. Acoustic architects and engineers naturally think of buildings as collections of sounds. The king’s dependency on only one sense has become a curse. In concentrating on what his palace seemed to be saying, he has lost the ability to listen and unravel the “riddles. ”.
