-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
1/30
Consciousness
&Architecture
Human Bodies &
Buildings
Instructor: Marco Frascari
Azrieli School of Architecture
& Urbanism
Carleton University
A Public Seminar
Winter 2009
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
2/30
Justaswethinkarchitecturewithourbodies,
wethinkourbodiesthrougharchitecture.(M.F.,MonstersofArchitecture,1991)
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
3/30
By understanding that architecture is the resultof the merging the arts of thinking well,
building well and living well, the main concern
of this seminars is to raise a novel awareness
of the processes taking place in the mind and
body of architects during the acts of perceiving
and conceiving architecture.
In probing the role of the body in architecture, this
seminar takes part of a substantial concern regarding
the human body as a subject of scholarly inquiry.
In recent years, in fields as diverse as anthropology,
sociology, psychology, geography, philosophy, religious
studies, art history and theory, and gender and culturestudies, embodiment has become an key word to
unlock amazing areas of study
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
4/30
The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundariescan represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a
complex structure. The function of its different parts and their relation afford asource of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpretrituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva, and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers anddangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body.
Mary Douglas,Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966., p. 115.
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
5/30
In architectural drawings, human figures can be seen asthe creation of base configurations that perform, form,reform and transform architecture by tracing
metaphorical, metonymical and demonstrative patterns
in plans, elevations and sections.
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
6/30
Buildings are as useful to our minds as they are to our bodies.John Onians
Architectural knowledge generallyoriginates with the individualsperceptual and motor systems.
Architecture is framed by embodiedexperience and embodied experience
is framed by architecture
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
7/30
The Neapolitan Giambattista Vico, an unusual philosopher of the eighteenth century, was
interested in the power of imagination anddiscovered the beginning of humanity in theontological dimension of stench. Vicos discoveryis that the world of senses begins in the peripheryof our bodies and moves to inner and higher levelsof perception. From there, in analogical manner,the senses rule the way we willfully and wittily actin our world.
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
8/30
Senses are at the basis for a sated human sapience and
consequently Vico points out:
Rational metaphysics teaches that manbecomes all things by understanding them (homointelligendo fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysicsshows that man becomes all things by notunderstanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia);and perhaps the latter proposition is truer thanthe former, for when man understands heextends his mind and takes in the things, butwhen he does not understand he makes thethings out of himself and becomes them bytransforming himself into them.Giambattista Vico, New Science, 405.
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
9/30
The role of architecture, as a body art, is to fosterhappiness, to facilitate the beatific life.
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
10/30
By using philosophical meditations andcritical theory about architecture,drawings, images, affects, andcognition, this is an exercise about thesecond nature of architecture. Ascribing embodied and embedded
thought to architectural drawings theaim is to redefine our relationship withthem and enlarges our ideas about body, mind and buildings. This noveland closely interdependentrelationship marks a turning point in
our understanding of the connections between humans, the uses ofarchitecture and architecturalconceiving.
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
11/30
Transubstantion from body to building
The identification human body with
buildings and its parts survived inmany medieval churches where theaxis of the apse is slightly slanting to
the right of the axis of the nave,revealing the inclination of the headof Christ at the moment of his death
on the cross:et inclinato capite emisit spiritum.
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
12/30
The notion of embodiment in architectural
thinking intimately depends on the duality of
perception of the internal representation of humanbody.
Body image is a system ofperception attitudes and
believes.
Body schema is a system ofsensory-motor capacities
that function withoutawareness or perceptual
monitoring
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
13/30
Descartes partitioning of the world into objects (resextensa) and mind (res cogitans), occurs mostprofoundly at the level of the body. The identity of theindividual, the formerly complete unity of body andsoul, is separated.
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
14/30
Descartes error of the separation ofmind and body could not beperpetrated without the replacement ofthe metaphor of architecture as human body with the mirror metaphor of the
human body as a building.
The union of body and mind waschallenged by the new anatomicalconceptions of the body as machine
which became extreme in the case ofJulien Offray de la Mettrie.
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
15/30
The bodys vocabulary of primary positionsarticulates not only its own subjectivepresence, but its surrounding space.
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
16/30
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
17/30
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
18/30
Architecti est scientia pluribus discipliniset variis eruditionibus ornata, cuius iudicio
probantur omnia quae ab ceteris artibus
perficiuntur opera. Ea nascitur ex fabrica
et ratiocinatione. Fabrica est continuata actrita usus meditatio ad propositum
deformationis, quae manibus perficitur e
materia, cuiuscumque generis opus est.
Ratiocinatio autem est, quae res fabricatassollertiae ac rationis pro portione
demonstrare atque explicare potest.
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
19/30
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
20/30
Illustration from Le Corbusier, Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City
Planning, p. 125. Skeleton, musculature, and viscera provide inspiration for the free plan. !
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
21/30
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
22/30
The anatomical body changed the perceptionof the building body
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
23/30
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
24/30
bloody organs in a marble statue
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
25/30
Scale Figures
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
26/30
From pencil points
1929
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
27/30
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
28/30
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
29/30
-
8/7/2019 1 Bodies
30/30
