Body and Architecture

AIARG 2016, Fifth Annual Conference.
Jacques Lecoq is recognized as one of the most influential pedagogues of modern theatre. Nevertheless, his
contribution to architectural education is little known and quite underestimated. Lecoq starts to apply his
research on mime, gesture and movement to architectural pedagogy in 1968, when he is invited to teach at
the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. From then on, along with the theatre courses
offered in his own school, he develops, over 20 years, a mimodynamic approach to architects’ training. Based also on my direct experience of Lecoq’s method at the School of Mimodrama of Teatro Arsenale in
Milan, my discursive, and - possibly - also non-discursive, contribution aims to show how embodiment and
en-acting exercise can help architects to rediscover the value and authentic meaning of the architectural
environment as theatre of life.

The relationship of architecture to the human body is a centuries-long and complex one, but not always symmetrical. This book opens a space for historians of the visual arts, archaeologists, architects, and digital humanities professionals to reflect upon embodiment, spatiality, science, and architecture in pre-modern and modern cultural contexts. "Architecture and the Body, Science and Culture" poses one overarching question: How does a period's understanding of bodies as objects of science impinge upon architectural thought and design? The answers are sophisticated, interdisciplinary explorations of theory, technology, symbolism, medicine, violence, psychology, deformity, and salvation, and they have unexpected and fascinating implications for architectural design and history. The new research published in this volume reinvigorates the Western survey-style trajectory from Archaic Greece to post-war Europe with scientifically-framed, body-centered provocations.

Architecture is always built out of architecture, there is no tabula rasa. This essay is built like the architecture it examines. It consists of fragments, interpretations, and intentions. An interplay of analogies, references, and influences emerges among the pictorial examples, written quotations, and short commentaries that bind them together. The various levels intersect and overlap – sometimes in contrast, sometimes with empathy. The reader is called upon to put the fragments together for himself or herself.

Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) an early twentieth century avant garde figure, is known for pedagogical, artistic, theatrical, and architectural projects in Germany between the world wars. As Master Teacher at the Weimar and Dessau Bauhaus, he was distinguished by his focus on the human body in space. This focus fits Schlemmer and his work firmly within the important subject of the human body and architecture. This dissertation focuses on the image of a male human body designed by Schlemmer, titledVordruck, or "form ." which Schlemmer made into a standardized form that was handed out and used in his Bauhaus course, Der Mensch — the Human Being, in the late 20s. The Vordruck is used here to explore his ideas about the human body in the context of design and architecture at the Bauhaus. Schlemmer placed this human and Return or "space" at the forefront of his productions. Yet the resoundingly maleness of the body and space of the Vordruck is revealed to have female origins: the source of the Vordruck was female. Schlemmer's Vordruck is the lens for a number of explorations. These include ideas of type, sources for this human type, the function of the canonical in artistic production, the implications of creating "ideal types" in the design and redesign of male and female human forms, as well as in the kind of architecture that was produced by the Bauhaus. This lens reveals how Schlemmer's bodies in space provoke architectural places of playfulness as well as ambiguity, vacancy, and indifference, and cause one to ask questions about events of that period in history and the acceptance of difference.

The modern body of architecture. A parallel between Kiesler and Le Corbusier.
A research between two architects and their life carried out in parallel with each other. The importance and why of their fascination for the body, the space, its size and the architecture that contains them.

Jacques Lecoq is recognized as one of the most influential pedagogues of modern theatre. Nevertheless, his contribution to architectural education is little known and quite underestimated. My contribution aims to show how embodiment and enacting exercise can help architects to rediscover the value and the authentic meaning of architectural environment as theatre of life.

This paper considers the Vordruck (form), a template of a male body
designed by Oskar Schlemmer in 1928 at the Bauhaus for his course
Der Mensch. The Vordruck, whose origins were based on both
ancient precedents as well as the figure of a woman, is an
innocuous, bland, seemingly silent and expressionless figure.
While many copies of this template were printed for his course,
the Vordruck took a leading yet hidden role throughout
Schlemmer’s oeuvre of the human body in space within his
drawings, costume designs and performances. The Vordruck
template fits within the historic legacy of canons that reveal ideal
proportions of the human body, including those by Polykleitos,
Vitruvius and Leonardo da Vinci, yet it is unique when compared
to these earlier canons as well as those developed later (Le
Corbusier and others). Its significance is that it is the earliest
modern canon of the human body developed specifically for
architects and designers, before Le Corbusier’s Modular, while
directly based on its historic precursors, such as Leonardo da
Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, which he enacted within his theatrical
experiments. At the same time the Vordruck represented the
Bauhaus philosophy of designing type-models for mass
production. Yet another previously unknown sources is a female
body, whose unique physical form was erased as Schlemmer
superimposed male traits over her body, transforming the female
into the male body. This erasure recasts and reveals the absence
and erasure of women within the Bauhaus.

Mostly attributed to Renaissance and Antiquity, humanism is believed to be the ideal that gives priority to human being and considers it as the center of the universe and measure of all things, including architecture. In the architectural scope often appearing really as " the measure " , remembering the famous Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, a human body-based proportion system, or Le Corbusier's Modulor which pursues it after centuries. Yet, one of the main suggestions of this paper will be that the human body is not a measure of architecture, but rather architecture is the measure for Man. Vitruvian Man is not any random body, pursuing the definition given by Vitruvius, Leonardo has depicted an ideal human being. The human body, which Vitruvius advises that one should follow the proportions of while building, is not any ordinary man but rather, the Idea of man. Only this fixed ideal model could be the measure for architecture. Thus, Renaissance intellectuals and architects believed in micro and macro cosmos theory that human body (micro cosmos) is the analogy for the universe (macro cosmos). So any malfunction of the body is the malfunction of the universe. Therefore, the deformation of the body is the break of the Order. That's why Avant-garde art movements like Dada has attacked the human body and proportion, the divine aesthetics during the years of World War I, because by this they attacked the humanly order, the Order that they blamed for causing the war. Bataille argues in his book " The Cradle of Humanity " [1] that humanity is born with arts. Man gains his humanity through arts and gets rids of his animal side through architecture. Yet, according to Bataille, man can only fulfill himself by emancipating his animality instead of trying to defeat it, because it is only with his animal side that he can resist to any kind of authority [2] [3], and this is what Arts (excluding Architecture of course) achieved in the early 20th Cent. This paper will try to discuss this animality and architecture relationship through the ideal of the human body and Order.

Purpose:
One of the main difficulties for first year architecture students is to sort out complicated physical rules of constructional systems and reflecting those rules to their designs. The constructional and physics rules that sustain architectural structures are difficult topics to explain also in built environment education (B.E.E.) designed for children. With the purpose of simplifying the learning process of these abstract topics, an experimental program, which might be used in structural design education in architecture, is designed and explained in the scope of this paper. This paper aims to introduce the YogArch program and the outcomes of its implementation.
Design/Methodology/Approach:
Human body is the inspirational source for designing an educational program for exploring structural rules in architectural systems. This program is based on two different disciplines, which are yoga and architecture. Therefore, it is called “YogArch”. YogArch matches specific yoga asanas (positions) with suitable architectural elements and systemic principles. This program gives the participant a chance to experience these constructional facts on his/her own body. In the scope of this paper 8 different implementations of YogArch program are examined. There are two different participant groups: children aged between 6-14 years old and first year undergraduate architecture students. There are totally 221 participants in these two focus groups. In the scope of this research, the outputs of the workshops are collected and analyzed, findings are generated and some suggestions are made on the future use of the program. In this context, both built environment education programs which are appealing for children and first year architectural education programs for undergraduate students are taken into consideration.
Findings:
The outcomes of implemented YogArch workshops are analyzed. According to these findings, this program supports creating built environment awareness for the participants aged 6-14 years old. Also, this activity is a good inspiration for their daily play routine. For the undergraduate students, the program supported and clarified the knowledge they’ve obtained in their formal courses. Also, using body experience in learning constructional rules is a practical method to simplify complicated terms.
Research Limitations/Implications
The YogArch program is based on practicing some yoga poses in order to create physical experience. During the implementation of the workshop schedule, some participants had difficulties due to their own lack of training, in practicing some of the poses which require reasonable amount of strength. In such cases the instructor had to support and direct the participant to practice the pose in a more suitable version and develop body awareness. In addition to this, the participant group was aged between 8-20 years old. But the nature of the program is convenient to be applied with a wide range of ages. The proposed workshop model can also be implemented with adults in order to make analysis based on a wider social profile.
Practical/Social Implications
The proposed model in the research is intended to be used as a medium for understanding built environment and constructional systems. The safety of a living environment depends on the consciousness level of inhabitants and users. Providing sufficient knowledge on constructional principles of buildings for the entire society and extending built environment education have vital importance especially for the countries which are at risk about earthquakes, like Turkey. With the awareness of the risks and vulnerability of their built environment, users can be more conscious about taking the right precautions against natural disasters.
Originality/Value
This study focuses on offering an experimental education model in structural and architectural design education for all ages. This paper introduces a new educational program called YogArch. The proposed model differs from previous studies, as it expands the educational methods in formal and informal architectural education.

"This chapter provides one phenomenological interpretation of writer and director Alan Ball’s popular Home Box Office cable-television series, Six Feet Under, which completed its fifth and final season in 2005. The chapter considers how home and at-homeness are portrayed in the series, drawing on two contrasting phenomenological conceptions: First, Edmund Husserl’s homeworld/alienworld as interpreted by Anthony Steinbock in Home and Beyond (Steinbock 1995); and, second, Kristen Jacobson’s being-at-home (Jacobson 2009). The argument is made that an open sense of at-homeness, grounded in family and place, allows for personal and communal transformation partly impelled by unsettling moments when characters suddenly encounter, in their home lifeworld, compelling situations and understandings before out of sight—i.e., the uncanny.

Key words: home, at-homeness, dwelling, homeworld, alienworld, being-at-home, uncanny, place, phenomenology, phenomenology of home, Alan Ball, Six Feet Under
"

The physical adaptation, remaking and maintenance or building of the house plays a significant role in immigrants’ sense of belonging to a community. This chapter draws from studies of first-generation elderly southern European immigrants who have lived in their houses for twenty years or more. Practices of individual or collective house-building extend the migrant’s subjectivity such that migrants previously identified as unskilled labourers are transformed into subjects capable of many skilled productions and of imagination. The resulting house is a cultural product that represents this affirmative shift from a sense of being acted upon, to a sense of acting on (an idea).

Rogue Game (2007-ongoing), a project by Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosley in collaboration with Can Altay, springs from the given spatial regulations and parameters of a sports field. The typical sports field presents spatial efficiency by providing different colored lines for various sports. The project exhausts this gamespace through performing its potentials for hosting multiple sports matches simultaneously. The resulting social choreography of colliding collectivities not only reveal the limits of coherent play, and the architecture that hosts the games; but allows a new rhythm, a new landscape and a new game to emerge. Rogue Game thus proposes an architecture of transgression through cohabitation, movement, and activating the spatial excess inherent in any given context.

Architecture 1 A

PROJECT 1, 2, and 3
Architecture is a concrete thing made with physical materials and yet it also produces a non-material void or series of voids, and we call this phenomenon – architectural space. Space is the part that is inhabited by people, in which individuals can exist or just be, and in which all the human action and drama take place (no matter how public, private, intimate or secret).

Architecture 1A explores space and matter. Project 1 (Esquisse) addresses this through learning about the spatial body. Project 2 is a temporary dwelling for three individual persons. A series of tasks develop a design method from the inside outwards, related to spatial relations, ritual, and massing. It culminates in the animation of the wall with openings and fenestration. Project 3 begins with the wall but explored as an ordering mechanism on a public site and urban space. The ceremony and ritual related to the public wall both returns the project to the people and transforms it from the individual to the collective.

This paper focuses on the kinesthetics of human bodies, whether engaged in generic everyday movement or in ritual formations. It attempts to articulate how such kinesthetics constitute a layer of experience which, while ephemeral and barely conscious, is deeply informative of the conception and configuration of building space. To link the ephemeral grain of kinesthetics to spatial configuration, the argument refers
to Rudolph Laban’s Effort-Shape theory of movement (Dell 1977). Laban distinguishes between movements that the body directs at itself, and movements directed towards other objects and bodies. The latter, termed spatial-movements, construct nearly imperceptible forms of social interaction, as  demonstrated by systematic analyses of dance forms in various cultures (Bull 1967). The fleeting, ‘fine-grain’ of encounter suggested by moving and gesturing bodies, underlies conceptions of space. This is particularly emphasized in mass gatherings within building enclosures, which amplify issues of generic movement and stasis, and attendant  kinesthetics. The paper examines two different building types: Muslim mosques and Soviet assemblies. While different in many respects, both involve synchronic and diachronic spaces meant for large crowds in ritual formations. Generating a range of kinesthetic movements and sensations, the different crowd
formations in both species of buildings construct subtle  patterns of encounter, besides proposing models for framing the sense of things (bodies and objects) and of the enclosing boundaries. During Muslim ritual, it is the reliance on subtle spatial-bodily gestures between physically contiguous bodies to communicate a feeling of unity that permeates Muslim ritual space with an overall sense of transparency. In Soviet mass
assemblies, diachronic movement is more crucial. The Soviet Rationalists’ manipulation of building floors as curved surfaces (the Palace of Soviets, 1931), generates a choreography of rhythmic gestures synchronized across the mass of moving bodies (after Meyerhold’s theatrical Biomechanics; Law 1996). A flow of rhythmic spatialgestures (after Laban) conjoins the attending crowd in a pattern which scaffolds shifting attention. Self-awareness of the body’s weight and movement provokes a sense of space as the empathetic projection of weightiness, complemented by the Rationalists’ tilted building masses and play on gravitational pull. Centered on this kinesthetic crowd, Soviet architects shaped spatial boundaries as ‘floating’: visually detached from the ground and from a conclusive resolution to their structural forces.

The mutual cultivation of subject and object in architecture

The relationship of the migrant figure and the house has been explored in previous research on the migrant house. In addition, the relationship between the migrant house and its perception and representation within the local and national communities within the immigrant-receiving city has been analyzed. The approach and theoretical frameworks for this research involved an understanding of the relationship between the human subject and the object of architecture. Given that much poststructuralist theory has attended to the rethinking of human subjectivity and to rethinking the human body, traditional conceptualizations of the relationship between human subject and object in architecture also need to be re-examined. This paper thus presents an examination of one approach to this relationship, focusing on the exploratory and creative work of the late John Hejduk. Hejduk’s Vladivostok presents an assembly of figure-objects that together are a literary metaphor for both society and the city. The paper will argue that the human subject is imagined within an already ordered architectural setting, and that the human subject cannot be thought prior to and outside the stage of architecture. Rather than searching for a causal or determining relationship between subject and object this conceptual underpinning between the subject and object asks for an understanding of the dynamic and animated cultivation between them. In examining Hejduk’s entry on the ‘subject/object’ in Vladivostok, the paper will present an account of the mutual responsiveness that arises between human beings and architecture. It will argue that culture and subjectivity is internal rather than external or marginal to architecture.

Keywords: Hejduk, subject and object, migrant house, everyday, cultivation

Performative Space and the Construction of Place
Heidi Saarinen

For the purpose of this research project, I have undertaken a series of practice-based approaches to examine how concepts of place may be created using film and performance. Through filmed excerpts of dance and movement work, and through the interaction with space, sites and landscapes, I have set out to determine differences, meaning and responses to place. As part of the process I have used the body as research tool, movement as interaction and film to record, document and analyze the process.

Artists and practitioners in the 1970s New York dance and performance scene, such as dancers Yvonne Rainer, Tricia Brown and artist Gordon Matta-Clark have particularly inspired me. Ideas by these practitioners, based on fundamental interests derived from simple everyday routines and movements, developed into collaborations influenced by the socio-economic situation in the city at the time, becoming an important phase in performance. I have examined and linked some of the initial research to other artists, dancers and choreographers, such as Pina Bausch and then to my own practice as a spatial dance artist, with emphasis on dance and the use of space on a phenomenological level. Furthermore, I have explored place from the angle of a range of writers and philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, often connected to architecture and place. I have also researched Juhani Pallasmaa’s interest in sensory space, as well as Jane Jacobs’s explorations of the notion of place in the city. Thus, this thesis will investigate and analyse space and how, through interaction with space, through physical being or phenomenological approaches, space may transform into place.  The thesis contends that it is interesting to see that phenomenology is a well-established discipline and has impacted on architecture. It is also interesting to discover that architects are aware of notions of sensory spatial engagement. My role is to rethink this from a dance and performance platform.




keywords:
space, place, architecture, dance, choreography, performance, body, derelict, landscape, urban, experimental, solo, everyday, spatial_choreographies, architectural_heritage, community, Judson_Dance_Theatre, New York, Tricia_Brown, Yvonne_Rainer, sister_suitcase

This paper examines architecture as a performative space, firstly as an interface between movement, temporality and its physical configuration, and secondly through signification, reading and discourse. It develops a close reading of the intoxicating mixture of ceremony, incense, and sung prayer; geometry, volume, surface and iconography, and the movements of women’s bodies inside a small church. How can this atmosphere through which architecture is moved beyond its material enterprise, be read? Through a critical investment in architectural representation, the paper develops a model for capturing both temporality and spatiality. Desire and pleasure are not new adjectives ascribed to the reading of vernacular architecture. The problem is to shift a canonical appropriation framed through the dichotomy of desire and disgust. The paper argues that language and discourse mediate both the way architectural theatricality is perceived, and the nature of the architect’s or historian’s pleasure in traditional architecture.

„Give me a gun and I will Make all Buildings move“, schreibt Bruno Latour mit Blick auf die scheinbare Statik der Architektur. An dieser rüttelt auch der bildgeschichtlich orientierte Vortrag, der das Thema der Baustelle und das Sujet einstürzender (Neu)Bauten dialektisch begreift. Welche ethischen und ästhetischen Vorstellungen von Ordnung liegen dem ‚vernunftgeleiteten‘ Prozess des Bauens zugrunde, aber auch der Zerstörung von Architektur? Sie wird im Moment des Auseinanderberstens zum Akteur, der terrore (Schrecken) mit sich bringt und den menschlichen Körper zur Angriffsfläche macht.

space-matter

BACKGROUND
Architecture is embodied and sensuous, and involves several ways of perceiving and experiencing it including – sound, volume, solidity, enclosure, materials, permeability, natural light, shape, hardness-softness, texture, ornament, pattern. The relationship between architecture and the body is important and can be both evident and subtle. The body moves through architecture while architecture itself is usually immobile, and yet architecture invariably shapes in some way the body’s movement – both external and internal. Architecture is a concrete thing made with physical materials and yet it also produces a non-material void or series of voids, and we call this phenomenon – architectural space. Space is the non-physical part of architecture. It is essential to nearly all architecture because it is the part which is inhabited by people, in which individuals can exist or just be, and in which all the human action and drama take place (no matter how public, private, intimate or secret). Body-Space relations may be said to be essentially creative.

PROJECT
The project  explores ‘space’ and spatiality in architecture, starting with an understanding of the body as a spatial, in addition to a physical, entity. The brief for each of the parts above has asked students to think about space conceptually, to experiment with the design process that assists in visualising the concepts, to practice transforming from 2 dimensions to 3 dimensions and back again, and to begin to perceive the shape of mass and space. Finally to make a drawing that is like a proto-plan (the foundation for a plan) of a house. For each part there has been specific product requirements, exercises, skill practices:
•    Project 2a Spatial Body
•    Project 2b Sequence Space
•    Project 2c Massing
•    Project 2d Excavation
•    Project 2e Dis/section
•    Project 2f Inhabitation

The brief for each of the parts above has asked students to think about space conceptually, to experiment with the design process that assists in visualising the concepts, to practice transforming from 2 dimensions to 3 dimensions and back again, and to begin to perceive the shape of mass and space. Finally to make a drawing that is like a proto-plan (the foundation for a plan).
Design Teachers: Marc Dixon, Todd Palmer, Susan Ang, Nathalia Guaraldo, Su Mellersh-Lucas

... Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press ... web of desire lines, in which the navel is inextricably connected to the penis. ... See Mirjana Lozanovska, “Mistresses and Others: the Body as Subject in Architectural Discourse ...