Diagram developed for Contemporary Design Approaches, RPI Architecture, 2015
As a common sense, the body is the regent object when we talk about architecture. Even when taking gigantic structures, or minimal spaces, the whole architecture experience comes down to the reaction between construction and body scaled. It comes down all the way from Vitruvius, in the third of his 10 books of architecture, on how body and building function as the same – as an unique metabolism. The idea of the body as a protagonist continues through Renaissance – where specific examples such as Pietro di Giacomo Catanio and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, spreading the basic idea of the human body as a generator forms and proportions.
The approach of this diagram, however, is not only highlight the already obvious importance of the body for this field, but how much architecture is evolving to a much complex translation of that. If the very begging it was all about shelter, we understand that any way that lead to it purpose could be architecture – such as clothing. Sanchez believes that the garment is the first habitat and primary global interface. She also states that it is a dynamic and interactive space that mediates the relationship with the environment. Therefore, if clothing is architecture, Wigley concludes: Architecture is Clothing.
As the world evolves faster every day, people do too. Their identity can no longer be fixed to a specific place anymore. It briefly reminds us that Virilio, in his paper “Overexposed City” believes that, with the internet and communication system explosion, people don’t actually have an address anymore. And that’s why architecture is reacting. As it tries to follow the way faster storm that clothing and fashion represents, it is now leaving the ground to embrace the body, the practicality of being carried around. Architecture is now in motion.
On the diagram, what we have is a timeline condition by how embodied the living environment has become. It shows case studies, names, exhibitions and moments during the last 100 years – bubbled by the way it is approached – skin, tent, pneumatic structure. The interface line connects the data that better work as an interface – as the garment -, or, quoting Cruz, “as a place where different conditions can meet and exert an influence on each other”. It starts off with the concept of the Modulor brought by Le Corbusier, right from Modernism. It is the first sketch for the ergonomics, an architecture fitted to the man, more for the whole body than for the eyes. Although minimal housing is a practice as old as architecture, is it the first jump to see the body as a reaction of the structure.
The first approaches, as William von Allen, may seem quite allegorical. Dressing up as his own Chrysler Building at the Beaux Art ball at 1931, he expresses the relationship between architect and building in a more tangible way, as one is a part of the other, and the final result is only a shell. At the same category of crafts, a decade later the feminist artist Louise Bourgeois represented in a series of drawings of the house mixed with her body and lady parts, taking a statement on how she feels trapped and imposed by the patriarchal society, which is reflected on the architecture.
By the 60’s we go through Mary Douglas’ theory as the body understood as a symbol in which the fragility and vulnerability of its skin is reproduced on its surrounding systems. The pneumatic dwelling by Jean Paul Jungmann, and Frei Otto are different approaches by the same decade. The latest using the tent, as a simpler way to create architecture – reaching for the skin, considered the primary architectural state. The first, it resembles in a way to Reyner Banham’s bubble house, from is paper “a home is not a house”, where all we have is a pneumatic enclosure with a major infrastructural mechanism which provides every need for the house only in one piece.
But it was from the middle 60’s, context of Cold War and space run, that the surrounding embodiment got real. The proposed ‘space clothing’ represented a habitat, a house in suit. The interface at its maximum, generated new millennium approaches, such as 3D printed wearable structures by Iris van Harper, the skin studies from “In wall creatures” by Marcos Cruz, and the more literal approach by Lucy Orta. They are examples of how the clothing was before stiff and only prototype, could engage with architecture in a fashioning way. The final proposition should be, in a future, the whole embodiment of architecture – a cyborg. A structural body, who provides everything, its independent of its environment and is the interface itself. It’s only a matter of architectural limits, and we all know how far it can get.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CRUZ, Marcos. The Inhabitable Flesh of Architecture. Farham, 2001
BANHAM, Reyner. “A home is not a house”. New York, 1995.
KRUGER, Sylvie. Textile Architecture. Berlim, 2009.
SANCHEZ, Maria Celeste de F. Fashion Design: the project of the intangible. Sao Paulo, 2015.
SOUZA, Patricia de Mello. The Correlation between thermal comfort in buildings and fashion design. Londrina, Brazil.
TAVERNOR, Doods and. Body and Building. Cambridge, 2002.
WIGLEY, Mark. White walls, Designer Dresses. Cambridge, 1995.
WINGARDTH, Gert. What is architecture? And 100 other questions. London, 2015.
