٣ ... The Body of Surroundings

¶ Architecture body

Human beings are born into architecture and are conditioned by it. When the architecturally motivated body replaces the mind, “what’s on your mind?” can be more posed as “what’s up with your architectural body?”. We can say that ideal normatized body in architecture dismmissed many aspects of the human body. Conceived this way, architecture becomes a machine engaging normative processes, both in its users’ imagination and in an anatomical action. Following are some examples on how the architecture body was ideallised. Other examples show how to architecture body was interconnected with the surrounding environment.

— Normalized body

3.1 The Vitruvian man. Leonardo Da Vinci, 1487. https://leonardodavinci. stanford.edu/submissions/ clabaugh/history/ leonardo.html • The modernist project to establish a standard of the human body was not born in the 20th century. Renaissance was built around this notion of idealized proportions both for the body and architecture.

• In 1936, Ernst Neufert, created an Architects’ Data book which establishes a rationalization of the human male body and its direct built environment. This book is still considered as the “bible” in some architectural schools.

3.2 Man: the universal standard,by Arnest Neufert 1936.

3.3 Modual man, Le Corbusier.1984 • Le Corbusier’s proportional rationalization of the human body 1984, is modulor to embody a “range of harmonious measurements applicable to architecture.

• In 1974, American industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss reinterprets these normative diagrams by adding to them the gender differentiation as well as the acknowledgment that other bodies exist and respond differently to normalized environments. He gave them names: Joe and Josephine.

3.4 Anthropometric figures, Joe and Josaphine. Charles Ramsey and Harold Sleeper, Architectural Graphic Standards, 7th ed. (New York: Wiley, 1981). Courtesy of Judy A. Crookes, Henry Dreyfuss Associates.

3.5 Drawing by Claude Parent for the Oblique function, 1964. image source:http:// boiteaoutils.blogspot. com/2010/09/obliquefunction-by-claudeparent-and.html

• Claude Parent’s work; in Oblique Function 1964, expressed the relation between the body and surrounding architecture as a single oblique line.

• Arakawa and Madeline Gins conceptualized under the name ‘Architectural Body’, the relation between the body and its architectural surroundings, and developed a form of symbiosis that resists death as a process. Through their oblique designs, we can notice the relation between their works and the oblique line sketch.

• The winning entry of the Phase Shift Park (Taichung) competition by Philippe Rahm architects and Catherine Mosbach 2011, introduces the body by its biological relation to the environment. Heat, humidity and pollution, are three factors mapped and have consequences the body.

3.6 The Phase Shift Park, by Philippe Rahm architects and Catherine Mosbach 2011. image source: https:// www.istitutosvizzero. it/it/talk/nuovorealismo-filosofiaarchittetura-e-arte/

3.7 L’homme, mesures de toutes choses (2012) by Thomas Carpentier (ESA). image source: https:// www.thomascarpentier. com/Measure-s-of-ManArchitects-Data-Add-on

• Oskar Schlemmer began to conceive the human body as a new artistic medium. He presented his body ideas as a choreographed geometry; a figure as ballet dancer, transformed by costume, moving in space. • In the project, “L’homme, mesures de toutes choses” 2012, Thomas Carpentier, subverts the normalization of the body by proposing a series of other bodies -fictitious or real- to imply a different approach in the conception of architecture.

3.8 Oskar Schlemmer, Theory of Costume. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Mensch und Kunstfigur’ in Die Bühne im Bauhaus Bauhausbücher 4 (Munich, Albert Langen Verlag, 1924) 16-17.

¶ Architecture of Joy (Arakawa and Gins)

Deleuze defines the increase in the power of acting as ‘joy’. As a corollary, any encounter that tends to destroy the relations of one’s body is considered bad and is called ‘sadness’. In Arakawa and Gins’ architecture, the human body keeps reharmonizing its parts in relation with the architectural parts and thus develops a conscience of its direct environment. The body learns and becomes both stronger and more skillful. That leads to the consistent refusal of death. In accordance with the 18th century French physiologist Xavier Bichat who stated that life is the totality of functions that resist death. Arakawa and Gins’s foundation: the Reversible Destiny; is an absolute refusal of modernist comfort. Their architecture challenges the body, and leaves it without any other alternative than to react to this delicate situation. They designed and oversaw the realization of structures they believed had the capacity to stave off death, including lofts in Tokyo, a park in Yoro, Japan, and a house in East Hampton1 . They developed architecture and constructed environments that challenge the body as a way to “reverse our Destinies”, by pushing the body into movement. Arakawa and Gins wish for visitors to explore and move like children and to reorient perceptions.

Describing the experience in the Nagi museum, Koji Takahashi, a curator at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Tokyo, wrote: “the small entrance room, the stairway and the cylindrical room present an exercise in perception and physical experience. The balance between self-consciousness and the perception of one’s body is broken down, the ‘axis’ shifts, consciousness leans out, is ‘doubled’ and ‘something’ emerges. This ‘something’ existed in the perceptions of a newborn child. We have forgotten it growing up.”

Architecture body Nagi 1994.

1 The saddest thing is that I have to use words,A Madeline Gins reader, edited by Lucy Ives, Siglio Press2020. page: 10

— Understanding concepts of Arakawa and Gins reversing the destiny of ‘death’

1• Making Dying Illegal

‘Making Dying Illegal’ is a statement by the architects and artists Arakawa and Gins. The architectural fabrications they created are based on understanding of human biology, and used to strengthen the human mental and physical health, fighting death. “Every day, you are practicing how not to die”.

In addition to an understanding of our biology, death has other connotations; to curb your chronic stress is to live a longer life. That is because chronic stress has been associated with shortened telomeres; the shoelace tip of chromosomes that measure a cell’s age. Telomeres cap chromosomes to allow DNA to get copied every time a cell divides without damaging the cell’s genetic code, and they shorten with each cell division. When telomeres become too short, a cell can no longer divide and it dies.

From a philosophical point of view, according to the Dutch philosopher Spinoza, death is the transference of bodily extances from an entity to another; a displacement of a placement. Hens, In this research project death is not approached as the termination of a life, in the common sense. But rather taking death as a concept; an affront, an insult to the human’s rights and ambition.

2• Cognition as movement

Cognition in the work of Arakawa and Gins was very much linked to movement. The sites they created pushed the human body to resist death

-mentally and literally- through bodily movements. Slime molds2 actually have the such cognition, their cognition is identical to movement. The slime mold is often referred to as a biological computer. It has been popular in scientific experiments for its ability to navigate a maze using the shortest possible route to food source and for it is used to confirm transportation networks efficiency. The slime mold coordinates itself through sensory feedback with its environment. In one of the artist Jenna Sutela works, the slime mold navigates a three dimensional maze inside a spherical micro environment. In addition, the behavior of slime molds when they experience stressful conditions, is interesting. When separated during times of stress, they gather and some of them develop into spore generating fruiting bodies. Biologists find this weirdly interesting in relation to their cognition (identical to movement), and because of their ability to change their sociology and cooperations.

3.9 © Jenna Sutela, Orbs (2016). Physarum polycephalum, agar and oats on a silver 3D print of the Minakata Mandala, infrared light rod with engravings. Photo by Mikko Gaestel. source: https:// rhizome.org/ editorial/2016/ aug/16/slimeintelligence/ 3.10 © Mycetozoa from Ernst Haeckel’s 1904 Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature). source: https:// en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Slime_mold

2 A slim mold is a simple organism that consists of an acellular mass of creeping gelatinous protoplasm containing nuclei, or a mass of amoeboid cells. When it reaches a certain size it forms a large number of spore cases. source: https://www. lexico.com/definition/slime_mould

3• Perceptual adaptation .

• Perception Arakawa and Gins contended that perception is a complex activity composed of multiple ‘microevents’. People understand the relationships between things in space in terms of a small number of elementary schematic mental images. Imagine a ball on a table. The relation ‘o’ has three parts: n 1. The ball is in c with the table. ontact

3. it is by the table. supported

2. It is v e r t i c a ll

y oriented with respect to the table.

Not every language has a concept ‘on’, but every language has the concepts ‘Contact’, ‘Vertical Orientation’, and ‘Support’. Each of these is an elementary image-schema. Others Include: ‘Container’ defining in and out, ‘Path’ defining to and from, and so on. We also have basic body schemas: head, trunk, arms, legs, front, back and basic face. Every complex mental image we have is made up of a collection of these elementary imageand out,

schemas. Terry Regier’s research, published in his book The Human Semantic Potential, suggests that our elementary image-schemas arise from inborn structures of our bodies and brains, plus very basic common experiences.

• The brain builds a trustworthy reality using the information it gets from the surrounding environment, including image schemas. Arakawa and Gins worked on altering the perception of the spaces they built, and adapting the body to it. There are also modern works that try to alter the perception like the work of the artist Xin Liu. She designed glasses that make you see your surrounding environment upside down. In this way what is perceived is always filtered by cognition, where the brain takes what it remembers and unscramble the input into what it knows. This ability of perceptual adaptation does not only work on image recognition but also on the body. For example, holding a pencil in someone’s mouth as if they are smiling ends up getting them into a better mood because it activates the same muscles as smiling. This is a simple DIY way of hacking one’s biology. Context > cognition > perception > reality Perception is a fabrication of your mind. We form our versions of reality based on what we perceive through our senses, cognition and mind that is shaped by our context.

3.9 Arakawa and Gins, Reversible Destiny Lofts, Mitaka, Kitchen and Sphere Room, 200. © photo: Masataka Nakano

4• New landing sites On a daily basis we fluctuate between a normative perception of ourselves, the world around us ,and a much more dynamic and variable self; a multiplicity of sentiments, directions, actions. This breakdown of thought is what Arakawa and Gins attempted to prolong. An invention which provides the opportunity for the human to realign herself and create a new spectrum of selves; of landing sites. According to Arakawa and Gins, the world is composed of three types of landing sites: perceptual, imagining, and architectural. They see their job as forcing you to create new landing sites by systematically removing and reconfiguring your old ones. The body is redirected; the paths to the old landing sites are blocked. New perceptual landing sites are installed, new paths to physical landing sites inserted. Straight paths are made curved. You can no longer just walk through the room with your old body posture. The body must change. By using architecture to challenge perception and cognition, the imagination is stimulated. One of those examples is The Reversible Destiny House, where Identical sets of furniture stand similarly positioned one above the other within the upper and the lower altered labyrinths, with the furniture of the upper region hanging upside down from the ceiling.