The boldness of unfolding yourself: occupying space with your body By Setareh Noorani
Inhabiting space as a physical and conceptual practice has been the consideration of humans for as long as they have been aware of the ideological implications. Architects have claimed the birthright to experiment with the forms this inhabitation could take by placing inanimate objects into space as representation of the human body. These experimentations manifested themselves in controlled dimensions and articulations of bodies within space, or shape. Mentally, the said inanimate objects are considered as being one with their controlled shape, causing movements like the defunct Postmodernism and the now hyper-graphic re-rendering of this Pomo to blossom, in a certain “whateverness”1. A result of this has been the continued unnatural folding of the human body within these ideological representations. Bodies folded into shapes, rooms, corridors, squares, monuments fit to the taste of the time. Could we say that the typologies of shape are dominating the body-subject as soon as they are crafted, complicit to ideology? In this short explorative essay, I would like to propose that spatial precedents do represent an oppressive factor to the conceptual body. These objects form an unnatural vessel in which the body is expected to perform, or fold. Secondly, by imagining one specific body during a design, implicitly or explicitly, all other bodies are immediately in disadvantage and have to fold more in order to fit. Deconstructing the expected behavioral pattern within a given space, or unfolding, might be the boldest consideration of space in this time. Folding into the Vessel Contemporary ideologies have historically expressed their will to inhabit space via the architecture. Now, several ideologies fight for attention in the Media, its watered down snippets the main frame of thought we adhere to now. The current convergence of hyperactive, daily changing ideologies into flattened views, which we can take on and off like the latest fashion, affected the way space is designed. Late-capitalist billboards portraying water-colored, dreamlike images are uncanny in their skin-deep promise. “Postmodernism repackaged as a glossy, digitally enhanced, high-definition remaster.2” Monstrous adaptations of modernist buildings in countries several plane-hours away. The designs are thus vessels for contemporary thought, and currently our contemporary thought is one that must fit in 140 characters or a single filtered photo. By seeing designs as vessels, we can do a small leap of thought to thinking that they are not only objects of creation in themselves, but also objects of containment for that which is expected to be contained. Throughout history, these contained substances have been human bodies. Thus, on the other hand, the objects that are contained must adapt to the container. Bodies squeeze themselves to fit into trendy, efficient, normative spaces. Bodies cannot exceed the given limit or underperform the proposed minimum. This we call folding. Disadvantaging bodies When a mismatch of vessel and body occurs, where the two are expected to interact, a body is disadvantaged. Bodies digress to collective infill of the vessels, cornflakes packed in the quirky cardboard box, not anymore the fuel for radical possibility that is native to them3. Narratives are purposefully used or if deemed useless, forgotten. Even more so in this age where ‘whateverness’ prevails. The deconstruction of vessels must occur, beyond the cry for architecture to incorporate diversity, or the undoing of design bias. The latter two only engage in hindsight patching of spatial objects, while the former unfolding proactively proposes critical exploration.
1
The Problem With Shape, p. 47, Hans Tursack, Log no.41, 2017 The Problem With Shape, p. 47, Hans Tursack, Log no.41, 2017 3 Hannah Arendt speaks in The Human Condition of the natality of freedom. There is radicalness into taking freedom that is native to our birth. 2
Unfolding “We must identify and respond to new structures that attempt to encode and enforce evolving forms of cultural normativity.4” This quote from Kolb’s essay Working Queer entails that in order to follow the ideological pace of the contemporary and its tendency to devour bodies and their narratives as infill for vessels, unfolding is a matter of “how”. Queerness is explained as “not carving out space”, yet unfolding as a method does urge to expand into space and transverse the vessel. With this writing for example, the words used do take up a mental space for experimentation, beyond the vessel of that which exists. In the same way, boldness beyond the caricature might be unfolding as an act against the vessels of late capitalism. Architects can use their position, residing beyond the realms of philosophy, sociology, politicology, to unfold and allow for unfolding, and thus transgress the ideological structures of contemporary age.
4
Working Queer, p. 63, Jaffer Kolb, Log no. 41, 2017