We Are
Architecture
Transformation of the Body via the City
The
primary site of examination is the sudden, and unexplained, re-appearance of
the human body in the evolutionary decades of architecture with the use of
prosthesis and its relationship to bodily reference for issues of
post-humanism, digital technology, globalisation and science.
There
are many issues I want to explore the human form and how it reacts around
architecture:
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The Histories of architecture have overlooked the discourse around
the human figure in many parts of Europe and America.
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There has been a renewed interest among progressive architects in
early twentieth-century arguments for the geometric ordering of natural bodies.
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Architectural discussions of the body, humanism and postmodernism
frequently refer to mid-century discourses on proportion.
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The preconscious topology of contemporary architectural thought
and highlighting current issues.
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The mid-century interest in the body is usually presented to the
return of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian humanism
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Understanding what the traditional body metaphor is, the ordering
it projects, how it is constituted and how it inscribes subjectivity through
geometry.
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Digital and biological body technologies, raising anxieties to
architecture’s relationship to epistemology in a post-modern condition.
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Evolution of body prosthesis
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How can humans be tools for sculpting a new architecture using
digital inscription.
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Framing the augmented spatial experience and making it meaningful.
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There has been significant impact on the visual appearance and
experience of the urban environment as a consequence of the emergence of
augmented public space. What follows is an attempt to capture at least some of
the reality of this transformation in the inherent structure of urban spaces,
where the virtual form inherent in the interaction of the media content are
experienced simultaneously with the real structure of the built environment. Such
a transformation has occurred through the integration of the built environment
with the media layer of digital display technologies and communications media
now coexists with architecture. At the most basic level, one key argument is
that, due to the application of display technologies such as LED screens into
city environments.
Majority of cities in the UK, at the
heart are now into the category of the augmented urban spaces rather than this
being confined to major international and global cities.
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Digital Humanity
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Body Spaces
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The Body as a sociocultural artefact
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Politics of the Body & The Political Bodies
Politics of the body and the political
bodies are two pervasive models of the interrelation of bodies and cities.
Finding alternative methods may help future designs for urban developments and
corporeal consequences.
The body and the city has a concerning
peripheral relationship rather than a constitutive relationship. The city is a
product of bodies; bodies are predating the city, causing the motivation for
their design and construction. This assumes and social structure and historical
character; the city develops not to how it wants but to human needs and design,
developing from nomadism to sedentary agrarianism to the structure of the
localized village, the form of the polis through industrialisation to the
technological modern city and beyond. Cities have become alienating environments;
environments which do not let the body an abundant framework….or have they
always been an alienation environment?
This view of the city as a product or
projection of the body is a form of humanism: the human subject is conceived as
a sovereign and self given agent, which individually or collectively, is
responsible for all social and historical production. Humans make cities and
such formulations; the body is used and seen as a tool of subjectivity of
self-given consciousness. The capability to design, plan ahead, to function as
an intentionality and be transformed in the process are products of the
muscular and energy aspects of the body which resemble the city. This
separation of design is reflected in two parts, the construction and the art
& craft. Humanism and Marxism share this philosophy, the distinction being
whether the relation is conceived as one-way relations of subjectivity to the
environment; or a dialect from subjectivity to the environment and back to subjectivity.
Another formulation proposes a kind of
isomorphism between the body and city; the two are understood as analogues in
which the feature, organization, and characteristics of one are reflected in
the other. The notion of the parallelism between the body and the social order
finds its clearest formulations in the seventeenth century, when liberal
political philosophers justified their various allegiances through a metaphor
of the body-politic. The condition parallels of the body; artifice mirrors nature.
The association between the body and the body-politic , the populace as the
body. The law has been compared to the body’s nerves, the military to its arms commerce
to its legs or stomach, and so on. If there is a morphological parallelism between
the artificial and the human body is the pervasive metaphor of the body-politic,
the body is rarely attributed a sex type. If one presses this metaphor just a little,
we must ask these questions:-
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If the state or the structure of the polis/city mirrors the body?
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What takes the metaphoric functions of the genitalia in the body-politic?
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What kind of genitalia are they?
In other words… does the body-politic have a particular
sex? Are we just surmising that the body-politic to be referred to is the male body
to represent the human? Phallocentrism is not just the dominance of the phallus
as a pervasive use of the masculine to represent the human. It is not to eliminate
the reveal of the masculinity inherent in the notion of the universal, the generic
human.
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Emotional spaces influenced by technological networks
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Today, one of the most important characteristics of electronic
landscapes has been that they are supported by personal devices, such as mobile
phones, mp3 players, digital cameras, portable game players etc. as the
development of “G-Multimedia” technology, which has vastly improved the mobile
phone market; it allows a handheld device to connect to the world. This allows
a connection to a network society, a new kind of society emerging through
information and communication technologies. The social network is a one of the
most outstanding digital landscapes to which the ordinary human bodies are
connected to electronic machines act as nodes in techno-social networks.
Machines, cities and bodies have been
evolving together for a long time, and the recent development of information
and communication technologies has transformed both the city and the body into
new forms through the implosion of humans and machines and the explosion of the
body in the world.
“the
city is an active force in constituting bodies, and always leaves its traces on
the subject’s corporeality. It follows that, corresponding to the dramatic
transformation of the city as a result of the information revolution will have
direct effects of the inscription of bodies” – Elizabeth Grosz; Bodies – Cities
Alongside the development of state of
the art technologies, contemporary cities are undergoing “cyborg urbanization”
in which the boundaries between human and machine spaces are increasingly
blurred and human bodies are evolving into “human-hybrid Machines” called
“Post-human”
Definitions of words by others
City by Elizabeth Grosz – “a complex
and interactive network which links together, often in an unitegrated and de
facto way, number of disparate social activities, processes and relations with
a number of imaginary and real, projected or actual architectural, geographic,
civic and public relations”
