Thoughts and Words....the story so far

...........What is my Architecture? Defining my own architectural intent

Vestigial Anatomies & Vicarious Prosthesis............(a working title)

".......Man, has as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God..... when he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent." (Freud)

To begin....

My architecture seeks to synthesise a milieu of ideas concerning the body- its tectonic surfaces, mechanics of motion and relations to space, and the performative roles of the anatomy within a larger techno-ecological framework. This coupled with a preoccupation in futurist notions of representing (or indeed the misrepresenting in the traditional sense) the anatomy/anatomical surface in ‘movement space’, delineates my current architectural agenda.

Thus far my work has be preoccupied with the body’s relative positionings in space, through how its physicality is thus subjugated through so called prosthetic navigations, and concordantly adopting 'futurist' notions of representation, where body exists continually in a movement state.
Thus, as bodies move they trace out a path from one locale to another and these paths constantly intersect with those of others in a complex web of biographies. These are not just human bodies but also all other objects that can be described as trajectories in time-space.

"Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, since our sharpened and multiplied sensitiveness has already penetrated the obscure manifestations of the medium....... A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears." (Boccionni)

Theoretically the trajectory of the work drew comparisons between futurist ideas and late 20th century cyber-theory, exploring the ‘trope’ of corporeality dissolving through ‘extensions of man’, a reference to Marshall McLuhans seminal text ‘Understanding Media: The extensions of Man.’ Wherein electrical technologies are analgous to prosthetic extensions of the central nervous system.
Such prosthetic apparatus modulate physical change multiply and extend bodily relations to the world- which, exhaustively discussed, is positioned as a new media of disembodiment. Flirting with ideas of cybertheory as a discourse on the reflexive relationship of corporeality and technology, and as means of reifying the idea of the Vestigial Anatomy.

The progenitor of these cyber-theories William Gibson (and cyber theorists in general) propagates a hyperbolised, neo-cartesian idea of metaphysics that connotes the separation of body and mind - where the body exists as a lesser mechanism (‘the meat’) distinguished from an ontologically superior mind.

Conversely Maurice Merleau Ponty challenges the cartesian model founded on the corresponding dualism of the mind and body; ‘res extensa’ and ‘res cognitans’; the subjective and the objective- purporting instead ‘the phenomenological body’. For Merleau-Ponty the body is not simply a material location from which we perceive. He positions perception as a fundamental ‘corporeality’ rather than as a result of the actions of a disembodied thinking. Merleau-Ponty talked of the body as 'flesh', made of the same 'flesh' of the world.
'Flesh’ in this instance becomes an extended meaning of skin and, accordingly, skin not as surface or membrane , but rather like ‘a place of minglings’(Connor.) Thereby implicating a notion of three-dimensionality that is manifested through the material landscape of skin.

The largest organ of the body, the skin is made of dead and living cells that act as our environmental envelope. It is an indeterminable organ state - its visiblility/invisibility congruent with a categorical separation between seeing and touching. It is the Visible and the Invisible. The skin begets a primary architectural state- one of encapsulation, protection, coverage. There is however no such thing as a boundary, in that all spaces are porous to a greater or lesser degree. Bodies caught in freeze frame may look like defined envelopes, whereas in actual fact they are punctured bags of water constantly shedding off pieces of themselves.




The skin is not only a structural sheath for the functioning of the body or an envelope maintaining homeostasis, it is also a fundamental sensory organ and it contributes to the delineation of a body in the phenomenological world - a spatial filter between states demarcating properties of interiority and exteriority.(a fundamental tenet of architecture?)
To be continued.......