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    Marco Frascari
    This document provides an overview of a public seminar on consciousness, architecture, and the human body led by Marco Frascari. Some key points: - The seminar will examine how we think about architecture through our bodies and think about our bodies through architecture. - It will raise awareness of the cognitive processes architects undergo when perceiving and conceiving of architecture. - The human body will be examined as a subject of scholarly inquiry in fields like anthropology, providing a key to new areas of study. - The seminar will use philosophical meditations and drawings to redefine our relationship with architectural drawings and enlarge ideas about bodies, minds and buildings.

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    1 Bodies

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    Marco Frascari
    187 views30 pages
    This document provides an overview of a public seminar on consciousness, architecture, and the human body led by Marco Frascari. Some key points: - The seminar will examine how we think about architecture through our bodies and think about our bodies through architecture. - It will raise awareness of the cognitive processes architects undergo when perceiving and conceiving of architecture. - The human body will be examined as a subject of scholarly inquiry in fields like anthropology, providing a key to new areas of study. - The seminar will use philosophical meditations and drawings to redefine our relationship with architectural drawings and enlarge ideas about bodies, minds and buildings.

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    This document provides an overview of a public seminar on consciousness, architecture, and the human body led by Marco Frascari. Some key points: - The seminar will examine how we think about architecture through our bodies and think about our bodies through architecture. - It will raise awareness of the cognitive processes architects undergo when perceiving and conceiving of architecture. - The human body will be examined as a subject of scholarly inquiry in fields like anthropology, providing a key to new areas of study. - The seminar will use philosophical meditations and drawings to redefine our relationship with architectural drawings and enlarge ideas about bodies, minds and buildings.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    187 views30 pages

    1 Bodies

    Uploaded by

    Marco Frascari
    This document provides an overview of a public seminar on consciousness, architecture, and the human body led by Marco Frascari. Some key points: - The seminar will examine how we think about architecture through our bodies and think about our bodies through architecture. - It will raise awareness of the cognitive processes architects undergo when perceiving and conceiving of architecture. - The human body will be examined as a subject of scholarly inquiry in fields like anthropology, providing a key to new areas of study. - The seminar will use philosophical meditations and drawings to redefine our relationship with architectural drawings and enlarge ideas about bodies, minds and buildings.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 30

    Consciousness !

    &!
    Architecture!
    Human Bodies &
    Buildings!
    Instructor: Marco Frascari!

    Azrieli School of Architecture


    & Urbanism!
    Carleton University!

    A Public Seminar!
    Winter 2009!
    Just  as  we  think  architecture  with  our  bodies,    
    we  think  our  bodies  through  architecture.      
    (M.F.,  Monsters  of  Architecture,  1991)    
    By understanding that architecture is the result
    of the merging the arts of thinking well,
    building well and living well, the main concern
    of this seminars is to raise a novel awareness
    of the processes taking place in the mind and
    body of architects during the acts of perceiving
    and conceiving architecture. 

    In probing the role of the body in architecture, this


    seminar takes part of a substantial concern regarding
    the human body as a subject of scholarly inquiry.
    In recent years, in fields as diverse as anthropology,
    sociology, psychology, geography, philosophy, religious
    studies, art history and theory, and gender and culture
    studies, embodiment has become an key word to
    unlock amazing areas of study

    The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries
    can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a
    complex structure. The function of its different parts and their relation afford a
    source of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpret
    rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva, and the rest unless we are
    prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and
    dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body.!

    Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966., p. 115. !
    In architectural drawings, human figures can be seen as
    the creation of base configurations that perform, form,
    reform and transform architecture by tracing
    metaphorical, metonymical and demonstrative patterns
    in plans, elevations and sections.!
    Buildings are as useful to our minds as they are to our bodies. !
    John Onians!

    Architectural knowledge generally


    originates with the individual’s
    perceptual and motor systems. !

    Architecture is framed by embodied


    experience and embodied experience
    is framed by architecture !
    The Neapolitan Giambattista Vico, an unusual
    philosopher of the eighteenth century, was
    interested in the power of imagination and
    discovered the beginning of humanity in the
    ontological dimension of stench. Vico’s discovery
    is that the world of senses begins in the periphery
    of our bodies and moves to inner and higher levels
    of perception. From there, in analogical manner,
    the senses rule the way we willfully and wittily act
    in our world. !
    Senses are at the basis for a sated human sapience and
    consequently Vico points out: !

    Rational metaphysics teaches that man


    becomes all things by understanding them (homo
    intelligendo fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics
    shows that man becomes all things by not
    understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia);
    and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than
    the former, for when man understands he
    extends his mind and takes in the things, but
    when he does not understand he makes the
    things out of himself and becomes them by
    transforming himself into them.!
    Giambattista Vico, New Science, 405.!
    The role of architecture, as a “body art,” is to foster
    happiness, to facilitate the ‘beatific’ life.!
    By using philosophical meditations and
    critical theory about architecture,
    drawings, images, affects, and
    cognition, this is an exercise about the
    second nature of architecture.
    Ascribing embodied and embedded
    thought to architectural drawings the
    aim is to redefine our relationship with
    them and enlarges our ideas about
    body, mind and buildings. This novel
    and closely interdependent
    relationship marks a turning point in
    our understanding of the connections
    between humans, the uses of
    architecture and architectural
    conceiving. !
    Transubstantion from body to building!

    The identification human body with


    buildings and its parts survived in
    many medieval churches where the
    axis of the apse is slightly slanting to
    the right of the axis of the nave,
    revealing the inclination of the head
    of Christ at the moment of his death
    on the cross: !
    et inclinato capite emisit spiritum. !
    The notion of embodiment in architectural
    thinking intimately depends on the duality of
    perception of the internal representation of human
    body. !

    •  Body image is a system of


    perception attitudes and
    believes. !

    •  Body schema is a system of


    sensory-motor capacities
    that function without
    awareness or perceptual
    monitoring

    Descartes’ partitioning of the world into objects (res
    extensa) and mind (res cogitans), occurs most
    profoundly at the level of the body. The identity of the
    individual, the formerly complete unity of body and
    soul, is separated.!
    Descartes’ error of the separation of
    mind and body could not be
    perpetrated without the replacement of
    the metaphor of architecture as human
    body with the mirror metaphor of the
    human body as a building. !

    The union of body and mind was


    challenged by the new anatomical
    conceptions of the body as machine
    which became extreme in the case of
    Julien Offray de la Mettrie. !
    The body’s vocabulary of primary positions
    articulates not only its own subjective
    presence, but its surrounding space.!
    •  Architecti est scientia pluribus disciplinis
    et variis eruditionibus ornata, cuius iudicio
    probantur omnia quae ab ceteris artibus
    perficiuntur opera. Ea nascitur ex fabrica
    et ratiocinatione. Fabrica est continuata ac
    trita usus meditatio ad propositum
    deformationis, quae manibus perficitur e
    materia, cuiuscumque generis opus est.
    Ratiocinatio autem est, quae res fabricatas
    sollertiae ac rationis pro portione
    demonstrare atque explicare potest.

    Illustration from Le Corbusier, Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City
    Planning, p. 125. Skeleton, musculature, and viscera provide inspiration for the free plan.!
    The anatomical body changed the perception
    of the building body !
    bloody organs in a marble statue

    Scale Figures

    From pencil points
    1929

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