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