The Inhabitable Flesh of Architecture

Marcos Cruz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351887687
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Today's architecture has failed the body with its long heritage of purity of form and aesthetic of cleanliness. A resurgence of interest in flesh, especially in art, has led to a politics of abjection, completely changing traditional aesthetics, and is now giving light to an alternative discussion about the body in architecture. This book is dedicated to a future vision of the body in architecture, questioning the contemporary relationship between our Human Flesh and the changing Architectural Flesh. Through the analysis and design of a variety of buildings and projects, Flesh is proposed as a concept that extends the meaning of skin, one of architecture's most fundamental metaphors. It seeks to challenge a common misunderstanding of skin as a flat and thin surface. In a time when a pervasive discourse about the impact of digital technologies risks turning the architectural skin ever more disembodied, this book argues for a thick embodied flesh by exploring architectural interfaces that are truly inhabitable. Different concepts of Flesh are investigated, not only concerning the architectural and aesthetic, but also the biological aspects. The latter is materialised in form of Synthetic Neoplasms, which are proposed as new semi-living entities, rather than more commonly derived from scaled-up analogies between biological systems and larger scale architectural constructs. These 'neoplasmatic' creations are identified as partly designed object and partly living material, in which the line between the natural and the artificial is progressively blurred. Hybrid technologies and interdisciplinary work methodologies are thus required, and lead to a revision of our current architectural practice.

INTRODUCTION
BODY AND FLESH

I.1 Preliminary Design Experiments

The investigations on body and flesh discussed in this book were triggered by a set of preliminary design experiments entitled Deviant Bodies. These encompassed a series of photo-collages whereby multiple body fragments were recomposed to create new anatomical figurations. Rather than following the proportions of a classical figure, the body was reinvented as a deliberately transformable object. This in turn suggested reconsidering it in its common understanding as architecture’s most fundamental parameter and certainly its main raison d’être. These formal alterations of the human body echoed broader preoccupations – within art and cultural studies in particular – with what can be considered the search for a new contemporary bodily identity.

In the collages various skin flaps were autografted on to different areas of the body, creating physical deviations that resulted in several monstrous, yet attractively ugly figures. The series was followed by a second group of images, in which organs and homografts of tissue were exchanged between different bodies, and therefore the body came to be understood more and more as a hybrid object of design. In a third attempt, human flesh was infiltrated with sophisticated machinery that extended its physical and sensory capacities, while connecting it to its surrounding digital net. These three series then further led to a bigger piece, entitled In-Wall Creatures, where the body became literally merged with a physical surrounding that was built out of a composite of artificial and living skin. The flesh of the human body and the flesh of architecture were to become what the feminist Donna Haraway described when referring to the cyborg: ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’.¹

Looking at these speculative scenarios triggered numerous questions that in turn created the intellectual underpinning of the investigations carried out in this book. With such hybridism between bodies and architecture, what kind of environments would we become surrounded by? Who would be able to inhabit them, and how would we embody them? What are the historic motifs and aesthetic implications of such newly created architectural flesh? And would it be possible to design and build it or would it all remain as pure fiction?

While developing these pieces of work, it became clear to me that there was a growing interest in flesh elsewhere in art and literature, which still prevails. A quick browse through Amazon.com shows that, apart from Diller and Scofidio’s Flesh: Architectural Probes and Richard Sennett’s Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, both publications dating from 1994, there are indeed over 4,000 titles mentioning the term flesh.² Even though the large majority of books deal with human flesh (with a strong emphasis on the sexual), there is evidence that something more meaningful is happening that is of great significance not just with regard to the current understanding of our human body, but also on other levels that have direct implications for our built environment. Since flesh implies a sense of bodilyness and material sensuality, but also notions of the abject, it prompts investigations in a variety of fields, such as aesthetics, biology, cultural studies, art and architecture. I wonder whether this reinvigorated interest in flesh is a sign that our society is finally moving away from a long-standing anti- flesh puritanism that has affected our Western society for so long; and, if so, one wonders whether architects are able to engage with an architecture in which notions of pleasure (Bernard Tschumi),³ the ugly (Mark Cousins)⁴ or the grotesque (Peter Eisenman)⁵ are at last becoming accepted as valid criteria.

Possible answers to the questions set out above created the basic hypothesis for what I defined in this book as The Inhabitable Flesh of Architecture. It is clear that with such a broad scope of investigation it was impossible to grasp all the possible implications of flesh in relation to contemporary architecture. More in depth philosophical and psychological investigations, for example, were left out due to the already extensive nature of the study. The complexity of the proposed theme required a holistic approach that crossed several disciplinary boundaries which have not really been bridged before in this manner. It was also important to overcome the disparity between architectural theory and practice, which still affects a lot of studies about the body in architecture.

I.2 Influences From Biology and the Medical Sciences

The Inhabitable Flesh of Architecture stands, in an initial formulation, for the conviction that changes that are occurring in architecture are partly to be understood outside the traditional disciplinary boundaries. The prophecies put forward by architects such as William Mitchell and Neil Spiller have alerted us to the fact that architecture is undergoing profound changes, and that architects are thus forced to rethink their field of action, from professional practice to education.⁶ This encompasses not just the way they understand the body and its natural habitat, but also the way in which architects are exposed to numerous new scientific developments on a both microscopic and nanoscopic scale, and most of all new computational processes and tools, digital fabrication techniques, intelligent and bio-materials, and so on.⁷ Moreover, wireless technologies are being introduced everywhere and improving very fast, ‘now completing the long project of seamlessly integrating our mobile biological bodies with globally extended systems of nodes and linkages’,⁸ as Mitchell has argued. There is also a large amount of research made in the realm of time-based, i.e. interactive and responsive architecture which, according to Stephen Gage, is potentially more ‘people-centric’ than a lot of other scientific research that tends to be rather more ‘material-centric’.⁹ Gage’s own academic investigations, as well as the work of Mark Gulthorpe’s kinetic media façade Aegis Hyposurface (1999–2001), for example, are obviously interesting and inform the preoccupations in this book, in so far as they place the body at the centre of responsive and interactive design. What is important in this context, as Gage has stated, is that ‘architects have always built things out of the available technology – when this has changed so has the built output’.¹⁰ This explains in part the focus on new technological advances emerging outside the architectural field, which inform the overall argument of this book. Such advances affect especially developments in the bio-technological realm and their repercussions on architectural design which have so far been considerably underexplored. I believe that new and innovative ways in which design is being approached in biology and the medical sciences is acquiring significance for architectural practice, demanding our attention due to their inevitable technical, aesthetic, as well as cultural implications. A notion of design is emerging whereby interdisciplinary work methodologies, traded between designers, artists, engineers, biologists and physicians are increasingly requested, giving rise to hybrid techniques, new materialities and hitherto unimaginable living forms. The results of these conditions – defined here as ‘neoplasmatic’ – are partly designed object and partly living material, or ‘neo-biological’, as the American science writer Kevin Kelly has called it.¹¹ His predictions are important because they give a broader picture as to how our physical surroundings might become increasingly infused with ‘principles of bio-logic’, merging ‘engineered technology and unrestrained nature until the two [will] become indistinguishable’, as he has argued.¹² Kelly imagines that ‘[i]n the coming neo-biological era, (…) there might be a world of mutating buildings, living silicon polymers, software programs evolving offline, adaptable cars, rooms stuffed with coevolutionary furniture, gnatbots for cleaning, manufactured biological viruses that cure your illnesses, neural jacks, cyborgian body parts, designer food crops, simulated personalities, and a vast ecology of computing devices in constant flux.’¹³ But however plausible such descriptions might be, there is a danger in seeing architecture’s future being fully replaced by such neo-biological conditions. My argument in this book, on the contrary, suggests scenarios in which pre-existent, more traditional surroundings might be infiltrated by the ‘bio-logic’, creating new hybrid and semi-living conditions.

I.1 dECOi Aegis Hyposurface, Birmingh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Images (According to their provenance)
• Photo Acknowledgements
• Introduction Body and Flesh
• Design Experiment I
• Section I Disgusting Flesh
• Section II Inhabitable Interfaces
• Section III Synthetic Neoplasms
• Design Experiment (Final Stage)
• Conclusion
• Bibliographic References
• Index