body matters

It took me a while to figure out what Lynn meant by the word "body". I thought he meant a literal human body (which actually fits in with alot of the text), but when I started to read Composition Through Differentiation and Parasitic Exchanges I started to get very confused. It was not until watching those YouTube lectures where I started to grasp his concept of "body". To Lynn, the body is like a vessel, being it the human body composed of organs and body parts housing the soul, or architecture composed of construction materials housing the human body, or urban setting composed of enclosed spaces and roads housing architecture. What interests Lynn here is the relationship between the whole body and its kid of parts (as Schumacher puts it). 

The unified body that he mentions in the beginning of the chapter I think is referencing the idealistic views of architecture, that started since the time of Vitruvius, and has been the limelight of architecture theorists in the renaissance, baroque and even modern eras. If you think about the classical orders, the centralized churches, the harmonic proportions in palladian villas, the ideal city, and the modular are all based on a unified body; a basic set of rules that shape the outcome of the product. Lynn attributes this to the simplicity of mathematical rational. It worked way back when, but like every other idea throughout history, there comes a time when it becomes overused and turns into a fashion fad with no critical reasoning behind it (Lynn uses the modular banality of todays toothbrush variety to illustrate this point in the lectures). The age of computers, or calculus as Lynn likes to put it, has brought-forth a new paradigm in how we view the body. To make things easier, the artist responsible for creating the body favored the general consensus of what the body should be, and discarded other "variations". 

With calculus aided computer technology, "bodies can emerge through local intricate connections, alliances, aggregations and affiliations of base matter". I think (i pray this aint bullshit) what this means is with today's technology, the body now has the opportunity to react with its surroundings and its own organs. Here, Lynn's idea of the "primitive" comes to light. If we think of the design process as continuous,  one that is continued after the building is built, where the architect takes a back seat, and watches how his work reconfigures itself due to its interactions with its inhabitants (i've always thought that the best uses of architecture are the ones where the architect did not expect, yet built an opportunity for his audience to shape it into what they need it to be, e.g. what i call the auditorium of the spanish steps in rome), and even before any line is drawn or thought of when the project "starts" (if you consider peoples' need that brought them to the realization that they need architectural intervention, and the whole cycle of events that lead up to that point, then this will make alot more sense). The "primitive" is not a starting point, it is just a point of departure, the active embarkation of the architectural process. 

This whole idea of the "primitive" and the use of the gravitational field of the mutated body (see Animate Form) intrigued me quite a bit. One of the books that influenced my thinking about architecture is Edward Hall's The Hidden Dimension (I read that in professor Beckhoffer's Regionalism seminar). Hall says that there are 4 different distances that the body keeps track of: public, social, personal, and intimate (public being the most distance to the body and intimate being the least). This is what we say when we talk about our spatial bubbles. When I sit really close to you, my dear fellow american, you will feel that I invaded your personal space. When a lover kisses the partner, he is invading intimate space (lets hope that it was an invited invasion). When people are walking around in a party or gathering, the distances between them are considered social spaces...etc. I will be very pissed at myself if I dont throw in the fact that each culture understands the concepts of these spaces differently, and therefore we get many of cultural clashes.

Charles Moore's Body, Memory and Architecture takes this a step further; he says that we create a bubble surrounding our own bodies that take the shape of the body, but is tailored to suit our own comfort levels with our body (or soul) image. Lets say that there is a specific body part that one is not comfortable with, or a previous injury on a specific location of the body, or other philosophical comfort levels that I dont want to get into, the bubble inflates to give that specific part of the body more area. This bubble is what I understand as a blob. An architectural space (the whole body) should be animated to house the spatial blobs of the human body (the part) with all its variations, thus creating a more dynamically rationale towards architecture.

Ok back to the article at hand. What I just described above could also be understood as Lynn's parasite. It took me a while (and still is) to fully wrap my head around the parasite concept. Now a parasite is an organism that lives in its host and benefits by deriving nutrients from the host (at its expense?)...um...I'm just going to go out on a limb here and try to type the thoughts in my head about this issue. Could the interior be the parasite of the exterior? No this can't be it, the interior metaphor would be the body organ and the exterior would be the body's flesh. Are we then, the human beings inside the body of architecture, the parasites? If that's the case, weren't we always parasites? The computer aided architecture didnt just redefined us as the parasite, classical architecture would have seen us parasites as well...I need help with this.

In Greg Lynn's lectures, during the Q&A sessions, he mentions Peter Eisenmann's dislike of his embryonic houses. It seems, atleast according to Lynn's explanation, I do not propose that I know much about Eisenmann to make this statement, that Eisenmann would use the same process technology to find the best house out of all of the series, while Lynn stressed the need for variation; one is not important, it is the collective whole. This is where I have to express my disagreement and point out what could be a paradox in my own mind. Now I do agree with his call for the need for variation, but Lynn does not suggest that the dweller or inhabitant shape this variation himself, Lynn wants to be in control of the product in the end, and impose the form on the dweller. He clearly states in the Q&A session that he is not interested in a world where a layman could build his own vernacular. On one hand, he calls for a paradigm shift in the thought process of architecture, but he does not consider a re-evaluation of what today's role of the architect could be in terms of low cost housing. My ideas are still very wet and very conceptual, but I consider myself a regionalist, and I see alot of hope and promise in letting people build their world's themselves. Lynn, and everyone else who thinks what Im saying is a total act of mutiny on architecture, worry that a world where layman have a say in their architecture would result in a land of pure banality, a world where mindless contractors and developers rule as king, turning the united states and other first world nations as an suburban nightmare, and third world countries as settlement hell.

 They have a point. 

However, with this surge of new methodology (that brings new technology), architects may have a great say in affordable housing. It's all about the process, correct? It is impossible to guarantee what the end product looks like until we cycle through the process, correct? What if architects can adapt their skills into creating a conceptual bubble, and let the laymen realize the physical entity. For example, if architects use animation technology to test out new, cheaper, construction materials and methods, and alongside with it, testing out different configurations of spaces, whether its a relation between room and house, or house and neighborhood, and construct a set of parameters (also know in today's excitement free workforce as "design guidelines") to aid the laymen to construct his own house. The trick is to carefully layout these design guidelines, and make it more about the use of parts to create a whole, and less about the overall look and aesthetical value of the house (sure, of course issues like choice of color should be regulated). Us architects should be wise enough to realize that a carefully selected list of parameters would give us the aesthetics we want, and also make the layman feel that it is HIS house. The poor do not care about style or elaborate articulation of any sort.

I digress. I am sorry (not really).

If interested, I suggest reading Amos Rapport's house form + culture, E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, and Hassan Fathy's Architecture for the Poor. All part of the Regionalism seminar reading list.

I am also interested in discussing this further, and knowing myself, will probably bring this issue up during class discussion when applicable to the subject matter.