Bodying

Kevin Donovan

The body is substantive, a thing. We know instinctively what our body is; the physical part of what is 'me', so much meat with something more. Conceptually, this is not difficult for us. It forms the literal basis on which discussion of the body in architecture is founded. Buildings, we easily accept, should be 'fitting', tailored to the needs of the activities in which our bodies engage. Architects easily speak of programme, a word which, in other contexts, is considered sinister, controlling.

Society prescribes limitations on the body's liberty to express itself publicly. In a sense, the body is public property and as such is subject to a moral code, a means of sublimating desire which, when expressed, loses ardour. We dream of what is absent, it fires our imagination. Sometimes it is more delicious not to touch. Often we tire of what too easily yields to us.

Like the body, architecture occupies a place between the principles of reality and pleasure; whereas building exists in the scene, the super-ego, the manifest, architecture conducts part of its buisness in the ob scenum, offstage. While, as Juhani Pallasmaa reminds us, architecture is in part engendered by 'archaic responses and reactions remembered in the body' (1), it is an error to require the practice of architecture to communicate these too explicitly. A building that is predicated purely on the purposes of function or comfort might be correct, even gratifying, but it is an unlikely home for Eros.

Restraint is erotic; manifestos, though stirring, are not. Much white Modernism tends to be grounded in the ocular and as such susbscribes to an entire vocabulary of scopic control; it seeks clarity, focus, overview, transparency, the 'hygiene of the optical'(2). It cannot envision architectural or bodily obscenity. We, on the other hand, cannot properly perceive what is too visible. If there is no tension or when mystery is edited out, we become disengaged.

We tend to consider ourselves the still point in a context of constant transformations, the immutable centre of our experience. The fact of our body as a physical entity, however, is not enough to allow it independent existence. As socialised perceptors we operate on the field of the other. Though we might attempt to, we cannot control the series of signifiers which make up our perceptual selves. Our bodies are bound up with the systems of sensual discourse within which our lives are lived. These pre-date our existence and will continue long after we have gone. Our being, body and soul, is constantly deferred across the field of impermanence that forms our context for living. In a sense, we are never really as 'there' as we assume we are. In the moment it takes us to acknowledge the assumption of what we are, the section of ourselves and its context has already shifted. Our seven ages are, in fact, inumerable.

'I' is a subject, 'me' an object. What we are is neither of those things, or partly both at the same time. Nietzsche in The Will to Power describes humanity as 'prisoner to a grammar invented at an early stage of human evolution' which causes our reason to be conditioned by primitive notions of reality. We might thus begin to think differently of the body; perhaps as something that exists in an undefined state between the verb and noun, being, an existence that is neither entirely visible, nor stable. Architecture itself, after all, also exists in a state of constant becoming, in, as Pallasmaa points out, the act of entering rather than the fact of the door (3).

Italo Calvino tells stories about cities of memory and desire, hidden cities, cities with shifting forms. It becomes clear on reading these stories that these places are one, a forgotton part of where we live. These are the cities for our invisible bodies. Here, like Kublai Khan, we may begin to discern, 'through the walls and towers destined to crumble, a tracery so subtle it could escape the termites gnawing'(4).

1. Juhani Pallasmaa: The Eyes of the Skin
2. Moholy-Nagy: Vision and Motion
3. Juhani Pallasmaa: The Eyes of the Skin
4. Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities