GRADUATE RESEARCH DESIGN STUDIO II
Diana Agrest, The Irwin S. Chanin Distinguished Professor

The Body: Corporeal Boundaries and Spatiotemporal Intersections

It is through the focusing on the Body as an object of study that architecture and architectural discourse articulates itself with other discourses and disciplines in a constant oscillation between the body as a real object and the body as object of study.

This studio approaches the question of the Body in its articulations and intersecting boundaries from a critical perspective. This exploration is developed in specific urban contexts. The project addresses both the body itself and the environments where it operates, opening to questions ranging from socio-political, cultural, physiological, mind, and psychological, gender, environmental, economic, representational, etc., that bear on the modes of construction and conception of bodies.

Focusing on the incredibly rich subject and narratives of the human body, we can transcend (critically) the original preconceptions of the body established in our architectural unconscious (ideology) based on the foundational texts and principles of Western architectural theories. From the texts of the Renaissance reading of Vitruvius going from Alberti to Francesco di Giorgio Martino and Filarete, the body has been both a referent, a tool, and a construction in which the body (of man) is both a metaphoric and a metonymic construction having perfect proportions and harmony based on nature in whole and in part. This embodiment of nature, thus God, is consistent with the transfer of the center from God to man.

We can fast forward from there to the first half of the 20th century and all forms of architectural constructions of the body from Ernst Neufert's Architects’ Data of 1936 to The Modulor by Le Corbusier of 1945 and 1955. This technocratic ideology takes its extreme form in the second half of the 20th century a with the impact of systems theory, cybernetics, mediatization, and virtual reality and into the 21st century and the predicted culture of disembodiment

Or one could look at the body, in its corporeality and the pushing of the limits of the body itself as in athletic activities and all mode of extreme explorations. Or the overcoming of its boundaries through the means of possible extensions, and prosthetic devices from those related to the senses to parts of the entire body. But what body is the body in question? The question is that of difference as opposed to the universalization of an abstract (male) body. Differences of all kinds, from genetic, to cultural including questions of sex, gender, race or ethnicity and others. This body is also affected if not completely determined by socio-political, economic, cultural, ideological, and physical environments and enacted in diverse places and modes habitation, and from the physical body to culture of disembodiment, in the cyberspace we inhabit, exacerbated at the present time.

The Body in the City
As we focus on the Body, this year’s studio focuses on the body in the City where it interacts with, reacts to, myriads of flows of all kinds in a process of give and take. Being a recipient and generator in the interaction and articulation between social context and multiple conditions where the range goes from public place of social interaction to the repercussions of the urban condition in private space the body. 

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