What is the relationship between building & body today? Are buildings metaphors of the body; abstractions of the body; direct responses to the body; some combination of these; or something else?
ARTICLE READING
LECTURE 08
I believe that the relationship between human and architecture has always been inseparable from the very beginning, since human is the very reason why architecture exist in the first place, to shelter the human. Architecture in the past utilize the proportion of the human body, and consider it as a design by nature, and it is metaphors of the human body, also an abstraction of the body stated by Marcus Vitruvius. It is then further developed and used by Le Corbusier, to produce a measurement system, called “Le Modular” to unite the measurement system. As time goes on, I believe that the relationship between human and architecture had somehow evolved in order to adapt to our present generation. In today’s architecture, I felt that human have had much more relation and consideration when it comes to the design of a building.
I think in today’s architecture, human body and architecture are more than a standard dimensions or measurements and placements within architectural space. Lance Hosey highlighted the point that different methods used to represent the body to reveal the human figure to be gender and race specific. Therefore, I believe architecture should do so as well, where building should reveal itself to different human bodies and to the different uses of today’s architecture.
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A great example of this I think would be Sou Fujimoto’s wooden house. This houses doesn’t fit as the best example but what I wanted to highlight is the considerations of human body and its movement in each space. Each activity required a certain amount of spaces, and that spaces is mainly affected on the movement of body, and in this box, Sou Fujimoto tried to implement all the spaces in the same roof. Which requires lots of study of how human body work for different activities, just as how different people have different scale. So this brings to my point that architecture should not only design according to a standard human body, or standard measurement, I believe we should look more into, who are we building for, and what’s the function of the space.
Spaces within the block the block are design with accordingly to fit human body and also make sure that the human bod is able to function well in the space for its purpose.
This somehow adopted the human principle design as it is somehow symmetrical as a 350mm square wooden box. He envisioned the creation of new spatiality that preserves primitive conditions of a harmonious entity before various functions and roles differentiated. Here, humans are distributed three-dimensionally in the space. There are no separations of floor, wall, and ceiling here. A place that one thought was a floor becomes a chair, a ceiling, a wall from various positions. The floor levels are relative and spatiality is perceived differently according to one's position. This is where the consideration of human body came into place, just like how architecture in today society are built with the considerations and adaption of the human body anthropometry and human body behavior to adapt and accommodate human of this era.
Today's architecture involves a much more variety of factors to be considered, and different places in the world have different context, different sizes of not only human but also architecture. Therefore i felt that architecture should not be design the same as any another, and that architecture should be design with the consideration of what type of human are we building for, adults, children, disabled, male, female, and also with the consider of the human activity for the space. Only then I feel that the architecture could be fully utilize and appreciated for its relationship with the human body.
Here's a comparison for the relationship of human body with architecture of ancient times (Left), and the relationship of human body and architecture stated by Sou Fujimoto (Right)
In contrast the past are designing more based on the human physical body itself but Sou fujimoto believes its something more.
Each space are calculated carefully to ensure that human anthropometry fits in the usage of each space
Every space are thought of very well, in order for human activities to take place.
