Performative Architecture

Design Strategies for Living Bodies

Sam Spurr
A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy

School of English, Media and Performance Arts

University of New South Wales
2007

i
Originality Statement

‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my
knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by
another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been
accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any
other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made
in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I
have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the
thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the
product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in
the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic
expression is acknowledged.’

Signed ……………………………………………..............
Date …………………10.01.2008…………………………..................

ii
Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks must go to my supervisors James Donald and Ed Scheer. I am

particularly grateful to Ed, where in amongst the caffeined conversations have
been your continual reassurance, dedication and inspiration to this changing
project throughout the years.

I am very grateful to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauch Dienst for the

opportunity to live and research several aspects of this thesis in Berlin. I would
also like to thank Erika Fisher-Lichte and the Sonderforschungsbereich Kulteren
des Performativen Research group at the Free University in Berlin, for their
support and welcoming into an inspirational place of research. Thank you to
Gabrielle Brandstetter for your innovative introductions to the body in dance
theory. Thankyou also to the Bauhaus Archive, Berlin for their interest and help
with this project.

Thankyou to my persevering editors Roger Dawkins, John Golder and most

specifically to the articulate and charming Hamish Ford, for going above and
beyond your editorial roles. Thankyou to Justin Tauber for your
phenomenological insights and to Kim Roberts for your thoughtful reading. To all
the friends who have remained accepting of my moods and absences, and those
that have particularly supported me; Samantha Newman for your friendship and
home, Charles Rice for your ever wise and calming council, Ben Hewett for the
tangible and intangible support of my fragile sanity, and to Toby Winton-Brown
for your love and care through these many, many years.

Finally thankyou to my family; Mum, Peter, Pam and Michael and my dear father.
For all the last minute demands, housing, phone calls and desperations, funding,
editing, and continuing, irrational love.

iii
Abstract

Under the title ‘Performative Architecture’, this thesis draws on theories from
performance studies and phenomenology in order to look beyond humanist
practices that see the body as fixed and static. This thesis addresses two
questions that I will be arguing are of increasing significance to contemporary
architecture: Firstly, in the context of emerging digital and digitised spaces, how
does the living body interact with the surrounding environment?; and secondly,
what do these changing forms of human inhabitation and movement mean for the
practice of architecture?

The time frame spans from the work of Oskar Schlemmer in the 1920s to
contemporary built works, examining the different ways that performativity has
infiltrated architectural design. The case studies are divided into architectural
performances that highlight the living body, and performative drawings that
explore how to bring that body into the design process. In doing so a number of
emerging paradigms become apparent that find built form in contemporary
architectural examples. This approach is used to describe and analyse recent
projects by Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, Diller and Scofidio and Lars
Spuybroek, and to identify a common orientation through very different types of
built environments.

Acknowledging the change in both bodies and spaces in the Information Age, this
research seeks to make room for the living body in the design of emerging, multi-
dimensional, built environments.

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Contents

Originality Statement ii
Acknowledgments iii
Abstract iv
Contents v
List of Illustrations vii

INTRODUCTION 1
0.1 The Body 7
0.2 Performance Studies 10
0.3 Performative Architectures 14
0.4 Justification of Research 15
0.5 Research Methodologies 17
0.6 Key Terms 19
0.7 Thesis Outline 22

ChapterONE: The Space of Architecture 26

1.1 The Situation of Space 27
1.2 Technology and Architecture 29
1.3 Stable Spaces and Moving Bodies 35
1.4 The Space of Architectural Discourse 40
1.5 The Body in Architecture 43
1.6 Previous Connections Between Performativity and Architecture 56

ChapterTWO: Bodies and Drawings 60

2.1 The Creative Body 62
2.2 The Phenomenological Body 65
2.3 The Space between Bodies 74
2.4 Drawing Architecture 80

ChapterTHREE: Architecture Performances 90

3.1 Moving Bodies and Buildings 92
3.2 Making Visible Body Movement: The Ballets of Oskar Schlemmer 93
3.3 Pedestrian Improvisations 114
3.4 Activating Spaces/ Spaces: The Performances of Vito Acconci 120
3.5 Urban Transactions 135

ChapterFOUR: Performative Drawings 140

4.1 Mapping Situations 143
4.2 Losing Perspective 149
4.3 Scripting for Experience: The Masques of John Hejduk 157
4.4 Drawing Dance 171
4.5 Moving Drawings: The Drawings of Bernard Tschumi 178
4.6 Drawing Conclusions 192

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ChapterFIVE: Non-Standard Architecture 194
5.1 Performative Design Processes 196
5.2 The Diagram 199
5.3 New Spatial Structures 207
5.4 Topological Architecture 210
5.5 Bodily Interfaces 212
5.6 Emergent Design Paradigms 216

ChapterSIX: Performative Architecture 227

6.1 Extension to the Jewish Museum, Germany 229
6.2 The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Germany 240
6.3 The Blur Building, Swiss Exposition 250
6.4 The H20 Pavilion, Netherlands 263

CONCLUSION 279

Works Cited 287

Electronic Resources 293

vi
List of Illustrations

Figure 1 95
Schlemmer, Oskar The Triadic Ballet, 1922.
Source: Ehrlich, Doreen The Bauhaus (Mallard Press: US, 1991), p.154.

Figure 2 100
Fuller, Loie (photograph), 1894.
Source: Kruman, Susan Gillis, The Early Moderns, www.pitt.edu Retrieved 06.06.2007
at <http://www.pitt.edu/~gillis/dance/2.gif>

Figure 3 112
Oskar Schlemmer, Slat Dance,1927.
Source: Oskar Schlemmer, Slat Dance (1927)
The Expressionists, 12.08.2000. www.english.emory.edu. Retrieved 10.03.2007 at
<http://www.english.emory.edu/DRAMA/ExpressionImage.html>

Figure 4 116
Debord, Guy The Naked City.
Source: De Zegher, Catherine, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures
from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (The MIT Press: USA,1999), p.96.

Figure 5 124
Acconci, Vito Instant House,1980.
Source: Linker, Kate. Vito Acconci (Rizzoli: New York, 1994), p. 46.

Figure 6 127
Acconci, Vito Seedbed (performance), 1972.
Source: Linker, Kate, Vito Acconci, (Rizzoli: New York, 1994), p. 46.

Figure 7 137
Nuiwenhuys, Constant, Sector Constructie, New Babylon, 1956.
Source: De Zegher, Catherine, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures
from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (The MIT Press: USA, 1999), p.119.

Figure 8 145
Debord, Guy, page from Mémoires, 1957.
Source: Careri, Francesco, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Process, (Editorial
Gustavo Gili: Spain, 2002), p.105.

Figure 9 150
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, Le Carceri, plate 6 (second state), 1761.
Source: Bloomer, Jennifer. Architecture and the Text: The (s)crypts of Joyce and
Piranesi, (Yale University Press: New Haven & London, 1993), p.121.

vii
Figure 10 151
Libeskind, Daniel, Micromegas 3, Leakage.
Source: Libeskind, Daniel. Libeskind at the Soane: Drawing a New Architecture, (Sir
John Soane's Museum: Great Britain, 2001), p.9.

Figure 11 156
Hejduk, John, ‘Retired General’s Place’ from The Lancaster/Hanover Masque
Source: Hejduk, John. The Lancaster/Hanover Masque, (Architectural Association:
London, 1992), p.25.

Figure 12 156
Hejduk, John Text for ‘Retired General’s Place’ from The Lancaster/Hanover Masque
Source: Hejduk, John. The Lancaster/Hanover Masque, (Architectural Association:
London, 1992), p.26.

Figure 13 178
Tschumi, Bernard, from The Manhattan Transcripts (2). 1978
Source: Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction, (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA,
1994), frontispiece.

Figure 14 190
Tschumi, Bernard, Screenplays. 1977.
Source: Tschumi, Bernard. Architecture and Disjunction, (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA,
1994), p.152.

Figure 15 228
Libeskind, Daniel, Extension to the Jewish Museum, 2001.
Source: photographs by Ben Hewett.

Figure 16 240
Eisenman, Peter, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, 2005.
Source: photograph by Ben Hewett.

Figure 17 250
Diller & Scofidio, Blur Building, Switzerland, 2002.
Source: Diller, Elizabeth & Scofidio, Ricardo, Blur: The Making of Nothing, (Harry N.
Abrams: New York, 2002), p. 371.

Figure 18 263
NOX Architecture, The H2O Pavilion, 2006.
Source: photographs by Toby Winton-Brown.

Figure 19 263
NOX Architecture, The H2O Pavilion, 2006.
Source: photographs by Toby Winton-Brown.

Figure 20 280
Phaeno Science Centre, Germany, 2006.
Source: photograph by Ben Hewett.

viii
Figure 21 280
Mercedes Museum, Germany, 2006.
Source: photograph by Ben Hewett.

Figure 22 280
Digital image, World Millennium Tower, Busan Korea
Source: www.europaconcorsi.com, 04-04-2007. Retrieved 10.06.2007 at
<http://www.europaconcorsi.com/db/pub/scheda.php?id=15961>

ix
ChapterINTRODUCTION

1
This thesis is concerned with bodies and spaces, both singularly and in the way
they inter-relate. Entering into the new millennium it has become more important
than ever before that we reassess the ways in which bodies and spaces are used
to construct our built environment. Human movement in everyday life is now a
fluid transition through multiple spaces and geographical co-ordinates are as
likely to be defined by mobile phone reception as a road map. These spaces
mesh and blur, indifferent to physical boundaries. Technology has created new
environments both virtual and material, and to inhabit these terrains the body
must re-invent itself. In order to negotiate these spaces, bodies must learn to
improvise. Mobility becomes the key to habitation, the flexibility and dexterity to
leap, flow or fall from one space to the next. In this context, this thesis has been
inspired by two questions of increasing significance for the contemporary practice
and understanding of architecture. First, how is the human body responding and
adapting to the new environments brought into being by new technologies, new
social relations, and new ways of building?; and second, what do these changing
forms of human inhabitation and movement mean for the practice of
architecture?

Architectures are now situated in a variety of unstable sites, from buildings made
of cardboard tubes to virtual art museums. The once assumed, constant ground
of architecture is shifting and the relationship between bodies and built
environments has become a key issue throughout a number of disciplines.
Changes brought about by media and telecommunications have raised questions
about traditional design forms and the role of the body within them. In the same
way that the automobile would change the everyday mobility of bodies, advances
in technology during the last fifty years have changed how bodies interact in, and
with, built environments. Firmly situated in the Information Age, the greatest
transformations are sited virtually.1 In addition to physical buildings, inhabitation

1
The ‘Information Age’ is a term formulated by Manuel Castells to describe the social and
economic dynamics of the contemporary age. This condition Castells characterizes by the

2
now incorporates both the digital spaces of virtual worlds and the digitised
spaces of the material one, interwoven with new interfaces and other spaces.
These changes are mirrored in the new design systems that are being used by
architects. Developments in computer-aided design and manufacturing have
changed how architects design, as well as make, buildings. Computational
processes stress fluidity and flexibility, encapsulating the changing contemporary
relations between bodies and spaces.

This research stems from the belief that architecture too often forgets to
incorporate the animate, sensory body in its practice. This argument has been
made by several theorists, with a variety of agendas, including architectural
historians such as Iain Borden, architects Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi,
and particularly theorists advocating phenomenology in architecture, like Alberto
Pérez-Gómez and Juhani Pallasma.2

The primary influences for this research are two philosophers of space: Iain
Borden and Elizabeth Grosz. Borden emphatically argues against the typical
focus on the object in architecture history, demanding that ‘architectural
historians must move away from seeing architecture only as things, imagination
as that only of architects, mapping as only by drawing, and space as only interior,
façade, composition and garden.’3 He is dedicated to a subversion of
architectural history. Instead, Borden describes architecture as a ‘set of flows, as
set of experiences and reproductions’.4 Exemplified in the practice of
skateboarding, Borden’s understanding of the essentially performative
relationship between bodies and built environments has been paradigmatic for
the approach that I have taken.

exchange and fluidity of networked information. See his trilogy The Information Age: Economy,
Society and Culture (1996, 1997 & 1998).
2
Their ideas will be examined in this thesis in Chapters One and Two.
3
Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City (Berg: New York, 2001), p.7.
4
Iain Borden, ibid, p.6.

3
The second important primary influence on this research comes from the
philosopher Elizabeth Grosz. From 'outside’ of architecture, Grosz challenges
the profession to rethink its operations and processes in a transforming world of
multiplying and increasingly virtual spaces.5 Grosz argues that the fundamental
relations between bodes and spaces are being transformed, and the formulations
of space and temporality, by such theorists as Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Jacques Derrida and Henri Bergson, provide new pathways to open architecture
up to emergent spaces. In her book Architecture from the Outside, Grosz
confronts architects with the changes to bodies and spaces that have occurred
via new technologies. She writes: ‘[I]t is the task of the architect to negotiate how
these spaces (the virtual and the real) are to exist in contiguity with each other
and how we are to inhabit them.’6

Back inside architecture, it is specifically in the expanding digital field where

these questions have been most extensively discussed, because it is here that
design methodologies themselves are being transformed. Hani Rashid from
Asymptote, a design firm renown in this growing field, declares:

[B]y understanding the new form and new space that is occupied by the
body in our digital and electronic universe, we can build up a map of this
activity as a kind of internal geometric organ or a new geometric situation
for architecture, so as we proceed ever further into this digitalized world, I
am investigating a way of physically reproducing what I see as an
irresistible state of excitation, a state of modernity and a kind of new way

5
Elizabeth Grosz has rigorously explored the impact of digital technologies on space and the
body. She has been accepted into architectural discourse through the ANY conferences and
publications, while always making clear her position as a philosopher from ‘outside’ the
architectural profession. Grosz has focused on architecture and philosophy in terms of sexuality
and Deleuzian theory.
6
Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Cyberspace, Virtuality and the Real’ in Architecture from the Outside: Essays
on Virtual and Real Space (MIT Press: USA, 2001), p.82.

4
 of being in the 21st century.7

Rashid recognises the shift needed in architecture due to this new spatial
context. Led by these digital architects who are pushing the conventional
limitations of architecture, there is a demand to reconsider the design of
buildings. The first decade of the new millennium has seen the infiltration of
radical forms of architecture not only in the journals and academy, but realized in
built projects. This thesis has been generated by a perceived need in this
context, to construct design strategies that incorporate living bodies in these
novel tectonics.

This thesis asks how explorations in the changing negotiation between bodies
and buildings have influenced innovative and unprecedented architectural forms
over the last fifty years. It argues that in the incorporation of new design
processes, it is important that the moving, breathing, experiencing body is not left
behind. It is in this space that architecture can be understood as conjured into
presence by bodies. It is here that the seemingly opposite states of performance
and built form begin to blur. To this purpose this thesis looks at the cross over
between theatre and architecture in terms of performance, and the living body
through the lens of phenomenology.

Typically, throughout the history of architecture, the body is laid out like a
cadaver to be measured and dissected, from the medieval body of Christ to the
Corbusien body of man. This form has remained stable and frozen, pressed into
building plans or abstracted into programmatic requirements. While novel
architectural practices in digital media are creating extraordinary forms, living
bodies are just as absent in these design processes as their historic
predecessors. For the body-based discourse of theatre, however, architecture
has proved less solid than it appears, preferring the more ambiguous conditions

7
Hani Rashid, ‘Approach the Future - The Asymptote Experience’ (interview). Design Boom
Website. Retrieved 31.05.2007 at <http://www.designboom.com/contemporary/asymptote.html>

5
of non-prescriptive spatiality. Moving out from the stages and galleries, into the
streets and everyday life, architecture has come to symbolize for many in theatre
only control and confinement. The fundamental interdependence between the
functional building and the creative performance tends to provoke either
antagonism or absence. It is precisely this overlap between theatre and
architecture, which will be re-examined in this thesis in terms of performativity
and phenomenology.

‘Performance’ is typically used in architecture to describe a building’s

performance in terms of structural and functional capabilities. Recently it has
begun to be used describe computational processes in architecture that use
building performance as procedural within the design process. This thesis draws
the term from its disciplinary origins in theatre, where performativity is used to
define the body’s symbolic behaviours. The aim is to analyze the dynamics of
the animated body and building, and to bring together the discourses of
architecture and performance studies. Phenomenology has been used in
architectural discourse predominantly in the search for an authentic relationship
between bodies and the built environment. In contrast to this ontologically
focused reading, this research will articulate an understanding of
phenomenology, which presents a contemporary, theoretical framing for the
body-world relationship. This thesis will argue that the body as a living, animate
entity has become a defining challenge to contemporary architectural design.
Accordingly, a framework for this thesis has been built on Maurice Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenology of perception.

Both phenomenology and performance theory understand bodies, space and the
world as interwoven and overlapping, in continual confrontation and collision.
Together they help form an understanding of how bodies and their environments
interact.

6
By understanding the mechanisms that are driving these changes in our bodies
and our spaces, it is possible to consider the implications and inform the
possibilities for radical architectural practices. This thesis aims to investigate
these new relationships in order to provide strategies for incorporating living
bodies into the design of new architectures. A key objective is to escape from
seeing architecture purely in term of static presence. Instead to consider the
space made between bodies and buildings, a space that is constructed through
the interaction between the two, which is performed into existence.

As the environment is further augmented with digital spaces, finding ways of

incorporating the sensorial body into the design of architecture becomes
essential. What is at stake is a changing world that the built environment has
been slow to acknowledge. What is being challenged is how to both embrace
these changes and build environments for living bodies.

0.1
The Body
Performativity and Phenomenology

In order to construct an understanding of the body based on concrete experience

and movement, this thesis draws on aspects of the philosophy of phenomenology
to allow an examination of spatial experience. By basing its foundations on
concrete experience, phenomenology proposes an existential analysis of the
world, a real world built on structures of consciousness that can only be seen
from the subjective viewpoint. What phenomenology brings to architecture is an
accentuation of the sensorial body, whereby the visceral and the unconscious
connection to the built environment is evaluated and analysed along with material
buildings.

7
It is from architectural phenomenologists that the most strident calls for
reconsidering the role of living bodies in architecture have come. Alberto Perez-
Gomez, a noted theorist from this field, describes the need in terms of the
contemporary condition:

Fully to address the dangers of aestheticism, reductive functionalism and

either conventional or experiential formalism, architecture must consider
seriously the potential of narrative as the structure of human life, a poetic
vision realized in space-time. The architect, in a sense, now must also
write the “script” for his dramas, regardless of whether this becomes an
explicit or implicit transformation of the “official” building program. This is,
indeed, a crucial part of his design activity, and also the vehicle for an
ethical intention to inform the work. Only by accepting this responsibility
will it be possible for his work to invite the radicalised “individual” of the
late 20th century to exercise, with his/her freedom, a reciprocal
responsibility to “participate” in the re-creation of the world of art that is no
longer a mimesis of a shared, socially validated or transcendental order no
product of a Romantic imagination attempting a construction ex nihilo [out
of nothing].8

Pérez-Gómez uses several performative terms here; scripts, dramas,

participation. Defining the role of the architect through an engagement with the
narrative, or performance, of human life, Pérez-Gómez emphasizes the
importance of seeing architecture as more than a tectonic arrangement of form,
but impacting and shaping how people live. This will be discussed in Chapter
Two.

8
Alberto Pérez-Gómez, ‘The Space of Architecture: Meaning as Presence and Representation’ in
Steven Holl et al, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture a+u special issue
(a+u: japan, 1994), p.24.

8
Understanding the body as placed within a specific and changing historic time, as
opposed to an authentic and continuous definition of being, has become the key
difficulty in the phenomenology of architecture. It is important to recognise the
reasons for its reputation in the architecture academy for a retrieval of archetypal
forms, in order to reason whether it could still be the premise for an architecture
based on future innovations. This thesis argues that though the use of
phenomenology in architecture has until now failed to satisfactorily address the
issue of embodiment, it holds the possibilities for doing so.

In order to pursue these possibilities it is essential to articulate the differences

between the philosophy Martin Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Mainly through
Heidegger’s essay, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, phenomenology has been
developed as an important aspect of architectural theory. His texts have most
often been used to justify a return to a more profound and spiritual way of
building on the earth.9 Despite Merleau-Ponty’s focus on an embodied
understanding of bodies and their surrounding environments, his theories have
only rarely been used.10 This thesis argues that Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology of perception is more suitable for conceptualizing a performative,
body-based understanding that can be used in designing novel kinds of built
environments.

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes a body in which

the world layers and ingrains itself, becoming sedimented beneath the skin and
through the bone. In this way we could say the world is in the body. This is not
any body, but the individual, particular body, and thus through knowing one’s

9
See architectural phenomenologist such as Pérez-Gómez, Christian Norberg-Schulz and
Karsten Harries. This will be further discussed in Chapter Two.
10
One example is Mario Frascari’s Monsters of Architecture, Anthropomorphism in Architectural
Theory (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing: USA, 1991). Frascari uses Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology of perception in order to reconsider the position of the body in architecture,
specifically in terms of the body’s semiotic representation in the drawing. More recently, Lars
Spuybroek from NOX Architecture cites Merleau-Ponty in his design process, which will be
looked at in Chapter Six.

9
own body one could know the world. Merleau-Ponty argues that knowing is
brought about by experience: there is no pre-existing world separate from our
experience of it, nor do we construct it separately in our consciousness. Instead,
the world is brought into being through the individual experience of it. This action
of conjuration is performative in several ways, as will be discussed in Chapter
Two. The point here is to note that Merleau-Ponty's insistence on the lived body
is essential to how we perceive our own existence separates him from other
ontologically-focused phenomenologists like Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.
This emphasis, without the transcendental tendencies of Edmund Husserl and
Heidegger, brings his writing into line with the discourse of performance studies.

0.2
Performance Studies

This thesis will argue that Performance Studies are a way of bringing the
unacknowledged issues surrounding the living body into architecture. 11 These
are the elements of ‘liveness’, of animation and the essential interconnectedness
of the body and space. In contrast to the static representation of bodies,
performativity describes how bodies act and interact with each other and their
surroundings, proposing new ways of designing architecture. While the discipline
of Performance Studies incorporates a wide range of definitions, this thesis
draws from Clifford Geertz, who describes performance as the symbolic action of
human behaviour.12 It is a discipline that reads body movement as enacting
actions in space that are layered in meaning. This anthropological understanding

11
Theatre theorist Erika Fischer-Lichte has written concisely about the importance of
performance as a tool of analysis across disciplines. Fischer-Lichte however situates her
investigations in theatre studies, where, despite acknowledging the importance of built
environments, the discourse still fails to understand architecture as more than potential shells for
performance. For this reason in contrast to theatre, performance studies provides a useful basis
for inquiry in its understanding of built environments.
See Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, trans. by Jeremy Gaines & Doris L. Jones
(Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1992).
12
See Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books: US, 1973).

10
of performance focuses on the study of human interaction. Performativity is
being used in this thesis in order to define the living body and its behaviours as a
method to document and examine the buildings I am defining as performative
architecture.13

The term ‘performative architecture’ refers to the academic field of performance

studies developed during the 1970s, pioneered by the work at New York
University by theatre director and academic Richard Schechner and
anthropologist Victor Turner. This relationship between the two disciplines
proposed an interdisciplinary mode of cultural critique. It aims to describe a kind
of architecture formulated around ‘liveness’ and the animated body. As a
discipline, while performativity initially developed in the realm of theatre studies, it
also incorporates and is now incorporated into the fields of anthropology,
ethnography and sociology. As the study of individual bodies in specific contexts,
it is an ideal basis for an architecture of animation and experience. Schechner
describes the ingredients of presence, live-ness, embodiment, action, behavior
and agency, as inherent to a discipline based on a broad spectrum of human
activities. 14 It is these performative issues that tie it essentially to architecture, to
an understanding of architecture as something inhabited and experienced.
Performance studies reads through the given taxonomies of stable objects and
re-envisions them as practices, events and behaviors. The state of performativity
is specifically constructed on temporality; live-ness is essential on a stage where
the past and present play a fundamental part in shaping the perception of the
viewer. This is in comparison to the accepted definition of architecture that is
weighted in a state of immovability. It aims to conquer time.

13
Performance is being used now throughout disciplines as a way of reading the world.
Whereas previously it was texts and artifacts that were seen as the manifestations of culture, it is
now being recognized that the performative allows us an alternative viewpoint. Seeing culture as
performance is a strategy by which Erika Fischer-Lichte explores the production of meaning. She
has been a leading protagonist in highlighting the importance of performativity, advocating the
investigation of events from religious rituals to sports carnivals in the critique of contemporary
culture.
14
Richard Schechner, Performance Studies Handbook (Routledge: USA, 2006), p.2.

11
The term ‘performativity’ is derived from J.L. Austin's original linguistic
formulation.15 For Austin, performative speech acts are utterances that bring
action into being; where ‘to speak’ is also ‘to do’. Austin’s book How to Do
Things with Words described a specific speech act where, in contrast to making a
statement (termed as descriptive or constative), the action occurs in its
enunciation. In Austin’s definition, this act does not occur anywhere else but in
the saying of the words itself. As Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick
explain, these speech acts are ‘utterances that accomplish in their very
enunciation, an action that generates effects’.16 Phrases such as “I do” (as in the
ritual of the Marriage Act), “I dare” and “I resign”, are performative because of the
fundamental action of performing them, without which the action could not
eventuate.

In the performative utterance, the act of speaking becomes creative. This

bringing together of word and action provides the framework to describe spaces
as performative, where spaces are created through movement. In opposition to
the Cartesian idea of absolute and measurable space, performative spaces can
therefore be seen as transformational, dynamic and open to possibilities. The
emphasis is on modes of ‘doing’. This brings it back to the question of the
phenomenological relationship between body and world. It demands an ability to
see how the interaction of the body and the world is bound in the contingent
relationship of perception, movement and space. This underlies the many rich
connections between performativity and Merleau-Ponty's embodied conception of
mobility and the world. The inseparability of word and action in the performative
act becomes an essential relationship between the body and action. It brings the
idea into being through doing it; it is active, a process of making.

To bring this definition of performativity into spatial tactics is to incorporate the

15
Austin first explores this in How to Do Things with Words (Harvard Uni Press: USA, 1975).
16
Andrew Parker & Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, introduction to Performance and Performativity
(New York : Routledge, 1995), p.3.

12
idea of action as making. Theatre theorist Peggy Phelan uses the term
‘performativity’ to describe a kind of writing based on the enacting rather than
simply describing of ideas.17 Performative writing is a method, which, instead of
using literal descriptions, draws on various personal and autobiographical
techniques in order to perform itself. Performative writing is used in this thesis as
a method to analyze the final architectural case studies. Like a performance, it is
based on the same fleeting temporality, ‘the act of writing towards
disappearance, rather than the act of writing towards preservation’.18 Phelan’s
description of performative writing is useful for developing a methodology for
considering performative architecture. This issue of preservation is also one of
presence. To consider buildings aiming toward disappearance provokes a
contradictory premise to the conventional basis of architecture. It means to focus
on the ephemeral behaviors, movements and interactions of bodies. For
architecture this means allowing for transformation and embracing indeterminacy,
two aspects that have become integral to contemporary, digital architecture
processes.

Performativity therefore posits the temporal, situated actions of the body as

central to an understanding of space. The question for architecture is: How can
the built environment enact ideas? How to critique the making of architecture as
an experiential act made through the unfolding of spaces through the body? The
inseparability of word and action in the performative act becomes an essential
relationship between the body and action. Reminiscent of Heidegger’s
description of Einraumen (making room), it brings idea into being through action,
a process of making or creating.19 The potentiality of the performative speaks of
a latency inherent to buildings, but this does not mean that architecture becomes
a series of empty rooms waiting for the performing body. Philosopher Andrew

17
See Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (Routledge: NY, 1997) and
Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (Routledge: NY,1993).
18
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (Routledge: N.Y,1993), p.148.
19
Heidegger discusses the concept of Einraumen in his essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ in
Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper Perennial, USA, 1976).

13
Benjamin describes this through the concept of l’informe, where architecture,
rather than being fixed, is in a constant state of change.20 To bring performative
practices into the making as well as thinking of architecture, foregrounds bodies
instead of buildings. It is this reconsideration of the relationship that can be the
stimulus for dynamic and innovative performative architectures.

0.3
Performative Architectures

‘Performative architecture’ is a term that Australian architect John Andrews used

in the early 1990s to describe his understanding of architecture as a backdrop to
body movement.21 More recently the term has been taken up by architects in
order to describe a variety of intents. Branko Kolarvic’s and Ali M. Malkawi’s
book ‘Performative Architecture’ presents a range of these uses.22 Kolarevic
notes that despite its multiple applications, it is the contemporary merging of
construction processes with design processes, which are promoting its wide
usage. He writes: ‘The increasing interested in performance as a design
paradigm is largely due to the recent developments in technology and cultural
theory and the emergence of sustainability as a defining socio-economic issue’.23
Despite its acknowledgement of various considerations of what performance may
mean for architecture, the book is weighted toward the engineering of
architecture and how digital technologies can be considered in this arena.

This thesis may be considered as a missing chapter in this first collection of

examinations in performative architecture. My analysis is situated in the space

20
See Chapter One for further discussion of Benjamin’s use of l’informe in architecture.
21
See John Andrews, Architecture: A Performing Art (Oxford University Press: UK, 1991).
22
Branko Kolarevic & Ali M. Malkawi Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality
(Routledge: US, 2005).
23
Branko Kolarevic, prologue in Kolarevic & Ali M. Malkawi Performative Architecture: Beyond
Instrumentality, p.205.

14
between bodies and buildings. This is not an absolute or abstract idea of space,
but space creatively constructed through the animate body. In order to
distinguish this space, which is still to be essentially architectural, I am calling this
‘performative architecture’. Closer to the definition this thesis will use is the
‘performative architecture’ termed by artist Vito Acconci’s to describe his
interactive environments. Rather than passive spectatorship, this is architecture
where the visitor engages actively with the space.24 This thesis uses the term
‘performative architecture’ to describe a mode of ‘doing’ and in this sense it is an
ideal declaration for an architecture based on the construction of sites of
potentiality and the possibility for the human act or event. Reminiscent of
Phelan’s description of writing towards disappearance, the best kinds of
performative architectures are the ones where the presence of the building
dissolves to such a state where the built form promotes diverse activities.

This thesis begins by tracing this performative architectural history through a

series of examples from the fine arts. Especially by spatially orientated artists
and designers. In the last twenty years however, performative elements have
begun to slip into the architectural profession, which have taken on the tactics of
performance studies to produce new kinds of built environments.

0.4
Justification of Research

In order to begin this project it was necessary to have a clear understanding of

the contemporary social and cultural changes relevant to regarding how people
now inhabit the built environment. Accepting that technology is reshaping body
movement and interaction in a variety of spaces, demands understanding the
historic basis to those changes and their implications on a broader level. From

24
Acconci describes this mutual engagement between bodies and environments as ‘transactive’,
a term that will be examined in Chapter Three.

15
this point it will be possible then to relate these new definitions of bodies and
spaces to architecture.

It became apparent during this research that in order to understand the

implications for digital technologies in the architectural design process, it is
necessary to return to the origins of the architectural drawing. By tracing its
history to the primary systems of Euclidean geometry and single-point
perspective, it is possible to see what is gained through these new technologies
and what is lost. Rather than succumb to the structures and systems of new
computational processes, it is essential to critically understand digital systems
and processes in architectural practice, from basic CAD (Computer-Aided
Design) drawing systems to new generative, design processes.

Case studies are to develop an argument for how to rethink designing buildings
in order to incorporate the living performance of bodies. These examples begin
with the Bauhaus dances from the early 1920s up until the spatial
documentations of Daniel Libeskind in the late 1980s. The case studies show
how artists have grappled with the changing relationship of bodies and building in
the context of technological and spatial transformations during the 20th century.

Looking beyond the disciplinary boundaries of architecture was necessary in

order to reclaim the body in spatial design. This thesis draws from several
disciplines in order to explore this contemporary shift in architecture. In the same
way that radical disciplines in practises such as dance have incorporated aspects
of other fields, this thesis incorporates examples in performance and installation.
These examples from the fine arts focus on alternative body-spatial relationships.
For example, in his Triadic Ballets Oskar Schlemmer focused on the geometry of
the moving body in space, tracing volumes in the same way that the
contemporary choreographer William Forsythe would later construct his own
dances. By examining both processes from this understanding of spatial
construction, it is possible to draw parallels in the built environment with a

16
dynamic interior such as Daniel Libeskind’s design of the Jewish Museum in
Berlin. This means returning to a core issue of architecture: how bodies move in
spaces. This becomes the acknowledged starting point, rather than what occurs
after a building is constructed.

0.5
Research Methodologies

This thesis relies on written documentation and critical analysis in order to

provide a context for the project. The architects of each case study have written
extensively on their ideas and processes. It is necessary to understand how they
have come to their built work in terms of theory and other projects, as well to
examine the specific buildings themselves. The writing of Libeskind, Peter
Eisenman, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio and Lars Spuybroek interweave
throughout the theoretical framework of this thesis. Because this research draws
on phenomenology as a critique of the way built environments are experienced
and can be conceptualized, it was important not to rely on quantitative research
methods. Where ever possible, personal documentation of the examples have
been made. In cases where this was not possible, this research has utilized
written experience and other forms of media documentation, such as photos and
videos.25

25
Schlemmer was well aware of the failures of choreographic notation to encapsulate three-
dimensional movement, therefore without viewing re-enactments it is extremely difficult to picture
the movements and gestures of the dances. His Triadic Ballets were performed in the early 19th
century, but there has been three noted re-enactments that were viewed at the Bauhaus
Archives, Berlin. The Archives also hold original drawings by Schlemmer of his costume designs
and stage sketches. The opportunity to view original drawings early in my research, as in the
case of Libeskind’s ‘Chamberworks’ series or a selection of Situationist maps, became important
to crafting my thinking on spatial representation. The interaction of the viewer with the image
became fundamental to my discussion of the work. LIbeskind’s Chamberworks and Micromegas
drawings were viewed at ‘LINEAGE: The Architecture of Daniel Libeskind’ 18.10.2000 until

17
A visit to such buildings as the Jewish Museum in Berlin were important to this
project because such built environments need to be experience. These authors’
aims in regard to physical disequilibrium, for example, must be experienced in
order to judge whether they are successful. Experiencing recent examples of
architecture developed from new digital design processes was also very
important in order to understand the physical impact of these future
environments. Such examples as the Mercedes Museum in Stuttgart by UN
Studio and the Kunsthaus in Graz by Colin Fournier and Peter Cook, are the
realizations of these new technologies. It is only in the last few years that
buildings are now being completed which utilize, from their inception, these new
systems. While advances in building hardware catch up to what can be achieved
in architectural software, it is now becoming possible to experience the built
outcomes.

Placing my body within these environments and considering my own actions

through those spaces as essentially performative acts, made it possible to
construct a description of performative architecture, which I have documented in
the style of performative writing. Performative writing is therefore a way
documenting the concrete actions of living bodies. It is a writing form that arises
through the doing of writing, which is also the doing of performance. Della
Pollock describes the relationship between performance and writing as:
‘Performativity describes a fundamentally material practice. Like performance,
however, it is also analytic, a way of framing and underscoring aspects of
writing/life.’26 This thesis has claimed the need to understand spaces through the
performance of bodies rather than representations or abstractions.

18.01.2001at the National Gallery of Victoria on Russell Melbourne, Australia. Constant and
Situationist drawings were viewed in the ‘Future City:Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956
– 2006 from15.06.2006 until17.08.2006 at the Barbican Art Gallery, London.
26
Della Pollock, ‘Performing Writing’ in The Ends of Performance ed. by Peggy Phelan & Jill
Lane (New York Uni. Press: USA, 1998), p.75.

18
0.6
Key Terms

Several of the terms used in this thesis are loaded with multiple meanings and it
is important to clarify how they are to be read. These terms can be separated
into those concerned with the body and those concerned with space.

This thesis defines the body in terms of individual, multiple bodies. Elizabeth
Grosz’s inquiry into the evolution of theories of space and time is made in order
to reconsider the body in terms of gender.27 Cultural and social theorists have
critically reconceived this lived body in terms of socio-spatial relationships, such
as Edward Soja or through postcolonial and cultural issues like Homi Bahba.28 In
acknowledging the importance of sexuality and gender, and socio-cultural
formulations in terms of contemporary conceptualisations of the lived body, this
thesis takes a transgendered and transcultural approach to the body. For this
reason, using performativity as a specific practice, constructs an open,
transformative approach to bodies, rather than defining specific models for action
and behaviours.

The body is understood as a hybrid of virtual and actual. This thesis argues that
architecture must now recognise the phenomenological needs and desires of the
material body, but also the flexibility and accessibilities demanded by the virtual
one. In order to understand the body as animate, interactive and creative in its
relationship with space, this thesis uses Merleau-Ponty’s description of the ‘living
body’, whose knowledge of the world is based on concrete experience.

27
Grosz makes a clear argument in Architecture from the Outside, that historically privileging
masculine perspectives must be deconstructed in order to allow for other bodies.
28
See Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: the reassertion of space in critical social theory
(Verso: London,1989) and Homi K Bahba, The Location of Culture (Routledge: UK, 1993).

19
In staking a conceptualisation of space on a bodily, performative reading, the
differences between places, spaces and environments also become blurred.
Through this thesis recurs the sometimes subtle, but essential differences,
between ‘built space’, ‘built environments’, ‘buildings’ and ‘architecture’. These
distinctions are important in this thesis, which endeavours to look beyond the
physically-situated boundaries prescribed by architecture and examine its
essential components of bodies and spaces through other disciplines. ‘Built
space’ refers to spaces that are physically constructed, whether delineated in
building walls, the edges of a sculpture or between the arms of a dancer. In
contrast to the natural landscape, the term ‘built environments’ describes places
that have been designed and constructed by people.

The term architecture is particularly difficult to define. Tschumi draws on Hegel

to describe the conventionally held difference between architecture and building.
For Hegel architecture is the immaterial quality of a built environment, the ‘artistic
supplement added to the simple building’.29 Le Corbusier, the master of
architectural modernism, made the distinction between building and architecture
as the materiality of construction and the impact of a building on people:

The Engineer, inspired by the law of economy and governed by

mathematical calculation, puts us in accord with universal law. He
achieves harmony. The Architect, by his arrangement of forms, realizes
an order which is a pure creation of his spirit; by forms and shapes he
affects our senses to an acute degree, and provokes plastic emotions; by
the relationships which he creates he wakes in us profound echoes, he
gives us the measure of an order which we feel to be in accordance with
that of our world.30

29
G.W.F Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, vol 1, (G.Bell & Sons: London, 1920), quotation in
Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p.67
30
Le Corbusier, ‘Vers une architecture’ in Towards a New Architecture (London, England:
Rodker, 1931), p.1.

20
In this quotation the architect is described not only in their traditional role as
‘master builder’, but as a kind of conduit between ordinary people and the greater
cosmos. This god-like status is being challenged by the digital design processes
that will be explored in Chapter Five. Rather than seeing the architect as a sole
genius of a building, these processes provoke a rethinking of the architect’s role
in design. As terms, ‘architecture’ has typically described the entire event, where
forms are generated through a design process. ‘Buildings’ describes the
physical, constructed result of architecture in space. The first part of this thesis
highlights the separation between these two terms, exploring architectural
endeavours without construction as a goal. These examples come under the
titles ‘architectural performances’ and ‘performative drawings’. The final two
chapters bring architecture and building together to explore new built
environments generated from performative architectural processes.

These design processes are situated in two contested sites: virtuality and the
digital realm. Virtuality fundamentally describes a condition separate from reality,
brought forth through constructed media. This means that it is possible to talk of
the virtuality of a book as well as the virtual space of an interactive computer
game. The virtual is described as a state of being actualised, rather than having
been realized. Virtual space is located between information and reality, a
location that can be inhabited mentally if not physically. The term ‘digital
architecture’ describes architecture generated through and with digital
technologies. Not only in terms of visualization and fabrication, but where digital
technologies are a leading component in the design process. Digital architecture
is architecture initially sited in virtual, computational spaces. The foundations of
this kind are architecture is based on information, which can be used to create
forms not held by the constraints of Euclidean space. These later forms have
been given names such as ‘non-standard architecture’ to describe their use of
such unconventional design processes.

21
0.7
Thesis Outline

The formulation of the body in architecture has been based on an anatomical and
figural approach, perpetuating the dichotomy of the subjective, centralized body
and the objective, stable world. The Information Age has created new
relationships between bodies and buildings, which demand new modes of
thinking and of making the built environments.

This thesis is structured in three parts. The first (Chapters One and Two) are
dedicated to describing the condition and framework in which to strategize an
understanding of performative architecture. The second part (Chapters Three
and Four) use examples from the fine arts to show how alternative ways of
thinking and designing architecture emerges when performance practices are
brought into spatial design. The third part (Chapters Five and Six), bring these
strategies into contemporary architecture. In this way there is a clear
development from ideas into the creation of those ideas into spaces, and then
into contemporary architecture. The final chapter uses personal analysis in order
to critique performative architecture through my own body.

First Chapter OUTLINE : The Space of Architecture

The first chapter is dedicated to laying the foundations for a concept of
performative architecture by siting contemporary spaces and bodies within the
architectural condition. It begins with the essential tenet of architecture – space.
This thesis adds to this architectural principal, the body. The concept of space
has become very slippery, laden with debates on ‘place’, ‘virtuality’ and
reconceived ‘reality’. Here space will be considered in terms of the body and its
role in representing built environments. This starting point will provide the basis
for rethinking the design process. I wish to clarify how the assumed ‘truths’ of
spaces and bodies can be unpicked to reveal their historically constructed
systems. This will allow for alternative pathways for new kinds of architecture.

22
Second Chapter OUTLINE : Bodies and Drawings
This chapter defines the theoretical framework for performative architecture. It
describes the two spatial principles of this thesis: bodies and drawings. The first
issue is how the lived body actively constructs space. This will be explored by
drawing on aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. The focus
is on the interconnectedness of body, space and world, brought about through
movement. As well as Merleau-Ponty, the body constructed in terms of
movement as described by Edmund Husserl and Michel de Certeau will be
examined.

The second issue is how conceptions of space shape architecture through the
design process. This necessarily has cultural and social ramifications, but what
is important for this thesis is how contemporary understandings of space impact
how architecture is conceived through the systems developed for designing
buildings. In order to do this, I trace the architecture drawing’s history from its
inception in Renaissance Italy, showing how it is necessarily specific to a
particular age and way of thinking. The analysis of these two essential, yet
ultimately questionable states, of the living body and the architectural drawing
provides the basis for exploring performative architectures through the following
examples.

Third Chapter OUTLINE : Architectural Performances

Chapter Three examines the first spatial condition articulated in the theoretical
framework: exploring how the living body actively constructs space.
Phenomenological and performative practices are shown as imported into
various creative processes. The aim is to look at built spaces designed with
architectural concerns, but without the pragmatics of building construction.
These projects come from the fields of performance, fine arts and literature.

23
Following this examination of the body from a phenomenological basis
constructed through movement, this chapter explores the relationship between
dance and architecture, using the projects of Oskar Schlemmer as a case study.
This traces a shift in thinking from the figural towards new possibilities for the
body and architecture. Looking at the body as an active force that works
interactively with its surrounding environment finds explicit, expressive form in
installation art. The art projects of Vito Acconci reveal the implicit political
machinations between bodies and buildings.

Fourth Chapter OUTLINE : Performative Drawings

To begin at the origin of the design process is to begin with the drawing. This
chapter explores the second spatial condition proposed in the theoretical
framework chapter: the importance of the architecture drawing within the design
process. The drawing will recur through this thesis as an integral part of bringing
animated bodies into architecture. To bring movement into architecture the
architectural drawing may be considered as not as a fixed representation of
reality, but as a map, a musical score or a diagram. The examination of the
architecture drawing as the connection between spatial conceptions and the
design process is premised on the radicality of Bernard Tschumi and John
Hejduk’s re-interpretations of the drawing. Clarifying how conceptions of space
shape built work through the drawing opens the design process to new
possibilities of thinking architecture in a contemporary context.

The case studies so far are all transient structures. Whether staged or mapped
out in a dèrive, they are built in the ephemeral space of the event. What happens
when these strategies are solidified into concrete form? Architecture, whose
physical weight tends to drag it behind other creative disciplines, has increasingly
begun to address these ideas through the virtual, where explorations of
habitations created in digital surfaces have created dynamic, three-dimensional,

24
virtual forms. The following chapter looks at how to relate bodily placement in
space and its architectural containment.

Fifth Chapter OUTLINE : Non-standard Architectures

Chapter Five brings the elements of embodiment and the architecture drawing
into contemporary digital design practices. This chapter traces the possibilities of
a performative architecture through new design and drawing systems. It aims to
show how these technologies, instead of alienating living bodies, can instigate
new kinds of corporeal interaction. This leads to the explication of four
performative paradigms: Destabilization, flux architecture, improvisation and
blurred space.

Chapter 6 OUTLINE : Performative Architectures

This chapter performatively presents a qualitative analysis of four architectural
case studies. Through retelling the performance of my own body through these
environments, emerge the strategies previously outlined. This chapter aims to
show how the defined paradigms are made physically apparent in these built
environments. As architects create new kinds of environments for these new
bodies and spaces, these performative strategies have been drawn upon. What
results from this examination is not a definitive answer to how the
phenomenological body can be incorporated into new architectures, only a
selection of proposals presenting possibilities. In the exciting shift in making and
thinking architecture, these case studies show the potential richness and
complexity of the living body, as incorporated and also instigating the
extraordinary forms being produced.

25
 ChapterONE
The Space of Architecture

26
This first chapter examines the field of architectural research within which this
thesis is placed, tracing a genealogy of ideas that contribute to a
conceptualization of a performative architecture. It is necessary to first
understand the context out of which new bodies, spaces and technologies are
emerging. The shifting definition of space through time and different discourses
become the starting point for looking at the way new technologies have led to
different relationships between the body and new architecture. The body in
architectural discourse has a history of its own and it is necessary to distinguish
the specific, performative usage of the living body used in this thesis. In the
same way that an understanding of the body has evolved from a specific
architectural discourse, the contemporary condition of architectural practice has
been developed out of a unique context that has supported innovative and critical
forms of architecture. The different issues of this chapter come together to
describe how this thesis understands the contemporary space of architecture.

1.1
The Situation of Space

Since the mid-20th century there has been a cross-disciplinary growth in the field
of spatial theory across various disciplines. Though philosophy has deliberated
about space since antiquity, in the last fifty years spatial theory has increasingly
infected and impacted upon many different discourses. Academics from various
fields regularly refer to geography, cartography, boundary, bringing with them
new concerns and viewpoints. The rapid expansion of cities in the Western world
due to industrialization promoted urban life as the symbol of modernity, with
urban planning and architecture becoming objects of social and cultural critique.
Transformations in tourism and immigration through globalization have changed
how we understand placement, geography and location. Changes in technology
have led to the creation of new kinds of spaces. Telecommunications through
virtual media, from the birth of the telephone through to the Internet and mobile

27
phones, have become easier, cheaper and more common. These virtual spaces
can no longer be considered separate from our daily lives. Now the everyday
can be defined as interwoven networks of electronic and information-based
systems. As the cultural theorist Margaret Morse writes, people now move and
inhabit multiple, simultaneous worlds, which are co-present in different modes.31
In this context, more options are continually opening up in order to escape from
our physical selves. Morse distinguishes the differences between different
realms of cyberspace, from virtual worlds to networks and virtualised physical
spaces, all of which demand different kinds of experiences. These aspects have
resulted in the issue of dislocation and alienation as a key concern in critical
theory - dislocation of the body from the world, from each other, from ourselves.
These two issues of multiple, co-present spaces, and the ease of losing the body
in these kinds of places, present a new spatial ground upon which architectural
design is constructed.32

These new spaces demand new kinds of movement and inhabitation.

Questioning conventional design methodologies has usually meant discarding
the body in favour of virtual interfaces or returning to a figural approach to design
and the body, both processes based on representation. An important question is
the relevance and application of the moving body in these new, technologically
immersive spaces. This question has become more relevant than ever before
and in a selection of contemporary architectures it can be seen how architects
have begun to address this question in new ways. The architects of these
projects are finding new methods of bodily incorporation beyond humanist
practices that see the body as fixed and static. In order to progress using new
technologies not as simply tools but as new design methods, this thesis argues
that architects need to focus on retaining the corporeal body. People still live

31
Morse, Margaret, ‘An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television',
in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington and
Indianapolis / London: Indiana University Press / BFI Publishing, 1990),p.203.
32
As will be discussed in the next chapter, the architecture drawing as a system that supports
and limits a particular design process, is formulated on the understanding of bodies and spaces
as fixed, stable and homogenized.

28
with, experience and are affected by architecture. By pursuing strategies drawn
from phenomenology and performance studies, this kind of architecture has
taken on an embodied approach to design.

This chapter lays the foundations of thinking in this area. The research draws on
20th century projects and follows this line of thought into several contemporary
manifestations. This time frame encapsulates the extreme and rapid changes to
bodies and spaces during modernity. They present a movement from machine-
based technologies towards the information age of today. This movement also
shows the shifts in attitude toward technology, from the technophobia of Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis, to Le Corbusier’s utopian pedestalizing of the machine and
now the current condition of spectatorship encapsulated in reality time television
and blog sites. The case studies chosen reflect these changing perceptions and
experiences of the body, environments and technology.

1.2
Technology and Architecture

Perhaps the most striking transformation effected by these [digital]

technologies is the change in our perceptions of materiality, space, and
information, which is bound directly or indirectly to affect how we
understand architecture, habitation and the built environment.33

Elizabeth Grosz articulates the link between advances in technology and

architectural practice. While the relationship between the experiential body and
buildings has long been a part of architectural discourse, the difficulties have
been multiplied by the effects of technological innovations. It is essential to
architecture more so than to other creative disciplines due to its basis in

33
Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (MIT Press:
USA, 2001), p.76.

29
construction and materiality. It aims to be made, and this making is both
dependant on new technology and set free by it. This is itself not new advances
in technology have always been a catalyst for new kinds of architecture.
Architectural historian Siegfried Gideon articulated this point in 1941 through the
schism that occurred in the 19th century between architecture and technology in
the industrial age. Here he quotes from a contemporary newspaper:

1850: Mankind will produce a completely new architecture out of its period
exactly at the moment when the new methods created by recently born
industry are made use of. The application of cast iron allows and enforces
the use of many new forms, as can be seen in railway stations,
suspension bridges, and the arches of conservatories.34

In quoting from contemporary popular discourse, Gideon noted the shift that must
occur in architecture in line with changes in technology. Otherwise, he warned,
architecture, as an artistic and cultural form, would be left behind. In the same
way today, it is crucial that architecture comes to terms with new digital
technologies. In a purely practical sense, it is impossible to disregard the
importance of rapid advances of technology in architecture in terms of rethinking
bodies and buildings. The last ten years have solidified the reliance on CAD
programs in architecture firms across the globe. The specific aspect of these
new technologies that separates them from traditional drawing tools is that there
are now computers that can not only build a scale model directly from a digital
image, but can also size and cut component parts for the 1:1 building. The
stages of translation from ideas to buildings are therefore minimized. Design
using these new technologies is to explore new digital, spatial territories, but with
the option now of bringing those investigations into the material world.

34
Seigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Fifth Revised
(Harvard Uni Press: USA, 2003), p.149.

30
1.2.1
Digital & Virtual Spaces

‘Cyberspace’ was first described in 1984 by William Gibson as an abstract

collection of data made up of virtual worlds, networked spaces and augmented
material spaces.35 This original definition is based on cyberspace as a three-
dimensional simulation of real environments. Malcolm McCullough notes the
paradigm shift that occurred during the 1990s that initially presented cyberspace
as a coherent, distanced and idealized realm. Instead, McCullough writes,
‘[D]igital technology, pours out beyond the screen into our messy places, under
our laws of physics; it is built into our rooms, embedded in our props and devices
– everywhere’.36 Technology has become pervasive. To write about space in
the 21st century is to bring together multiple typologies which were not only
previously irrelevant, but non-existent. In order to conceptualize new spatial
structures architects have increasingly turned to Giles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, Henri Bergson and Michel Foucault. They have looked to Situationist
cartography and biological structures, presenting pathways and directions that
explode, opening to multiple opportunities. These new modes of spatial thinking
and representation have been further complicated by the addition and infection of
digital, virtual spaces. These spaces are what Deleuze and Guattari described
as ‘rhizomatic’, breaking from an arborous structure of cause and effect and
presenting the relationship of time and space as something fluid, unstructured
and based on the experiential as the catalyst for future possibility.37 What the
digital domain has proposed is a multivalent perspectival space. Instead of a
single, static viewing point and subject, multiple, simultaneous possibilities allow
for inclusion and immersion for many different kinds of bodies. These can be

35
Cyberspace was first described in Gibson’s science fiction book Neuromancer, published in
1984.
36
Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground (MIT Press: USA, 2005), p.9.
37
The Rhizome has become an emblematic term for describing the contemporary condition of
networked mobilities and flows. Deleuze and Guattari propose the rhizome in their book A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Continuum: London,1988).

31
reached through movement, they can change, they can adapt and transform with,
and by, the viewer. As several of the paperarchitecture examples show, to bring
mobility into architecture we might now think of the architectural drawing, not as a
precise image of reality, but as a map, a diagram or a score.

Throughout this shift the brute matter of reality has proved surprisingly porous. It
is this porosity that has led many artists to comment on the ‘blurred’ condition of
contemporary built environments.38 These are spaces where the material and
virtual converge. Several architects have noted the importance of this spatial
state in which to reconsider inhabitation and interaction. Notably, they have
come out of the digital arena, led initially by Marcus Novak and Steven Perella,
calling for the need for built environments to acknowledge this new, technology
provoked, condition. Perella describes this condition in architectural terms as
replacing the anxiety of ‘lost in space’ with ‘lost in the home’, whereby, rather
than staying abstract, this state has become domestic.39 Virtual spaces are no
longer separate from our daily lives; instead the everyday is negotiated through
interwoven networks of information. Novak uses the term ‘eversion’ to describe
the bleeding of the virtual into the real.40 Rather than pejorative, this can be seen
as an opening up of new kinds of movement and inhabitation. The body moves
through these spaces in a state of constant transformation and adaptation. This
occurs both consciously, in the accumulation of prosthetic devices such as
mobile phones and satellite navigation systems, and also unconsciously in terms
of how these technologies are changing the way we organise, co-habit and
socialize. This can be understood to follow on from Merleau-Ponty’s description
of the ‘habitual body’, which accumulates an intuitive knowledge of the world as it

38
Peter Eisenman, Diller and Scofidio and Hani Rashid and Lisa Couture have all used ‘blur’ in
different ways; see Chapter Five for further examinations of this idea.
39
Perrella, Steven, ‘Hypersurface Theory: Architecture><Culture.’ Det Humanistiske Fakultet,
Copenhagen University Website. Retrieved 29.04.2007 at
<http://www.hum.ku.dk/visuelkultur/efteraar2002/digvis/perellahypersurface.html>
40
See Gullbring, Leo, ‘Marcos Novak’ (interview) Calimero Journalistik Och Fotografi Website.
Retrieved 25.04.2007 at <http://www.calimero.se/novak2.htm>

32
moves through it.41 But the spaces we’re moving through are no longer only
material. At the interface is what Perella has called the ‘hypersurface’, events
described as tangible, vital, phenomenological experiences within informational
states that include both space and time.42 As well as acknowledging the co-
presence of these new spaces, we must also reconsider the performance of
bodies within them.

1.2.2
The Body in New Spaces

The absence of the corporeal body in virtual architecture is problematic due to a

failure to accept that physical bodies in physical spaces construct a different
relationship from that of virtual bodies in virtual, digital spaces. In order to design
buildings in and for these new spaces, we must recognize this new form of
embodiment. Recent work using motion capture suits have created more
realistic body movement, usually for human animations, where a three-
dimensional mannequin is given the fluid movements of a ‘real’ body.43 But,
though more lifelike, they fail to change how our bodies interact in these new
spaces. They forget that rather than objects, as Grosz points out, it is information
that occupies virtual space.44 To thus place a body, regardless of its
dimensionality, into virtual space creates a new association. The issue of scale
is important in any virtual model, whether cardboard or computer, where the
anthropometric scale to the human figure is lost. Rather than bemoaning this

41
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, pp.129-131.
42
Stephen Perella, Hypersurface Theory: Architecture in Architecture and Science, Guiseppa Di
Cristina (ed.) (Wiley~Academy, 2001, Great Britain), p.140, see Chapter Five of this thesis for
further analysis of the Hypersurface.
43
An alternative approach can be seen in explorations by artists and choreographers such as
Australian performance artist Jude Walton. These projects program the body into virtual
environments as sets of co-ordinates, foregoing the body as an anatomical figure and focusing on
embodied movement.
44
Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (MIT Press:
USA, 2001), p.41.

33
loss, digital technologies provide new modes in which to reclaim a non-figural
approach to the body.

Negotiating movement through the interface of the computer screen is also in

flux; from keyboards to voice activations, to virtual bodysuits – but the body is still
present. Both Grosz and philosopher Brian Massumi point out that this interface
means that an analogue process is still being utilized in order to ‘connect up’ to
new digital spaces. This is an essential point for the relationship between
physical bodies and digitized technologies, where claims to corporeal
transcendence presuppose an ability to leave the body behind. In line with
McCullough’s description of pervasive digitized environments, Grosz describes
cyberspace as an in-between space between the built and the unbuilt. It occurs
only between the user and the network, or the viewer and the system, or even
the user and the user (as in telecommunications). Total disembodiment is not an
option offered by virtual environments, because the body is still connected to the
machine or working with its interface in real space.45 This is why Grosz argues
that a separation of the virtual from the real (like the Cartesian division of the
body and mind) is an impossibility:

If we don’t just have bodies, but are bodies…there can never be the threat
of displacing body in favour of mind or abandoning the real for the virtual.
Rather, cyberspace, virtual worlds, and the order of computer simulation –
whether imagistic or computational – show that our notions of real, of
body, and of the physical or historical city need to be complicated and
rethought to accommodate what they seem to oppose.46

Grosz believes that it is the task of architects to negotiate how to make spaces
for this virtual and material body in this new condition.47 We must now accept

45
Elizabeth Grosz, ibid, p.18.
46
Elizabeth Grosz, p.86.
47
Elizabeth Grosz, p.82.

34
that the body has a virtual presence based on communication and information,
rather than only a material one.

It is essential to recognize the consequences of these changes that have

occurred to the body as well as to spaces, in order to propose new processes for
architecture. I am defining the body as a hybrid of the corporeal and the virtual.
The hybrid body is one that can physically move in material space but just as
easily, and at the same time, fluidly in a virtual one. Bodies are accumulating
more and more equipment – mobile phones, mobile entertainment systems,
navigation tracking systems. More than leisure or pragmatics, these devices hold
for many the essentiality of prosthetic limbs. This image of a body physically
attached and extended through technology encapsulates the hybrid body.48 In
accepting Grosz’s argument that it is still a corporeal, living entity, the hybrid
body means accepting that a theory of phenomenology still has an essential role
in spatial inhabitation.

Having looked at how new spaces and bodies have emerged from digital
technologies, the question is how to bring them into architectural practice. A key
factor that is recurring throughout this primary research is the importance of
movement; bodily mobility and spatial mobility. Far from a recent issue in
architectural discourse, it is important to trace its history before considering
further destabilization of its foundations.

1.3
Stable Spaces and Moving Bodies

In trying to re-instigate living bodies in architecture, rather than considering them

48
This body can be seen in reference to Donna Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto, published in
1985, which described the contemporary body as a cyborg, a fusion of organic and machine,
constructed by the social, cultural and political.

35
as animated individuals, it is much easier to simply use the form of the body.
This thesis questions how to bring these ideas of interaction and motion into
architecture. How is it possible for buildings, whose strength seems to rest on its
weight and immovability, to incorporate in bricks and mortar notions of
movement? How is it possible to reconsider the continual separation of the body
and space, where the subject moves and the space stays still?

Architects have often posed these questions, but now new technologies are
providing answers. In two very different books dedicated to movement and
architecture, one on the work of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava and the
other on new digital Dutch architects, both authors note the historical connections
between motion and architecture. Kari Jormakka reminds us that in his famous
treatise on architecture, Vitruvius included mobile objects and constructions
along with fixed buildings.49 Anthony Tzonis writes how Heinrich Wölfflin
formulates a theory of movement in architecture whereby it finds expression
through a specific style of ornamentation and occasional structural form.50
Wölfflin defined a particular preoccupation with movement in the Baroque age,
which can be seen in the architectural forms. This question of architecture and
motion is not new, but the desire to transcend the weight of architecture was
specifically revived in the 20th century obsession with speed and mobility. This
has been re-emphasized with new digital technologies.

In Space, Time and Architecture first published in 1941, Giedion described a

conception of space that was based on the notion of time.51 He recognized that
with the shift into the industrial age, time and space were being interwoven. He
was the first to write about the importance of this specifically in terms of
architecture. Gideon elucidates a new conception of space through several art

49
Kari Jormakka, Flying Dutchmen: Motion in Architecture (Basel: Birkhauser, 2002).
50
Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque (London, 1964) referred to in Alexander Tzonis &
Liane Lefaivre, Movement, Structure and the Work of Santiago Calatrava (Birkhäuser: Basil,
1995), p.11.
51
See the chapter ‘Space-Time in Art, Architecture and Construction’.

36
movements of the 20th century. By looking at Cubism, Constructivism and
Futurism, he showed how breaking from the limitations of the Renaissance
understanding of space can bring about new models for the architectural design
process. Though he articulated the importance of architecture accepting these
changes, Gideon failed to continue this area of his book into an examination of
how this could be achieved. While he is often considered to be the first to see
the potential of bringing time and motion into architecture, understanding the
importance of moving bodies through architecture, he retained the separation of
body and space, where the subject moved and the building stayed still. When
motion was considered again in architectural discourse and practice in the 60s
and 70s, it retained this hierarchy. Architecture was seen as a stage set,
allowing designers to talk about buildings and motion without having to change
their design processes. This is illustrated in the following statement by the
postmodern architects Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore, whose book aimed to
retrieve a sense of the experiencing body: ‘All architecture functions as a
potential stimulus for movement, real or imagined. A building is an incitement to
action, a stage for movement and interaction. It is one partner in dialogue with
the body.’52

This statement shows the dialogue in architectural discourse with the body as
one with a single direction; the body reacting against the architecture and
therefore not disturbing the accepted roles of buildings as stable, static
structures, which instigates actions and events. This was also John Andrews’
description of ‘performative architecture’ in the 70s, as previously discussed. By
the late 20th century, movement became a key issue in the architectural
discourse of digital media. Digital architects, such as Greg Lynn, who have
based their design methods on animation and motion are regularly attacked with
this essential argument: buildings don’t move. Virtual and material mobility is
becoming more essential in today’s spaces. Understanding that while buildings

52
Kent Bloomer & Charles Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture (Yale Uni Press: USA, 1977),
p.59.

37
may not move, spaces can and do, emphasizes the reconsideration of how we
think and make architecture.

The theme of movement in terms of fluidity has become an essential conceptual

component of digital spaces. The structure of everyday movement is now based
on fluid transitions through multiple spaces, simultaneous flows instead of linear,
individual experiences like those portrayed in Etienne-Jules Marey’s frame-by-
frame photography. Physical movement weaves into digital movement as people
walk through streets with mobile phones or email from personal palm pilots on
buses. Nearly half a century after the Futurists, radical architecture groups such
as Archigram and Archizoom embraced the new world of speed and technology.
They focused on mobility and flexibility in direct contrast to the fixed heaviness of
modernism. Programs of campervans, space ships and submarines were used,
critiquing the desire for stability and consumption. These hypothetical projects
have become known as ‘Futurist’ or ‘Utopic’ architectures, due to their disregard
for the practicalities of construction.

Meanwhile European Modernist cinema in the 1960s explored the counter

position to stable buildings and moving bodies, producing films where the motion
of architecture and bodies intermeshed. Films by Alain Resnais’ and
Michelangelo Antonioni (who was originally an architect) showed architecture as
a key protagonist in the cinematic narrative. The art historian Erwin Panofsky
wrote about this new cinema in which;

[A]s movable as the spectator is, as movable is, for the same reason, the
space presented to him. Not only bodies move in space, but space itself
does, approaching, receding, turning, dissolving and recrystallizing as it
appears through the controlled locomotion and focusing of the camera and

38
 through the cutting and editing of the various shots.53

This new imaging of architecture through film proposed an alternative portrayal of

spaces that were contingent on individual bodies. Non-linear and durational
conceptualizations of temporality were shown through multiple, simultaneous
framings of spaces. As will be discussed in Chapter Four, these new cinematic
processes were picked up by Bernard Tschumi in order to reconsider the
systems of representation in the architecture drawing.

A different approach to these avant-garde and cinematic proposals is Tzonis’s

descriptions of Portuguese architect Santiago Calatrava explorations of
movement in his structures, beyond visual representation. Calatrava’s design for
the World Trade Centre transportation building in New York presents a
biomorphic impression of momentary stillness. Like many of Calatrava’s
buildings, its chrysalis form exposes a complex structural system, whose skeletal
form appears on the edge of organic motion. Calatrava creates mobile
architectures which feature what Tzonis describes as a paradoxical state of
permanence in space and time through movement, ‘incorporating fleeting
moments within their static body; effacing their own fetishist aura by constantly
reminding the viewer of their generic process; manifesting their victory over
collapse by pretending to be in the process of falling’.54 The architecture of
Calatrava is an excellent example of a non-literal process of bringing movement
into buildings themselves. While they are often very reminiscent of joints, wings
or limbs, the forms are drawn from the poetics of structure, rather than an
existing mimicry. The built works seem often at the point of collapse or flight.
They provide an excellent reply to the traditional doctrine of buildings staying still
while bodies move through them. Calatrava’s projects are monumental, they are

53
Quotation in Sik, Cho Im, ‘Diagramming; Lars Spuybroek’ interview, Sarai Reader 02, ‘The
Cities of Everyday LIfe’. Sarai Website. Retrieved 10.01.2007 at
<http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/02-the-cities-of-everyday-life/03diagramming.pdf>
54
Alexander Tzonis & Liane Lefaivre, Movement, Structure and the Work of Santiago Calatrava
(Birhauser; Basel,1995), p.13.

39
to be viewed as iconic sculptures in the landscape. They present an idea of
architecture that encapsulates motion in its form. They are not formed by the
performance of bodies, and it may be argued that their spectacular forms only
heighten the hierarchy of the architecture over the pedestrian. My description of
performative architecture, however, endeavors to incorporate motion in terms of
moving bodies. As can be seen in new generative CAD programs, some
contemporary architects, such as Greg Lynn and Lars Spuybroek, are also
finding ways of bringing this information into the forms themselves.

1.4
The Space of Architectural Discourse

Examples of performative architectures have emerged from a particular time in

the discipline of architecture in which visionary projects and theoretical research
have been actively promoted. The extensive theoretically rigorous architecture
now emerging can be attributed to this condition within the discipline in the last
few decades of the 20th century. The architects examined in this thesis have
worked within academia during the last forty years, building reputations in
theoretical projects, texts and alternative design and art practices. The 1970s
saw the radical visions of Archigram, Archizoom and Ant Farm exploring utopic
and dystopic urban life in collages and text. Architecture schools led by the
Architecture Association in London and Cooper Union in New York were
breeding grounds for pushing the boundaries of what architecture could be,
incorporating politics, literature and theatre into studio practice. John Hejduk,
Dean of the School of Architecture at Cooper Union, infamously insisted that
building was not essential to architecture. Inspiration could come from Italo
Calvino’s book Invisible Cities, or a film by Resnais.55 In these design courses
there were a focus on drawing and other media of artistic representation, rather

55
See Nigel Coates (ed.), A Discourse of Events (Architecture Association Press: UK, 1983).

40
than building technology. It was at the universities rather than on the building site
that key thinkers such as Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman
explored new ideas, inspiring the next generation of architects such as Daniel
Libeskind, Elizabeth Diller and Ben Van Berkel. This section traces recent
architectural discourse, in order to clarify historic background of the case studies
in Chapter Six.

While there has always been a strong theoretical discourse in the discipline of
architecture, during the 70s and 80s critical theory became very influential in
practice. This can be seen in the flourishing of journals such as Oppositions and
Assemblage. Oppositions was edited by Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton,
concentrating on the possibilities and uses of Deconstruction in architecture. In
1986 Assemblage established itself as a journal for critical exchange in
architectural discourse, the writers of which have included many of the most
important and vocal architectural theorists of the late 20th century.56 Its subtitle
was ‘A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture’ and it aimed to make
theory part of practice.

These journals presented an initial focus on linguistic and semiotic concerns,

based on deconstructive strategies in architectural theory. A decade later
interest turned to cultural issues, opening architectural critique up to gender, race
and spatial theory. By the new millennium Foucault was usurped by Deleuze as
a key theorist for architects, whose work is well suited to the multifarious and
transformative digital domain. This opening of architecture to other disciplines
meant an awareness of architectural issues beyond the pragmatic. At the same
time, architecture became more than backdrops of events for artists and
performers. Performance practitioners such as Trisha Brown and Vito Acconci
were exploring architecture and urban space in a specifically bodily way. An
understanding was established of how an installation work such as Gordon

56
Assemblage was published by MIT Press and included such regular writers as K. Michael
Hays, Stan Allen, Jennifer Bloomer, Beatriz Colomina, Stanford Kwinter and Mark Wigley.

41
Matta-Clarke’s ‘Splitting’ could be an important critique of not only art, but also
architecture. 57 The solidity of architecture as both a material form and a way of
thinking was becoming more porous. Later, in the 1990s, the ‘Any’ conferences
and subsequent journals focused on intellectual inquiry regarding architecture.
Incorporating many of the theorists from both Assemblage and Oppositions, they
aimed to establish architecture in contemporary cultural and social discourse,
bringing together people from philosophy, film and art as well as respected
architecture theorists, and young digital architects. The ‘Any’ group were
important in generating debate internationally between leading architectural
theorists, and open the typically closed world of architecture theory to the
outside.

During this time emerged the phenomenon of the ‘star architect’. Despite the
lack of actual building projects, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind and Tschumi
became known in the architectural world through their ideas voiced in teaching,
journalism and publications. The publication of the seductive, ‘hyper-monograph’
S,M,L,XL brought Rem Koolhaas international acclaim, redefining graphic
design, architectural and urban theory. This notoriety has spread over the last
few decades into the public arena, with the growth in ‘star’ architects, where
celebrity names mean increased revenue, from cultural buildings to expensive
apartment blocks. Beginning with Renzo Piano and Richard Roger’s design of
the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1977, during the last ten years several
architects have become household names, perhaps never so exemplified as by
Frank Gehry’s entry into pop knighthood by appearing on ‘The Simpsons’.
Gehry’s design of the Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997 showed that a single
building could be instrumental in making an unknown, industrial city in Spain into
an internationally-recognised tourist destination. Bilbao showed the branding
potential of architecture, but also the brand naming of celebrity architects. What

57
The disillusioned architect Gordon Matta-Clarke became famous with this installation work in
1974, where he split a typical suburban house up the middle, the beginning of his subversions
and dissections into architecture.

42
this means for architectural practice is the growth of big-budget, international
projects, whose organisers are actively seeking originality and innovation.

By the late 1980s the architectural climate began to change. This was the time
when the first projects of Tschumi, Eisenman and Libeskind began construction.
The focus began to shift from critical discourse to making things. The theorists
who had been so important in writing about ideas were starting to put concepts
into built form. The last edition of Assemblage marked a shift in the agency of
critical architectural discourse, from thinking to production. The final edition in
1999 spoke of a specific turn in architecture, whereby the idea of theory as
distinct from practice in architectural discourse need no longer be emphasized.
Stan Allen wrote, ‘[T]he most urgent and interesting issues are no longer debates
about formal language, its origins or affiliations, but rather, the complex questions
attending its realisation in built form. Debates about blobs versus boxes dissolve
in the common filter of technical information.’58 Today architecture, Allen argues,
must negotiate the issue of the virtual and actual. Allen ends by writing ‘[T]he
results in process suggest an optimistic future based on practice itself as source
of innovation and creativity.’59 This thesis argues that the shift from critical theory
to practice also means the reemphasis on not only the idea of the body, but also
the body as a living and animate entity.

1.5
The Body in Architecture

There are various ways in which the body has been brought into architectural
design. An example that has been popularized through Gehry’s work has been
called ‘Biological Spatiality’, where a building’s form reference organic body

58
Stan Allen, ‘Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia Lab Architecture Studio’, Assemblage 40.
(Dec., 1999), p.59. JSTOR. Retrieved 10.01.2007 at < http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0889-
3012%28199912%290%3A40%3C56%3AFSMALA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V>
59
Stan Allen, ibid, p.59.

43
forms. While it has been critiqued as creating a visceral reaction in the beholder,
this kind of architecture tends toward a particular style rather than bodily
interaction. The process which the body has been traditionally brought into
architecture has usually been described as a ‘figural’ or ‘humanist’ approach.
Figural architecture uses the size and measure of the human form in the design
of buildings. Historically, the body has been brought into architecture through an
anthropomorphic process of representation. It traditionally describes the
Renaissance use of the image of the human form in a building’s design, leading it
also to be called ‘humanist architecture’. This is exemplified by Leonardo da
Vinci’s image of the Vitruvian Man in 1492. In this famous drawing, the male
figure reaches out to the edges of his kinosphere, delineating the Euclidean
geometry of a circle and square. He is the unifying element, the centre of
universal form. For Vitruvius, the metaphor of architecture came from reflections
on the human body – architectural beauty (Venustas) came from the proportions
and geometry of this circle and square.60 It defined an order and strength, which
architecture was to emulate. This parallels the onset of single-point perspective
and Cartesian space as a centralizing of the individual human body in the world.
‘Figural architecture’, therefore, means the scaling and homogenizing of the
human form.61 The body becomes a regulating system of the world around it,
becoming particularized into a specific gender and type. What this means is that
instead of considering the body as living and animate, it can be brought into
architecture in terms of mimetic reproduction.

60
Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius:Writing the Body of Architecture (MIT press: USA, 2003), p.12.
61
The term Figural Architecture has also been used to describe a style of architecture in
response to Modernist abstraction. Post-modern architect Michael Graves in his essay ‘A Case
for Figurative Architecture’ in Michael Graves: Buildings and Projects, 1966-1981, (Rizzoli: New
York, 1983), describes the use of suggestive and familiar symbols in architecture which relate
back to the body.

44
1.5.1
Figural Architecture

Figural architecture is described by architect Robert McAnulty as a ‘projected

interiority’, where the body’s image becomes the blueprint that is extruded
directly upwards into built form.62 A key problem with figural architecture is that it
sets up a dichotomy between the body and the world. This binary relationship
creates a distance between the two, defining separate positions of subject and
object. By homogenizing the body, either it tends towards the particular male
body (as in the Vitruvian Man or Corbusier’s Modular Man), or it becomes
asexualized. Importantly, it enforces stillness, taking on the static qualities of an
image and allowing it to become a dimension-able, measurable entity.

In trying to re-animate the body in architecture, it is difficult not to resort back to a

figural process. Beyond the basic representation of the body in architectural
form, many theorists in the search for a contemporary body-building relationship
fall back into this humanist approach. This issue forms the basis of McAnulty’s
essay ‘Body Troubles’, which is significant as one of the few texts to discuss the
need to critically examine the issue of figurality in terms of reformulating the body
in contemporary architecture.63 McAnulty draws on Foucault’s definition of the
social body, specifically in order to open up contemporary thinking in architecture
beyond this classical approach to the body. Contrasting the Vitruvian figure of a
pre-existing body that projects itself onto the built environment, he uses
Foucault’s understanding of the body in terms of exteriority and its engagement
with the world. McAnulty makes clear that a figural architecture is only a return to
the classical model, ‘that finds the body as an interiorized subject projecting itself
onto an exterior world’.64

62
The clearest example is the body of Christ directly forming the ground plan of the church.
63
Robert McAnulty ‘Body Troubles’ in Strategies in Architectural Thinking John Whiteman, Jeff
Kipnis, Richard Burdett (eds.) (The MIT Press: USA, 1992).
64
Robert McAnulty, ibid, p.191.

45
In ‘Body Troubles’, McAnulty examines two contemporary approaches to retrieve
the body in architecture, the first is phenomenological and the second
psychoanalytic. Both are unveiled to expose their still essentially figural
grounding. McAnulty defines the need to look at the spatial, rather than figural,
inscriptive rather than projective techniques, and sexual rather than animistic.
These three alternative aspects he proposes point to a physicalized, animated
and multi-dimensional view of the body-world relationship. The body is seen not
as a form, but as an animate being, inscribed by the social and cultural world as
in Foucault’s exterior body, gendered and interactive. Rather than foregrounding
either the body or the built environment, McAnulty argues one must begin by
examining the relationship between the body and the world.65

In arguing for the legitimate use of phenomenology in architecture, it is useful to

look at McAnulty first case study; Alberto Perez-Gomez’s reading of John
Hejduk’s work, which seeks to ‘renovate and reclaim’ the body in architecture in
order to find an authentic, metaphysical relationship to the world.66 McAnulty
argues that this Heideggerean longing takes the body back to an interior
projection of the body, in this case into the notion of the ‘clearing’, an issue that
will be explored in the next chapter. While Pérez-Gómez also wants to escape
from the body-world dualism, McAnulty argues that phenomenology posits the
body first ‘making room’ and ‘making space’; necessarily returning to a hierarchy
of first body then world relationship. The resulting form is still projected onto the
outside world. It therefore returns in the end to the classical model. This failure
to relate to the exterior world, whether environmental or cultural, is a key
problem. McAnulty sees the difficulty in using Heidegger’s concept of dwelling in
architecture as bringing something non-volitional into the pragmatics of

65
McAnulty ends his essay by using the work of Diller and Scofidio to present an alternative
approach to these previous examples. He sees in Diller and Scofidio’s work a reformulation of
the body also without recourse to the figural.
66
The examination of Hejduk’s masque projects in Chapter Four, argues that it is possible to
make a performative reading of his work, which incorporates embodiment beyond the figural.

46
architecture, which is essentially instrumental.67 This understanding of
architecture as an instrumental system of potential actions and flows is literally
realized in digital architecture processes that design structures in which data
generates form. It is for this reason that the fifth chapter is dedicated to exploring
how these new processes incorporate embodiment in order to create new kinds
of architecture.

McAnulty’s consideration of the body in terms of spatiality rather than figurality is

an essential distinction for this research, emphasizing the space made between
bodies and buildings. For this reason this thesis uses performativity to get away
from the necessity of an a priori figure. In the process it challenges McAnulty’s
claim that phenomenology in architecture must necessarily bring us back to the
figural. While acknowledging the difficulties in using phenomenology in this
regard, it will be argued that it is integral to find a strategy for bringing the
experiential body into the architectural process. By using performativity as
defined by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception rather than
Heidegger’s ontologically-based theory, the body is brought into architecture in
animate and creative interaction, rather than mimetic replications of the human
form. The architects Reiser and Umemoto put this issue into a physical example,
showing that in breaking away from the figural, architecture can focus on the
performance of bodies;

Anthropocentrism is representational and is the most limiting when it is

applied at the scale of the body. We prefer architecture to engage what a
body can actually do. A skateboarding ramp, for instance, is not patterned
on a human. Rather, it is an intervening technology that belongs to a
totally different pattern of order upon which the human works. The ramp

67
Robert McAnulty, ibid, p.187.

47
 augments the body; it is an extension of the body via the vehicle of the
skateboard, but it does not represent it.68

1.5.2
The Body as Scale

If the body is no longer to be conceived as an anatomical figure, the question of

scale becomes a key issue. Scale describes a standard of measurement. In the
relationship between architecture and the body, it implies a ‘proper’ proportional
rule. As the architect Steven Holl writes: A re-assertion of the human body as the
locus of experience (whether on the street or from the 50th floor) as well as to
affirm the aim to re-establish roots in the perceptual world with its inherent
ambiguity presents us with new questions of proportion and scale in the
development of future architectures’.69

Eisenman ties the issue of scale to figurality, arguing that it irrevocably results in
what he deems an obsolete, anthropomorphic architecture. Eisenman contends
that it is only through the artificial that architecture can truly embrace
embodiment, otherwise, he writes ‘[M]imesis claims only mimesis’.70 In the
Vitruvian Man the issue of scale is clear; the body is the central point around
which the built world measures itself. In order to escape this tradition-bound
anthropomorphism, Eisenman uses scale as a strategy of subversion. By
changing the expected scale of objects, he dislocates the body as the authorial
generate of a building’s measurements.71 To stop using the body as the basis of
architectural scale or to actively subvert that position does not mean that one

68
Reiser & Umemoto, Atlas of Novel Tectonics (Princeton Architectural Press: NY, 2006), p.85.
69
Steven Holl et al, Questions of Perception, p.116
70
Peter Eisenman, Blurred Zones Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman Architects 1988-
1998 (Monaceli: 2003), p.314.
71
In the experience of Eisenmen’s design of Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, the
result of this is destabilization and the need to re-orient the body.

48
must forget or ignore the bodily, phenomenological elements. As Eisenman
argues, the result of this scaling actually provokes physical interaction whereby,
rather than relying on assumed movement, people are forced to actively engage
with the space.

An argument often made against architects who work in the digital domain is the
loss of scale that occurs when designing in cyberspace. Though seen as a
negative trait, to accept that the everyday is now permeated with virtual, digital
spaces, the question of scale becomes more complex. In defining the bodies of
today as hybrids of virtual and actual dimensions, the issue of scale must be
rethought. Digital architecture adds to these new bodies the possibilities for
spaces to become fluid and transformative. In these environments dedicated to
flux, the use of scale is further problematized. This will be explored in the final
chapter through the work of NOX architecture. Architectural methodologies that
take a non-figural approach to the design process have been developed in terms
of the event, where the body’s scale can be entirely reconsidered in favour of
exploring action.

1.5.3
Alternative Strategies for bringing Bodies into Buildings

The ‘Event’ is the most popular strategy by means of which embodied action has
been brought into the architectural design process. It can be seen in the early
projects of Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman, typically drawing on the texts
of Derrida and Foucault. While it is based on the body in time and space, the
Event situates itself in the moving state of action rather than bodily form, thereby
bypassing the possibility of figural representation. Several theorists of both
architecture and philosophy have extrapolated a theory of the Event in order to
provide placement in space. Edward Casey traces its beginning to Heidegger’s

49
description of space as the act of ‘clearing’ and ‘making room’ for the Event.72 In
this way we understand its basis in creative action, in embodied making.

The Event may be described as a point, it is a marker, a hinge, a breaking point,

an interruption, a disruption, the moment of coalescence, the moment of opening.
Events are not the result of actions or context, they imply changing direction or
transformation. Events are known to be both novel and creative, providing the
opportunity for change and progress. Derrida contrasted this disruptive ‘point’ to
architectural practice’s primary concern for the surfaces of forms and objects.
Events in this way are interruptions in the historically-linear course of time. From
these descriptions the Event can be understood as performative, based in
movement and embodied action. Similarly it was a term brought into theatre
discourse to describe avant-garde performances such as ‘Happenings’. It
described a ‘live’ act, cutting a slice out of the causal system of time.

Derrida became practically involved in architecture through his collaboration with

Peter Eisenman in the design of a garden in the masterplan of Bernard
Tschumi’s Parc de Villette. Although it was never realized, the publication of their
dialogue between architecture and philosophy presents the struggle between the
practices of philosophy and the making of architecture.73 Derrida had previously
used Heidegger’s notion of the ‘act of clearing’ in his concept of Events, where
the Event becomes an opening and a disruption of space. Derrida connected the
idea of invention with Event, which comes from the same derivation in French of
‘venir’. It implies unanticipated newness, opening up multiple future possibilities.
For Derrida, as with Foucault, these Events must be singular, a turning point and
a breaking point.74 In this kind of spacing, potentiality becomes the essential

72
Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (University of California Press: USA,
1997), p.313.
73
See Jacques Derrida, & Peter Eisenman, Chora l Works (Monacelli: USA, 1997). Derrida
wanted to design ‘Chora’, what he described as an impossible place. This set Eisenman the
difficult task of designing an architecture that cannot be designed.
74
Edward Casey, ibid, p.316.

50
component, but coupled with themes of motion – two aspects that recur
throughout this research in performative architectures.

The difficulty is in what philosopher John Rajchman pinpoints as the spatial

problem of inhabiting time.75 Repeated acts, which become known as function,
exist in a historic temporal dimension. The Event becomes that which explodes
this temporality, opening architecture up to the purely present and the future. As
Casey points out that for Derrida, a building is more of a happening than a thing,
it is in continual occurrence.76 Instead of accepting presence as essential to
architecture, Derrida proposed to rethink it as ‘a writing of space, a mode of
space which makes place for the Event’.77 This ‘spacing out’ offers the built
environment a sense of interiority; the spectator is placed within the architecture,
as opposed to outside it where the emphasis is on form. This opening up of
space becomes what he termes an 'Eventalising of architecture'. He writes:

The question of architecture is in fact that of place, of the taking place in

space. The establishing of a place that didn’t exist until then and is in
keeping with what will take place there one day, that is place[...]the setting
up of a habitable place is an event.78

Derrida argues that architecture must embrace the notion of the Event in order to
make places that are both true to the present and open to the future. In this way
Events can be key sites for architectures that incorporate both the now and the
indeterminate actions of the future. This is the difficulty in creating architecture
based on Derrida’s definition of the Event and it was the sticking point in his

75
See John Rajchman’s examination of this idea of the event in philosophy and art, Philosophical
Events: Essays of the 80s (Columbia Uni. Press: US, 1991).
76
Edward Casey, ibid, p.313.
77
Jacques Derrida, ‘Point de Folie- Maintenant L’Architecture’ AA files, no 12 (1986), trans. by
Kate Linklater in The Fate of Place, p.312.
78
Interview with Jacques Derrida ‘Architecture where Desire can Live’ in Nesbitt, Kate (Ed.),
Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995
(Princeton Architectural Press: USA 1997), p.145.

51
collaboration with Eisenman – how to build the unbuildable. For Derrida,
deconstruction in architecture is about questioning the foundations of the
architectural metaphor. For the Parc de Villette project it became a philosophical
discussion, the translation of which into built structures finally proving too difficult.

Tschumi was the architect to first bring the Event directly into the architectural
design process. He opened architecture to the Event by way of the drawing,
using the ‘point’ as written symbol. This process can be seen in his design for
the Parc de Villette.79 Following Derrida's theorizing of space, Tschumi named
his architecture the ‘Architecture of the Event’, proclaiming ‘there is no space
without Event, no architecture without program’.80 The program defined the
parameters of action, while the Event held the opportunity for the experiential.
Tschumi wanted to use the Event to describe this encounter between the body
and space. As for Derrida and Eisenman, an Event was something totally
unrepeatable for Tschumi, a cataclysmic moment in time exemplified in his
notations of fireworks, but also in the quotidian movement of a single step across
a room. Cataclysmic because it had been cut out of the continuously unraveling
sequence of chronological time and held for a moment in the light. These
metaphors of sequence and narrativity lead to Tschumi’s use of cinematic
techniques in his restructuring of the architecture drawing in order to include the
Event.

Tschumi’s project, Manhattan Transcripts presents the possibilities of the Event

in incorporating the living body and architecture. Using the Event as a strategy
for making architecture however is problematic in its translation into the design
process. This thesis therefore looks to alternative practices that engage with
physical movement, such as dance, or that provoke bodily interaction, such as
installation, in order to construct a performative reading of space. The Event

79
Tschumi won the competition to design the master plan for the Parc de Villette in Paris in 1982.
This project allowed him to physically explore his experiments with the event in architecture
through a built project.
80
Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p.121.

52
opens space to the experiential, but does not construct a new methodology in
which to bring that animate body into the design process. Instead, it remains
fixed in the traditional form of the architectural drawing, represented in points and
surfaces. While the body as a figural image has been removed, it has been
replaced by another set of symbolic abstractions. Its applicability to a
diagrammatic system results in simply another notational form. Two other
methodologies that refuse such symbolic representations are the Interstitial and
L’inform, which remain based in embodied movement.

1.5.4
The Architectural Interstitial and L’informe

The ‘Interstitial’ and ‘L’informe’ (translating in English to the formless), are two
very similar terms connected to Event theory which have been used to develop
an architecture based on temporality and the experiential. Both describe
architecture as a process of ‘becoming’, in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari,
as opposed to a fixed method of form making.81 Both the Interstitial and
L’Informe propose a new conceptual site for the design of architecture that
embraces eventmental spaces.

The Interstitial in architecture was formulated by Eisenman, who defines it as a

state of in-between, ‘a condition where architecture is neither dependent on its
former narratives nor devoid of meaning by residing between the two, where
other forms of meaning, and meaningful situations, can occur’.82 Like the Event,
the Interstitial creates a liminal space between the past and assumptions of the
future. This allows room for alterity and experimentation, temporarily
incorporating past, present and future. Time is understood here through Henri

81
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the idea of ‘becoming’ as process of continual transformation,
see their chapter ‘Becoming Animal’ in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
82
Peter Eisenman, Blurred Zones Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman Architects 1988-
1998 (Monaceli: 2003), p.7.

53
Bergson’s notion of ‘duration’, rather than chronological lineality.83 The Interstitial
proposes a way of understanding architecture, rather than a strategy. In this way
architecture is understood as never complete, but in constant transformation.
Instead of what Eisenman sees as an anti-functionalist humanism spawned from
modernism, he argues that architecture must focus on its ‘interiority’ based in
human events and experiences.

The Interstitial relates to Bataille’s concept of L’Informe. The philosopher Andrew

Benjamin brought this term into architectural discourse from the art world.
L’Informe is not the opposite of form, but the subversion of it. 84 Benjamin uses
the term to critique the projects of Eisenman along with the new field of digital
architects such as NOX, who use generative design systems.85 Benjamin works
from Bataille’s description of L’informe in poetry, as that which ‘working to undo/
disturb/ rearrange, demanding generally that each thing has its form/ the form
proper to it’.86

L’Informe is a state of becoming, a state in transition from what is, to what is to

be. As such it is a productive as well as a destabilizing element. As Benjamin
writes: ‘It is not empty spaces awaiting programmatic injection. Rather the
complex activity of blurring produces the yet-to-be determined.’87 This state of
blur provides the opportunity for new kinds of inhabitation, rather than assumed
practices. Functional and programmatic elements are still present, but
transformed. This transformation, whether through scale, or blurring between

83
Bergson described time as durational, rather than discrete and objective, which unfolded
through movement in the experience of it. It can also be related to Deleuze and Guattari’s
description of ‘becoming’, see Duration and Simultaneity (1921).
84
For further work on the informe within a fine art context see Rosalind Krauss and Yves Blois,
Formless (Zone Books: 2000)
85
See Andrew Benjamin, Architectural Philosophy (Athlone: London, 2000) and Benjamin’s
essay ‘Notes on the Surfacing of Walls: NOX, Kiesler, Semper’, in Lars Spuybroek, NOX:
Machining Architecture.
86
Georges Bataille Oevres Complètes, 1:217 quotation by Andrew Benjamin, Architectural
Philosophy, p.29.
87
Andrew Benjamin, ‘Opening up the Interstitial: Eisenman’s Space of Difference’ in Blurred
Zones p.310.

54
expected dichotomies (for example, interior and exterior, or old and new) or
hierarchies, opens architecture to new kinds of experiences. Rajchman
describes it through Eisenman’s work as ‘[A]n architecture of the informe is one
that exposes its containing grid as “constraining” or “framing” something that is
always exceeding it, surpassing it, or overflowing it’.88 It is therefore a
methodology that seeks constant radicality, it must be continually aware of these
limitations in order to fight against them. Eisenman believes architecture should
always strive to be ‘dislocative’. By this he means that the form of architecture
should always dislocate itself from previous, historic typologies. In this way
architecture is constantly re-inventing itself. Eisenman believes that the
Interstitial is a way of instituting a contemporary, ‘meaningful’ connection
between people and the built environment.89

The Interstitial and L’informe are very useful terms for rethinking the assumed
tenets of architecture. Benjamin has shown it to be highly suitable as a form of
critique. As the site for a design methodology though, the tendency is for both
terms to ultimately lapse into uninhabitable, anti-architectures. Despite this they
are very useful for providing strategies such as scaling and blurring, which have
physical applications. From the previous strategies that have been based in
active, embodied processes for reconsidering the body in built environments, this
chapter comes to looking at how performativity as a practice has made its way
previously into architectural discourse.

88
John Rajchman, Constructions, p.20.
89
The issue of dislocation in Eisenman’s design of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
in Berlin, will be examined in Chapter Six.

55
1.6
Previous Connections between Performativity and Architecture

Despite their regular intersection, critically relating performativity and architecture

has been rare in both theatre and architecture discourse.90 Performativity as an
interdisciplinary practice has more flexibility to infiltrate architecture. The
‘Strangely Familiar’ group of architecture and art historians based in London have
focused on theorizing urban space through a lens of cultural theory.91 With its
focus on bodily interaction in specific contexts and environments, performativity
fits well into these contemporary examinations of public spaces. The specificity
of the body as a culturally constructed individual moving through space, is
acknowledged by the Strangely Familiar group as essential to critiquing built
environments. The relationship between the spatiality of the built environment
and this animate body is the basis of their investigations that integrate a variety of
disciplines. Architectural historian Jane Rendell, for example, brings a feminist
perspective to this area, examining how urban mobility and visibility have
constructed and segregated certain bodies.92 Her book The Pursuit of Pleasure
examines the notion of the ramble through the public and private spaces of
Regency London. Gender theory is used to show how spatial and social
relationships of bodies in public space are interwoven with the architecture of the
time. Rendell examines the performance of bodies within a specific time in
history, in order to construct a new kind of architectural history.

90
An exception is Alan Read, professor in Performance Studies at Roehampton University, who
has endeavoured to bring together the two disciplines in his publications and in the development
of the Performance Architecture Location project. But this research and focus has remained
specifically in the field of performance studies, failing to sufficiently engage with architectural
discourse. See Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (1993/1995) and
Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday (2000).
91
Iain Borden, et al (eds.), Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City (Routledge:
UK,1996) and Iain Borden, et al (eds.), Iain Borden& Jane Rendell (eds.), InterSections:
Architectural Histories and Critical Theories (Routledge: UK,2000),The Unknown City: Contesting
Architecture and Social Space (The MIT Press: UK, 2002).
92
Jane Rendell, The Pursuit of Pleasure (Rutgers University Press: UK, 2002).

56
This section will briefly focus on a key example of how performativity and
architecture can be brought together. Iain Borden, an architectural historian and
skateboarder, has become a well-known figure in the bourgeoning field that
connects architectural and cultural theory. Like Rendell, Borden claims that the
typical architectural historian has concentrated on the production of buildings as
opposed to the production of spaces. His aim is to recreate the historian as a
revolutionary, whose role is not simply a retelling of the past, but a rethinking of
the possibilities within it. This opens architecture up to the possibilities of the
present and future.

Borden is the only architectural theorist to specifically bring J.L. Austin’s concept
of performativity into a critical discourse of architecture. His book Skateboarding,
Space and the City: Architecture and the Body, presents a unique and innovative
connection between performativity and urban architecture.

Borden aims to show how the practice of skateboarding fundamentally enacts,

both politically and dynamically, the relationship between space, time and the
social body. Through this, an alternative understanding and engagement with
urban architecture is possible to that constructed by dominant capitalist ideology.
Using Henri Lefebvre's texts as a theoretical framework, Borden proposes
skateboarding as a performative encapsulation of those theories, not only in
refusing and resisting capitalism, but by 'restlessly search[ing] for new
possibilities of representing, imagining and living our lives'.93 Borden argues that
skateboarding denies the codification that characterizes the production and
reproduction of other signifiers. He draws on Merleau-Ponty, writing that the
mobility of the body allows the skateboarder to live out Merleau-Ponty's belief
that '[B]ecause movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and
time, it actively assumes them’.94 Borden uses skateboarding to open interaction
in spaces to new kinds of movement and new ways of seeing and being in built

93
Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City (Berg: New York, 2001), p.10
94
Quotation by Borden, ibid, p.100.

57
environments. Borden’s definition of architecture is a changing space for
productions and reproductions – an architecture neither stable, nor fixed, but
constituted by the discourses and practises of social life.95 In this way he breaks
down the concept of architecture as a pre-existing structure, into one that is
produced and created by living bodies.

Skateboarding is presented by Borden as successfully performative in its

fundamental 'liveness', retaining a temporal immediacy. It is a practice where
action and creation coalesce. Skateboarding actively writes the city, rather than
passively reading it. In the sense of Austin's performative utterance, the doing
becomes a creating. Through this Borden can make the claim that skateboarding
actually becomes architecture, 'not as a thing, but as a production of space, time
and social being'.96 Borden puts skateboarders above the average, scopically
focused pedestrian because they engage with space using their entire bodies.
Skateboarders experience a visual and phenomenological connection to the
urban environment, shared only in part with the cycle couriers. Like the earlier
statement by Reiser and Umemoto, the board becomes an extension to the body,
a prosthesis, which constructs a specific mode of movement and engagement.
The city is transformed into a series of ramps, of slides and runs – a city of
surfaces and textures. Through these fragments, a unique relationship is
constructed with distance and time.

The Strangely Familiar group use the performative body as a strategy to analyse
urban space. They focus on city environments, examining how urban spaces
can be rethought through alternative practices that occur within it. Borden is
focusing his studies on skateboarding itself and the political implications of it as a
performance, rather than looking more generally at how the performance of
bodies construct spaces – the practice of skateboarding as a form of critique,
with the skateboard as a political tool. What this thesis aims to achieve is to

95
Iain Borden, ibid, p.9.
96
Iain Borden, ibid, p.1.

58
accept this body as a producer of architectural space and question what this
means for making architecture. In accepting this new understanding of bodies in
built environments, it is important to address how the origins of those spaces
have been constructed and how they can be constructed in new ways. For this
reason the case studies that will be examined in Chapter Three and Four focus
on what will be argued are the two core elements of the design process; the living
body and the architecture drawing. Extrapolated from these two issues will be
performative strategies for designing architecture.

This chapter has endeavoured to place this thesis in the context of contemporary
architectural discourse. It has traced the key issues concerning the incorporation
of living bodies into the design process. This began with the primary
problematics of defining space and how advances in technology have added to
this discussion. The impact of new technologies on the thinking and practice of
architecture were shown to provide new opportunities for spaces that can be
described as performative. The moving body was added to this spatial
formulation, tracing how it has been considered within architectural thinking; from
the figural image to the body as Event. This brought these ideas into the
contemporary context of architecture, which has promoted and allowed for the
possibilities for new and performative buildings. These foundations provide the
spatial basis for this thesis. Through this in the following chapter, the theoretical
framework of phenomenology and performativity will be woven in order to
construct a description of performative architecture.

59
 ChapterTWO
Bodies and Drawings

60
This chapter is dedicated to laying the foundations for a concept of Performative
Architecture. Whereas Chapter One placed this thesis in the space of
architectural thinking and practice, this chapter formulates a framework for
performative architecture. It begins with the essential tenet of architecture,
space. Added to this architectural principal will be the living body. This chapter
endeavors to clarify how the assumed truths of spaces and bodies can be
unpicked to reveal their historically constructed systems. It will argue that paring
these foundations down will reveal two key spatial issues, from which can be
developed a new reading of space based on the performative body and
contemporary ideas of space generated by technological and social changes.
The first is how the lived body constructs space; the second is how conceptions
of space shape architecture through the architecture drawing. This knowledge
will allow for alternative pathways to be made for new kinds of architecture.

By drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, this

chapter begins by looking at how the body actively makes spaces. The ‘body’ is
defined as the living, moving body, which can be said to ‘perform’ space. To
define this more specific reading of space, this chapter looks at theories based
around movement, examining how performative theory and walking practices
have been explored in relation to the built environment. It is important to
emphasize that the thesis is not primarily concerned with the body itself, but how
to think about the body’s active relations to built spaces. The aim is to look
beyond architectural pragmatism or fashion, in order to propose a different
approach to how the interaction of the phenomenological body can inform new
architectures. It is to try to fathom what is at first obvious: the relationship
between bodies and buildings. This study of space formed by the body will be
the basis of an examination of bodies in creative interactions with the world
around them. This leads to the new body geometries of Oskar Schlemmer and
the transactive relationship of bodies and buildings in Vito Acconci’s installations.

61
In doing so, this section lays the groundwork for constructing built space around
the moving, living body.

The second part of this chapter will look at how architects have traditionally
imaged space. This imaging of space has direct repercussions for the design
process. The concept of space has become slippery, problematized by debates
on ‘place’, ‘virtuality’, ‘reality’. Here it will be considered it in terms of the body
and its role in representing built environments. In order to consider these new
relationships in the design process, it is important to understand how the central
role of the architecture drawing reflects the need to pursue the historically-
produced systems in which it is structured. Its basis in systems of Euclidean
geometry and linear perspective need to be understood in order to rethink the
way that computers and information systems are changing not only how we make
architecture, but also how we inhabit it. This will in turn emphasize the radicality
of John Hejduk’s and Bernard Tschumi’s re-interpretations of the architectural
drawing. Clarifying how conceptions of space shape built work through the
drawing will open the design process to new possibilities of designing
architecture using new tools in a contemporary context.

2.1
The Creative Body

In the pre-industrial making of architecture, artisans used their bodies as

measuring tools. The nomenclature of imperial measurement retains the residue
of this, when buildings were literally handcrafted, feet and hands scaling
mammoth cathedrals. The body has always been important in architecture, but
as an inanimate fixed form. Today the body’s essential role in the play of
architecture has produced a kind of transparency – as if only a vague outline
remains. Elizabeth Grosz describes these absent bodies as architecture’s
‘unspoken condition’, where the assumption of their essential importance leads to

62
neglect. 97 This condition allows an unquestioned status, where bodies are
presumed to be integral to architecture, without needing to integrate them into the
design process. The last chapter observed how this leads to anthropomorphic
representations. Today, despite digital drafting tools, the body is still frozen in
the inanimate image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man or Corbusier’s Modular
Man. The question is whether it is possible to reconfigure its placement in
architecture as an animated, culturally and socially constituted body.

It is not enough to think of the body as simply form, but rather living, breathing,
moving. It is neither purely representational as in the case of the figural
architecture previously discussed, nor purely anatomical or biological. It is the
individual body that dreams, laughs, dances, falls over – the particular body. For
this reason I am employing aspects of phenomenological philosophy to
emphasize the body as animate and, most importantly, as situated in the world.
The important shift this posed for philosophy was a return to concrete experience
as the foundation of philosophical thought. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of
phenomenology is built on an existential analysis of the world, a world built on
structures of consciousness that can only be understood from a subjective
viewpoint. Everyday experiences are pivotal for phenomenologists, who seek to
uncover the hidden significance and complexity in the quotidian.

In defining the body through this active engagement with the world, will be added
the discourse of performativity. This is in order to describe a new kind of spatial
interaction, which allows the possibilities for an actively creative approach to how
bodies and buildings relate. It is this process, fuelled by the rapid changes in the
last fifty years in spatial inhabitation and movement, which is leading us to a new
understanding of built space. These changes in how we live and move in the
spaces of the twenty-first century are leading to new possibilities for architecture.
The traditional divisions that separated body, space and world are now

97
Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (MIT Press:
USA, 2001), p.14.

63
inextricably interwoven. Both phenomenology and performativity demand as
fundamental the active body as a creative force, where the process of movement
is a conjuring into existence. In this way space is not presumed to be absolute,
but something in constant transformation.

2.2
The Phenomenological Body

In advocating the use of phenomenology in a contemporary critique of

architecture it is important to resist resorting to traditional modes of bodily
representation. The body is understood by Merleau-Ponty as the ‘living body’.
His emphasis is on an interacting body-subject, characterized by an embodied
consciousness. It is through our body that we could know the world. It is an aim
of this thesis to find a way of using phenomenology in architectural discourse
beyond the restrictions of authenticity described by Heidegger. Unlike
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty is specifically concerned with experience over
ontological questions of being. 98 This emphasis, without the transcendental
tendencies of fellow phenomenologists Heidegger, Jean-Paul Satre and even
Edmund Husserl, finds echoes in the key writings of Performative studies.

The Phenomenology of Perception is considered Merleau-Ponty's masterwork,

where he defines perception as the process in which to understand 'being' as an
active engagement with the world. His procedure is to first describe an
Objectivist understanding of the world and through that critique propose his
alternative approach. His writing can be read as an attack on European society
of the mid 20th century, whose understanding of the world he felt was bound in
an Objectivist vision that either accepted scientific rationalism to explain the

98
Merleau-Ponty continued from the phenomenological work of Edmund Husserl, generally
known as the father of phenomenology. In his later writing Husserl turned away from searching
for a deeper ontological significance, toward focusing on the everyday.

64
surrounding world or the prevailing philosophical intellectualism in French
universities of the time. Merleau-Ponty saw both these approaches as the dead
world of objects or the abstract world of the mind; a viewpoint that kept people
separated from the world and others, creating a detachment between body and
mind.

By the mid-20th century Merleau-Ponty believed that two world wars and a series
of major scientific breakthroughs severely damaged the possibility of a
philosophy based on truth and certainty. He drew on the new literature that was
being published in science, physiology, psychology and psychiatry, and in this
way more than any other phenomenologist he brought philosophy closer to the
human sciences and away from abstract theory. In contrast to Kant’s abstract
conceptualization of space, Merleau-Ponty believed space must be engaged with
physically in order to know it. He believed that the primary condition of our
knowledge of the world was through our experience of it. For Merleau-Ponty,
body, space, movement and world were inseparable, working continually through
each other. Exploring the reciprocal interactions of these issues he defined his
concept of ‘being-in-the-world’, built on the foundations of engagement and
action rather than objective analysis or reflection. 99

2.2.1
Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Being-in-the-World’

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty proposed a body in which

the world would layer and ingrain itself, becoming sedimented beneath the skin
and through the bone.100 Our bodies become ‘habitualised’, they accumulate
knowledge of how to interact with the world beyond our own conscious desires or

99
Merleau-Ponty first mentions his concept of ‘Being-in-the-world’ in The Phenomenology of
Perception trans. by Colin Smith Routledge: UK, 1995), p.79.
100
For Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term ‘sedimentation’ see The Phenomenology of Perception,
pp.130-131.

65
demands.101 This pre-reflective state is not consciously prescribed, rather the
intention is brought forth from the body, what Merleau-Ponty calls bodily or
operative intentionality. In the same way that an object is understood by picking
it up, feeling it, reflecting and describing it, so too an environment is
comprehended through movement. This bodily intentionality demands, and is
both limited and extended by, the abilities of our body movement. Merleau-Ponty
argues that movement brings about knowing, there is no pre-existing world
separate from our experience of it, nor do we construct it separately in our
subconscious.

The viewpoint is always situated in the body-subject, otherwise the world is

neither objective, nor subjective, existing only through inhabitation. 'Being-in-the-
world' is a key phrase to illuminate this relationship. Heidegger also uses the
term ‘being-in-the-world’ or ‘being-there’ (Dasein) to emphasise that a person
cannot be separated from the context of the world, that to be human is to be
somewhere. In this sense, through architecture’s ability to make places, it has
the possibility of facilitating a meaningful ‘being-in-the-world’. It can, but often
doesn’t, ground and place the body in space. But Heidegger's prevalent concern
with ontology would keep his embodied subject abstracted from concrete
existence. By contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘being-in-the-world’ means
exactly what it sounds like – that to be, is to be in the world. Rather than
distinguishing between two separate concepts of the body and the world, this is a
way of talking about both as fundamentally connected. As Eric Mathews
describes it; ‘To explore our being-in-the-world is to explore our ways of being
involved with the world, the purposes we have in relation to surrounding objects
and the meanings that we give to them.’102

Merleau-Ponty argues that one cannot separate the world from one’s experience

101
For Merleau-Ponty’s examination of habit and the body see The Phenomenology of
Perception, pp.142-147.
102
Eric Matthews, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (McGill-Queens Uni Press: USA, 2002), p.9.

66
of it, that one knows something only through that experience. This constitutes a
transformative and fluid notion of space based on embodiment, rather than an a
priori and fixed definition.103 Merleau-Ponty would insist on the examination of
self and world through the physical, actual experience. The priority is ordinary,
lived experience, where the world is 'my' world. Instead of an isolated
consciousness, it demands the acceptance of the individual body in space.

Rather than focusing on the body as an object, this thesis understands it as a

living entity moving through space. It must therefore be understood through its
relationship with the internal self and the outward construction of the social body.
Spatiality is formed by the inhabitation of lived bodies, objects and the
relationships that are constructed between the two. Merleau-Ponty sees the
world as inherently part of the human experience. It is not an object that can be
examined separately from the historical, cultural and physical interactions of the
body, nor is it a determinate, impersonal, geometric space. In this relationship
mobility becomes central, ‘Bodily spatiality, inherently dynamic, is the very
condition for the coming into being of a meaningful world. Thus it subtends our
entire existence as Human Beings.’104

The body is defined by Merleau-Ponty as a ‘potentiality of movement’.105 Our

bodies are what orientate us in space, they locate us, giving us a point of origin
with which to comprehend the world. Merleau-Ponty describes body movement
as having its own intentionality, rather than simply responding passively to
stimuli. The world cannot be made up of determined, pre-existing objects or
abstract constructions of our subconscious. Instead he sees the world as
individually created anew by the moving body. In this sense we may understand
the world to be made up corporeal objects that are only brought into being

103
Merleau-Ponty uses Stratton’s experiments with vision and retinal inversion, in order to show
the differences between the bodies conception of physical space and geometric space, see The
Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 244-245.
104
Eric Matthews, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, p.9.
105
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, p.109.

67
through interaction.106 This conceptualization of the body in relation the
surrounding environment, describes an animate and interactive relationship
which will be brought into spatial constructions over the next few chapters.

2.2.3
Heidegger and the Act of Making Room

Accepting the body as the dynamic basis of the world around it, Heidegger also
provides a useful way of describing spatiality. It is important to reiterate however,
that Heidegger’s insistence on an authentic relationship between the body and
the world, put him at odds with a performative reading. This chapter will later
discuss how phenomenology has previously found its way into architectural
discourse, which typically has been based on Heidegger’s writings.
Heidegger has been very influential in architectural theory for inspiring an
understanding of architecture based on bodies, space and being, rather than on
materiality and function. He continually questions and explores the subject of
‘being-in-the-world’, which he connects with the issue of building. Despite not
having written specifically about architecture, the importance of dwelling and
place-making are recurring themes, particularly in his later work. Writing during
the early to mid-20th century, Heidegger wrote in the context of a changing world
through modernization, capitalism and consumerism. As this age becomes faster
and even more physically disengaged due to technology, many writers have
returned to him for an alternative approach to architecture, an approach which
emphasises the spiritual and the profound. Heidegger advocates the ‘poetic’ as
an architectural aim, which lies between building and dwelling. By the poetic,
Heidegger means a state that touches us deeply, beyond the obvious structures
of language and form. As a phenomenologically informed philosopher, like

106
This act of bringing into being, is the process in which the individual subject knows the stuff
around them, beyond their state of pure form. The object is thus said to transcend the experience
of them. To move through the day, people constantly using this kind of knowledge in order to
interact with things.

68
Merleau-Ponty he bases an understanding of the world on concrete experience,
rather than abstract ideas. What is important is how things are apprehended and
understood by people. Importantly for the examination of a performative
architecture, in Heidegger’s text the landscape is not simply a measurable
Cartesian space, but as architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz points
out, space where human life takes place.107 It is therefore a ‘lived space’, rather
than a pre-existing, isomorphic one.108 Despite its dense style, Heidegger’s 1951
essay, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, has become extremely popular in
architectural teaching. This essay is an etymological investigation of key spatial
terms, which Heidegger argues expose an original and fundamental basis for a
poetics of dwelling. His phrase the ‘Genius Loci’ that translates to ‘spirit of place’,
is still prevalent in architectural discourse and practice.

In relation to Merleau-Ponty’s ‘being-in-the-world’, it is useful to look at his notion

of ‘making room’. Here spatiality (Raumlichkeit) is described not as a fixed
element, but something active, a making of space through interaction with the
surrounding environment. Heidegger writes about space as a making of room,
drawing on the German etymological roots of Raum to describe a giving and
clearing of space.109 Space is a ‘making’ which for Heidegger places ourselves
in the world. Heidegger’s word Einraumen literally translates as ‘making room’
and ‘arranging of objects’, but it also speaks of ‘the spaciousness of the world’, a
kind of ‘roominess’.110 The act of creating a boundary delineates space, allowing
it to be opened from those edges. Rather than pre-existing, space for Heidegger
is therefore something that has been made room for. What is being expressed is
a bodily act of spatial construction, a marking out and moulding of space. It is
space that is acted upon, shaped and delineated by bodies. In terms of

107
Christian Norberg-Schulz, ‘Heidegger’s Thinking on Architecture’ in Kate Nesbitt (ed.),
Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995
(Princeton Architectural Press: USA 1997), p.435.
108
Norberg-Schulz, ibid, p.435.
109
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time trans. by Joan Stambaugh (State University of New
York Press: New York, 1996).
110
Martin Heidegger quoted in Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History
(University of California Press: USA, 1997), p.266.

69
architecture, this fluid understanding of space, changes how built environments
can be conceived as containers or vessels. Highlighting movement as central to
a bodily process of engaging with environments, means clarifying ways in which
the body relates to the outside world.

2.2.4
Phenomenology in Architecture

Such elements of Heidegger’s philosophy have been taken up by several

architectural theorists, most notably Karsten Harries, Norberg-Schultz, Juhani
Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez-Gómez.111 Each of whom uses Heidegger’s texts
as a way to escape from what they perceive as the 20th century, architectural
approach to space and buildings as fixed and disengaged from the everyday and
from a spiritual definition of space. Heidegger’s theory of dwelling and place-
making have been fundamental to each of their approaches, providing the
directions toward an ‘authentic’ way of being human and on the earth. Harries
and Norberg-Schulz advocate a figurative architecture, where buildings are
designed in reference to the scaled body. Along with Pérez-Gómez, these four
theorists point to the loss of the poetic in our rationalist understanding of the
world around us, seeking to retrieve an authenticity of human inhabitation.
Pérez-Gómez looks at the relationship between maths and architecture to show
how modern architecture has based itself on a form of demystified mathematic
structures. In this context Pérez-Gómez argues that the body has been alienated
by technology. Pallasmaa on the other hand describes what he calls an
‘architecture of silence’, uncovering a psychic relationship between people and

111
Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (MIT press: Cambridge, Mass., 1997),
Martin Heidegger, Politics, Art, and Technology (Holmes & Meier Pub.: 1994), Christian Norberg-
Schulz, Genius Loci; Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (Rizzoli: 1991,), Architecture:
Presence, Language, Place (Skira: 2000), The Concept of Dwelling: On the way to a Figurative
Architecture (Rizzoli: New York, 1985), Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (John Wiley &
Sons: 2005), Steven Holl, et al, Questions of Perceptions: Phenomenology of Architecture
(William K Stout Pub: 2006).

70
architecture. He is specifically interested in a haptic, sensual approach to
architecture. These theorists want to look deep into both the natural and man-
made world, in order to understand its essential characteristics, but also to
understand it from an experiential position.

It is specifically the issue of authenticity that precludes using Heidegger in a

performative-based understanding of architecture, and that problematizes his
usage in the contemporary condition of mobile and transformational spaces and
bodies. Heidegger wrote specifically about phenomenology in relation to built
environments more than Merleau-Ponty and has been far better regarded in
architectural theory. The desire for architecture to be more than shelter or
decoration is what attracts architects to his work. The opposite to this profound
purpose will be cultivated in the new digital processes that will be examined in
the fifth chapter, where designers forgo control of the final product and thereby
leave it to bodies to have their own experiences of buildings. Although
Heidegger is insistent on the individual identity’s connection with the world, rather
than an overriding and fundamental relationship, one cannot escape the
universalist answers to his search for meaning. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology
of perception searches less for this metaphysical truth, but remains focused on
the concrete experience of the body moving through space. This frees
architecture from the quest for authenticity, allowing it to focus on the intimate
relations of body and space. In embarking on this quest, sovereign control is
needed in order to categorize and define the parameters for such authenticity. In
this preclusion of difference, the architect is pedestalized as a conduit to spiritual,
spatial enlightenment. The search for a primordial relationship to the world is
made even more untenable in the current existence of multiple, virtual spaces.

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2.2.5
The Interior / Exterior Body

The body has often been characterized in two ways: the exterior or the interior
body. Grosz discusses the growing interest with embodiment in philosophical,
political and social theory as an acceptance of the integral relationship between
both the interior body of the mind and the exterior, social body. Escaping the
persistent opposition created by this duality between inside and outside may be
found, Grosz argues, in the corporeal.112

The interior body is described by the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard,

whereby the internal desires and needs of the individual is projected out into the
world. Focusing attention onto the body in architectural discourse has generally
meant turning toward phenomenology. Along with Heidegger, Bachelard has
been very important in advocating an intimate, bodily understanding of built
environments. His book The Poetics of Space has popularized a particular form
of phenomenology in architecture, exploring how memory, dreams and personal
histories shape people’s relationships to places.113 This can be seen as an
‘interiorized’ relationship between the body and the world, where the exterior
world relates and is read through the internal workings of the mind and
subconscious.

An alternative approach can be seen in the exterior body as described by Michel

Foucault, who saw the individual as shaped by the external forces of culture,
society and ideology. In his 1967 essay ‘Of Other Spaces’, Foucault
distinguishes his approach from Bachelard’s very personal poetics of body and
space. What Foucault endeavours to define is the social body in the exterior
world, ‘in which we live, from which we are drawn out of ourselves, just where the
erosion of our lives, our time, our history takes place, this space that wears us

112
See Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (Routledge: USA,1995).
113
See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press: USA, 1994).

72
down and consumes us’.114 It is space both constructing and constructed by the
body. In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault shows the body to be
irrevocably inscribed with the workings of politics.115 He specifies that while
Bachelard’s phenomenology had explored the body as an interior force of
emotion and memory, what he is interested in is the exterior body, arguing that
the social came before the individual. This social body is shaped and
manipulated by the outside world. Through this bodily definition Foucault argues
that architecture, as a central force upon social bodies, is complicit with
structures of power. In his famous example of the Panopticon, through which he
creates a metaphor of modern disciplinary society, he shows how architecture
effects and regulates people, stating that its role in social control is
indispensable. 116 Foucault’s work highlights the fundamental shift in how we
understand the body as sculpted by exterior forces. This is a very different body
to that of the Vitruvian Man previously examined, who tames the space around
him. Acknowledging the way environments impact upon bodies, reveals the
political implications of subversive acts. By not following the scripts defined by
built environments, individuals can write their own personal performances in
spaces. It is therefore essential to understand the body as shaped by interior
and exterior forces in order to understand its relationship to architecture. The
final chapter presents contemporary architectures that by accepting their
inevitably dictatorial power, actively promote possibilities for improvisation.

The interface between the inside and outside of the body is both an issue of
separation and of porosity. The relationship between exterior forces as
described by Foucault, and the interior of Bachelard’s poetics, is negotiated

114
Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Uni. of California Press: USA,
1997), p.351.
115
See Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage: 1995).
116
Foucault’s examination of Jeremy Benthams design of the Panopticon describes the
relationship of governmentality to everyday life. The panopticon is a metaphor of the effect and
distribution of power in 18th century France, marking the time where, for Foucault, architecture
first became political through the shift to governmental power. Noting the change from the
Enlightenment era toward a state of surveillance and control, the Panopticon was itself a
technology of power.

73
through the flesh. The early work of Diller and Scofidio explored the spatial
repercussions of the artificial manipulations of this membrane, from cosmetic
surgery to prosthetic limbs. Their first monograph Flesh, looked at the
possibilities for new types of bodies for the environments of today. Flesh can be
considered a lamina of communication where the exterior surface comes into
contact with the world. It is also the armour around the vulnerable interior of the
body, protecting the subconscious. This is why acts of exposing the interior,
such as the surgical cut, become so powerful.117 Transformations of the flesh are
not tied to the purely cosmetic, but changes and advances in technology.

Technology has added another aspect to the duality of the exterior and interior
body. Today it is no longer possible to talk only of the material body, but also the
body that is made up of information. This body moves through virtual networks of
communication and data, irreverent of physical geographies. Through devices
that range from mobile phones to global positioning systems, technology is
remodelling places for inhabitation and transit. While the virtual body may
consist of several avatars and personalities, as discussed in the introduction to
this thesis, it is important that it cannot be seen as separated or liberated from
the material body, of which it is always a part of.118 Having examined specifically
how the body will be considered in this thesis, it is useful to now turn from bodily
issues to spatial ones, not examining space in general terms, but as the space
between bodies and buildings.

2.3
The Space Between Bodies

Having examined the body as a phenomenological subject in the world, it is

117
See Elizabeth Diller & Ricardo Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes (Princeton Architectural
Press: 1996).
118
For elaboration of this see Elizabeth Grosz’s description in Architecture from the Outside.

74
important to look more closely at the space between the body and the built
environment. This is a space that is constantly shifting. Despite the recent
preoccupation with motion that has arisen from new media and sociology, it is
important to retrieve the specifically bodily aspect. This thesis emphasizes that
the seduction of mobility and flux in terms of architecture, needs to be understood
from this bodily perspective rather than simply as forms.

2.3.1
Lefebvre’s Third Space

Dissatisfied with traditional fixed notions of space, several philosophers have

proposed alternative conceptualizations that incorporate the living body. It is
useful to briefly look at Henri Lefebvre’s location of an experiential understanding
of space. Many architects have drawn on Lefebvre’s theories because they are
grounded in a clear description of the political and social overlap between bodies
and places. Lefebvre’s ‘trialectics of space’ incorporates three elements: spatial
practice, the representation of space and spaces of representation – all of which
interweave and overlap.119 Spatial practice or perceived space may be defined
as the physical or material reality of space. Representations of space describe
the various depictions of space in data, analysis and images. The third space is
also described as ‘lived space’, the space of experience.120 These three forms of
spatiality mesh to create ‘total space’. Through an understanding of these three,
Lefebvre believes space can be the fundamental site for understanding the world
within a certain historical period. Rob Shields describes third space as: ‘space as
it might be…derived from both historic sediments within the everyday
environment and from utopian elements that shock one into a new conception of

119
See Henri lefebvre, The Production of Space trans. by Donald Nicolson-Smith (Blackwell
Pub.: UK, 1991).
120
The proposal of this lived space has been taken up as a space for alterity. Urban
geographers and political writers, such as Edward Soja and Doreen Massey, see it as an
alternative spatial field for those who fail to fit into conventional categorizations.

75
the spatializations of social life’.121 This shock can be seen as the provocation for
performative actions, where, in contrast to finding an authentic way of being in
spaces, people are given room to make their own way.

This thesis does not use Lefebvre’s description of space as a trialectic

arrangement of non-hierarchical elements. While taking account of Lefebvre’s
considerations of a space based on experiences, performative space is based on
a different model. It is in Lefebvre’s description of third space where the twinned
aspects of bodies and buildings are brought together, in the space between the
mental and the material. This thesis defines the core elements of architectural
design into bodies, buildings and space. In order to examine how living bodies
can be brought into the design process, these three elements are not considered
as separate, but in terms of what happens when they collide. This collision
occurs through mobility: the body moving through space and interacting with the
built environment in the construction of performative architecture.

2.3.2
Kaleidoscopic Vision

As discussed in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, movement as an essential

component of the relationship between bodies and spaces, can be considered in
terms of perception. The body in movement can be understood through the act
of walking as discussed by Edmund Husserl and Michel de Certeau. Husserl
wrote that it is only in movement that we understand space, that it positions the
body in space. Space here is the dynamic interaction between the body and the
world, and when we move the world is brought into perspective. Walking brings
together the two bodies of Leib and Körper – the German words Husserl uses to
distinguish the lived body and the material body (the physical, objective body and

121
Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love & Struggle: Spatial Dialectics (Routledge: New York, 1999),
p.161.

76
the living, experiential body). When one walks, one acknowledges one’s physical
self and also one’s self in relation to the world. Walking is makes both states
visible. To walk one assembles together ones body into a unified organism,
while at the same time conjoining it with its surrounding environment. The result
of this symbiotic action is twofold: both stabilizing and putting into perspective the
individual body and the objects of the world. Rather than a perspectival distance
separated from one’s surroundings, movement places one in the world by
bringing one into and through it. Husserl believed that walking was a process
that built up a coherent ‘Core-World’, from the fragmentary images we perceive
around us.122 This ‘Core-World’ is comprised of both what he calls the ‘near-
sphere’ of similar and accessible appearances and the ‘far-sphere’ of unfamiliar
and unknown things. These two spheres are brought together in the act of
walking. Without movement, Husserl describes perception as simply
‘kaleidoscopic’ – a mass of images without any comprehensible cohesion.

Edward Casey describes Husserl’s theory of walking as defining the absolute

‘here’ of the body, whose position orientates the world around it.123 Casey’s
focus on place means that he uses this idea of walking to show how the lived
body activates the space around it, thereby placing the body, and in doing so
creating place. Husserl believed that walking proves to ourselves that our body
is the centre of things and the world radiates from the centre, the world being
formulated out from our body. Man as the centre and measure of the world
sounds suspiciously like a return to the Humanist body of Vitruvius, but Husserl
emphasizes that this relationship only occurs through animation. The body
kinaesthetically connects to the changing world, creating a reciprocal
relationship. This is distinct from the Humanist position of the individual as
measure of the world. This relationship will be taken up by Vito Acconci in terms
of a transactive relationship between the spectator and the artwork. Seeing

122
Edmund Husserl, ‘The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding
World External to the Organism’ (1931) quoted in Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A
Philosophical History (University of California Press: USA, 1997), p.224.
123
Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, p.225.

77
bodily movement as a process in which the world comes into perspective, will
become a central issue for the architecture drawing.124 Instead of representing
the material world through the static position of a single viewer, acknowledging
Husserl’s perspective through movement, problematizes this founding premise
for the architecture drawing.

2.3.3
Michel de Certeau & Scripting the City

Similarly to Husserl, philosopher and cultural theorist Michel de Certeau

describes walking as a creative act. De Certeau describes walking as a ‘practice
of everyday life’, presenting an understanding of the city other than the
geographical, measurable and theoretical.125 By drawing us into the shoes of the
pedestrian or voyeur, de Certeau endeavors to provide us with an experiential,
kinesthetic reading of the city. In de Certeau’s work, walking becomes considered
as performative space making.

De Certeau critiques the practice of walking from a linguistic viewpoint. He

associates the relationship between walking and the city as mirrored to that
between a statement and the speech act.126 Walking was for de Certeau the
‘space of enunciation’. By this he means that through walking the body writes the
urban space. He articulated it as an action that altered one’s environment
through motion. The urban form can be understood as a script. The notion of the
script can be taken from the performance arts to describe the way environments
are devised for specific actions. In the same way that the director or
choreographer scripts a space for the performance of bodies, so too do urban

124
This will be further explored later in this chapter and through the spatial drawings of Pirenesi
and Libeskind in Chapter Four.
125
See Michel De Certeau, The Practise of Everyday Life trans. by Steven F. Rendall (Berkley
University Press:California, 1984).
126
Michel De Certeau, ibid, p.97.

78
planners, architects and designers specify how bodies should interact with the
environment and each other. Each environment is inscribed with various scripts
over which bodies make their way, from the passive stride of the businessman to
the deviant flow of the skateboarder.

In the same way that Husserl describes the kaleidoscopic images around us, de
Certeau writes; ‘The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no
matter how panoptic they may be’.127 Walking brings together the world into a
decipherable state. Again, the use of poetry discloses a way of connecting on a
deeper level with the built environment. The description of walking as a ‘long
poem’, intimates a performative relationship, an enacting of a more profound
reading of the environment.

For de Certeau pedestrians were fundamental to providing an urban tactic,

subverting the dominant institutions and ideology of the city – literally bringing it
to life. Texts are written in the form of places, sidewalks and curbs, which bodies
follow, constantly personalizing and re-writing. The walker writes the urban space
as they move across it, while at the same time illiterate to its semiotic text. De
Certeau believed that an ability to read the city could only be gained by climbing
tall buildings for the view from above, thus perceiving it as a unified whole. This
is only an illusion of wholeness however, because that elevation, while producing
the ability to see the city holistically, paradoxically distances the pedestrian from
the physical experience of the city.

The image of the metropolis from a height is reminiscent of architectural plans,

the manufacturing of impossible views from the positions of gods, looking through
rooftops and flattening the curving perspectives of the horizon. The transition
from a phenomenological interpretation of the body into how that body moves
performatively through spaces, becomes an issue of representation. Changing

127
Michel De Certeau, p.101.

79
how we perceive the world from a static, fixed position, to unraveling, moving
ones, necessarily questions the perspectival structures of the architecture
drawing.

2.4
Drawing Architecture

This next section examines the architecture drawing as central to the design
process. Explicating the difficulties in what Robin Evans calls ‘the translations
from drawings to buildings’, means unraveling the systems that have combined to
prescribe this key form of representation in architectural practice, allowing us to
consider the implications and possibilities of the new design tools examined in
Chapter Five. The analysis for a from of representation that endeavors to
capture material realities, must necessarily begin by defining space.

Michel Foucault read history as an archaeologist, sifting through the sediments of

spaces, reading eras. By bringing together time and space in this way, Foucault
recognised that places construct, as well as are constructed, by people: ‘How we
are housed helps to determine who we are and may be, and one can thus
examine through what means, conceptual and physical, and in response to what
problems, we have come, so to speak, to inscribe ourselves in architectural
stone’.128

Examinations in how space affects and is infected by bodies, society, history and
culture has become a central issue with the expanding urban spaces of the 20th
century. Whereas time and history had traditionally been the key aspects
examined in theoretical discourse, spatial theory has become a growing
discipline in the last fifty years, extending from geography and urban theory into

128
Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (Architecture
Association: UK, 1997), p153.

80
sociology, politics and cultural theory. Michel Foucault has exposed the political
machinations inherent to architecture, delineating the social body as constructed
by its environments. The focus became specific to the ‘everyday’ by cultural
theorists such as de Certeau, Surrealists such as Andre Breton and Louis Aragon
and social theorists such as Guy Debord. Lefebvre pulled up the paving stones of
the city to free the urban pedestrian, while Richard Sennet has analysed the
changing public man through urban architecture. Kevin Lynch drew the city as a
map of mental representations leading the way for the field of spatial cognition in
urban planning, while the contemporary cities of speed and excess are exposed
by Paul Virilio. Meanwhile theorists such as Doreen Massey and Jane Rendell
have shown the street as active constructors of gender. These have shown the
wealth of perspectives which spatial theory has brought to critical discourse,
developments that have enriched our speculations on the inter-connectedness of
bodies and built space, providing a multitude of perspectives.

The concept of ‘space’ retains an erroneous legitimacy when it comes to

architecture. Buildings must be designed with proper respect to gravity and
structural laws so that they can stand in actual space. In order to do this, the
systems of the architectural drawing have been formulated in order to facilitate a
direct translation of concept into built form. Though theoretical perceptions of
space may change, the assumption remains that the act of building demands the
acceptance of this basic spatial condition. In reality, the design process of
architecture has been fixed on specific systems whose reliance on spatial
authenticity is proving more and more fallible. In order to articulate a new space
in which we can consider active and interactive bodies as constructive of their
environments, we must first understand how conceptions of space have
traditionally shaped architectural practices. From the Classical notion of space
as a container, to space as a Cartesian grid, the way in which space is conceived
has shaped the limitations and possibilities of our built environment.

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2.4.1
Representing Reality

Architecture is traditionally built on the sturdy foundations of linear perspective

and a stable field. The human body is seen as a static object in a measurable
volume of space. This is not simply theoretical, but ingrained into its very
making. The drawing has held uncontested control over the architectural design
process for over five hundred years, premised on a single, perspectival vision.
This vision was a product of the Italian Renaissance, which developed a concept
of space imaged in the art of perspective. It places the body into the centre of
the world, making it the source of all measurement. The geometry of Euclidean
space and linear perspective became a documentation of the epistemological
truth.

Erwin Panofsky has drawn the link between a cultural way of seeing the world
and the changes in perspectival reproduction.129 Panofsky claimed that each
civilisation has its own understanding of perspective, for which linear perspective
encapsulated the era of the Renaissance. Accepting Panofsky’s claim requires
searching for new methods of spatial representation for today’s digital world. The
paradigm shift that has occurred from the machinic, industrial society to an
electronic, digitized one, has in the same way changed the tools and language of
architecture. In replacement of single perspective and Cartesian geometries, the
digital domain proposes the possibility of a multivalent, perspectival space. No
longer is there one static viewing point, but many possible ones. Most
importantly it is now possible not only to create still images from this viewpoint,
but to design entirely within this kind of space.

129
Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form trans. by Christopher Wood (Zone Books:
NYC,1991).

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2.4.2
The Systems of the Architectural Drawing

Unsettled by technology, the central architectural issues of drawing, space and

the moving body are in flux. The repercussions of these shifts will not only
radically change what buildings look like, but how we design and experience
them. The architectural drawing on the other hand is still weighted by gravity,
bound by the core systems of linear perspective and orthogonal geometry. The
architectural theorist Robin Evans described the drawing as ‘architecture’s
greatest security and at the same time its greatest liability’.130 Trained to work
within such a circumscribed system, Evans described how the architect could
comfortably design in ‘paperspace’ without consideration of placement and
experience. Unlike other artists who work directly with the medium of the final
product, architects must labour with various forms of simulants, from sketches to
drawings or models. Evans uses the word ‘translations’ to describe the distance
traversed from drawing to building, expressing the inevitable transformation that
occurs. The architectural theorist Alberto Pérez-Gómez points out that the
difficulty lies in ‘the illusion of drawing as a neutral tool that communicates
unambiguous information, like scientific prose’.131 Despite the architecture
drawing’s promises of veracity, Evans reminds us of the unique position of the
architectural drawing, that, unlike other drawings, it occurs prior to reality, rather
than before it.132 Instead of representing real spaces, they are proposals for
future ones. The space of the drawing is therefore an imaginary, visionary one.
Instead of representing real spaces, architecture drawings are proposals for
future ones.

The claim that the space of the architectural drawing is simply a reduction of real
space can be traced to its Euclidean dimensions. The Euclidian concept of space is

130
Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, p. 186.
131
Alberto Pérez-Gómez, ‘Architecture as Drawing,’ in Journal of Architectural Education (Winter
1982), v. 36, n. 2, p. 3.
132
Robin Evans, ibid, p.165.

83
based on a measurable, stable site. Space is thus understood as linear and
dimensionally finite, making it possible to demarcate, dimension and delineate. For
the architectural drawing, Euclidian space provides a stable field upon which to build
material form.

Euclidean geometry is a rational, mathematical system of points, lines, angles,

surfaces and solids, designed by Euclid in 300BC in order to accurately describe
the world. After the ancient philosophers, space is thus constantly constrained
by an emphasis on its ability to be documented in a two dimensional way. The
description of space as encompassing, of gathering and holding as described by
ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, have thereby been reduced to
stable, fixed definitions. In the fourth century Iamblichus defined space through
boundaries, rather than surfaces.133 In the 17th Century English philosopher John
Locke distinguished between two spaces, by describing space as the distance of
two bodies, and place as the distance between two points, both relational and
measurable. A system of connecting dimension and internal extension through
lines, rather than three dimensions, is thus established. Following Euclid’s
definition of a measurable container of space, Rene Descartes developed the
Cartesian co-ordinate system defining relative positions in space. This would
prove the perfect basis for representing architecture in the 18th and 19th century.

New perspectives in geometry began to proliferate in the early 20th century.

Non-Euclidean geometry, the ideas of simultaneity and a fourth dimension, were
postulated in physics by Albert Einstein and Herman Minkowski. The impact of
these new spatial concepts are most visible in the art field of Cubism, a
contemporary development of this new way of seeing the world. Despite this, the
Cartesian description of space has persisted until today as the primary basis of
architectural representation. These two systems epistemologically define a
universal truth – a belief that there is an accurate way to document the world.

133
The opposite stance will be taken by digital architects whose construction of forms using CAD
programs lend themselves to fluid, surface based forms.

84
It is this imposed geometrical structure that Elizabeth Grosz defines as what
‘conferred scientific and philosophical dignity on space at the expense of time’.134
The difficult, multi-dimensionality of time was put aside, creating an
understanding of space that could be systemized and easily comprehended. It
removed the movement of unfolding time out of three dimensional space and
placed it upon a two dimensional grid. This background in spatial history is
important to address because it is this understanding of space that informs the
very foundation of architecture, its documentation and therefore the process of its
design. This process has changed little from Alberti’s Renaissance Chapel until
the recent push toward computer drafting in the last ten years. The architectural
drawing demands this stability in order to “stand up” and as such the relationship
between the drawing and its built actuality has become inextricably connected.
This cartographic description of space as constructed on a relative order of co-
existing points enjoys a comfortable status on paper, but fails to encompass the
living, breathing, moving elements of lived space.

2.4.3
Single-point Perspective

The art of perspective makes the ambitious claim of creating a true image of the world.
‘Single-point Perspective’ or ‘Linear perspective’ was first developed in Classical
Greece, but it was through its rediscovery by the architects and painters of the
Florentine Renaissance that it was properly set down and defined.135 Single-point
perspective explains the phenomenon of two parallel lines converging in the distance
of one’s vision. It is a form of pictorial representation based on sight and reproduction.

134
Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Space, Time, and Bodies’ from Space, Time, and Perversion, p.98.
135
The Florentine architect Fillipo Brunelleschi is usually credited with the rediscovery of the
Classical Greek procedure of linear perspective in the early 15th century. It was the Humanist
Scholar Leon Baptista Alberti, who first wrote down the principals of linear perspective in his
treatise on painting, ‘De Pictura’ in 1435-36.

85
By being based on the viewpoint of a single person at a specified distance from the
object, it defines the individual subject as the centre and measure of the world around
them. Even through the Baroque age, where perspective was multiplied in paintings
and ornamentation, the architectural drawing remained firmly grounded in single-point
perspective.

The discovery of single-point perspective was fundamental in instituting the

architectural drawing system that is still taught and used today. This allowed
space to be represented in the Cartesian grid, it could be measured and
dissected as a stable volume. Buildings could be translated from the mind of the
architect directly onto paper using the systems of plan, section and elevation.
Three-dimensional images presented through the axonometric, presented
designs like two-dimensional models; scaled objects seen from impossible
distances. At the same time it created a uniform language with which to
communicate to builders and other artisans. As the foundation of the design
process, it is essential then that the architectural drawing is rethought in terms of
new technology and new understandings of space. It is no longer sufficient to
continue replicating Renaissance modes of representation, while using
completely different tools of production.

For architecture, space is still constructed by the two-dimensional drawing, firmly

grounded in the physical. Despite the use of three-dimensional images, they
remain dictated by the same systems of hand drawings. The perspective is still
that of gods or ghosts, either from up high or as if you were plastered into an
interior wall. Rather than the mere replication of traditional forms, CAD
(Computer Aided Design) programs present the opportunity to free architecture
from orthogonal geometry, with software from industrial design, aviation, film and
auto design, now finding their way into design. What was once theoretical
musing on alternative geometries and mathematics, are now viable, architectural
possibilities. What this means for the process of making architecture is an
entirely new set of tools with entirely new potential outcomes. If we accept that

86
space is not Cartesian, that it is fluid and based on bodily interaction, what are
the repercussions for the design process of architecture? This question will be
taken up again in the fifth chapter, as the performative strategies exposes in the
following paperarchitecture sections are brought into the contemporary making of
architecture.

2.4.4
New Methodologies in the Architectural Design Process

The work of architecture in the digital domain subverts the dichotomy that has
traditionally been maintained between the virtual and the actual. This distinction
enforces an inability to see digital architecture as more than simply an image on
a screen. However a new kind of design process is emerging, generated from by
these new processes of translation. In turn it is informing a new theory of design.
New computing programs have led to an emphasis on process and technique
rather than the final image. With it new architecture methodologies are
appearing based on organic and self-perpetuating systems. Terms such as
‘versioning’, ‘evolutionary systems‘, ‘genetic’, ‘developmental’, ‘biological’ and
‘topology’ are becoming commonplace.

Many architects still insist on their autonomy from CAD programs, calling them
another design tool in the same way as a pencil.136 But whether it is a cardboard
or digital model, each method of translation will affect the design. As will be
discussed in Chapter Three, the complexities of these translations in drawing
hold their own difficulties. It is important to emphasize that the computer cannot
be seen in the same way as the pencil. In both the design process and in the
making of architecture, the computer creates new ways of considering bodies
and environments. The illusion of complete control is what architects stand to

136
Frank Gehry has continually stated that despite the extraordinary forms of his buildings, they
are generated in the same pre-computational process.

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loose with these new programs. Brian Massumi describes these technologies as
generating a ‘post-heroic’ architecture.137 Massumi calls this ‘post-heroic’
because the traditional role of the architect as ‘creative genius of a finished object
is replaced with a less attractive position of ‘creative facilitator’. The focus is on
process and technique rather than finished form-making. Rather than a
signature of the architect, the building becomes a collaboration between the
designer, data and the technology. In this new process the computer is not an
imaging device, but a medium in this process of emergence. It becomes an art of
‘potentiality’, creating multiple possibilities rather than coming up with a single
‘perfect’ answer. Analogue traits are fed into the computer, whose interplay
shape potential, unanticipated forms. From this process can be generated
completely novel shapes. In this way, Massumi says : ‘The art of the architect is
the art of the leap’, it is about taking the risk of arbitrariness and seeing what will
come of it. 138 This means giving up control and giving up autonomy. This new
conceptualization of the design process is arguably the most radical infection of
architecture. It threatens the dearly held belief of the bolt of inspiration, of clarity,
the art of the pencil drawing and the genius architect. Whether these digital
processes will become subsidiary to traditional ones or if they will subsume them
is yet to be seen. What is unarguable is that they are never-the-less transforming
the way architects see and create built environments.

This chapter has sought to formulate a theoretical basis upon which to

extrapolate a performative reading of architecture based on living bodies. It has
focused on examining structures of thinking such as phenomenology, alternative
spatial definitions and the architectural drawing, through which a new
conceptualisation of architecture can be considered. The following chapters will
put these two spatial questions of the phenomenological body and the
architecture drawing into a contemporary context. Case studies will be used to

137
Brian Massumi, ‘Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible’ in Hypersurface Architecture
(Academy editions: US,1998), p.9.
138
Brian Massumi, ibid, p.5.

88
unveil their repercussions for architecture through built examples of these
speculations. It is fundamental to understand both spaces and bodies as
constructions of a particular age. The transformations that have occurred
through new technologies affect both how the built environment is designed and
how it is inhabited. The following two chapters focus on bodies and drawing
respectively. They follow from the two spatial conditions outlined in the previous
chapter: the body as a constructor of space and the drawing as an active shaper
of built environments. They explore the possibilities of these new interactions,
inventing new structures, new systems and new kinds of movement.

89
 ChapterTHREE
Architectural Performances

90
To adopt a phenomenological description of the body is to awaken it, to exhume
it from a state of immobility, transfixed in stone and to get it moving, thinking,
feeling. The last chapter mapped out how phenomenological philosophers have
written about this body, weaving it into a relationship with the surrounding world.
To use this understanding in the creation of artworks means to bring in aspects of
live-ness, of sensuality, of action and movement, and of the essential
interconnectedness of the body and the world. The focus turns to experience
rather than representation, performance rather than the making of objects to be
viewed. Instead of a passive entity, the body becomes a tool of inscription or
instrument of production.

Having defined a concept of the body based on an active engagement with the
world, this chapter look at projects that use this body concept to create spatial
forms. These can be described as ‘architectural performances’, artworks that are
informed through architectural issues and that can be seen as precursors to a
formulation of performative architectures. What this chapter explores is how to
relate these ideas of the body to a creative process that can be brought into
designing architecture. The following projects have been chosen in order to
substantiate a performative making and understanding of space. They show how
embodied interaction with the environment and the spatial conditions set out in
the theory framework find physical form in a selection of architecturally focused
performances. The disciplines of dance and performance art are the most potent
sites for these explorations, which in contrast to traditional architectural practice,
put the body first. For this reason this chapter begins by looking at how dance
and choreography have understood spatial issues, focusing on the work of
Bauhaus teacher, Oskar Schlemmer

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3.1
Moving Bodies and Buildings

The fields of dance and architecture initially appear in direct opposition; one
dedicated to movement and the other to stasis. In many ways dance appears to
hold all the qualities eternally beyond architecture; of conquering gravity, of ‘live-
ness’ and the ephemeral. It is precisely these fantasies that are inspiring so
many digital architects. As architecture struggles with these new desires, the
discipline of dance may provide new directions and processes. Importing ways
of thinking as well as doing from dance into architectural practice is conditioned
through the shared focus on the encounters between bodies and built
environments.

The relationship between dance and architecture has been bound in the
dichotomy of the performers/audience and the stage/theatre architecture, where
the building is again a static backdrop to the moving body. As both disciplines
endeavoured in the 20th century to break away from their historic ties, their aims
began to converge. While classical forms of Western ballet focused on patterns
of the body in space, contemporary dance has become known for exploring the
physicality of the body carving into and interacting with space. Space is here
reconsidered as solid and interactive.

Modern dance can be read as an attack on the geometry of the Cartesian space
that classical ballet was contrived within. In the same way that architecture is
striving to remove itself from these historic ties, the discipline of dance has also
searched for alternative understandings of space and movement. John Rajchman
touches on the relationship between dance and architecture, noting that they are
the two disciplines directly concerned with gravity.139 The desire to understand
gravity, use it and surpass it, provides a shared goal. Lightness and floating has

139
See Rajchman’s essay ‘Lightness’ in Constructions (MIT press: USA, 1998), p.52.

92
been facilitated by new materials, but it is also a strategy imported by digital
technology. Virtual spaces provide contexts whereby the natural laws of gravity
are no longer applicable. In the same way that CAD programs allow buildings to
be designed in the anti-gravitational sites of digital space, computer-aided
choreographic tools also allow the design of movements physically impossible on
earth. Unbound by these assumed truths, radically new forms can be explored.

The following section brings together dance and design in terms of the body in
movement. Rather than separating the body-based practices of gesture and
movement, from the spatial and design ones of stage and costumes, the ballets
of Oskar Schlemmer combined them into one entity. Together, the performances
used the artificial world of design to reveal the natural movement and interaction
of the body. What makes these dances so important to constructing an
architecture based on performativity, is that they are manifestations of the
performance of movement. Through costumes and gestures, they are formulated
from the moving body, where space becomes animated and tangible.

3.2
Making Visible Body Movement
The Ballets of Oskar Schlemmer

The creative investigation of design in the technologically informed culture of the

modern age was pioneered at the Bauhaus. The period of the Bauhaus School in
Germany from 1919 until 1933 had a fundamental impact on the world of design and
architecture. The work produced here would become a catalyst for the new century’s
encounters between bodies and architecture. In Schlemmer’s productions of the
Triadic Ballet and the Space Analysis Dances, the body was not a passive occupant of
space, but an active creator. Through costumes and props, this dynamic relationship
between body and space was made solid. To facilitate this, the theatre became an

93
experimental ground. Schlemmer’s creations were an abstract theatre of space and
movement. The dances were made up of bodies, forms and objects, whose changing
relationship to each other in movement and stasis constructed the narrative. It was
the space between bodies and buildings that became essential.

Schlemmer’s dances mark a specific time when the implications for the body in the
new spaces of the modernity began to be explored and examined. Rather than
avoiding new technology, Schlemmer embraced and actively sought out those
advances, in order to generate what he described as ‘the boldest fantasies’.140

The narratives of the Triadic Ballets were delightfully bizarre, focusing on emoting
reactions rather than describing characterizations. An interpretation of the first part of
the ballet may be surmised as follows: An alien falls from the sky onto a beach in
southern France, where a beautiful ballerina saves him from drowning. Despite his
head shaped like a moon and his staccato struggles at communication, amongst the
sunbaked sand dunes they fall in unlikely love. Schlemmer wrote that there is nothing
deeper to grasp behind the ballet, that it is all on the surface to be perceived and
engaged with, writing: ‘No feelings are “expressed” but rather, feelings are aroused.’141
While the choreography of Schlemmer’s ballets incorporated some traditional ballet
movements, they were experimental performances involving the uncanny actions that
were demanded by the rigid costumes: such as the continuous jumping of the deep-
sea diver. The performances, in their documentations as photos, drawings or re-
enactments, still have the ability to amaze and seduce. As constructions of
performative space, they make visible the geometry of movement, constructing a new
understanding of scale and measurement through bodily motion.

140
Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’ in Gropius, Walter (ed.), The Theatre of the Bauhaus
trans Arthur S Wensinger, (Wesleyen University Press: 1961, USA), p.17.
141
Schlemmer quoted in Howard Dearstyne, Inside the Bauhaus (Rizzoli; USA, 1986), p.179.

94
 Fig.1
Oskar Schlemmer, Costume Sketch, The Triadic Ballet, 1922.
Doreen Ehrlich, The Bauhaus (Mallard Press: US, 1991), p.154.

95
The performative aspects of the dances are clearly apparent, the performance of
bodies in space, but where the interaction between these two elements is dynamic
and interactive. Schlemmer understood space itself as performative, active and in
constant dialogue with the body. He understood the body as a hybrid entity, which
actively made spaces. Through costume design Schlemmer made solid the idea that
movement is what creates space. This chapter delineates two aspects in which
embodiment can be seen in relation to spatial construction; firstly in the physical
costume design and secondly through the conceptualisation of a spatial, bodily
geometry.

3.2.1
Bauhaus bodies

Under the direction of visionary, modern architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus aimed
to bring together the design fields of art, craft, technology, theatre and design into a
fully realised Gusamtkunstwerk (a total work of art). Despite the absence of a
dedicated architecture school until 1927, it was acknowledged that Gropius centred
the work of the Bauhaus on architecture.142 This meant that architectural issues
infected each of the different design schools. The body was understood as central to
the design teaching of the Bauhaus. The school integrated gym and fitness into the
teaching day and even incorporated a course called Movement Training, which aimed
to develop body and movement awareness in a way that would bring mental harmony
and directly contribute to artistic creativity.143 Rather than the body as figural or
symbolic representation, the Bauhaus conceived of the intermeshing of the living body
through the different design courses.

142
Gropius believed that building was the “ultimate goal of all artistic activity”, quoted by Eva
Badura-Triska ‘Free Painting at the Bauhaus’ in Jeaninne Fiedler (ed.), Bauhaus
(Ullmann/Tandem: Germany, 2006), p.160.
143
A combination of gymnastics and bodywork, the course was run by Gertrud Grunow, whose
background was in music and colour theory. Movement Training was part of the core Bauhaus
course from 1928 and 1932.

96
The Bauhaus theatre department was situated in the middle of tumultuous times in
theatre history.144 Avant-garde theatres across Europe were revolting against
narrative and realism, looking to abstraction and expressionism for new approaches to
performance. Revolutionary theatre practitioners such as Edward Gordon Craig,
Adolphe Appia and Antonin Artaud were questioning the fundamental issue of what
appeared on stage. Schlemmer’s response was the occupation of space.145 He
believed that the challenges of modernity lay in abstraction, mechanization and the
impact of new technology, and it was in the theatre that he felt these issues could best
be explored. His aim was to focus on three specific elements: the body in space; light
in motion, and architecture – essentially: bodies, motion and buildings. He noted that,
while form and colour are fixed in their usual domains of art, sculpture and
architecture, it is in theatre that one can explore them in motion.

Despite Schlemmer’s focus on the visual aspects of the performances, dance was a
very important part of his ballets, which experimented in the new movement forms
being developed in Europe at this time. Schlemmer recognised that man as dancer
(Tänzermensch) specifically understood gravity and weight, the way space holds and
embraces the body. The human body created its own rhythms through heartbeat and
blood flows, resonating beyond the body and connecting with the world.146
Schlemmer was greatly influenced by rhythmic gymnastics and it was originally
incorporated into the Triadic Ballet, though this element was reworked by the time it
reached the stage.147 During the time Schlemmer was teaching in Weimer, the
Austrian set designer Adolphe Appia partnered with Dalcroze at the Festspielhaus

144
There are surprisingly few dedicated texts to the theatre workshop of the Bauhaus,
considering the plethora on its design and architecture courses. The importance of the theatre as
an experimentation ground for the new spatial ideas of not only the Bauhaus but the burgeoning
genre of Modernism has been greatly underestimated.
145
Howard Beckman, Oskar Schlemmer and the Experimental Theatre of the Bauhaus: A
Documentary (Uni of Alberta: Edmonton, Canada, 1977), p.36.
146
Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’ in Walter Gropius, (ed.) The Theatre of the Bauhaus
trans Arthur S Wensinger, (Wesleyen University Press: 1961, USA), p.25.
147
Eurhythmics was devised by the Swiss music teacher Emile Jacques Dalcroze, a system
which combined movement and rhythm. Eurhythmics has been taken up by various
choreographers including Vaslav Njinsky and Mary Wigman.

97
Hellerau near Dresden. Appia also believed that the interaction of body and space on
stage held transformational possibilities.148 On stage, actor or dancer animated the
tectonic arrangement of objects and in the process delineated a spatial and plastic
volume. This connection between dance and a volumetric understanding of space,
proposes understanding body movement that is not two-dimensional, but spatial.

3.2.2
Body Buildings and Moving Architectures

In the relationship between bodies and buildings, is it possible to make a building

move like a body? Frank Gehry’s ‘Dancing House’ in Prague is a literal translation of a
dancing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in the form of a steel and glass building.
Stylistically a deconstructivist icon, the building strives for lightness and motion, while
remaining solidly on the ground.149 A different approach is the Laban centre in
London by Swiss architects Herzog de Meuron. They used shifting light and shadows
to animate the translucent, minimal form of the dance school. This introduces the
subtleties of bodily movement into an orthogonal building form.150

Similarly, how does one make a body into a building? The first image that comes to
mind is perhaps the famous photo taken at The Beaux Arts Ball at the Hotel Astor,
New York, in 1931, where architects came dressed as their favourites skyscrapers.151
But there are more than simply literal metaphors in considering bodies as buildings. In

148
See Adolphe Appia, The Work of Living Art & Man is the Measure of All Things (Uni. Miami
Press: US, 1969).
149
The ‘Dancing House’ was originally called ‘Fred and Ginger’ after the famous couple, and was
designed by Gehry with the Czech architect Vlado Miluni. It was completed in 1996.
150
The Laban Centre, London was designed by Herzog de Meuron in 2003. They worked with
the artist Michael Craig-Martin to create a modernist, orthogonal form upon which a light-based
artwork moves. It is encased with polycarbonate panels, which change in light and colour,
allowing glimpses of shadow and movement into the interior. Herzog de Meuron decided to focus
on movement through these translucent panels, rather than the technique of Labanotation in the
design itself.
151
See Andrew Saint, The Image of the Architect (Yale University Press: New Haven and
London, 1983), p.11.

98
the introduction to The Theatre of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius describes
Schlemmer’s ‘magic of transforming dancers and actors into moving architecture’.152
Dance choreographers who have understood architecture as more than just static
objects have multiplied in recent years. William Forsythe has described dance as an
‘architecture of movement’,153 but the body first famously described as ‘dancing
architecture’ was the young American dancer Loie Fuller. Fuller became famous in
1892 with ‘The Serpentine Dance’, a hypnotic performance of light and movement that
fed the current fashion for elemental spirits and mystical phenomena. In the same
way that Schlemmer aimed for a direct emoting of reactions by his audiences, Fuller
described her dances:

To impress an idea, I endeavour, by my motions, to cause its birth in the

spectator’s mind, to awaken his imagination, that is may be prepared to receive
the image…I have motion. That means that all the elements of nature may be
expressed.154

Fuller soon became internationally famous for her distinctive, multi-media

performances. She would dance with draperies attached to long rods that would
seem to extend her arms into wings. Lighting would highlight and wash dramatically
over the moving gauzy, material.

152
Walter Gropius, introduction to The Theatre of the Bauhaus, p.9.
153 nd
William Forsythe, BBC radio interview by John Tusa, 2 February, 2003 (transcript).
Retrieved 10.12.2006 at
<http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_03/feb03/interview_bbc_forsythe.htm>
154
Loie Fuller, Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life, With Some Account of Her Distinguished Friends
(Boston: Small, Naynard & Co, 1913), p.70, quoted by Amy Zornitzer Revolutionaries of the
‘Theatrical Experience: Fuller and the Futurists’, Dance Chronicle, Vol. 21, No. 1. (1998),
Retrieved 12.05.2007 at <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0147-
2526%281998%2921%3A1%3C93%3AROTTEF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I>

99
 Fig.2
Loie Fuller, (photograph), 1894.
Susan Gillis Kruman, The Early Moderns, www.pitt.edu Retrieved 06.06.2007
at <http://www.pitt.edu/~gillis/dance/2.gif>

100
Like Schlemmer’s bodies, the individual is subsumed into moving form. Often Fuller’s
body was barely recognisable, only a shadowed silhouette or hand was sometimes to
be seen. The dances became pure, rhythmic movement, devoid of individuality. In
this way Fuller reconceived her own body as space and form. Fuller’s body was at the
same time astral and technological enhanced, the extended and mechanized cyborg
of the future, birthed by the possibilities of electric lighting. This was the new body,
expanded, extended and transformed by technology. In this way her performances
encapsulate how the changes in bodies could directly relate to new spatial formations.

3.2.3
Costumes as Spatial Forms

In the same way that modern painters such as Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani
looked to Eastern cultures for novel stylistic and figural imagery, Schlemmer also
looked to alternative theatrical systems such as those found in Japanese, Chinese
and Javanese traditions.155 This led to a focus on puppets and marionettes.
Schlemmer wanted to pare the theatre down, away from traditional narrative
structures, allowing him to focus on the body and movement as form.

Choreographically, bodily form and motion were isolated, analysed and reduced
to the most minimal number of shapes and movements, which were systemized
into repeated gestures. They became artificial beings, while the costumes were
no longer purely ornamentation but architectural form. Actors became tools,
props, parts of the set, serving a function for the production as a whole rather
than presenting characters. As with Fuller’s body, Schlemmer’s dancers were
more like mechanized mannequins than typical dancers, divested of identity. In
this way the dances became more like sculptures in motion than physical dance

155
The interest in primitivism that drew contemporary art to look at primordial images, rituals and
costumes, can also be seen in the aesthetics of Schlemmer’s costumes and puppets.

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pieces. The costumes themselves generated the choreography based around
bodily geometries.

It is easy to read Schlemmer’s bodies as characterizations of the 20th century ‘Modern

Age’: bodies that have been mechanized, divested of humanity. The image of the
robotic Maria in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis that premiered in Germany in 1927, is a
contemporaneous example of the blurring between flesh and metal. The questions
and fears of subsuming the body into the machine, were still raw in Schlemmer’s time.
In his work can we see some of the earliest examples of dealing with the body in the
age of new mechanic and electronic technologies. Despite the depersonalised nature
of his costuming and actions, it is important to understand that he was not advocating
turning the body into a machine. Schlemmer points out that in an age where
mechanization is everywhere, one must recognise what in the world cannot be
mechanized.156 Schlemmer did not believe that it was necessary to have to choose
between technological innovation and embodiment.

During this time the set designer and theorist Edward Gordon Craig was cultivating his
theory of the ‘Ubermarionette’.157 For Craig it was movement that was the most
important theatrical element. This was stressed specifically through the use of masks,
but also costuming, in order to dehumanise the actor. Craig believed the actor was a
puppet emphasising movement, gesture, dance and mime rather than word. He
scandalously wrote that the Ubermarionette would be an evolved and better
alternative to a human actor. The equivalent mechanization of the body at the
Bauhaus can be seen in the ballet of Schlemmer’s student Kurt Schmidt. ‘The
Mechanical Ballet’ was performed by five dancers completely hidden behind coloured
flats. These flats consisted of geometric, multi-coloured shapes, against an equally
abstracted stage set. The body was transformed into a completely mechanized series
of colours and shapes that changed through their relationships with other shapes,

156
Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’ in The Theatre of the Bauhaus, p.17.
157
See Edward Gordon Craig, ‘The Actor and the Ubermarionette’, in J. Michael Walton (ed.),
Craig on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1983).

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against different backgrounds. While Schlemmer also acknowledged the future
possibilities of using mechanized puppets instead of humans, his bodies were not
subsumed into the costume’s form. Instead, merging with the mechanical and
technological, they became hybrid bodies. Prosthetic limbs, attachments and devices
connected flesh to the external world. The costumes became an extension and
expansion of the human body.

3.2.5
Costume Forms

Schlemmer’s theatre transfigures human form, which can now perform any type
of movement. Its motion defies gravity. Costumes and mechanical devices,
automatons and marionettes, precision machines, glass, artificial limbs, outfits
designed by deep-sea divers and modern soldiers expand the human capacity
they simultaneously restrict.158

Gropius’s description illustrates Schlemmer’s abstraction of the body through

costumes. Fuller’s abstraction of her own body into the mystical and inhuman allows
her transformation into pure form. This emphasized the spatial tectonics produced by
the movement of her clothing against the dramatic lighting. With this technology
Fuller’s body could take the appearance of the stone folds of a caryatid or the
transparent flutter of butterfly wings. Schlemmer’s costumes also used abstraction to
define form over narrative in the ballets. As either exaggeration or transformation,
both Fuller and Schlemmer founded their choreographies based on embodied
movement.

The costumes encapsulated certain essences that Schlemmer categorised as

fundamental to the human body. In his essay ‘Man and Art-Figure’ (Mensch und

158
Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’ in Walter Gropius, (ed.) The Theatre of the Bauhaus,
pp. 28-29.

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Kunstfigur), Schlemmer defines an order of four essential costume forms, which
transform the body on the stage. (These can be viewed in the Triadic Ballet
costumes Fig.1) They present different strategies for designing costumes based
on the laws of space and the body. It is useful to describe them, in order to see
how costumes can be formulated through different systems of body movement
that in turn can become spatial.

The first Schlemmer called ‘ambulant architecture’, based on the body’s ability to
move. It enclosed the key elements of the body in orthogonal forms, creating a
machinic, robotic appearance. Each component of the body became a distinct
element. The outline of the natural body shape was still visible, revealing the
negative space formed by the geometric appendage. The second was based
on what Schlemmer described as ‘the functional laws of the human body in their
relationship to space’. This was the marionette, dissecting the body into separate
elements, connected by moveable joints. The drawing shows a figure of curved
forms, like a wood turned puppet. The emphasis on this marionette body is its
ball and socket joints, suggesting rotation, arcing and torsion. The third body
was defined by the laws of human motion in space, what Schlemmer called the
result of a ‘technical organism’. It was made by taking each component of the
body and created forms based on their movement in space. It took the
marionette and traced its allowable movements. From these geometries
Schlemmer created specific forms. The ‘technical organism’ is the most
compelling for performative architecture and is a natural progression from the first
two. Building on movement, it also has the most surreal appearance. Most of
the costumes of the Triadic Ballet take their forms from this style, though they are
were often an amalgamation of elements of the four. The fourth was based on
metaphysical forms of expression, which aimed at ‘dematerialization’. These
costume forms were made by what Schlemmer designated as the symbolic
elements, which can be found in the body. While the first three costume forms
are useful and innovative constructions from body movement, this fourth form

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looks to a symbolic level and I would argue in the process of leaving behind
corporeal movement loses its relevance to the body.

The costume as an abstraction of movement and form is most visible in Schlemmer’s

Triadic Ballet, which was first performed in Stuttgart in 1916.(Fig.1) The ballet
consisted of three dancers performing twelve pieces, with eighteen different costume
changes, and was the most refined and extravagant of all his performances.
Schlemmer called it in the genre of the ‘costume dance’ or masquerade. It is here,
through the drawings, the existing and reproduced costumes and the video
documentation that it is possible to have a holistic vision of how these costumes
worked with the choreographies.

Initially looking at the many drawings that Schlemmer made for these costumes,
it is their flatness that is apparent. The shapes are made up of compasses and
rulers and it is very hard to imagine them in three-dimensions. This makes the
photos from the performances even more extraordinary, circles become cylinders
and spheres, lines transform into cones, stilts and disks. The look of the
costumes were padded cloth and stiff papier maché, painted bright colours or
metallic shades. They were physical extensions, for example, the ballerina in the
first act is a woman in a tutu, but her arms are padded to look larger and rounder,
her torso is sculpted to look like a turned, wooden mannequin.

The performance of the Triadic Ballet was divided into three acts, each designated by
a colour. The first act was yellow and in the tradition of a comic burlesque. The
costumes are reminiscent of a beachside frolic and the colours are bright and
patterned with stripes and curves. The second was rose-coloured and defined in the
manner of a solemn festival. In this scene the costumes have become stranger, the
colours richer. The final act was black-based, to be performed with the heroic quality
of a Greek tragedy. By now there is an almost alien quality to the costumes, moon

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shapes, planetary rings, reflective and metallic materials against black body suits.159
The juxtaposition of costumes creates very distinct spaces between the performers.
At times these are comical, with changing shapes and forms, like the relationship
between the ballerina and the deep-sea diver. But in the final act the spaces seem
cast in stone, the gestures starker and the costumes cut the space into angles. These
costumes play with perspective, flat planes become spherical, harsh profiles soften
into tubes. The movements exploit this, very defined gestures and movements switch
between two-dimensional and three-dimensional perspectives.

Schlemmer expressed a desire not to completely do away with the human

element. The rigidity of the costumes is extreme, but they were not meant to
allow for unbridled movement, they were meant to limit it. Schlemmer’s
experiment was to see whether the body could transcend the parameters set by
the costume, both physically and metaphysically. Here the two challenges of
abstraction and mechanisation were met, where the costumes, rather than simply
mechanising the body, would intensify what Schlemmer felt to be the intrinsic
human being. This occurred through the dance itself, opposed to an image of a
static body.

3.2.6
Bodily Geometries

“Man the measure of all things” provides so many possibilities for variation and
for relationships to architecture and craftsmanship that one would merely have
to extract the essentials.160

159
The description of the Triadic Ballet is taken from a journalist A. Ho’s description of the
performance at the National Theatre, 1923, described in Howard Dearstyne, Inside the Bauhaus
(Rizzoli; USA, 1986), p.176, and personal descriptions from video footage of re-enactments of the
ballets.
160
Oskar Schlemmer, Diary November 1922 (Pasedena Art Museum: USA, 1968), p.133.

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The second element of Schlemmer’s dances that are useful for a performative
understanding of space-making, is the idea of new body geometries. Understanding
the body as a three-dimensional moving entity presents new ways of designing
spaces around the body. One of the key developments of modernity that Schlemmer
was interested in was the new mathematics of relativity.161 This proposed alternative
geometries of space that could be used in dance. The human figure was the central
reference to Schlemmer’s work. Schlemmer made an abundance of drawings of the
human body, from analytical diagrams to life-drawing studies. His detailed study of
the human form drove his explorations of how the body moved in three-dimensional
space. At the beginning of ‘Man and Art-Figure’ Schlemmer describes the history of
theatre as that of ‘the transfiguration of the human form’.162 While the materials for
this transfiguration are form and colour, the placing he called; ‘the constructive fusion
of space and building’.163 In this context, the three aspects a performance is built
around is firstly the body enacting the event, secondly the physical object of the body
or built environment, and thirdly constructed space. The figurines that Schlemmer
designed made solid the parameters of the body.

The dances can be described as a mathematical and machinic understanding of the

body moving in space. On seeing the Triadic Ballets, Bauhaus student and
biographer Howard Dearstyne described them as ‘more like mobile geometry than
fluid arabesques’164 . Following from the body as marionette, Schlemmer derived the
physical gestures and movements from mathematics, the joints and notations of limbs
or the rhythms of machines. Like Acconci’s early performances that showed simple,
repetitive physical actions, Schlemmer described the premise of his dances, as
beginning with: ‘the physical condition, from being, from standing, from walking and
finally from jumping and dancing. For taking a step is a tremendous event, lifting a

161
Oskar, Schlemmer, Diary May 1929, p.127.
162
Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’ in The Theatre of the Bauhaus, p.17.
163
Oskar, Schlemmer, ibid, p.17.
164
Howard Dearstyne, Inside the Bauhaus, p.174.

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hand, moving a finger no less of an achievement’.165 They were far from the
classically poetic and are still shockingly unappealing for those expecting a traditional
ballet. Schlemmer however was not interested in repeating the same steps of
traditional ballet scores. He saw in everyday actions the premise for a new kind of
poetry, prophesying the future use of quotidian movement by choreographers later in
the 20th century.

Schlemmer defines two possible relationships for the body and space on the theatrical
stage. The first is in the illusionist theatre, where the space of the stage is made into a
literal representation of nature in order to fit with the natural body. The second
possibility is the opposite, where man succumbs to what Schlemmer described as the
abstract space of the stage.166 He illustrated this with the sketch, ‘Figure in Space’,
which shows a central human figure in a rectangular cube. Through this drawing he
endeavoured to describe the geometry that is created by the surrounding
environment, showing lines that criss-cross the space forming dissections,
connections and pathways. This drawing is misleading however because it only
shows the geometry set up by the space, the dark figure is immobile, passive, and as
such not generating any interactions in the space. Schlemmer describes the body
entering the stage as an ‘event’, where the figure becomes a ‘space-bewitched’
creature.167 The drawing presents a figure caught in the webs of geometry that the
space is held in and up by, webs made by the geometry of the surrounding
environment. In the second that they move, the geometry will shift with them.

Schlemmer described this as an ‘architectonic-spatial organism’, which existed

intermeshed in a spatial relationship.168 Into this matrix the body enters, weaving
its own geometries. The space surrounding the body becomes animated by this
geometry, with connections and intersections, lines and sweeping curves that

165
Oskar Schlemmer, Diary May 1929, p.127.
166
Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’ in The Theatre of the Bauhaus, p.23.
167
Oskar Schlemmer, ibid, p.92.
168
From a lecture by Schlemmer at the Bauhaus to ‘The Circle of Friends of the Bauhaus’ in
March 16th, 1927 in The Theatre of the Bauhaus, p.85.

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traced the potential movements of the body. By making visible these spatial
geometries, space was understood as something essentially connected to the
moving body. This effect of the human figure on space was what Schlemmer
called the ‘stereometry of space’.169 ‘Stereometry’ means the measurement of
volumes in contrast to ‘planimetry’, which describes two-dimensional
measurement. Schlemmer uses the term stereometry to describe a geometry of
movement, tracing bodily patterns and forms in space. These patterns become
the blueprints for solid matter, for spatial forms. This is a strategy that resonates
in the contemporary dance field, but also for a making of architectural searching
to base itself on the moving body.

3.2.7
Felt Space

I have in mind dance creations derived from spatiality, from the feeling for
space. Space, like architecture, is primarily a construct of dimension and
proportion, an abstraction in the sense of a contradiction – if not a protest –
against nature. Space, in the sense that it influences everything within it, also
defines the behaviour of the dancer. If we were to fill up space with a soft
pliable substance, in which stages of the dancer’s movements were to harden
into “negatives” of the movement, this would demonstrate the direct relationship
of the planimetry of the stage floor to the stereometry of space.170

Schlemmer was a renowned painter who had originally joined the Bauhaus in the
sculpture department. His fascination with the theatre led him to take over the theatre
workshop in 1927, bringing to the theatre course the interests and perspective of both
painting and sculpture. ‘Space, Form and Gesture’ was the first subject that

169
Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man and Art Figure’, p.98.
170
Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Tänzerische Mathematik’ quote in Howard Beckman, Oskar Schlemmer
and the Experimental Theatre of the Bauhaus: A Documentary (Uni of Alberta: Edmonton,
Canada, 1977), p.37.

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Schlemmer taught, which evolved in his sculpture course. What was so unique about
Schlemmer’s approach to performance was this sculptural way of dealing with space,
focusing on volume instead of mass. Rather than building form, he taught his
students to explore enclosing space. In this way Schlemmer’s theatre works give us a
vision of performative space, where the body is seen to cut into the space around it as
it moves.

This feeling for space is suggestive of a phenomenological description of the

body. Through movement, the interaction of the body and space becomes
palpable. Neither is passive in this interaction and their relationship creates a
multitude of parameters and lineaments. The body perceives its surroundings
physically, gathering knowledge of the world as it moves through it. Instead of
the feeling for space, it is rather a feeling of space. Rather than this being a
situation confined to specific moments or contexts, this is being constantly
produced whenever bodies and spaces come into collision. Schlemmer
visualizes body movement three-dimensionally, whereby the body inscribes
space as volumes. The movement drawings or scores, which describe motion
only upon the singular plane of the floor, are hereby connected with the rest of
the body’s movements. ‘Stereometry’ therefore describes three-dimensional
movement.171

3.2.8
Space Analysis Dances

During the late 1920s Schlemmer experimented with these ideas using a series
of dances that became known as the Space Analysis Dances. These were
developed in the late 20s consisting of ‘The Slat Dance’, ‘The Metal Dance’, ‘The

171
The relationship between planimetric notations and stereometric movement in terms of
bringing the living body into the architecture drawing, will be explored in Bernard Tschumi’s The
Manhattan Transcripts in Chapter Four.

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Hoop Dance’, ‘The Form Dance’ and ‘The Gesture Dance’, usually lasting for
only a minute or two. Materials were instrumental, such as in the Metal Dance
where light, shadow and the reflections of the hanging, metal pieces became
active participants in the dance. ‘The Hoop Dance’ on the other hand created a
graphic three-dimensional environment made up of dozens of connected hoops,
which with dramatic lighting and continual arching rotations, made an impressive
spectacle in circular forms (though it is difficult to understand how the black clad
body interacted with it).

The most successful of the dances was ‘The Slat Dance’, where Schlemmer’s process
of analysing how the body constructs connections with the space around it is clearly
apparent. ‘The Slat Dance’ was performed by a single dancer with long slats attached
to their arms, elbows and knees. In Schlemmer’s sketch of stilt walkers the year
before, one can see the development from stilts and the extension of body parts, into
a performance. The dancer’s movements, slowed by the unwieldy appendages,
would be traced in grand gestures by these prosthetic limbs. Here the costume
becomes prop, becomes architecture, integrating the body into a seamless

relationship with space. The slats show the animated body as directional. Velocity
and force can be perceived through the proposal of each movement, followed through
visually down the length of each slat. In elevation one sees the geometric division of
space through the body. The edges of the body segment space and the movements
expand or contract sections like a graphic diagram. But, as the performer turns into a
three-dimensional view, they present a perspectival image, lines becoming arcs. The
diagram becomes volumetric.

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 Fig.3
Oskar Schlemmer, Slat Dance (1927)
The Expressionists, 12.08.2000. www.english.emory.edu. Retrieved 10.03.2007
at <http://www.english.emory.edu/DRAMA/ExpressionImage.html>

112
In the performance entitled Lines in Space in 1927, the geometry has been simplified
and takes its cues from the stage. In the photo that documents this performance, the
image is overlayed with a differently posed body, many arms and legs out stretched.
The parameters of a rectangular room create a geometry that seems to interact back
onto the lone, central figure. It is reminiscent of perspectival drawings from the
Renaissance, documenting the way the eye understood space. Schlemmer is trying a
similarly radical approach, not through the eye of the spectator but the body in the
space. This is what the ‘Slat Dance’ needed in order to ground the physical geometry
in a real space. In the installations of Vito Acconci that will looked at in the following
section, this level of transaction between bodies and buildings describes a reciprocal
interaction.

It was not so much architectonic space that Schlemmer investigated. He was focusing
on the body and how that individual form dissected, divided and moulded space.
Occasionally there were flats or screens that created a framing device or were used
for projections. It was only in the Slat Dance however, that Schlemmer extended his
experiments of the body and costume into architectonic space. In other works they
remained only as separate stage sets. Replacing the static image of the Vitruvian
Man, Schlemmer’s work proposes that true scale occurs only in movement.
Measurement in this sense revolves around individual bodies, creating dynamic forms
that are constantly shifting and reacting to their spatial surroundings. Such a
conception of the body in this thesis will be extended from the intimacy of costume
designs into built environments, where motion and interactivity will formulate the basis
of a performative approach to architecture.

Schlemmer’s ballets at the Bauhaus encapsulate the desire to design form from the
performance of the body in space. In these costumes and choreographies it is
possible to see how a performative understanding of the way bodies interact creatively
in spaces, producing exciting and innovative forms. While these forms are far from
those of buildings, they propose new spatial geometries – blueprints for built

113
environments. Schlemmer placed the body on centre stage, seeing it as an essential
protagonist in the construction of spaces. From this focus on the moving body, the
following case studies expand the scope of this performative reading into projects
more specifically concerned with built environments. Situationist theory provides a
performative strategy for connecting the body with the urban geography. In doing so it
moves the analysis from the stage, out into the streets, a shift that will be mirrored in
Acconci’s process explored later this chapter. Through the practice of the dérive, the
moving body enacts its relationship with its surroundings, providing a new,
improvisational approach to how bodies and spaces interact.

3.3
Pedestrian Improvisation

The built environment has always been a physical delineation of power structures
and ideology, from the central and safe positioning of religious buildings and
palaces in medieval towns, to Georges Eugène Haussman’s boulevards that
sliced through the revolutionary potential of Paris. Modernity heralded
centralized governments, which allowed a much greater and far reaching control
over entire cities and regions. By the early 1950s Le Corbusier had instituted his
plan for modernist architecture, with his vision of the ‘radiant cities’ of the future.
Le Corbusier’s dictate of architecture as ‘a machine for living’ summed up for the
avant-garde the pitfalls of the modernist dismissal of living bodies. The
Situationist International was a group of artistic and political provocateurs that
resolved to fight against this prevailing ideology. Though the group was made up
of painters, writers and theorists, they aimed to change the urban fabric itself.
The response of the Situationists came through performance. Despite the belief
that architecture would always subjugate its inhabitants, they believed that
flexible, creative urban planning could support an egalitarian, utopic society.

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3.3.1
Experiencing the City

As you can see, we’re flying over an island, a city, a particular city, and this is
the story of a number of its people, and the story, also, of the city itself. It was
not photographed in a studio. Quite the contrary…the actors played out their
roles on the streets, in the apartment houses….this is the city as it is, hot
summer pavements, the children at play, the buildings in their naked stone, the
people without makeup.172

In the opening sequence of the 1948 Hollywood detective film ‘The Naked City’, a
voice-over read the above quote while the camera flew above a city. It exposed
the desire to uncover the ‘real’ city, peel away its layers and understand it from
within, the experience of it. In this film, that inspired Guy Debord’s Situationist
map of the same name (Fig. 4), the urban environment is shown as layered and
multi-dimensioned, enriched with daily experience, aspects usually overlooked in
the glossy images of the 20th century metropolis. Understanding how the
quotidian held the key to bodies and spaces allowed the possibility of re-making
it. To experience the metropolis is to step inside it and across it.

172
The opening sequence of the ‘The Naked City’, written by Malvin Wald and Albert Maltz,
directed by Jules Dassin that inspired Debord, quoted by Simon Sadler in The Situationist City
(MIT Press: USA,1999), p.82.

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 Fig.4
Guy Debord & Asgar Jorn, The Naked City. 1957.
Catherine De Zegher, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s
New Babylon to Beyond (The MIT Press: USA,1999), p.96.

116
The transformation of the everyday was fundamentally a Surrealist concept,
taken up by Henri Lefebvre who expanded the idea politically in The Production
of Space and Critique of the Everyday. These theories took Marxist concepts
that operated on a political and social level and applied them to the intimate
realms of existence as well – to leisure time and the minor details of the
everyday. Lefebvre understood the animate body as that which followed the
regulations in which built environments prescribed for pedestrians. But it also
held the potential to be renegade tool that could subvert these rules. Lefebvre,
who was a Situationist member in its early stages, aimed to critique and
transform everyday life. Debord wanted to construct situations through activities
that were both artistic and political, from the personal to the metropolis. In this
way society itself could be transformed. Like other avant-garde artists of the
time, the Situationists were breaking down the stability of architecture by focusing
on the fluidity of performance making, rather than simply what it looked like.

Debord referred to the way the landscape affected the psyche as one moved through
it as ‘Psychogeography’. It is a way of describing the relationship between the
phenomenological body and the surrounding environment. It emphasized that
people’s relationship with the built environment was interactive in subconscious as
well as conscious ways. Fuelled by a renewal of interest in urban space, the last ten
years have seen a resurgence of interest in Situationism by academics and students
from architecture.173 Psychogeography is a problem for architecture – how does the
architect incorporate these intangible aspects into the design process? To map
existing spaces based on personal, phenomenal interpretations is fashionable in
architecture schools; streets take the form of bottled smells and zip-lock bags of

173
Simon Sadler notes that Psychogeography can be seen as a part of the growing discipline of
social geography in the 1960s, as opposed to academic geography. Texts such as Kevin Lynch’s
Image of the City, examined cognitive mapping and urban design, making the area a growing
field that examined urban geography beyond the qualitative pre-20th century parameters. A
useful selection of architectural essays of these new works can be seen in Iain Borden and Sandy
McCreery’s New Babylonians: Contemporary Visions of a Situationist City (Academy Press; UK,
2001).

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detritus. The question is how to design from Psychogeography, how to utilize
information based on personal, transient, experience.174 The performance of the
dérive and the making hypothetically spatial of that performance on an urban scale,
presents many new opportunities for architecture. Situationist theory has become
popular in this field because it makes palpable how environments affect the
inhabitants.

3.3.3
Scripting the Everyday

The infamous dérive is itself already a kind of drawing. The drifter, responding
to the resonances between the hidden forces of the unconscious and the
hidden forces in the city, draws a meandering line through the city. The drift is
an automatic drawing that subverts the official city plan by exploiting unmapped
sensual and subliminal qualities.175

The architecture theorist Mark Wigley here points out the creative relationship
between the performance of the dérive and the drawing. The act of the Situationist
dérive is a performance in which the typical spectator is thrown onto the stage, in front
of the camera, becoming the leading lady, the detective, the hero. Walking through
the metropolis became the central strategy for the politically motivated art group of the
Situationists. The core of Situationist theory was the dérive, where Situationism is
itself performed by the body through the built environment. The ‘dérive’ was a practice
developed around the idea of ‘life’, rather than art or representation. The dérive,
(usually translated in English as to ‘drift’), meant moving through the city, allowing the
actions, the events, the uncontrollable forces of the city to take you from one place to

174
Later in this chapter the only architectural work to be spawned from the Situationist
International (the city of New Babylon) will be examined.
175
Mark Wigley, ‘Paper, Scissors, Blur’ in de Zegher Catherine et al (eds.), The Activist Drawing:
Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond (MIT Press: USA,
2001), p.47.

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the next. The analogy of the pinball machine was used by the Lettrist International to
describe the push and pull of forces as pedestrians moved through the urban
environment. The bodily inscription of improvisation is performed over the script of the
city. In this way it is an act necessarily deviant, like graffiti on a wall. The dérive
encapsulates an experience of the city that is emotive and intimate, in contrast to
subsuming of the body in the speed of the modern city. An experience both alienating
and overpowering. It was also decidedly non-productive and therefore against the
contemporary emphasis on consumption, capitalism and modernization.

What the Situationists proposed was art that was not representational, on stage or
page, but a methodology in which to participate. Situationist theory revolves around a
belief that the transformation of everyday life could be achieved through individual
participation in urban space. They began with a very theoretical philosophy and took it
to the streets, making the active individual in space the focus. They propose through
the body how a new kind of urban space can be constructed. The performance of the
dérive is a bodily example of performative architecture. It refocused the issues of city
planning and design back onto the body, empowering the individual as a constructor
of their surroundings.

The infiltration of the quotidian act of walking into art practices brings with it the
performative. The focus on the everyday is important to the foundations of a
performative architecture because it moves the issue of the body from the general to
the individual, from a theory into the visceral corporeality of the general populace. The
body is no longer either passive spectator or object to be viewed, but an active
participant.

Considering the body as a creative tool is useful in building a theory of performative

architecture on the direct, creative relationship reflected in between bodies and the
built environment. Theories of body art explore how the body performs built space
through motion and interaction. The connections between body and built environment
will lead to the work of Vito Acconci, who has moved from personal body

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performances into architecture making. Acconci’s projects show how embodied
performances can be seen as a ‘transactive’ relationship with its surroundings. Both
his performances and installations situate themselves in an inherently social condition,
designating physical performances as necessarily political. In Acconci’s installations,
the bodily practices proposed by walking artworks and Situationist theory, are
constructed into built environments.

3.4
Activating Spaces/Places
The Performative installations of Vito Acconci

‘Once a viewer is in the middle of things, art becomes architecture’.176

The collision between the body and art is an act of creation. The encounter is not
only one of corporeal forms, but between the haptic perception of the viewer and
the artist’s intent. Unlike typical two-dimensional art forms, how people connect
with installation art is not simply an optical process of viewing. Creating states of
mutual engagement, installation art acts upon the viewer, as the viewer interacts
with it. What installation art problematizes is the occupation of built environments
with bodies. As an art form it emphasizes that environments are built through
individual experiences by a process of ‘Transaction’. For the artist Vito Acconci,
Transaction implies a dialogue and exchange between two parties, where both
are complicit in the interaction.

Installation art makes evident how this interaction is continually in operation,

whether one is cognizant of it or not. It shows how narratives are built into the
footprints, the floors, the suspicious holes gaping in the walls. The objects
themselves permeate the buildings and seep into the imaginations of the viewers.

176
Heinz Schütz (ed.) & Vito Acconci, Courtyard in the Wind (Hatje Cantz Verlag: Germany,
2003), p.16.

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As if the volume of the interior had been separated from the building’s form like a
Rachel Whiteread sculpture, these negative spaces make eloquent descriptions
of performative architecture.177

Acconci’s extensive work over the last forty years has examined how real bodies
interact in real spaces. Acconci has interrogated how public spaces control
private bodies, offering alternatives in the form of his own body or physical
constructions. By comparison, Schlemmer’s bodily-produced spatial
constructions, which find form in costumes and movements, Acconci uses the
direct interaction between bodies and built environments in order to manifest his
examinations of spaces. Projects are formed around people doing things and the
architecture doing things back. It is useful to look briefly at bringing this into an
urban scale through the Situationist city of New Babylon.

Many note how Acconci’s innovative and always controversial work has moved
from the written word of poetry, out into the street for performance art and into
the structures of our built environment. His career began as a published poet in
the 60s, after which Acconci began using his own body in performances. These
performances were highly autobiographical, concentrating on his own body,
sometimes in relation to another or many other bodies. A key strategy that
emerges in his work and which will be used by a number of the later architecture
projects examined, is destabilization. It becomes a physical form that refocuses
interaction back onto the body. His work is notable for its aggressive force and
for Acconci’s insistence on crossing the boundaries of society’s taboos. For
Acconci the issue of architecture is one of publicity - the private body in public
space. The Situationist understanding of the city as a script upon which the
regulations of society are inscribed is exposed in Acconci’s work. His work
stresses the need for improvisation, freeing the body from defined ways of

177
Rachel Whiteread has become known for her sculptures that showcase absence. Setting the
interiors of spaces, from objects to houses, in concrete, she solidifies the negative space,
creating in the process a new volume.

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moving through built environments. Acconci is continually seeking solutions to
how we live and move through public spaces, provoking alternatives and
critiquing current situations. Coming from his background in performance he
works from the body out, seeing architecture phenomenologically as a thing that
people know with their bodies.178 He founded the ‘Acconci Studio’ in 1988 and
now works in architecture and landscape design, having made the move into built
space on an architectural scale.179

3.4.1
Body Space

Understanding the body from a phenomenological basis is essential to reconsidering

the built environment in a contemporary context. Acconci is always emphasising the
flesh in his early works – pain, shame, scarring. The body as a physical, sensorial
being is continually highlighted. This corporeal issue was of central importance in his
performance work during the 1970s. These performances were visceral examinations
of the body – a body of blood, skin, bone. Acconci would often push the limits of his
own body, but unlike artists such as Stelarc who put their bodies through extreme and
often violent acts, Acconci’s performances allowed just enough room to step into his
shoes. These performances were uncomfortable but accessible, dealing with
everyday action and Events, framed and broadcasted as heightened reality. In his
video work ‘Openings’ (1970), Acconci pulls the hair from his stomach until it is bare,
soft and bruised. Watching it as a close up video that frames his stomach, the viewer
becomes entirely fascinated by the intimacy of the skin pulled up by each hair,
grasping the hairs, the jerking reaction of the body with each movement. The act of

178
‘Vito Acconci: Good Guys Wear Black’ (transcripts) Redstudio MOMA Website. Retrieved
09.03.2007 at <http://redstudio.moma.org/interview/_media/html/thecompletetranscript.html>
179
Specific to an examination of performative architectures is Acconci’s installation and public
artworks rather than his more recent architecture projects. The reason for this is that his
architecture is yet to encapsulate his ideas, which are so direct and emotive in his earlier work.
Having moved now into buildings themselves, the ability to play artistic provocateur has had to
give way to dealing with pragmatic issues of construction.

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watching heightens the awareness of one’s own body. The body is never abstracted,
but disturbingly fleshy.

Throughout his career Acconci has focused on how the moving body interacts
with other bodies or with the space around it. As the bare space of his early
performances became more and more populated with props, machines and
objects, so did Acconci’s body recede from the stage. What began as a personal
exploration of the body, moved into focusing on the absent body or the potential
body. This change transferred the appearance of Acconci’s work from the body
to built environments. In this process bodies became even more central in his
work. The disappearance of his own body makes possible the presence of other
peoples.

3.4.2
Making Space

Acconci makes room for possible performances. In contrast to the presentation

of an artwork or performance, Acconci creates opportunities for performances by
his audiences. In this way the built environments are ‘unfinished’ without bodies.
Heinz Schütz describes Acconci’s architecture as creating blank spots for human
beings.180 Acconci sees this as inherently political, allowing for alternative
actions and improvisation. Making space for non-prescribed public actions is
considered in contemporary society as deviant. His installations are formulated
on the grounds that space is a substantial thing, something that can be built and
made. Spatiality has always been the ground for Acconci’s examinations.181

180
Heinz Schütz, introduction to Vito Acconci: Courtyard in the Wind (Hatje Cantz Verlag:
Germany, 2003), p16.
181
As a determinant for social behaviour Acconci often cites the importance of anthropologist
Edward Hall on his work. According to Hall, space and location contain the key issues to
understanding how human beings are in the world.

123
 Fig.5
Vito Acconci, Instant House 1980.
Kate Linker, Vito Acconci (Rizzoli: New York, 1994), p. 46.

124
When Acconci began his body performances, this movement was translated into
physical poetry.182

Making room means allowing for improvisation. Acconci is well aware of the
contemporary idea of public space as something that is named and defined by
ruling forces, whether politicians or development companies. Public space is for
a chosen section of the community who fit into the defined construction of good
citizenship. Those that do not fit, have to in Acconci’s words ‘take public space’.
Public space becomes a realm in which to requisition property, to assert one’s
body in urban space.183 In this way it becomes a performative space, it can only
come into being through physical interaction. Acconci aims to create niches,
interstitial places in which one can have intimacy, community, privacy within
public space. Acconci insists that these spaces have to be taken, because they
are no longer made. The presence of public space can no longer be simply
assumed.

In Acconci’s installation works the built environment is always itself active and
interactive. ‘Instant House’ (1980) was a key example that showed this
implicated body. (Fig. 5) A swing invites the viewer, surrounded on each side by
flat boards painted with the US flag. They can see that the boards form the
collapsed sides of a house, a comforting image complete with cutout windows
and sloped roof. By sitting on the swing the visitor triggers the sides to tilt up
around you, enveloping and placing you inside the suddenly three-dimensional
house. What you cannot see, but is now clear to other spectators, is that the
outside is painted with the Soviet Union flag. There are timely political issues at

182
In some of Acconci’s first forays away from poetry and into performance, his projects showed
images of him in action, in a landscape. Photos of him jumping, walking, running. They present
a crossover between the two art forms, a kind of concrete poetry. The issue is action, not
movement in Acconci’s work. It is based on making the decision to move, not simply arbitrary
motion.
183
Vito Acconci, ‘Making Public; The Writing and Reading of Public Space’ in Heinz Schütz, (ed.)
& Vito Acconci Courtyard in the Wind (Hatje Cantz Verlag: Germany, 2003), p.97.

125
play in this project, but to look purely at the interaction of the body and the built
environment, Acconci makes it clear that neither the body nor the architecture is
ever neutral. It is a clichéd image of the ‘home’, but enveloped in the
propaganda of patriotism.

Acconci’s performance and installation work is made up of question and critique,

making visible the unseen forces, making audible peoples desires and fears.
They never aim to be objects of desire, but usable, practical elements in a
society. They are to become part of public life, rather than monuments to the
artist. As integral to these spaces built for events is Acconci’s refusal to allow the
visitor to remain separated from the environment. This is most patent in his
notorious work ‘Seedbed’ in 1972.

In ‘Seedbed’ Acconci shared his erotic fantasies of visitors from beneath the floor
of a gallery. (Fig. 6) It created the unusual collaboration of minimalist art and
confrontingly explicit sexuality. It is here that Acconci’s work became spatially
performative. Halfway across the room, the floor ramped upward two feet to the
outer wall. Listening to the sound of their footsteps, he would broadcast his
desires and masturbate through a microphone. It created an extremely personal
interaction between the visitor and the hidden body of the artist, focusing on this
relationship through architecture.

‘Seedbed’ was based on the fantasy of the unseen body, how the imagination
constructs the other’s body. Acconci brought visitors verbally into his own
fantasy, forcing them to participate. The space became charged with the
proximity of his body and the broadcasted soundscape. How visitors accept or
reject this soundscape adds to the ‘tension in the air’. The project merged the
very private realm of masturbation and erotic fantasy with the very public realm of
the art gallery.

126
 Fig.6
Vito Acconci, Seedbed (performance), 1972.
Source: Linker, Kate, Vito Acconci (Rizzoli: New York, 1994), p. 46.

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When viewed from outside the ramp became a minimalist sculpture, a single
object in the gallery space. In the performance, Acconci’s voice eroticised the
mute environment, anthropomorphizing the architectural object. Visually
dislocated while at the same time physically very close, Acconci in a sense
became the architecture. The space is electrified, made volumetric and palpable
through the disembodied voice of the artist and the physical presence of the
visitor. Both are implicated in this construction, both are essential to making the
artwork.

The confronting absurdity of the situation becomes a destabilizing element in the

installation. The ramp’s simply shifting of the floor plane is an architectural
understatement to the sounds emanating from it, throwing the visitor literally off
balance. ‘Seedbed’ exemplifies how Acconci constructs situations where specific
actions radically transform existing spaces. In this way they can be described as
performative constructions of Eventmental architecture. In Bernard Tschumi’s
drawings of The Manhattan Transcripts, which will be examined in the following
chapter on drawing, extreme events are juxtaposed against buildings, their
disjunction proving the failure of building architecture purely on programmatic
requirements. Acconci’s interactive spaces place individual bodies irrevocably in
ideas. He has often described architecture as a performance space, a space for
the body and its performances, a definition of architecture as occasions for
people.184 The built environment provides the space and script for audiences to
perform.

184
Vito Acconci in interview ‘Good Guys Wear Black’ MOMA Redstudio, last viewed 09.03.2007
at http://redstudio.moma.org/features.

128
3.4.2
Active Architectures

By destabilizing the ground plane, Acconci heightens the physical reaction by

creating a state of imbalance. For Acconci’s architectural installation at the MAK
centre, he took the existing interior form and then repeated, shifted and tilted it
three-dimensionally.185 The interior felt like it was literally turning in on itself. The
traditional cues that the pedestrian uses to negotiate a space are overturned.
Floor, ceilings and walls are positioned in disjunctive, uncomfortable angles. The
memory of the existing space is partially visible, but fragmented. This
emphasizes the disorientation more than if it had simply been discarded. There
is grass growing, not only inside, but on the ceiling. This led architecture theorist
Anthony Vidler to write, ‘Nothing is stable in Acconci’s world; underneath the
ground, which is no more than a quagmire, there are forces always ready to rise
up, swallow up, and submerge what is above ground.’186

The built environment is never passive in Acconci’s projects. He creates a brittle

edge to space, this volume that lies between the moving body and controlling
environment. In a work such ‘VD lives/TV must die’ in 1978 or ‘The People
Machine’ the following year, the installations create a tension between viewer
and art object by setting up an intriguing, and ostensibly dangerous, situation. In
both works the room is bound with pullies and ropes, precariously held together
by a complexity that is very difficult to comprehend. There is a visible chain of
physical repercussions that one is tempted to start off. But what will really
happen? If one pulls free this rope, will the cannonball really catapult through the
upper storey window and out into the street? Will the swings really tumble to the
ground, what will be the repercussions of such an act? The idea of interactivity
takes on a different context; it is the temptation to interact, the fear of doing so,

185
Acconci’s exhibition at the MAK (Academy of Applied Arts) in Vienna in 1993 was called ‘The
City Inside Us’.
186
Anthony Vidler, ‘Home Alone’ in Vito Acconci, The City Inside Us (MAK: Austria 1993), p.39.

129
the desire to do so. The space is heavy with possibility. Regardless of which
position you will finally take, the viewer is left feeling that their potential actions
will dramatically shape that environment.

The experience of being overturned is also apparent in the ‘Bad Dream House’
(1984), which Acconci defines as being his first real move from the gallery into
public space.187 Three houses were fitted together, turned upside down and
sunk into the earth. One must enter through the floor, which slides open,
allowing you to crawl into the connected spaces, complete with bed, shelves and
a chair. The house as a representation of home is literally over-turned, the
suburban dream home transformed into a nightmare. The result is startlingly
disconcerting, by using very conventional objects in very unconventional ways.
Acconci takes the object of architecture and turns it into a non-architecture,
forcing us to re-consider how we view that object. It highlights the importance of
built environments in being a safe or stable ground upon which to live. This
destabilizing aspect describes the interactive relationship between the body and
the built environment. Instead of ‘interactive’, Acconci describes the ‘transactive’
relationship that occurs between people and environments.

Destabilization is a recurring strategy used in several examples in this thesis.

Choreographer William Forsythe shifts the central axis of the body in favour of a
spatial geometry that introduces disequilibrium and imbalance into his dance
scores. This creates entirely new kinds of movement. Giovanni Battista
Piranesi disorientates the viewers of his etchings, provoking both a sense of dis-
ease and immersion in the spaces imagined. Architects Peter Eisenman, Daniel
Libeskind and Lars Spuybroek use destabilization to re-emphasize the physical
body, stimulating an active interaction with the built environment. In their projects
the secure ground plane is toyed with, gradients of floors, walls and ceilings
shifted, scale manipulated and solid forms made fluid. This strategy elicits

187
Acconci in ‘Art becomes Architecture becomes Art’; A conversation between Vito Acconci and
Kenny Schachter, moderated by Lilian Pfaff’ (Springer Verlag: Austria, 2006), p.70.

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physical responses, where the body must realign, reorient and rearrange itself in
order to simply stand upright or move ahead. In many of Acconci’s installations,
the expected is overturned in a similar way.

3.4.3
Transactive Spaces

The viewer activates (operates) an instrument (what the viewer has at

hand) that in turn activates (builds) an architecture (what the viewer is in)
that in turn activates (carries) a sign (what the viewer shows off): The
viewer becomes the victim of a cultural sign, which, however stays in
existence only as long as the viewer works to keep the instrument
going.188

In this statement Acconci illustrates his own definition of performative

architecture, the synthesis of his two expertises. Performative architecture for
Acconci means ‘transaction’, people actively interacting with the built
environment and necessarily provoking repercussions. This is a continual
process of activating elements and in turn reacting to them. In it we can see how
the interaction of the body and the building create a political space, where the
body is always fundamentally implicated. Many of his works show how the
interactions of people with the installation expose the invisible machinations at
play in built environments. Acconci’s artworks are never static tableaux, they are
always in a state of process, being acted out either by himself or by others.

For his installation work in the mid-80s, Acconci has used visitors to activate his
artworks. People would have to interact with his installations in order to activate
them, often playing with the dynamics between people, through the installation.

188
Jacucci, Guilo & Wagner, Ina, ‘Performative uses of Space in Mixed Media Environments,’
1981. Helsinki Institute for Information Technology Website. Retrieved 10.02.2007 at
<http://www.hiit.fi/files/admin/sab/SAB04/material/UERG/24_jacucci_wagner_phd.pdf.>

131
In ‘Room Dividers’ (1982), people had to move sliding wall dividers and in doing
so created and recreated the space. 189 It was a very simple, architectural idea,
but by putting it in the hands of people and giving them the solid, one to one
model that they could experience, Acconci made real the architectural idea.

We obviously want space that works as biology. We want a space to live,

to live not as a monster that overtakes the person, but as something that
reacts. Action is great, but transaction is better. Action is ultimately
private; transaction lets other things in as well. We would love to make
space that would actually react to people, as people react to those
spaces.’190

A photo of Acconci’s ‘House of Cars’ (1988) is not the artwork itself. The
installation has the look of a derelict’s refuge, but in order to understand the
artwork you must experience it, climbing into the shell and inhabiting it yourself.
Here the absent body (that of the inhabitant of the car house) becomes your body
(as the present inhabitant). Acconci doesn’t let you turn away from the very real
issue of public housing and homeless people, proposing a witty alternative and
cheap urban housing. It is a shift from viewing Acconci’s own body in distress,
emotive though it was. Now he wants you step inside the action itself and
become part of the performance. Now it is your actions that shape the space and
change the environment.

189
Room Dividers were made up of 18 units of corrugated aluminium on door tracks. Like
Japanese screens in a traditional house, but this was a gallery, and the materials were industrial.
190
Acconci, Vito, ‘Art becomes Architecture becomes Art’; A conversation between Vito Acconci
and Kenny Schachter, moderated by Lilian Pfaff (Springer Verlag: Austria, 2006), p.42.

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3.4.4
Political Improvisations

The built environment, in an electronic age, is a throwback to an industrial

era. In an age when quantities of places can be stored on a disc, the built
environment occupies too much space; it takes too much time to walk
through the built environment, in an age when distant places can be
brought home on television.191

Acconci is interested in what changes in public space by technology mean for

designing places. For Acconci, the body becomes public when it crosses the
boundary of the body.192 With technology this is now everyday practise, whether
it is chat rooms, mobile phones or sms. Acconci explores how computers have
irrevocably changed public space, arguing; ‘the electronic age obliterates space,
and overlaps places’.193 He emphasizes the spatial importance of politics on
bodies. The multiplicity of non-physical spaces means that architecture needs to
reassess how it creates physical publicity. What does it mean when the internet
allows such open and democratic connections? How can an embodied
understanding of public space work differently, or even better? Acconci has often
said that he wanted the art gallery to be used like a town square, to recapture in
the space of the gallery a space of meeting and community, and freedom of
thought and speech.

Acconci’s work exposes how social and cultural ideology is enacted by bodies.
That people perform politics. By revealing how these scripts are inscribed into
architecture, Acconci proposes how it is possible to subvert them and improvise
one’s own movements. In this way Acconci’s artworks show that architecture can

191
Vito Acconci in Linda Shearer, (ed.) Vito Acconci: Public Places (Museum of Modern Art:
NY,1988), p.27
192
Heinz Schütz, introduction in Courtyard in the Wind, p.16.
193
Vito Acconci, The City Inside Us, p.117.

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always be considered to be performative, setting the foundations for
reconsidering the design process.

Acconci’s work is unique because he has been the most successful artist to
bridge the gaps between performance art and built space. Many of the tactics
Acconci employs are simply the process of good installation work making the
viewer take an active role in bringing the artwork into existence, whether it is
simply walking or physically interacting with it. In this way successful installation
artwork can always be seen as a good example of performative architecture.
What makes Acconci’s work significant is his sensitive understanding of the
power structures that weave through our built environments and how they bind
and blind our bodies. His dedication to the importance of the built environment
projects a substantiality that is lacking in the art field. At the same time the fact
that he is not a trained architect helps explain his disinterest with monumentality,
an acceptance of time and weathering in this work, and an openness to
community discussion and debate over his designs.

Acconci brings to his work an intimate understanding of how the body is in

relation to others and to objects. This transactive relationship is continued in
Constant’s urban designs. His visions of a future city can be read as a macro,
spatial ideation of Acconci’s description of transactive spaces. Though Acconci’s
recent architectural work has left behind the very personal nature of his earlier
performances, there is still a sensitivity that he has retained with his built works,
which understands that baring all can be as much about architecture, as it is
about the body. A key aspect of his work is that architecture is never neutral,
whether it is the ramp beneath you masturbating, or a wall that looks like a bra.
Architecture is always acting upon people, Acconci merely heightens the effect,
highlighting it and making it impossible to ignore.

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3.5
Urban Trans-actions
New Babylon

It is useful to view Constant Nieuwenhuy’s design of New Babylon in parallel to

Acconci’s installations. The relationship between Acconci and Constant’s urban
understandings is based in the transactive connection between bodies and built
environments. Conceived by the active mobility of bodies moving through
environments, the design of New Babylon solidifies the performative strategies of
Situationist theory. As with Acconci’s provocations between the body and
environment, New Babylon demands participation and improvisation. In it, it is
possible to see an urban environment built on Acconci’s intimate performances
and actions, where mobility becomes the key to inhabitation.

Constant put the Situationist theories of unitary urbanism, the dérive,

psychogeographical play and detournement, into built form.194 The practice of
the dérive is in itself a performative act, but in the extensive models Constant
made of the visionary city of New Babylon, it is possible to see an environment
based on Situationist theory.195 These models use the methodology of the gypsy
camp, a futuristic proposal of nomadism, of cities designed for transient
communities.

New Babylon is an urban form based on motion. It is situated in flux, where

bodies, environments, atmospheres and experiences are in continual
transformation. It proposes an urban image in stark contrast to the historically
fixed and stable state of the metropolis. While Le Corbusier pioneered the

194
While Constant was an original member of the Situationist International, his dedication to a
built reality put him in conflict with other members (a difficulty with many of the practicing artists)
leading to his resignation in 1960.
195
The name ‘New Babylon’ is derived from the ancient Summerian city of Babylonia. In the
bible it was branded lawless for its decadence and excess. What was being used pejoratively
was for Constant a perfect name for the ludic city, a city of desires and dreams. It came to
symbolise an alternative form of urban planning to the functional Modernist dogma of the time.

135
modern vision of the machinic metropolis, Constant responded with a city formed
on playful, transactive relationships between bodies and buildings. It aimed at
anti-architecture. Displacing the role of the master builder, the inhabitants
became individual creators of their environments.

136
 Fig.7
Constant Nieuwenhuys, Sector constructie, New Babylon,1956.
Catherine De Zegher, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s
New Babylon to Beyond (The MIT Press: USA,1999), p.119.

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Simon Sadler describes New Babylon’s structure as a space frame ‘ideally suited
to the creation of transitory, amorphous architecture, fantastic vistas and fecund
space, ready for homo ludens to let his imagination run wild’.196 The look of New
Babylon was a labyrinthine world of connected platforms, vast machinic elements
suspended from the existing cities and ground. The connection is often made
with the urban context of post war Europe; cities of demolition, reconstruction,
scaffolding and ladders – forms that pervade the New Babylonian spaces. The
city is also reminiscent of oil jetties or the airport terminals often referenced by
Constant. Catherine de Zegher also makes the point that Constant was
prophesying the World Wide Web, with its networks of flexible, personal spaces,
placed on another plane from the existing city structures.197 As an example of
flux architecture, New Babylon is both solid and in continual transformation. As
environments they vacillate between science fiction and the past, creating
psychogeographic spaces that provoke memories as well as propose futures.
The forms created an organic, interconnected system of spaces, open to multiple
programs and transformable. The structures floated, allowing the ground plane
to be free for traffic and the stable monuments and natural spaces of the past.
The interiors in contrast were fluid, mobile spaces that transformed through light,
sound and various mobile systems. Programs and actions were not pre-
determined by the architecture, but were created and re-created by individuals.

New Babylon was devoted to the collective. Reacting against capitalist

privatisation, it formed itself around social spaces, where homes were only ever
transitory. Highlighting interactions between people, the city’s inhabitants took
temporary control over their environments, prophesying the cognitive, smart
houses of the new millennium. It marked the conquest of nature through
technology. Sadler draws the connection of New Babylon with the utopian

196
Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (MIT Press: USA,1999), p.132.
197
Catherine de Zegher, introduction to The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures
from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (MIT Press: USA,1999), p.10.

138
architectural projects of Archigram, the faux cities of Disneyland and the
excesses of Las Vegas, all heightened artificial environments. But the difference
is Constant wanted to give control to each city dweller. The New Babylonians
were to be the architects of their city. By displacing the role of the ‘father figure’,
world-maker architect, the citizens would really own their city and feel
empowered to shape it according to their desires. This emphasis on the political
implications of the built environment is what Acconci is demanding in this
installation. By merging the private and public realms, Constant proposes a
reciprocity between bodies and buildings.

An architecture based on transaction is necessarily improvisational. In the

exchange between bodies and built spaces, pedestrians and inhabitants are
given the opportunity to innovate across the usual scripts of action. By granting
freedom of circulation and freedom of desires, the inhabitants of the city are
forced into action. Constant relied on this active participation for New Babylon to
work. The architecture would literally bring people together, promoting interaction
and community. The architecture was neither a controlling machine of
capitalism, nor a passive backdrop of history. Instead Constant wanted to create
a symbiotic relationship between architecture and people.

From the intimate spatial geometries of Schlemmer’s Bauhaus dances to the

multi-spatial metropolis of Constant’s New Babylon, these projects have shown
how performances have incorporated architectural concerns in novel ways. In
order to see their use for the design of built environments, lead to the problem of
the architecture drawing in bringing these embodied strategies into the design
process. The following chapter shows how a selected group of artists and
designers have reconsidered the systems of the architecture drawing. In
addition or exchange with the conventions of this specific drawing type, these
case studies draw on disciplines outside of architecture to present the
relationship of living bodies in contemporary environments.

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 ChapterFOUR
Performative Drawings

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The drawing has long been weighted by gravity, held by the same notational
limitations for over five hundred years and holding an unparalleled control over the
design process. Objects defined by Cartesian co-ordinates situated in a Euclidean
definition of space have been the architectural drawing’s core system, perpetuated by
its triumvirate of plan, section and elevation. Now that CAD systems provide the
opportunity to free architecture from orthogonal geometry, completely new forms of
architecture can be explored. Various new kinds of qualitative and quantitative forms
of representation have been taken up by digital architects. These systems have been
facilitated by software from aviation and nautical design, film and animation and auto
design through which multiple forms of data can be incorporated into the design
process.

In Chapter Two the history of the architectural drawing was presented from its
development during the Renaissance, showing how its structures of
representation have been formulated on specific spatial constructs. If we accept
that the architectural drawing fails to incorporate the new ways in which we
understand space and embodied movement, what are the alternatives? In this
section examples will be examined that acknowledge the problems of bringing
these elusive aspects onto paper. In the process of doing so, they propose new
methodologies. This chapter will argue that these forms, from choreography to
cartography, embrace new conceptions of space and the body and by doing so,
present new possibilities for the architecture drawing.

In order to escape the presentation of the purely tectonic elements of architecture

in the drawing, it is necessary to look to other disciplines. By focusing on bodily
movement, dance is a logical starting point for exploring new graphical
possibilities for bringing bodies into paperspaces. Movement diagrams as well
as dance scores provide notational systems that can be brought into the
architecture drawing. The infiltration of alternative graphical systems in

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architecture is growing, but these examples have be chosen because they
specifically contribute to bringing phenomenological concepts into the drawing.

The debate concerning the architecture drawing in the age of CAD must be
clarified in order to decide what must be held onto from conventional processes,
and what can be lost. This process becomes a questioning of what is important
to the design process, and what is a product of potentially outdated social
aspects. The drawing traces the ways in which artists or architects have brought
performative space into architecture by way of the drawing, looking at how the
traditional architectural processes of drawing can be expanded in order to make
space for bodies. This is encapsulated in the work of Gianni Baptista Piranesi
and Daniel Libeskind, whose drawings can be seen to reconfigure the traditional
systems of perspective and scale. This thesis is specifically looking at drawings
that embrace body movement, traditionally in the forms of maps, scripts and
scores. This takes us to cartography and choreography, two areas that may
provide the architectural drawing with new strategies for dealing with the moving
body. These highlight the problems of the drawing in architecture, leading to two
examples by the architects John Hejduk and Bernard Tschumi. Instead of
accepting the formula of single-point perspective, each example immerses the
body by using multiple, layered viewpoints. Each recognizes that fluidity is
integral to placing the body in the space of the 21st century – spaces structured
by the flow of information, communication, as well as bodies themselves. These
examples illustrate aspects of the difficult task of developing built environments in
this new context. They attack the traditional state of architecture as stable, and
integrate motion as a creative force. In Chapter five how each project redefines
space and the built environment will be unpicked in terms of the context of
changing technologies.

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4.1
Mapping Situations

Following from the environmental performances of the Situationists and

Constant’s design of a city based on their principles, this chapter begins by
looking at how those performative practices were represented on paper. The
Situationist dérive as a performance of pedestrian improvisation was presented in
the previous chapter in relation to bodily movement. To translate these
performances into images is to bring elements of motion, freedom and possibility
into the two-dimensional plane of the drawing. The Situationists imaged their
bodily strategies cartographically. A map directs the body - armoured in car,
plane, sneakers – through the landscape towards a desired destination. As such,
its purpose is the animate body in relation to places. The map therefore locates
the body, past, present and future in space: where one has been, where one is,
where one could be. In this way it states location without fixing place. In terms of
the architecture drawing, the map proposes a representation of the environment,
built on multiple temporalities and potential movement.

The map as a post-structuralist cliché has been embraced during the last fifty
years, exemplifying the transfer in interest from time and history to issues of
spatial conditions in critical discourse. It may also be argued that what separates
the map as a spatial representation from other systems is its potential for also
incorporating temporal aspects. While the diagram (which will be discussed in
the Chapter Five), depicts movement patterns, the map presents possibilities for
movement. In the map, what is important is acknowledged in what happens
between the objects shown, spaces for possible transition, whether a city
backstreet or a valley cleft through a mountain. In this way the map provides
opportunities for incorporating movement into the conceptualisation of space,
which is not simply motion, but the movement of bodies. Through its focus on
space, the map has been a strategy used in much literary and theoretical
architecture discourse, particularly in terms of Deleuzian theory. The map is a

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system that collates information in order to present it into comprehensible
images. Its historic status has been as a symbol of authority, defining ownership.
As another graphic process, it can slip into the architecture drawing, bringing with
it movement and potentiality. Like the architecture drawing, the map presents
data, constrained by functional and historical specifications. The construction of a
map is the construction of a language. While maps may utilise the tools of its
predecessors, each demand a different kind of reading, whether it is a street
directory, sea chart or treasure map. There is the factual information of the map;
naming, text, boundaries, and there is also the artistic; symbols, colours and
stylistics. Both operate as systems of description, defining spaces and
manipulating readership to its vision of the world.

There is a key difference in the way people look at maps in contrast to

architecture drawings. When viewing a map one looks at the blank spaces
between buildings. One is interested in locating places and transit, rather than
objects. When viewing the architecture drawing the focus is the solid lines, the
structure and form. What the average street map fails to present are the possible
encounters, the collisions and intersections of individual mappings, crossed
paths. Exploring the way maps present images of the world, Situationist
cartography focused on these empty spaces. The Situationist theory of the
dérive was based on moving through spaces, allowing their various sensory and
imaginary aspects to pull you from one space to the next. Situationist mapping
denied the absolutism decried in the average maps, instead infiltrating contrary
elements of possibility and desire. In this way the map is itself performative,
because rather than describing action, it allows the viewer to participate in the
environment.

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 Fig.8
Guy Debord & Asgar Jorn page from Mémoires, 1957.
Francesco. Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Process, (Editorial Gustavo Gili: Spain,
2002), p.105.

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4.1.2
Drawing the Dérive

Whether in the form of a remapping of known cities or in designs for

altogether new ones, an imagery of water functioned as the key metaphor
for the change and flexibility that modern capitalist society seemed to
deny.198

Situationist theory formulated itself on a fluid plane, reacting against the

bourgeois notion of stability and comfort.199 Motion was essential to the dérive, in
direct contrast to the monument, consumption and architecture itself. Situationist
movement establishes being ‘out of place’. Moving through the city, the drifter
sees and experiences it with the excitement and freshness of the tourist. In
making one’s own city new, it produces a continual sense of nomadism and
vagabondage.200 The idea of a culture based on movement summed up the
futurist society, without land ownership or other shackles of capitalism. Debord
wrote of the city as an ocean, mapping, exploring, ebbs and flows. In the dérive
this meant moving through places in the city possibly well known, but seeing
them as if for the first time. One would have to read the city in terms of context,
the time of day, one’s emotional state. In Constant Nieuwenhuys design of the
Situationist metropolis, the architecture would keep changing, instigating
continual movement. A key aspect of New Babylon was disorientation, where
nothing was recognizable. Exemplified in such places as the airport, Situationist
spaces are situated in-between, unbound by the usual structures of capitalism.
The opportunities for encounters are thus magnified in this liminal space. Using

198
Thomas McDonough, ‘Fluid Space: Constant the Situationist Critique of Architecture’ in
deZegher Catherine, Wigley, Mark (eds.), The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist
Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond (MIT Press: USA, 2001), p.102.
199
See Thomas McDonough’s essay ‘Fluid Space: Constant the Situationist Critique of
Architecture’ in The Activist Drawing. McDonough where he critiques their practice specifically in
political terms of the assumed state of fixed places against freedom of movement.
200
The concept of ‘nomadism’ has become an important term in post-modern theory, described
by Deleuze and Guattari’s in A Thousand Plateaus.

146
the liminal as a context for improvisation is a strategy devised in the Masque
projects of John Hejduk, where drawing the liminal will become a key issue for
representing the built environment.

Situationist cartography was a re-reading and re-inscribing of the city. It took

various forms, ink and paint on metro or country maps, collages from
newspapers and cartoons, aerial photographs and models. Due to their focus on
urban design, city plans were one of the most important techniques. The
Situationists were looking for new ways of presenting and seeing the city,
understanding how it could be understood pyschogeographically, rather than
held in the confines of quantitative geographical systems. Instead of observation
from a distance, they advocated experience in the action itself.

The dérive itself was shown on the map in arrows whose different sizes, weights
and tones suggested differing intensities. Situationist maps aimed to show that
moving through the city was always contingent and open to change. The
determinants of the dérive were intensities of both emotional and ambient types
and an ability to read the characteristics of places that repelled or seduced the
drifter. This was described through the analogy of the pinball machine, whereby
the urban inhabitants were continually pushed and bounced through the city by
unseen forces.201 There were also patterns which were mapped out
cartographically, such as the tendency to continue flows along ‘fissures in the
urban fabric’, which proved least resistant.202 The dérive was analytically
constructed in the map careful placement of the fragmented plans would express
how one remembered the sequences of places in one’s journey. The inscription
of lines, arrows and borders would show how environments shape our bodies
movements. This was most visible in the famous drawing of The Naked City
(Fig.4) by Debord, where movements were shown in arrows, lines, points of

201
Simon Sadler, The Situationist City, p92.
202
Simon Sadler, ibid, p90.

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intensities and explosions.203 Like the dérives themselves, these maps were
open-ended and transformational, intimating new possibilities rather than defining
end points. The Situationists drew from the original Surrealist descriptions of
moving through the metropolis as a coalescence of art and life. The drifter
moving through the metropolis saw the pavement as paper upon which their
meandering journey would be written. The cartography was connected to the
belief that the performance of the dérive itself was a kind of drawing.

Guy Debord and Asgar Jorn would cut up maps and displace and disconnect
them, floating segments of the city, disconnected and dislocated from their
original connections. In order to map the dérive, the Situationists had to invent
new notations of space and time. For the book Mémoires, Debord and Jorn
created a series of Situationist maps, combining Debord’s text and Jorn’s
paintings. They amalgamated abstract paintings with textural narratives and
prose poems, presenting a series of dérives through Paris. This was
fundamentally the Situationist image of the city, constructed through the
accumulation of personally experienced situations. Jorn’s dynamic paint
splatters conjured the expression of desire, the state of drifting and explosions of
events, while Debord’s words expressed memories, imagination and desires.
They provide a different way of documenting the space of the built environment
made by bodily interaction. The images of Mémoires are strange yet evocatively
personal mappings, which address the strict specificity of the map. The smell,
the dirt, the event of falling over, falling in love, falling asleep, the way places are
understood and ingrained in the human head rather than the Cartesian logic of
the road map.

In the drawings of Mémoires it is possible to decipher a new cartographic

language that grappled with the intangible issues of spatial negotiation such as
events, memories and desires. (Fig. 8) In it are methods used in The Manhattan

203
The map of The Naked City (1957) covered a specific area of central Paris, presenting a
psychogeographical account of movements across its terrain.

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Transcripts; collage, constructing series of initially disjunctive spaces and the use
of movement notation. They expose the map as an object of imagination, of
daydreaming, showing how the perception of places is contingent on a multitude
of personal interactions. To move further away from the role of the architecture
drawing as a communication device is to understand it as an examination of
spatial experience. The following drawings expose the experience of space as a
perspectival labyrinth. In contrast to passive representations of environments,
they demand from their viewers total immersion.

4.2
Losing Perspective

The autonomy of linear perspective and orthogonal geometry has been

questioned by radical architecture groups across Europe and America in search
of new ways of incorporating space and bodies into the design process.
‘Archigram’ in the UK, ‘Archizoom’ in Italy and ‘Antfarm’ in the USA, all
experimented with the architecture drawing using collage, photocopies and
sketches of visionary designs that critiqued the contemporary urban condition.
The governing structures of the architecture drawing were exchanged with
techniques borrowed from pop culture, more like advertising posters or record
covers. Rather than reconfiguring the design process, the aim was to construct
new representations of architecture as a subversive form of social critique.

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 Fig.9
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le Carceri, plate 6 (second state), 1761.
Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (s)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi, (Yale University
Press: New Haven & London, 1993), p.121.

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 Fig.10
Daniel Libeskind, Micromegas 3, Leakage, 1979.
Libeskind at the Soane: Drawing a New Architecture (Sir John Soane's Museum: Great Britain,
2001), p.9.

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Gianni Baptista Piranesi and Daniel Libeskind create two very different images of
built space that abandon the designated drawing systems and provide alternative
structures in which the architecture drawing can incorporate dynamic and
embodied elements. Both drawing types open up a phenomenological
relationship between the architectural image and the viewer. A key strategy used
by both artists is the play on perspective. In the loss of perspective that occurs in
these drawings, is the transformation of depth and scale. This creates a state of
immersion, where the viewer becomes part of the image.

Architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman and John Hejduk have all
cite Piranesi’s influence on their work. Piranesi’s architectural etchings from the
18th century retain a flagrant disregard for linear perspective. In his ‘Carceri’
etchings of the mid-eighteenth century, there is no central perspective, but a
perspectival labyrinth. (Fig. 9) Forgoing the tradition of single-point perspective
means forgoing a single reality. In order to see his ruins, prisons and temples,
one must personally enter into the image and move through the drawing,
negotiating a way through the spaces. Piranesi’s dream-like interiors
disorientate; the spaces seem to seethe and proliferate, drawing the viewer in
and letting them fall. The security of a singular dictated way of seeing the world
is replaced with multiplicity and a resulting destabilization. The viewer is made to
physically feel part of the image, rather than remain at a comfortable, separated
viewing distance. This is heightened by the roughness of the drawing style. The
coarse strokes allow areas to lose definition and dissolve into shadows.

The contemporary architect Daniel Libeskind would create another kind of spatial
mapping in his Micromegas series (1978) (Fig. 10) and Chamberworks (1983).
Unlike Piranesi’s visions of ancient Rome, these drawings are more like spatial
fantasies. They allude to space and architecture, without providing the viewer
with the necessary clues with which to see them as buildings. In these drawings

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Libeskind creates a new kind of spatial mapping. Rather than starting from the
premise of setting down an image of past experiences or concrete places, these
drawings propose an alternative understanding of space. They are speculative
architectures: they hint at possible but non-prescribed spatial experiences.

Libeskind uses the traditional tools of architectural drawing – compass, set

square and ruler, inked lines on paper. The drawings however are purposefully
unoriginal. They are drawn from architecture itself and constantly refer back to
architecture. Libeskind describes the architectural drawing as: ‘as much[…]a
prospective unfolding of future possibilities as it is a recovery of a particular
history to whose intentions it testifies and whose limits it always challenges’.204
For this reason he works within the systems of the architectural drawing – a
method of subversion from within. Libeskind utilizes the semiotics of architectural
drawing but subverts their rationalism, the results are images that are readable in
fragments but as a whole seem incomprehensible. Rather than only using the
typical architectural language for notating spatiality, Libeskind, who was also a
musician, incorporates the language of music. The drawings construct a
rhythmic patterning, repeating elements and forming dynamic motile structures
that hint at musical scores.

John Hejduk has described Libeskind’s drawings as profoundly

phenomenological.205 Architectural phenomenologist Juliana Pallasma has
similarly described Libeskind’s drawings as ‘architectonic visions [which]
interpreted a new multidimensional space-time experience’.206 Micromegas does
not immediately strike one as creating a felt, embodied space. They are hard-
edged drawings, full of points and lines, angles like sheer cliffs and broken
shards. The drawings have a geometric density that produces multiple points of

204
Jeffrey Kipnis preface in Daniel Libeskind: The Space of Encounter (Universe Publishing: NY,
2001), p.84.
205
John Hejduk, ‘Cross Over’ in Libeskind Macroscope to End Space: An Exhibition at the
Architectural Association (Architectural Assoc. Press:UK 1980), p.6.
206
Juliana Pallasmaa, ‘Images’ in Libeskind Macroscope to End Space: An Exhibition at the
Architectural Association, p.2.

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entry. In the same way that Piranesi’s etchings provided multiple perspectives
that create a disorientating reading of the space, Libeskind’s images allow one
the possibility of entering into the drawing and becoming immersed in the space.
As with Piranesi’s etchings, it is not possible to stand separate from it as in linear
perspective drawings. One must visually enter the image.

Having multiple perspectives simultaneously present, also liberates the drawing

from the traditional position of authority and control. Libeskind’s drawings are
continually proposing spatial narratives. Instead of perpetuating the architecture
drawing as a representation of absolute truth, Libeskind consciously exposes its
inability to present a single understanding of space. He recognises that once
something is formalized as built object it is assumed to become fixed. These
drawings are his attempt to show architecture as something in flux.

In the fluid environments of both Piranesi’s and Libeskind’s drawings, representations

figural imagery is specifically absent. The traditional architecture drawing demanded
the submission of the body to the authority of the image. Any bodies on paper are
generally featureless and few, their existence dedicated to providing scale. At the
same time the viewer’s body must be docile, accepting the authority of the image and
what it decides to make visible. In Piranesi’s etchings, outlines of bodies are only
occasionally glimpsed in shadows and they are conspicuously absent from
Libeskind’s. Yet this does not mean that the body is forgotten. The absent imagery of
bodies is a strategy that will be used in both Tschumi’s Transcripts and Hejduk’s
Masque projects. The body is central to each of these artists: The body as an
experiential entity relating and interacting with the environment around it. In contrast
to the figural body in architecture that presents a singular and static form, both artists
allow for two kinds of bodies. In order to incorporate phenomenological aspects into
the two-dimensional state of the drawing, the body of the viewer is highlighted.

The body in both works is not that of a separate and distanced entity, but of the
individual and personal body-subject of the viewer. It is not possible to remain

154
passively separate from the work as in a linear perspective drawing – one must dive
into it. Though initially they seem far from images of embodied interaction, both
Piranesi and Libeskind make space for the viewer’s body, allowing one to participate
in the environment. This emphasis on embodiment, while refusing to regress into
pictorial anthropomorphism connect their drawings with new digitally processed
drawings. Looking at the work of Piranesi and Libeskind next to some of the
contemporary digitally produced examples, reveals many visual similarities that will be
further examined in Chapter Five. In the next case study is a concerted effort to
rethink the architecture drawing, using cartographic systems. The Masques of John
Hejduk reflect the map’s qualities of presenting opportunities of potential movement
and interaction, integrating the intangible elements of the poetic experience into its
imagery.

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 Figs.11 & 12
John Hejduk, Retired General’s Place, from The Lancaster/Hanover Masque(above)
John Hejduk, The Lancaster/Hanover Masque (below)
(Architectural Association: London, 1992), pp.25 & 26.

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4.3
Scripting for Experiencing Bodies
The Masques of John Hejduk

The phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard believed that poetry was a strategy for
reaching a lyrical engagement with the subconscious. He called poetry a
‘phenomenology of the soul’, because the poetic image draws on the imagination to
affect an experiential response.207 In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard dissects the
spaces of memory, through poetry: the nests we long to curl up in, the stairways that
draw us into secrets and the cellars where we hoard our fears. The poetic becomes a
process that encompasses the interiorized phenomenological experience.208

The poetic is a critique that typically comes after construction. It is formed

through layered experiences, built up over time. To consider it during the design
process therefore initially appears incongruous. To bring the poetic into the
architecture drawing is to search for new methods of imagery. The architecture
drawing is made up of a series of orthogonal projections with annotated
information. It is based on conveying the adequate amount of information
needed to either see the building in one’s imagination; and, in the case of the
construction drawings, to build it. Neither premise provides the possibility of an
embodied or experiential understanding of a building. It is from this point where
the late American architect John Hejduk seems to begin.

Hejduk’s drawings delight as much as they dismay. The obscure imagery and poetic
narratives that accompany them are often considered pretentious and impenetrable.
Looking at these drawings I am drawn into them; they immerse me in a drama that I

207
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas (The Orion Press: NY, 1964), p.
XVI.
208
As discussed in Chapter One, phenomenology formulated around an interior body too easily
leads to another form of figural projection out into the world. This is the danger of reading
Hejduk’s drawing purely through a Heideggerean or Bachelardian view. Instead, by focusing on
transformative exchanges between bodies and built environments, Hejduk’s Masque projects can
be read as bringing a performative engagement into the architecture drawing.

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cannot quite fathom and must therefore fill in with my own thoughts and memories.
Instead of presenting only built forms, they also show the aspects typically absent
from the map or architectural drawing – the movements, actions and bodies. In these
projects the architecture drawing is rewritten as a presentation of the performance of,
and in, architecture. While Hejduk’s drawings seem to bear few similarities with
Tschumi’s graphic notations, they share an underlying belief in the interweaving of
bodies, events and architecture. While the Transcripts describe the incorporation of
movement into the architecture drawing, the drawings that make up Hejduk’s Masque
projects bring the experiential into architecture drawings that are typically distanced
and passive. Instead of presenting drawings of specific buildings or places, the
Masques provide the scripts and backdrops for actions and events.

The Masque projects provoke two key questions. First: how does one draw the
sensorial body? Second: how does one draw spaces for their embodied
movement? If the architecture drawing is a presentation of the tectonic elements
of a building, how is it possible to incorporate the other intangible elements of
architecture. Hejduk chooses to focus on these absent aspects of architecture.
They are memories and emotions and how people view their surroundings or the
way people enact rituals in certain places. The author Wim van dem Berg
described the framing device of the Masques as, ‘Theatrical/architectural models
in which Hejduk simulates the space of poetic thought in order to investigate its
qualities and order, the “architecture of inhabiting it”’.209 Rather than focusing on
the metaphysical elements of the poetic, looking at what van dem Berg could
mean by an ‘architecture of poetic inhabitation’, provides opportunities for
rethinking the architecture drawing in terms of embodiment and indeterminacy.
The space of these drawings, situated somewhere between theatre and
architecture, provides a liminal site bound by neither and thereby open to
questioning and examination.

209
John Hejduk, The Lancaster/Hanover Masque, (Centre Canadien d'Architecture: Canada,
1992), p.83.

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Hejduk’s Masque projects use the theatrical script as a structure in which to bring
bodies, spaces and buildings together. While the Transcripts draw on diagrammatic
techniques to incorporate the moving body, Hejduk’s Masques are reminiscent of
choreographic scores. While the Transcripts utilise modes based on cinema, the
Masques are indebted to theatre. Unlike the Transcripts, which documented extreme
events in realistic spaces, the Masques propose quotidian possibilities in the liminal
space of the theatre. Instead of information for building an object, Hejduk provides
information on people and their actions.

In a literal sense Hejduk uses the poetic in the accompanying text to open up
interaction with the reader rather than limit it to specific characters or situations. The
narratives that accompany each structure and character must be personally
deciphered. Their ambiguity provokes reflection. The texts allow for improvisation, for
taking on the role oneself. The poetic also describes the strategy that Hejduk uses
through each Masque. The Masque is a structure that engages the imagination
through the theatrical, drawing the viewer into the drawings.

Hejduk has left an abiding legacy from his teaching to such publications as a book of
cartoon-like sketches titled Architectures in Love.210 Hejduk has consistently denied
that building is essential to architecture, proclaiming that ‘drawing on a piece of paper
is an architectural reality’.211 Instead, he has rigorously explored the discipline through
poetry, drawing, hypothetical urban and residential designs and the Masques.

It is significant of the complexity of Hejduk’s work, that these projects have been
scrutinized through so many different theoretical lenses, from the linguistic and

210
John Hejduk, Architectures in Love: Sketchbook Notes (Rizzoli: NY, 1995)
Hejduk was Dean of architecture at Cooper Union New York for twenty-five years. He has
mentored and influenced many innovative American architects of the late 20th century,
advocating the interdisciplinary nature of architecture. Elizabeth Diller, Don Bates, Peggy
Deamer are all ex-students of Hejduk’s who have been vocal of his influence, but this is most
apparent in Daniel Libeskind’s work. Libeskind also wrote the introduction to Hejduk’s collected
works, The Mask of Medusa (Rizzoli: NY, 1989).
211
John Hejduk, The Mask of Medusa, p.69.

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metaphysical to urban theory and critiques of modernity.212 Their status as
architectural drawings that incorporate embodiment and motion, is useful for
rethinking them through the discipline of performativity. Architecture theorist K.
Michael Hays describes the aim of Hejduk’s drawings as: ‘to destroy the false
picture of a world already finished, whose features are already decided before
the architect arrives on the scene, to purge architecture of decades of
accumulated biases and partitions.’213

As with Libeskind’s architectural mappings, our recognition lies in the language of

architectural communication that Hejduk employs, a communication that implies
built form. Site drawings, elevations and sections betray their disciplinary roots
through the tools of compasses, rulers and coloured pencil renderings. While
this strategy will initially lull the viewer into the supposition of their status as ‘real’
building designs, their seduction lies in the continual slippage between fact and
fiction. Here the presumption of the architecture drawing as a pictorial
representation of reality is used to question our own assumptions about
architecture. The people who inhabit buildings, what they do and what the
buildings look like, assume the status of information in these drawings. What the
viewer is left with is an intermingling of character, event and building – a
performative understanding of architecture.

4.3.1
Drawing Restraints

Hejduk began the Masque projects in the late 1970s. Each drawing is titled with
a European city: Berlin, Lancaster/Hanover, Vladivostok, Riga. The Masque was
a type of dramatic entertainment from the European mummery tradition, popular

212
For a collation of different theoretical approaches to Hejduk’s work see Hejduk’s Chronotype
(Princeton Architectural Press:1996, USA), which includes essays by writers such as K. Michael
Hays, Robert Somol and Stan Allen.
213
K. Michael Hays (ed.), Hejduk’s Chronotype, p.13.

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in the 16th and 17th centuries. These events were presented for courtly
entertainment, usually incorporating mythological or allegorical figures. The
narratives of Masques were traditionally open ended and without a building
storyline or crisis, more like festivals than theatre productions. Stage sets were
incorporated into existing spaces, often elaborately designed by leading
architects of the time. They defined a specified space, cordoned off from reality
similarly to the carnival. These historical details form the grounding of Hejduk’s
projects, on top of which he builds his own, architecturally focused, performative
form.

Hejduk calls the first project ‘A Contemporary Masque’ with structures,

emphasizing the inclusion of free standing, architectural objects. The
composition of each Masque is text and drawing: character and action, beside an
image of an architectural form. As in the typical architecture drawing, the text –
usually appearing as annotations – are integral elements of information in the
drawing. A physical script, in the form of a site map, places each object and
provides the blueprint for imagined interaction. The Masque creates a field in
which the interplay between people, events and buildings becomes visible.

In setting the stage for improvisation in the drawing, the viewer is continually prompted
for physical manifestations. We ask: What will happen between these characters and
their strange buildings? How will the Masque be acted out? Or are they still-lives,
tableaux? Does the Masque only happen once? Are events played and replayed, night
after night? How can you envision the movement and interaction of the spectator
around these events? Will the usual programs suffice between these strange
partnerships of characters and structures. The naiveté of Hejduk’s drawings prove
deceptive, making them easy to dismiss as simply playful images. There is often
something too clear and simple about them. The flattened perspective of the
structures in the Masques produce a cartoon-like appearance. One is rarely sure
about how to enter them. If they have doors, how can they open? Are the windows
actually transparent glass, or like eyes revealing only your own reflection? A Masque

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implies something hidden, something beneath the surface. When Libeskind describes
Hejduk’s work as making visible the invisibility of architecture, he is describing the
carnality of everyday life.214 The elements normally absent in the architecture drawing
or map are the corporeal mess, encounters, deviations, memories – too garbled and
elusive to pin point using Cartesian co-ordinates.

4.4.2
Liminal Opportunities

The Masque’s placement in the theatrical defines a liminal site, but the architecture
drawing, being essentially an illusion of real places as previously discussed, also
describes a liminal space of representation. Replacing cartographic clarity, the
Masques are located in an in-between or other space, where the typical program of
architecture does not apply. Released from the onus of representing reality, the
Masques can deviate from typical spatial representations, providing an alternative to
space defined by Cartesian systems. The word ‘liminal’ comes the Latin limen, which
translates to ‘threshold’.215 The was made very popular in performance studies
through Victor Turner, who used it in terms of rituals describing a state of ‘betwixt and
between’ social catagories and personal identities.216 Richard Schechner notes that
what interested Turner in the liminal was the opportunity for creativity to be brought
into rituals, whereby new situations, identities and social realities could be performed
and explored.217 The liminal is essentially an ambiguous and open site, and in this
sense it is an ideal space for performative actions.

The liminal creates a spatial opportunity for deviant architectural exploration, making
room for transactive relationships and actions in the architecture drawing. The usual

214
Daniel Libeskind, introduction to The Masque of Medusa, p.16.
215
Richard Schechner, Performance Studies Handbook (Routledge: USA, 2006), p.58.
216
Victor Turner quotation in Richard Schechner, ibid, p.57.
217
Richard Schechner, ibid, p.57.

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structures of the architecture drawing are dissolved through this liminal site. Siting
architecture in a liminal space allows for the performative and makes space for
improvisation.

The Masques trace a journey. They are reminiscent of a band of travelling players
presenting a show and disappearing over night, only to appear again in another
foreign city. They have the seductive quality of circus performers or magic-makers.
Hejduk had only visited half of these cities. The Masques are not meant to be
extrapolations of a specific city’s site analysis, but like a circus are implanted into each
new site. Similar to a performance troupe, they animate the new location with their
actions. Buildings are presented in architecture drawings as monumental, cut out from
their surroundings and spotlighted. The theatrical setting of the Masque gives them
the quality of stage props. There is no permanence to them – rather, they are firmly
placed in the ephemeral as if they could be packed up in a few hours and sent on to
the next site. In this way Libeskind describes the Masques as locating architecture in
a human condition rather than a physical place.218 They are constructed by bodies,
rather than by places. The absence of site specificity in the architecture drawing is
highlighted in these drawings, because they are so markedly detached from any
sense of place. Libeskind contends that the act of specifying location shuts out the
possibility for the performance of architecture.219 Architecture becomes freed from
representation. It is through this liminal siting that Hejduk can thus critique this notion
of being and architecture. Eisenman strategizes this issue of site through what he
calls ‘the graft’. By removing traditional ideas of location, Eisenman believes
architecture can focus on its own specific issues, such as inhabitation. Grafting
becomes the process that is added to a place.220

218
Daniel Libeskind, introduction to The Mask of Medusa, p.14.
219
Daniel Libeskind, ibid, p.14.
220
The graft is an artificial act upon the site, where the new system or structure transforms the
existing one will be explored further in the Chapter Five in terms of Eisenman’s design of the
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

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The Masques have often been described in terms of the historian and cultural theorist
Johan Huizinga’s descriptions of “states of play” and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s
examinations of the “carnival”.221 Both describe temporary spaces separated from
prescribed and productive reality. This allows for aberrant actions. The carnival is
traditionally a space of release and celebration from the everyday, but Hejduk’s
Masques do not speak of escape, the angels have amputated wings and the people
are weighted with everyday fears and ambitions. 222 Instead, Hejduk uses the
essentially liminal space of the drawing to question the relationship between bodies,
Events and buildings. The suspension of normative social and temporal rules and
structures allow the possibility for new social configurations. Rather than the typical
scripting of movement and interaction, the bodies within these spaces are enabled to
improvise.

4.4.3
Drawing Space & Time

In the carnival, conventional temporal rules are overturned. In Hejduk’s Masques the
relationship between time and motion is emphasised. This is exemplified in the Berlin
Masque’s structure of the Clock Tower, an architecture of temporality. A tower is
numbered along two sides, when the hour strikes a square blank surface covers the
number. Hejduk explains, ‘blocking it out so to speak, or we can not see fixed time, or

221
In the 1930s the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga described the “state of
play” as a separate space outside of ordinary life, where free, voluntary, unproductive and non-
ulititarian acts could occur. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element (Beacon
Press: New York,1986).
Mikhail Bakhtin describes the carnival in terms of collectivity, as a space which gathered together
people beyond the typically held social, economic and political catagorizations. Costumes and
Masques heigtened the subsuming of the individual into a larger, performing body, promoting a
greater sense of ones own sensual self.
222
The ‘carnivalesque’ is a term, which comes from the carnivalizing of normal life. The carnival
inverts official social norms, and in this way they can be considered highly subversive, proposing
alternative social possibilities. They were also traditional events where participants would be
totally immersed in a separated world that was turned upside down, and therefore allowed for
alternative performances.

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feel the present, we are simply in motion’.223 Motion takes the place of time, a
continual sense of moving on, forward, backward, and the action of events rather than
the linear structure of time. This state of motion, however, only heightens the sense of
the present. The clock does not define the time; time is defined by the body.

Hays uses the term ‘Chronotype’ to describe Hejduk’s work, also the name of a
collection of noted essays published about Hejduk.224 The term is also taken from
Bakhtin, who defined the Chronotype as the phenomenal aspect of a constructed
space, holding specific temporal and spatial features.225 Hays quotes Bakhtin’s
description of a space where, ‘time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes
artistically visible, likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements
of time, plot, and history.’226 In the performance the Hejduk Masques, space is
understood, as in Schlemmer’s dances, as something volumetric. No longer passive,
the space actively interacts with the people and objects within in it. Temporality gives
way to the transaction between bodies and this solid space.

4.3.4
Theatrical Perspectives

The Masque was historically a specific from of theatre whose perspective

changes through movement. In contrast to the proscenium arch, masques were
originally viewed while moving through external spaces such as courtyards.
Unlike the Renaissance Theatre that would evolve later, there was no dedicated
stage in the masque and the division between spectator and performer often

223
John Hejduk, The Mask of Medusa, p.141.
224
K. Michael Hays (ed.), Hejduk’s Chronotype.
225
The term ‘chronotype’ was described by Bakhatin in his essay ‘Forms of Time and of the
Chronotype in the Novel’ in terms of literature. Chronotype literally translates to ‘time space’,
expressing the essential intermeshing of time and space in concrete reality.
226
Mikhail Bakhtin ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotype in the Novel’ in Micheal Hoquist, ed.
The Dialogic Imagination, Carl Emerson & Holoquist, M, trans (University of Texas: Austin, 1981),
quoted by K. Michael Hays, introduction to Hejduk’s Chronotype, p.10.

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blurred. This was heightened by the fact that courtiers often participated in the
performances along with the actors. In order to present this through the drawing,
Hejduk infiltrates the traditional systems of the architecture drawing with the
theatrical.

The presentation of the Masques is the listing of character and event next to an
image of the structure. The images themselves retain the fixed nature of
architectural orthogonal projections but they are destabilized by the text, or rather
by the bodies described in the text. In this way, to describe the employment of
perspective in the Masque projects are through both image and text, and as an
unfolding series, rather than encapsulated in a single image. Unlike the typical
architecture drawing, there is no single viewing point and the boundaries
between subject and object are uncertain.

Motion is highlighted in the Masques through the essentially static quality of

drawings and text. Unlike Tschumi’s Transcripts, where the drawing system itself
incorporates mobility through cinematic and dance techniques, the Masques are
almost disturbingly static. The carefully delineated and rendered architectural
drawings present themselves as empty spaces awaiting inhabitation, devoid of
figures and dependant on the accompanying text for action. In the Transcripts
perspective becomes multiplied and montaged, layering in the manner of
Libeskind’s Micromega drawings. In Hejduk’s Masques perspective is something
one travels through. The Masque is read in movement from one event and
structure to another.

This dramatic program is produced in the drawings by Hejduk’s refusal to present

a single, overall image. Instead the spaces unfold as one moves through them.
There are site plans showing the layout of structures, lists of structures and
characters, rough sketches. They are almost incomprehensible when read
individually, but in accumulation they build up the performance. There is no
finished, single performance – and one is forced to give up on the idea of finding

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it. As one begins to randomly look at different structures or pick out character
names, one realizes that the performance is already underway in one’s reading
of it. The drawing is not the Masque, it is the script for the Masque. But it
provides the potential for the performance, a potentiality lived out in its reading.
This interaction between the reader and the Masque bring the body into these
projects.

4.3.5
Drawing Bodies

As noted in the drawings of Piranesi and Libeskind, the absence of figural body
allows the possibility of the viewer, allowing them to enter the imaged space. In
the Masques there are two bodies that are presented: the character within the
drawing and the body of the viewer. In the same way motion in the Masques is
two fold: the character’s action within the Masque and the viewers navigation
through the space of words and images. These two bodies negotiate the space
of the theatrical Masque and the space of the drawing, a process that enacts the
performance of Hejduk’s architecture.

The body in Hejduk’s Masques is shown as a trans-active, creative force.

Whether it is the architecture working on the body or visa versa, the interaction of
object and subject is essential. The body is presented in the Masques as the
specific body. In this first body it is not simply a physical, abstracted entity, but a
character, named and expressed through a dedicated action. In this way Hejduk
denies generalizations: the bodies are individual bodies in line with a
phenomenological reading. The body is characterized to become a specific body
– the time-keeper, the general, the suicide. The character described in the text
functions as the bodies within the drawing. The body is not imaged in the
Masques, but shaped in text. Rather than physical descriptions, the characters
are presented through an event. These bodies then are formed by their actions,

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rather than external features. Their personal interactions in space are what
shape the environments. The viewer receives only a name and an event against
the backdrop of an architectural form, they must fill in the gaps themselves and
writer their own performances.

The body of the viewer is needed to fulfil the latent action of the Masques. They
are a game in which to participate whereby the viewer animates the still images.
When viewing the drawings, the emptiness between objects is extreme and
strange. There are almost never people drawn into the images of the Masques,
only very occasionally as shadowed figures aimed to show scale. The text
functions to fill these empty spaces or rather for the viewer to fill it. In this way
the viewer’s body becomes essential. Motion is presented through the text of the
event. This is created by the viewer: one reads the text, and in the process
imagines the event. This is fundamental to the Masque becoming a
performance, the active (through the imagination) participation of the viewer. The
perspective is custom-built. In this way the viewer’s body becomes the co-
ordinating point around which the environment is constructed.

4.3.6
The Creative Collision of Bodies and Buildings

In the Lancaster/Hanover Masques Hejduk describes the first three drawings as X-

rays. These extraordinarily fine and detailed pencil drawings, stand out separately in
detail and style. They seem to expose the internal organs of the buildings they
present. Hejduk describes the Court house as exposing the entire story, where the
accused is sentenced, the judge seen through. But when you look at the drawing,
there are no figures or tableaux of this event, only the structure. 227 The rendering of

227
John Hejduk, Masque Lancaster/Hanover, p.13.

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the drawings expose the narratives of events that shape it. It is as if this repeated
scene had become ingrained into each carefully wrought line.

The impact of individual bodies on architecture takes on a dreamlike quality in the

Masques. The initial reassurance of their clinically constructed pencil lines and the
repeated use of archetypal building typologies (towers, bridges, theatres etc),
transforms into a growing discomfort. The shapes become almost too familiar, spikes,
hair, claws protrude from walls and prisons, anthropomorphic or animistic, dangerous
and monstrous. Van den Burgh suggests that they can be read as prostheses of the
inhabitant, man-made extensions in architectural form.228 Like the cyborg, where flesh
and metal combine to construct a new human body, the architecture in Hejduk’s
masques seem implanted with visceral, bodily qualities. Where as with Schlemmer’s
costumes, the body takes on architectural propose that extend out toward the
surrounding environment, it is the buildings in the Masques that seem to reach out to
the inhabitants. Far from being a subservient backdrop to human emotions and
actions, the architecture appears to actively act back onto people.

In the interaction of bodies and architecture Hejduk reveals the most provocative
questions for the possible practice of performative architecture: in the performance of
everyday life, do buildings shape bodies or do bodies shape buildings? In this chicken
and egg paradox the question for the design process is which end should we start
from? The body could be a reflection of the architecture, or architecture’s reflection in
it. It takes the idea of phenomenology, where space is felt through embodied action to
an extreme, where the built space is also intimately formed by the inhabitant. One is
not sure what happened first – has the structure transformed over years to become an
extension of its owner? Or has the person somehow taken these obtuse shapes into
their consciousness? The clearest example is ‘The House for the Suicide’, where the
harsh radiating roof of spikes evoke clearly and emotively the internal desperation of
the inhabitant. The question of whether buildings are shaped by bodies or the other

228
Wim van den Bergh, ‘Icarus’ Amazement, or the Matrix of Crossed Destinies’ in Masque
Lancaster/Hanover, p.83.

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way round, is constantly being posed. If the architecture has not anthropomorphised
into an avatar of its inhabitant, has at least been formed by the events within it?

The key question posed by Tschumi was how Events sculpt built environments.
Tschumi showed it through the disjunction of Events and spaces, that it is the
interaction between Events, buildings and what they are programmed for, which
create architecture. Hejduk is putting forward a similar claim, but his strategy is
based around embodied Events. In doing so the Masques retains an even
greater ambiguity, allowing for personalized interaction. Rather than focusing on
disjunctive relationships, Hejduk presents Events and buildings as seamlessly
connected.

Many writers have described the Masques in terms of a matrix as a structure for
understanding their complexity. As with Tschumi’s Transcripts, each disparate
part constructs a reality through its relationship with another element, creating an
interlocking system contingent on each connection. In this way it that it is not
possible to say that the forms are made by bodies or the other ways around.
Instead, it means to understand the relationship between events and structures
as interwoven, in constant dialogue and change.

Hejduk’s Masques become a distillation of the relationship between architecture

and inhabitant. The buildings themselves are merely odd forms without their
human partner, fixed shapes while the characters contain the stories. The
structures are essential in order to place the bodies. The text of the Masque
functions as an essential piece of the project, as opposed to explanatory wording.
Together the two propose architecture. This proposition however is not itself
architecture. The architecture occurs through the Masque, through the
performance between character and structure. The actions of the inhabitants
performatively construct the architecture. The existence of the architecture is
only within the performance because it occurs only through action. For example
the vault passage of the bank is constructed by the Bank-Key Man’s ritual of key

170
making; the Weatherman’s tower is made by his refusal to forecast the weather.
Hejduk’s Masques are important in questioning the architecture drawing because
they bring together bodies and buildings in the most profound and poetic sense.
They endeavor to map the very personal interactions that occur in real space,
between real bodies.

Rather than fetishizing architectural forms, Hejduk shows that only through the
interaction of people and buildings can drawings begin to present architectural
properties beyond the purely tectonic. Instead of perpetuating the great distance
between the architecture drawing and the viewer, that drawings can pull you into
spaces, allowing you to participate in the performances, inhabit the places.
These emotive performances refuse to remain distanced from the viewer. As a
result they transform the traditionally silent state of buildings and expose its many
voices. As theatrical scripts they propose that rather than seeing bodies and
buildings as separate and hierarchical entities, that their interactions and
subsequent transformations are continually interweaving. Allowing opportunities
for improvisation across this script, means allowing for creative and active
involvement. An important part of any drawing is the language it uses to present
the non-visual qualities of space. The incorporation of experience and motion for
example, demand abstractions of information. For this reason it becomes useful
to look to the field of dance for how it has coped with similar difficulties in its
documentation.

4.4
Drawing Dance

In forgoing the assumed state of the body as figure, the architecture drawing can
open the design process to new bodily understandings. Transcribing the
phenomenologically understood body is a difficult project. It means fixing the
multiple sensory and ever shifting body into a graphic system, while at the same

171
time relating that body to the spatial surroundings. The moving body is one of
the invisible elements of the architecture drawing. It is implied in the blank
spaces between the lines and the possibility of traversal and gathering as walls
create corridors and openings. When the body is absent it is assured,
consequently, that it is an element that will be included post-construction. In this
way it is made to ‘fit’ into the architecture. To incorporate it at the beginning of
the design process is fraught with difficulty.

Drawing the living body has been of great importance to the discipline of dance,
whose practice, being based on live performance, has had to grapple with the
difficulties of its documentation. Dance notation provides possible systems of
representation focused on the animate body. By using a language connected
with movement, it brings with each notated line the intimation of the body moving
through space. It shares with architecture the use of movement diagrams.
Unlike architecture, which sees them as additional information, the central issue
for dance is this body in space. Several contemporary choreographers see this
interaction as dynamic and interactive and have been dedicated to searching for
new modes of representation in order to document this.

The relationship between dance and architecture notations is few. The Feuillet-
Beauchamp system in 18th century France presented body movements and floor
plans combined like architecture drawings, so that the front of the stage was also the
top of the page. Generally however, the two systems have found little common
ground in the past. At the same time that architecture drawing systems were first
being refined, the Renaissance also saw the early development of dance notation.
Ballet was performed on a proscenium stage, thereby choreographed for single-point
perspective. As dance steps became more popular and complex during the 17th
century, the previously basic notations became systemized. However these notational
forms still failed to show what should happen from the waist up. It was not until early
in the 20th century that systems based on abstract information, rather than imagery,
were developed.

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This shift toward abstract systems occurred as a result of the desire to incorporate
elements that pictorial representations fail to include: energy, force, direction, intent
and potentiality. In abstracted representational systems the shape of movement is not
as important as the movement itself. This can be seen in Wassily Kandinsky’s
drawings of Gret Palucca in 1926, which present a body distilled into a minimum
number of brush strokes.229 Kandinsky created diagrams for a series of photos of the
dancer that encapsulated the dynamic action of each pose. The body is presented as
creative force, rather than a passive figure in space. It shows how abstracted
techniques can allow intent and direction to come into the image. These drawing were
of a single dancer striking particular poses. When movement must be considered in
multiple transformations, it becomes much more complicated.

The dance score functions similarly to the drama script or musical score. It tends to
document a creation, or present a set of instructions delineating how a piece is to be
performed. On the one hand like the architecture drawing, the score is a form of
translation. On the other hand, unlike the architecture drawing, it holds few of the
illusions to authenticity, where, particularly in the drama script, ranges of interpretation
has become a generally accepted practice. It presents an overview of an artwork, it is
the blueprint of a work that clarifies the intent of the original creator. The notion of the
score, therefore, provides opportunities to infiltrate the architecture drawing with the
ambiguous and the indeterminate.

The difficulty incorporating the dynamic body into a fundamentally static image
has led choreographers to look beyond their own disciplinary borders. Due to
their intermingling of theatre and the fine arts, the Bauhaus produced interesting
examples of movement scores. In Lazlo Maholy-Nagys’ essay ‘Theatre, Circus,
Variety’, he included a score for his suggested production of a Mechanized

229
‘Dance Curves of the Dance of Gret Palucca’ (1926). Kandinsky analysed four photos of the
German dancer Grey Palucca taken by Charlotte Rudolphe. See Ulrike, Becks-Malorny, Wasily
Kandinsky 1866-1944: The Journey to Abstraction (Taschen: Koln, 1999).

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Eccentric.230 It was to be a musical variety show that synthesized form and
colour, light, sound and odour.231 In this score the difficulties of the
choreographic score is made apparent. Maholy-Nagy was trying to find an
alternative way of scripting theatre productions, which was no longer reliant on
traditional dramaturgies. His drawing looks like a film score by Sergie Eisenstein
or a systemized puzzle of different kinds of imagery and notations. He wanted to
incorporate into the drawing the interconnectedness of each element in his
production. His sketch for the Mechanized Eccentric score is a vertical score
showing the relationships of the different elements for a performance. The first
column is made up of collages as well as what looks like movement notations.
This formatting will recur in The Manhattan Transcripts, drawing on the cinematic
and a matrix of performative elements.

In the last century choreographers have developed a variety of new notational

techniques.232 The difficulty has been how to incorporate time and direction into a
written system. The first and most influential notation system to do this was invented
by the Austrian choreographer Rudolph Laban in the 1920s. Labanotation is the first
descriptive vocabulary of movement specifically designed for the field of dance that
aiming to record every type of human movement. Duration, movement and the shape
of movement was integrated into a complex, graphic language. More than the creator
of a movement notation system, Laban formulated a theory of movement based on
relating body structure to the structure of movement in space. Laban understood
movement as a dynamic process operating between stability and mobility, with the
various elements of bodily movement as connecting parts of a unified whole.233

230
See Lazlo Maholy-Nagy ‘Theatre, Circus, Variety’ in Walter Gropius, (ed.), Theatre of the
Bauhaus, ibid.
231
Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, ibid, p.49.
232
Two of the most used systems in dance are the Eshkol-Wachmann and Benesh notation.
Eshkol-Wachmann Movement Notation is a general movement technique that is essentially
numeric, whereby the body is conceived like a stick figure. Benesh notation on the other hand
presents three dimensional movement like a musical score on a five line stave that corresponds
dimensionally to different points on the body.
233
Vera Maletic, Body-Space-Expression: The Development of Rudolf Laban’s Movement and
Dance Concepts (Mouten de Gruyter: Berlin,1987), p.52.

174
Gestures were presented in terms of space, time, force and flow, showing direction,
duration and energy. He had initially studied architecture and had a keen awareness
of space in his examinations of bodily documentation. Body movement was
understood by Laban as built up in space, with direction as the most important
element. He ‘believed that moving into various spatial directions contains a form-
building force, similar to the building of crystalline forms’.234 The appearance of
Labanotation has the look of a musical score in the graphic form of a Bauhaus
etching. Being able to encapsulate the multitudes of physical movement in a graphic
way is seductive, but their complexity leads to a tendency to see them as
representational imagery.235 It may be postulated that this led to Herzog de Meuron’s
decision to ignore Laban’s famous notional system in their design of the Laban Centre
in London, in favor of capturing movement itself across the façade.

4.3.1
Drawing Chance

The renowned avant-garde musician and artist John Cage inspired many
choreographers and performers during the 60s and 70s to incorporate potentiality
and chance into their work. Cage’s performance scores merge mapping
techniques and informational systems, pushing the conventional assumptions of
authorial control. The choreographer Merce Cunningham has been known to
choreograph dance sequences by rolling dice. To bring potentiality into the
drawing means relinquishing complete control over the final product.
Indeterminacy in the design process will become a key tactic for several digital
architects, leading to philosopher Brian Massumi’s description of ‘Post-heroic
architecture’. The use of indeterminacy to create new kinds of movement and

234
Vera Maletic, ibid, p.176.
235
An example can be seen in the Stevie Eller Dance Theatre on the University of Arizona
campus in Tucson that was completed in 2004. Designed by Gould Evans Associates, the design
was based on the Labanotational score for the noted choreographer Goerge Balachine.

175
form may be the key overlapping issues between contemporary architecture and
contemporary dance.

Specific to both the architecture drawing and the choreographic score is the issue of
potentiality. Both drawing types do not aim to represent past actions, but future ones.
This means building flexibility into the performance script. Traditional ballet scores
and notations present only body shapes, where teaching becomes a process of
mimicry. They are formulated on defining fixed events. Alternatively, contemporary
choreographers have endeavoured to understand that notations must present a body
that is never still, but holds multiple potentialities of movement.

In their shared dismissal of Cartesian space and traditional dance forms, many
contemporary choreographers have drawn on different artistic disciplines to present
new kinds of movement and interaction. In breaking away from traditional dance
typologies, new forms of documentation are needed. Technology has become central
to creating systems that can document and represent the essentially live medium of
dance. An example is Cunningham, who uses dance notation as a creative starting
point, drawing on new technologies. Cunningham was the first notable choreographer
who began experimenting with integrating computer technologies into dance works.236
Cunningham uses LifeForms software (now called DanceForms), as a generative
device for exploring new kinds of movement.237 LifeForms is a program for creating,
storing and editing movement, but is more suited for experimentations in
choreography than documenting it. It is ideal for use in collaboration with live
performances, and as a tool for creating new kinds of movement. In his well-regarded
production of BIPED in 1999 with digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar,
motion capture images were projected onto scrims, allowing dances to perform in real
time with their avatars.

236
Jose Gil analysed Cunningham’s choreography using Deluezian theory, describing it as
creating a new choreographic language. See Gil’s essay José Gil La danse, le corps,
l’inconscient. Terrain n.35 septembre 2000 Danser
237
LifeForms software for choreography developed by a design team from Simon Fraser
University in Vancouver. It is now called ‘Danceforms’.

176
Accepting the scripting of living bodies in architecture, means finding new ways
of incorporating these bodies into the design process. Instead of focusing on the
documentation of solid forms, to look at bodily transition and spatial transaction is
to bring into the drawing process possibilities for chance and improvisation. As
contemporary dancers such as Cunningham and Forsythe utilize new
technologies, the disciplines of dance and architecture start to converge. What
dance may provide is methods that respond to the difficulty in retaining the
animate body in the virtual acrobatics generated by new, generative, architectural
programs. By focusing on the moving body, the interaction and overlap of
technologies can bring issues of the environment into dance practice and the
body into architecture.

Architecture drawings typically consider these issues from the perspective of the
built environment rather than the body. As a result they typically fail to consider
the space between bodies and buildings, choosing instead the solidity of
buildings. What follows is an analysis of a project by Tschumi who takes the
similar themes of the event and the experiential, but is focused on reinterpreting
the traditional systems of the architecture drawing. In Tschumi’s drawings of The
Manhattan Transcripts can be seen an innovative experiment in endeavouring to
capture multiple emotive, physical and bodily elements – in motion, on the page.

177
 Fig.13
Bernard Tschumi, from The Manhattan Transcripts, 1978.
Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1994), frontispiece.

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4.5
Exploring Movement in the Architecture Drawing
The Manhattan Transcripts

Bringing movement into the architecture drawing has become a central concern
of the architectural design process. The accepted dualism of body-subject and
architecture-object has traditionally allowed only one aspect to be in movement.
The weight of architecture has made it the inert element and its mode of
representation has followed suit, presenting in paper form, objects in stasis.
Reconsidering these assumed states means finding new ways of incorporating
motion into the architecture drawing. Bringing movement into the static image of
the architecture drawing presents a paradoxical problem. While movement has
been the key aspect traditionally missing from the architecture drawing, CAD
programs are allow the possibility of bringing dynamism into the design process
itself. Firstly however, new systems of notation must be developed in order to
facilitate this process. The conundrum of bringing movement into the
architecture drawing is illuminated in a project by Bernard Tschumi from 1978.
The Manhattan Transcripts was a book in which Tschumi invented a new
architectural notational system, combining photos, architectural drawings and
movement diagrams into a filmic sequence of images. Tschumi addresses the
problematics of the architectural drawing, creating a model for seeing spaces as
opportunities for embodied action.

Because of his teaching and extensive publications, Tschumi has been an important
figure in architectural discourse for the last three decades.238 Tschumi’s continual and
often radical examinations of body, event and space in architecture, make his work
important to consider in constructing a theory of performative spaces. His projects
have evolved from theoretical propositions to buildings, and retaining the argument

238
Initially during the 1970s and 1980s Tschumi taught at the Architecture Association in London
with Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid and later as dean of architecture at
Columbia University, New York.

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that there is no architecture without events.239 Reacting against both the dominant
modernist and post-modernist paradigms, Tschumi demands that architecture give up
its dedication to monumentality and stylistic concerns. He argues that architecture
must move beyond the doctrine of ‘form follows function’ and embrace human
movement and actions. Inspired by Situationist writing and French urban theory of the
60s, Tschumi explored how these politically charged theories could be incorporated
into architectural practice. From his early theoretical projects to the large-scale,
commercial architecture designs of today, he explores various ways of achieving this.

“In order to understand architecture,” Tschumi argues, “one must not ask: what does it
look like? But rather: what is happening in that space? What motion is inhabiting it”.240
Breaking from the historically fixed definitions of architecture, The Manhattan
Transcripts propose the following: for architecture to encompass the moving body in
space, the process of making and thinking it would have to change. The Transcripts
are not meant to be representations of existing spaces or imaginary visions, but –
similar to Libeskind’s Micromegas series – they are described by Tschumi as ‘an
architectural interpretation of reality’.241 In this way the Transcripts are distinct from
the typical brief of the architecture drawing, as either the presentation of potentiality, or
Piranesi’s visionary architectural spaces. Rather than a narrative based solely on
people’s actions, in the Transcripts the environments contribute their own stories.
They provide a new way of envisioning space, which is built around moving, laughing,
living bodies. This is in contrast to the descriptions of the built environment as a stage
set, ‘architecture ceases to be a backdrop for actions, becoming the action itself’.242

The Transcripts appear more like film scores than architectural drawings. Looking
at them is to see the world in flux. The images are fragments caught or stolen

239
Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (St. Martin's Press: UK, 1995), p.121.
240 th
Campiotti, Alain, ‘An Architect Who Wins the World’, trans. by Sylvia Hottinger, Saturday 7 ,
January, 2006. Letemps Journal Website. Retrieved 10.05.2007
<http://www.letemps.ch/template/transmettre.asp?contenupage=nlreader&page=newsletterdispla
y&id=20&NLArtID=5691>
241
Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, p.7.
242
Bernard Tschumi, Questions of Space, Text 5 (Architectural Assoc: UK, 1990), p.95.

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from time, you must piece them together like clues. They create stories that are
spatially transcribed, urban environments shaped and molded by a series of
extreme events. The Transcripts incorporate multiple drawing systems in order
to formulate each narration and in doing so become critiques of what is absent in
the typical architecture drawing.

Tschumi understood that performance practices provided a connection between

the event and architecture. Focusing on live actions as the impetus for spatial
understanding becomes the basis for his thesis on architecture as an event. His
projects with students at the Architecture Association in London during the 70s
drew on dance and theatre as well as literature and film. He also collaborated
during this time with the performance artist Rosalee Goldberg. The performance
of the fall or the murder is enacted in the Transcripts, which repeat each
performance like a film. But their lack of clarity means that each performance will
always differ depending on the reader. In this way they are far from the fixed and
static nature of the traditional architecture drawing.

The Transcripts are an exploration of how to document the late 20th century city.
They are similar to how the Situationists explored different mapping techniques in
the images depicting their drifting through the Paris. By including time,
experience and movement, both Tschumi and the Situationists questioned the
core techniques and practises of spatial representation. Tschumi aimed to bring
the ephemeral experiences of the body into the practice and the understanding of
architecture. His method in The Manhattan Transcripts can be described as a
cinematic narrative of space. It distinguished what he saw as the three key
interconnected elements: events, motion and architecture. The Transcripts
provided a new way of imaging space built on these three programs, specifically
devoid of the traditional semiotics of architectural representation. In order to do
this Tschumi imported several new language tools from cartographic, cinematic,
movement and dance notation. By integrating alternative, but recognisable,
methods of representation with traditional architectural drawings, Tschumi

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proposed a holistic way of seeing the built environment, rather than the singular
vision portrayed in traditional drawings. There are three key strategies that
Tschumi employs in order to bring motion into these drawings: the layered use of
multiple notation systems, the integration of movement diagrams and the
development of cinematic techniques. These elements provide a vision of
architecture in constant transformation, a state created by the events that occur
within it.

4.5.1
Spaces, Programs, Events

The Transcripts must be examined, considered and then deciphered. It is necessary

to unravel their systems (architectural notations, movement diagrams, film scores), in
order to read them. The architectural programs that stand as titles to each chapter are
the spaces that are realised through the drawings: the park, the street, the tower, the
block. These chapters are made up of a series of images, amalgams of maps, photos
and diagrams in repeated layouts and combined into a small book of sixty pages. The
Transcripts present the world of events in photographs, the world of objects in
architectural drawings and diagrams, and the world of movements through
choreographic notations. Each of these aspects can be interpreted independently, but
as interwoven images they produce new interpretations, new narratives.

What Tschumi wanted to highlight is the disjunction created between spaces,

programs and events – the ballerina boxing in the church. In the chapter ‘The Block’,
the built space is five inner courtyards of a typical city apartment block. It is inserted
with unusual figures, such as ice skaters, footballers and soldiers. The focus of these
drawings is the disjunction between events, movements and spaces and the
outcomes and confrontations these disjunctions produce. Many theatre groups from
the avant-garde in London at this time were taking performances into unusual spaces,
and playing with the outcomes of such everyday theatres. During the time Tschumi

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was working on the Transcripts in London, several artists such as the group Fluxus
and the choreographer Merce Cunningham were experimenting with the relationship
between built spaces and art. They recognised the site specificity of where they
performed, searching for stages out of theatre in order to explore new relationships
between performers and architecture. From his disciplinary position in architecture,
Tschumi emphasized that it is what happens within built environments that makes
them what they are. The spaces of architecture are not fixed and absolute, but are
transformed by the events that occur within them.

Tschumi considered events as instantaneous and ungrounded. The introduction

elucidated Event theory as a specific approach taken up by Post-structuralist theorists
in order to rethink time and space. The Transcripts provide a strategy for bringing
these theories into the process of designing architecture. The program of a project
typically describes function and use. Instead of seeing programs as the singular
functional requirement for a project, Tschumi considered them as only a series of
events. Tschumi disrupted the conventional use of programs in architecture by
introducing alternative, extreme events, such as a murder and someone falling from a
building. By doing this he was questioning spatial function – something traditionally
seen as the core of architectural design. If form follows function, what happens if the
function of a building is transitory or bizarre?

The importance of the Transcripts lies in the questions it poses for the
architecture drawing; one such question is how to construct true representations
of the world? Through the Transcripts Tschumi asked: How can a different
process of design, for so long held in traditional drawing systems, change
architecture? If we start drawing the world differently, how can it make us design
differently? The use of techniques of representation that remained unchanged
for five hundred years point to the possibility that space and bodies are stable
and fixed. Or provoke the reconfiguration of the architecture drawing to
incorporate the changed in contemporary space and bodies.

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4.5.3
Multiple Notation Systems

The architecture drawing typically presents the vision of the architect. The
accumulation of multiple notational systems breaks down the assumption of a
single narrative. Instead, they propose several possible viewpoints that occur
simultaneously, from the different protagonists within the stories, an omnipotent
presence or the viewer’s own interpretations. It is a question of reading: how do
we read architecture drawings, maps or dance scores? What are we looking for
and what are we expecting to find? Because the focus of the Transcripts is on
architecture, rather than characterization or narration, their method of
presentation revolves around spatial systems.

The Transcripts define a sequence by layout. There is a natural progression of

frames when read in the typical Western manner – front to back, left to right, from
the top of the page, down. They lend themselves just as easily when read
backwards, or diagonally. Indeed it is difficult not to start reading them erratically,
dipping into random pages, making one’s own connections. The repetitive format
supports this, transforming the image into an illustrated hypertext. Tschumi
wanted to allow the individual frames to be read singularly but also able to be
rearranged in relation and contrast. The transcripts demand an active reading,
the viewer needing to imagine and uncover connections and threads, rather than
passively accepting information. The use of montage to juxtapose frames,
allowed for the participation of the viewer in writing the score. Tschumi believed
that this way of seeing space was closest to the experience of built environments.
Reality was made malleable, emphasizing that it is what one does in it that
matters.

Similar to Piranesi’s and Libeskinds’ drawings, understanding the Transcripts

means to actively participate in them. In the chapter ‘The Street’ for example,

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one’s body is continually moved, rearranged, scaled. One’s eyes follow the
background blueprint of the Manhattan street map, pacing down 42nd Avenue
across the orthogonal grid. The urban movement is reminiscent of a Situationist
dérive, traversing the cracks and in-betweens of an urban fabric, both real and
imagined. To move over this single street is to cross various different types of
borders, weaving across and through spatial boundaries that do not appear on
the usual street map. Tschumi uses photos to create a subjective reading of
each event. The photos turn the reader into a witness. They place the reader
inside the event. They make them an accomplice. Unlike in the Carceri or
Micromegas drawings, Tschumi incorporates a system of changing spatial
perspectives rather than a single, multiple one. One is continually jolted into a
sudden perspective, or a sectional cut. Instead of the distanced, bird’s eye view
of the map reader, one is taken abruptly inside the buildings, between the two
lovers, on the street. In this way the Transcripts are not only images of spaces,
but propose embodied interaction. Individually they are often seductive, but
rarely informative. They show how a representation repeatedly changes in
relation to another and that there is no single answer encapsulated in one image,
whether a plan, section or ‘close up’.

4.5.4
Movement in the Architecture Drawing

Instead of the Euclidean container, space is portrayed by Tschumi as a cinematic

series of events, of intensities assembled together. Rather than being an absolute or
fixed concept, he describes this spatial state as an ‘eventmental dimension’, that
resides in a spatial structure of ‘sequence, open seriality, narrativity, the cinematic,
dramaturgy, choreography’243 , this proposes that existent representations of
architecture are inadequate in describing spaces formed by Events. By drawing on a

243
Bernard Tschumi, Questions of Space, p viii.

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cinematic system of representation, Tschumi acknowledged the importance of a
particular way of seeing the environment. This kind of seeing is based on
transformation rather than a static, all encompassing image. As described in Chapter
Two, Edmund Husserl’s kaleidoscopic imagery in the act of walking, defines seeing as
a process of accumulating images of one’s surroundings while in motion. Presenting
this essentially experiential act in a drawing demands a system of moving images.

The layout was drawn from cinema, like a film reel of consecutive shots. Tschumi
was inspired by the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s film scores, which
juxtaposed music, colour, movement and image into vertically montaged
sequences. They create visible rhythms, synchronizing the various elements of
the film. The other obvious influence is the stop-motion work of photographer
Eadweard Muybridge and Jules Étienne-Jules Marey in the late nineteenth
century.244 These documented movement for the first time through sequenced
photographic frames. Using a process that Marey incorporated in his
photographic series of moving bodies and animals, particular points on limbs and
joints are high lighted. They provide threads through each consecutive image,
tracing a geometry of movement.

While the Muybridge and Marey photo sequences are an evident visual source of
inspiration, what differentiates them from the Transcripts is their sequence of
linear narration. The photos aim to elucidate a clear understanding of body
movement. Tschumi aims his drawings towards encapsulating the experience of
space. The sequencing process that Tschumi uses in the Transcripts is
fundamental to how one reads them. The sequence meant that each frame was
seen in the context of the surrounding ones. When understood as part of a
whole, each frame alters the one that proceeds and follows it. This allows for a

244
Muybridge and Marey both worked in the second half of the 19th century, exploring the
documentation of movement through the bourgeoning technology of photography. While
Muybridge developed performances around these images, showcasing the novel representations
to excited crowds, Marey was more interested in the scientific implications of this new form of
graphic recording.

186
plurality of readings and interpretations rather than a single correct answer. The
continual use of the square is fundamental to this process. The square provides
an accepted, stable structure, which can be in turn manipulated and transformed
by the images that it contains, sometimes taking over the frame itself. In the
same way that life cannot be unfolded into logical sequences, Tschumi’s
Transcripts show that architectural images don’t have to be either.

Movement Diagrams

The logic of movement notations ultimately suggests real corridors of

space, as if the dancer has been ‘carving space out of a pliable
substance’; or the reverse, shaping continuous volumes, as if a whole
movement had been literally solidified, ‘frozen’ into a permanent and
massive vector.245

The Transcripts the incorporate the diagram directly into the architecture drawing.
The movement diagram is the only existing architecture system that represents
motion. It is the diagram most typically used in the practice of architecture,
though a plurality of diagrammatic forms are now beginning to infiltrate
practice.246 It is a specific type of diagram, which in architecture has a very
functional purpose – to show high traffic areas, sizing of thoroughfares and
corridors and the need for greater flow or stoppage. Movement diagrams are
typically seen as purveyors of information separate from the main drawings of
buildings, though more recently they are used more and more in the early stages
of design. The movement diagram is drawn as a flat surface. Its potential three-
dimensionality has been limited to building walls around the lines representing
movement.

245
Bernard Tschumi, Questions of Space, p.10.
246
The diagram will be discussed in Chapter Five as a key system in new digital design
processes.

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In the Transcripts, movement diagrams are integrated into the architectural
imagery. Tschumi was the architect who began to play with movement diagrams
and explore how they could be used in more creative ways to make architecture.
Tschumi wanted to use movement notations to focus on the spatial effects of
movement. He used them extensively ‘to recall that architecture was also about
the movement of bodies in space, that their language and the language of walls
were ultimately complementary’.247 How this complementary relationship finds
built form, however, is far from simple. Tschumi understood that movement
diagrams could only recall the idea of movement, not encapsulate it. To extrude
lines directly upward from movement diagrams is to create spaces directly from
abstracted information. Movement notations are two-dimensional lines
presenting information of movement, not movement itself. They present bodies
as homogenized patterns inscribed on the ground. The problem becomes how to
consider body movement three dimensionally in terms of volume rather than
lines.

Oskar Schlemmer acknowledges the problems with accurately translating body

movement from drawings. He used the disjunction between moving bodies and
drawings in order to generate the dances and costumes of his ballet. In this way
drawing interacts with the choreography, rather than being considered as useful only
prior to a work or after it. Schlemmer recognised the difficulties with theatre or dance
notation to encapsulate his radical experiments on stage. Schlemmer recognised that
the disjunction between the body and the way movement drawings present motion
from an aerial view, could motivate new opportunities for thinking about the
relationship between the floor plane and that body. Schlemmer writes:

[I]t should follow the plane geometry of the dance surface and the solid
geometry of the moving bodies, producing that sense of spatial dimension

247
Tschumi, Bernard, Questions of Space, p.94.

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 which necessarily results from training such basic forms as the straight light,
the diagonal, the circle, the ellipse, and their combinations.248

Schlemmer thought through the dances on paper, the movements the dancers traced
across the floor connected upwards into gestures and movements. These became
the solid forms of the costumes he designed. These were not simple extrusions of
lines, as is the case with architectural movement diagrams. The two-dimensional lines
on paper became the instigators for three-dimensional forms. This relates to how
Schlemmer defined the planimetry movement diagrams in contrast to the stereometric
essence of body movement.

The typical movement diagram has led to the simplification of movement itself into
abstract lines without depth. This is evident in Tschumi’s earlier project
‘Screenplays’(1977). (Fig. 14) In these drawings stills from films are juxtaposed next
to diagrams of the protagonist’s movements. Tschumi extruded the lines to form
volumes, creating axonometric sketches of the negative space formed by the moving
body. They are literally physically constructed spaces. What is also evident in the last
chapter of the Transcripts, where the movements of groups such as the footballers,
sculpt strange three-dimensional forms. Or in the third chapter ‘The Tower’, portrayed
as a single column of five changing rows, which charts a fall from a great height and
the spaces that made from the falling body. The forms created from this technique are
bulbous and uninhabitable. The point is not to provide an alternative type of
movement diagram, but to show how conventional movement diagrams, drastically
oversimplify the representation of movement through space.

248
Oskar Schlemmer, Diary September 1922 (Pasedena Art Museum: USA, 1968), p.228.

189
 Fig.15
Bernard Tschumi, Screenplays 1977.
Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1994), p.152.

190
The Transcripts propose that the representations of built environments are poorly
conceived in typical architecture drawings. They show that in order to instigate
previously absent elements of embodied motion and changing emotion,
architecture will have to look beyond its disciplinary borders. Cinema and dance
are two fields whose graphic systems can be plumbed in order to expand the
design drawing. The Transcripts can be read as a possible way of constructing
drawing systems that embrace the three-dimensional body movements of
Schlemmer’s dancers, as well as the mutually interactive environments of
Acconci’s installations.

Tschumi uses the cinematic as a methodology to bring movement into

architecture drawings. The key difficulty in his approach, despite his focus on
movement, is becoming fixed on an optically cantered position. The camera (a
device of representation) is the key source in the Transcripts that emphasizes the
image. In this way, abstracted notations are more useful in allowing embodiment
into the drawing. The design of architecture is now being created using digital,
three-dimensional drawing techniques, far from the limitations of plan, section
and even axonometrics. The premise of Tschumi’s argument however, remains
the same, as is epitomized in The Manhattan Transcripts. It is that architecture
must explore the very margins of bodily experience in order to create built spaces
for real life. Because in reality the events that people play out are complex and
various, whether it is a dinner party or a murder. It is not possible see the world
as purely isolated elements and there is a danger in Tschumi’s work to dissect
body, space and events into compartments. Focusing on singular events,
moments in time and space, suggests designing architecture in cuts or frames
per second. Design becomes based around the incongruity of the break and a
specific image, rather than an experienced fluidity. More important than
Tschumi’s repeated proclamation of bodies, events and spaces, are the
connections, overlaps and negotiations between these elements. It must be
remembered that a holistic understanding of spaces can only be achieved
through these interconnections of people moving and living in space and in

191
buildings. The Transcripts present a methodology for how the architecture
drawing can present the negotiation of the body and architecture. In doing so,
the Transcripts propose new kinds of architectural spaces.

4.6
Drawing Conclusions

This chapter has examined two aspects typically omitted in the architecture
drawing: motion and embodiment. The case studies have presented drawing
notations and systems that incorporate a phenomenological interpretation of the
body and conceptualise space in new ways. They use different strategies in
bringing these elements into the drawing of built space and propose opportunities
for rethinking the design process. These examples emphasize the need to look
outside the discipline of architecture for alternative processes. The fields of film,
dance, cartography and theatre, all provide fertile arenas for incorporating the
phenomenological body. Each example showed that bringing the body into
architecture does not need to be limited to a figural approach. In doing so, the
opportunities for a physical and individual body in the built environment were
explored. This meant integrating phenomenological issues of tactility and motion.
These practices proposed spaces shaped around individual experiences,
emphasizing the immediate, physical impact that environments have on bodies.

Chapter Three presented examples of how the collision of bodies and built space have
been explored – how this in-between space has been described, mapped out or
remade by different artists. These case studies so far have all been transient
structures. Whether staged or mapped out in a dérive, they are built in the ephemeral
space of the event. What happens when these strategies are solidified into
architecture form, with all its pragmatics and functional requirements? The static
nature of the experiential body implies a significant difference between the examples
so far examined and architecture projects. When perceiving an artwork, the body is at

192
a distance from the object or image. While projects were specifically chosen which
break down this convention, the site of the gallery still involves a delineation between
the body of the viewer and the object or environment to be viewed. By breaking down
the distance between viewer and object, from personal interaction to dynamic
transaction, these projects build up the notion of a dynamic body-subject. Vito
Acconci understood this essential difference and this led him to start working with built
architecture in order to connect directly with people.

These examples seem contrary to the essence of typical notions of architectural

practise – the edifice of building, the shaping of artificial environments and the act
of construction. Their status as art/design projects frees them from pragmatic
issues of construction and function. The explorations presented in this chapter
have implications for practical approaches to the design and making of
contemporary architecture. These processes have been generated, if not
instigated, by technology. As architecture has turned to computers to generate
drawings, certain strategies are better suited to this new medium. The diagram is
particularly appropriate to digital usage and has been heralded as the new
essential device for architecture. Other kinds of systems, such as alternative
mathematics, also suggest new kinds of spatial thinking in the design process.
The following two chapters bring these architectural explorations into buildings.
In drawing out a series of strategies that have emerged from the performance
and drawing projects, it is possible to begin analysing built, architecture.

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 ChapterFIVE
Non-standard Architecture

194
From the two spatial conditions based on bodies and drawings, this chapter looks
at the new design processes that are emerging in what has become known as
non-standard architectural design. The last two chapters explain how
performative practices have brought the living body into the way space is made
and represented. Following from John Hejduk’s and Bernard Tschumi’s
experiments with the architecture drawing, this chapter presents the
contemporary context for innovative architectural practice. This context is
examined through the new spaces in architecture and the new tools for its
making. It begins by looking at the developments of the architecture drawing.
This is in order to propose new ways of bringing concepts and information into
the design process. Design methods are being formulated around advances in
technology, which are creating new tools of representation, production and most
importantly design. This shift is exemplified in the retrieval of the diagram as a
mode of conceptualisation in the design process. New digital design processes
have been just as distanced from living bodies as their analogue predecessors.
This chapter suggests that the key to unlocking this problem may be found in
digital programs that create fluid systems where ideas are integrated within
transformative processes, rather than a directly translated into form.

Alternative modes of considering the end result of the design process has led
indeterminacy to become a key tactic in digital design. This is promoting new
spatial structures based on the fluid technologies visible not only in the tools, but
in the multi-spatial environments we now inhabit. These spaces are creating a
specific kind of design process and aesthetic under the general title of ‘Liquid
Architectures’.249 In examining these new spatial forms and their novel interfaces
with bodies, this chapter claims that the body’s relationship to these porous and
fluid environments is an essential issue for designing buildings in today’s
condition. From these new processes and spaces that are shaping architectural

249
This was term was used by Marcus Novak , see ‘Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace’ (1991),
April 23, 2003. The Artmuseum Website. Retrieved 10.01.2007 at
<http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Novak.html>

195
practice emerge four key strategies: destabilization, flux architecture,
improvisation and blurred space. In the light of these patterns it is possible to
analyse contemporary architectural examples.

5.1
Performative Design Processes

‘Non-standard architecture’ has been embraced as a term to describe the kinds

of architecture emerging out of new, computational design processes.250 In 2003
the Centre Georges Pompidou presented a landmark exhibition of this name,
showcasing the leaders in this bourgeoning field that included the work of NOX,
UN Studio and Greg Lynn.251 As the name suggests, non-standard architecture
describes architecture that deviates in process and, or, appearance from
standard architectures. While non-standard architectural practitioners are still in
the international minority, it is their work that is becoming regarded as the future
of the discipline.252 Their impact on the discourse of architecture is rapidly
increasing however, as more examples of non-standard architecture are
completed.

The term ‘non-standard’ places itself against the traditional making of standard
architecture, understood since modernity as dependant on standardised systems
of construction and mass produced components. It describes a methodology
rather than an aesthetic. The praxis however, has up until now retained a
noticeable style generated from digital tools, where complex curved shapes can

250
Andrew Benjamin describes the term in his article ‘Non-standard’ in Architecture Review,
no.87, p.34.
251
The exhibition ‘Non-standard Architecture’ was curated for the Centre Pompidou by Frederic
Migayrou. It explored the implications of algorithmic design processes on architecture,
showcasing who Migayrou saw as the twelve leading architecture firms of innovative,
contemporary architecture: Asymptote, dECOi architects, DR_D, Greg Lynn, KOL/MAC studio,
Tom Kovac, NOX, Objectile, Kas Ooosterhuis, R&Sie , Servo and UN studio.
252
This has been previously referred to by Stan Allen in Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia
Lab Architecture Studio, Assemblage 40. (Dec., 1999), p.59.

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be easily manipulated. Where previously points, lines, planes and volumes
delineated spatial forms, architectural design now grapples with splines, nurbs,
fields and folds, which can cultivate entirely novel lines and shapes. From these
basic CAD drawing tools through to entirely new digital design systems, new
kinds of forms can be easily designed and manipulated.

An important break through in design modelling is evident in parametric design.

Parametric design is a design method formulated through a focus on parameters,
rather than shape. Catia is a notable parametric design system, used by Frank
O. Gehry for the Guggenheim at Bilbao. The geometry in parametric design is
based on associations between data. These parameters create a structure for
designing in a virtual paperspace, where information and form is interconnected.
The technique originally comes from engineering, and is pragmatically useful for
designing structural loading. Parametric design allows aspects of a design to be
manipulated, automatically showing repercussions for the building as a whole.
The modelling software allows the designer to directly work with the complex
structural functioning of a building’s form.253

Parallel to new drawing tools becoming conventional apparatus in architectural

software, is the development of hardware to bring them into actuality. With CAD
design has come CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) processes. Digital
fabrication allows for scaled models of buildings to be drawn as well as 1:1
building components to be generated directly from digital images. CNC
(Computer Numerical Control) cutting and milling, as well as new 2D fabrication
and Rapid Prototyping, means complex shapes on the virtual screen can now be
constructed.

253
Bentley's Generative Components system is another parametric design program becoming
widely used. Parametric design is the basis of many BIM (Building Information Modelling)
programs. This is another three-dimensionable modeling system more focused on production
rather than the extraordinary shapes produced by parametric design programs.

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These design processes are being defined by two specific areas; the first is new
spatial structures based on fluidity and the technology in which architectures can
now be designed. Both create unique kinds of architectural form. Rather than
their original role as tools for representation, since data can have a direct impact
on how a building looks, computers have become instrumental in the form
making process. Instead of design methods focused on an end result, new
architectural modelling programs are based in different processes of working.
These programs are generative devices, not representative tools. They provide
modes of generating form through coded information, this involves simply
modelling three-dimensional forms with a mouse, or the creation of a data code
to create new kinds of spatial programs. They are performative methods, based
in action, in doing. New programs such as those used by Lars Spuybroek (which
will be examining in Chapter Six) are formulating ways of bringing these
performative methodologies directly into the design process.

Notable figures theorizing the architectural possibilities of these new technologies

from the early 90s were Greg Lynn, Marcus Novak and more recently John
Fraser and Mark Burry. They are all considered pioneering figures in critiquing
the repercussions of these technologies on architecture, arguing that technology
has changed the relationship between the body and space. Philosophically,
digital architects have drawn on the work of Michel Foucault, Henri Bergson and
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as examined through the work of philosophers
such as Andrew Benjamin, John Rajchman and Elizabeth Grosz. Foucault’s
concept of the diagram has been very influential, as has Bergson’s philosophy of
duration. Both fit well with the possibilities for motion and information that
computational drawing and design technologies provide. Deleuze’s texts have
shown to be particularly applicable. Deleuze describes the reconfiguration of the
object, which can be used to describe this new way of making architecture:

The new status of the object no longer refers to its condition to a spatial
mold in other words, to a relation of form-matter but to a temporal

198
 modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation
of matter as a continuous development of form.254

Deleuze declares that object making can no longer the understood simply in
terms of its final product. Instead, the entire process of it’s making must be
considered, a process that is now based on continuous transformation.

5.2.1
The Diagram

The diagram can be understood as a method that encapsulates the way non-
standard architecture is being worked through in the design process. A diagram
represents how a thing works rather than what it looks like. In this sense it
becomes ideal for use in a design methodology dedicated to process rather than
an end form.

As previously discussed in Chapter Four, choreographic notations are graphical

systems in which body movement can be imported into the architecture drawing.
Techniques from dance notation and scores have the potential for breaking down
the static nature of architectural form. They incorporate movement, interaction
and embodiment into the architecture drawing. Alternative structures can also be
seen in quantitative notation systems. While not a new addition to the design
process, the diagram has recently become a key strategy in the use of digital
architecture, both as a conceptual and practical tool. Here, data is abstracted
into systems that can be integrated into the architecture drawing.

Abstraction is the key issue for diagrams, distilling information often to the point
of detachment. Diagrams present spatial relations and systems without being

254
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. by Tom Conley, (University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London, 1993), p.19.

199
held by the orthogonal projection of architecture drawings. Rather than
presenting the purely tectonic elements of an environment, the diagram can
incorporate movement, change, flows and rhythms. It can also present
organizations and other kinds of physical or physiological issues. It is therefore
possible to argue that diagrams propose a strategy for transcending Euclidean
space and single-point perspective. Unlike the conventional architecture
drawing, the diagram is a generative device rather than a representation of
presence. In this way it has been called performative, rather than
representational.255 By abstracting information, the diagram describes such
issues as what people do, how they act or what they can do in a space, rather
than describing what a space looks like.

Toyo Ito is considered the first to use the term ‘Diagram Architecture’ in 1996 to
describe Kazuyo Sajima’s minimal architecture as a spatial diagram of function
and movement.256 Subsequently the work of Lynn, Ben van Berkel and Caroline
Bos, and Rem Koolhaas have all been described using the term. Eisenman
particularly applied the diagram as a term to describe his process of thinking and
working. 257

The diagram has traditionally been used as a schematic instrument, but not seen
as integral to the design process. As Anthony Vidler notes, diagrammatic
architecture has previously been ‘a term more of abuse than praise, signifying an
object without depth, cultural or physical, one subjected to the supposed tyranny

255
As well as Deleuze and Guattari, architectural theorists Robert Somol, Stan Allen and
Anthony Vidler have also described the diagram as performative.
256
Toyo Ito ‘Diagram Architecture’ El Croquis, 77, no.1,(1996), pp.18-24, referred to by Anthony
Vidler, ‘Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation’ in
Representations, No. 72. (Autumn, 2000). JSTOR. Retrieved 09.01.2007 at <
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0734-
6018%28200023%290%3A72%3C1%3ADODAAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G>
257
Eisenman adopted the term to describe his work over the last twenty years, his monograph in
1999 was titled Diagram Diaries.

200
of geometry and economy’.258 The reason why it has been ignored in
architectural drawings and why it has now become so popular is because the
diagram has typically presented quantitative data. The last decade has seen a
significant resurgence in interest within both the discourse and practice of
architecture.259

The diagramming technique originally popularised in architectural practice by

Christopher Alexander in the 70s was based on the abstraction of form into an
authentic typology. 260 Alexander’s idea of the diagram was pictorial as opposed
to the generative structure proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze
described the diagram as an “abstract machine” where information is
produced.261 In Deleuze’s critique of Bentham’s panopticon he describes the
diagram as that which brings together space and language. It makes visible the
hidden structures of language, and therefore, power. From Deleuze and Guattari
comes the understanding of the diagram as that which allows for transformation
and continual becoming. The new generation of digital architects are using the
diagram as based on these Deleuzian definitions, which Eisenman describes as
‘a supple set of relationships between forces [which] form unstable physical
systems that are in a perpetual disequilibrium’.262 This instability is in direct
contrast to the static, monumental nature of architecture as represented in the
architecture drawing. Instead, Eisenman describes the diagram as a
presentation of forces, regardless of gravity. In terms of the design process it
allows for multiple, potential results. Rather than situating information in a stable

258
Anthony Vidler, ‘Diagrams of Diagrams: Architectural Abstraction and Modern Representation’
in Representations, p.8.
259
‘Diagram Work: Data Mechanics for a Topological Age’ edition in ANY Magazine 23 (New
York, 1998) and the ‘Diagrammania’ edition of Daidolos 74, 2000, were both dedicated to the
growth in diagrams within architectural practice.
260
See Christoper Alexander, Pattern Language and Christopher Alexander, Notes on the
Synthesis of Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).
261
See Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
262
Peter Eisenman, ‘Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing’ in Peter Eisenman, Diagram Diaries
(Thames & Hudson: London, 1999), p.29.

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reality, the diagram is based in a state of flux. This suits its use in digital
mediums, which actively promote these flows.

The architectural theorist R.M. Somol claims that the diagram has now become
architecture’s foremost and final tool in both discourse and practise, serving as a
subversive agent that acts between form and word.263 Somol argues that the
diagram has been transformed from a graphic information system, to that which
incorporates into architecture a variety of cultural, social, political and
phenomenological forces. Diagrammatic processes, therefore, destabilize the
architecture drawing by integrating these new systems. Somol contends that
Eisenman’s use of the diagram as a dynamic, generative technique throughout
the 80s and 90s prophesied the new digital architects use of 3D modelling
tools.264

Typically, a key problem with the diagram as a technique for architectural

creation has been that it too easily slips into pure abstraction. The diagram has
often been connected to the modernist edict, which, breaking against previous
forms of representation, positioned itself against past symbols and references.
The new wave of diagram architects are not using it as a form of abstraction, but
as a generative system. Nevertheless, in the same way that figural architecture
used the body’s form as a blueprint upon which to extrude built forms, so too
does the diagram easily lead to representative symbols. As drawings, they
become a complex arrangement of symbols that are literally transferred into built
environments. This can be seen in Bernard Tschumi’s design of Parc de Villette.
By retaining traditional methods of drawing, albeit with new notational systems,
the diagram remains static and stable throughout the process. Instead, digital
architects such as Lynn, Novak and Spuybroek treat the diagram as a starting
point to the design. In order to do so, alternative kinds of geometry are needed
to construct these buildings

263
R.M Somol, introduction to Diagram Diaries, p.7.
264
R.M Somol, ibid, p.10

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5.2.2
Alternative Geometries

When form is no longer determined by a prior field or ground given to an

independent or overseeing eye, it starts to operate in other, less systematic
or predictable ways.265

Possibly the most radical shift in the architectural design process has been the
incorporation of chance. The above statement by John Rajchman describes
how, by breaking away from conventional and historically constructed
architectural design systems, new kinds of processes can be explored.
Fundamental to these new architecture drawings is prioritising indeterminacy
ahead of the certainty of a finished shape. This strategy is perpetuated through
new digital design processes, but also highlights improvisation as a valid element
in considering the design of built environments. Thinking of indeterminacy in new
design processes is not restricted to simply these digital programs. It also
impacts the way that bodies behave within architecture. Indeterminacy means
losing control of the process and risking error. As a creative strategy, it is
beginning to achieve acceptance in architectural practice. Mark Burry has written
that it has reached the point where ‘emerging critical theory[…]has no
embarrassment in accepting, or benignly accommodating or even celebrating the
accident or error’.266 Several architects are looking to alternative non-linear
systems, such as complexity, biological or evolutionary based theories.

Computers have opened design to new ways of bringing concepts and

information into the process of making environments. Lynn claims that complex
geometries and mathematics have always been accessible, but computers have
enabled their usage to become commonplace. Responding to the inadequacies

265
John Rajchman, Constructions (MIT press: USA, 1998), p.107.
266
Mark Burry, ‘Paramorphe’ in Hypersurface Architecture II, AD Profile 139, (Academy Editions:
London, 1999).

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of the architecture drawing has led to a growing interest in alternative modes of
geometry. This has meant a resurgence of interest in pos-Newtonian physics.
Hyperbolic Geometry and Reimann’s Spherical Geometry provide two examples
of different ways of seeing and creating objects in space.267 Rajchman looks at
the impact of these other geometries in architecture, examining how to
philosophize geometry and relate it to the construction of architecture.268

The discrepancy between Euclidean geometry and the material world was
articulated by Edmund Husserl in his book ‘The Origin of Geometry’(1936).
Husserl traces the replacement by this geometry of the material world with
idealized objects. This results in what Husserl believed to be a turning away from
lived space. Reflecting back on the primordial geometry proposed by ancient
philosophers, Husserl notes that it is the same world today as it was then. Thus
he describes the desire to return to this original state of geometry. This thesis is
based on the argument that technology has changed the relationship between
bodies and the world around them – that it is not the same world. Nonetheless
Husserl’s assertion regarding the failures of Euclidean geometry has been
recognized in the influx of support for non-Euclidean geometries. The
architecture theorist Bernard Cache argues that, despite the inherent
discrepancies between Euclidean geometry and real space, it is still the most
useful for generating architecture in. Cache describes Euclidean space as ‘not
true, but fittest’ of all geometries. 269 Cache argues that new processes such as
topology present a methodology that provides multiple Euclidean possibilities,
rather than unique non-Euclidean ones. They are mobile systems, but as soon
as the process is stopped and the form is decided upon, it becomes a Euclidean
object.

267
Grosz discusses these alternative geometries in Space, Time and Perversion, p.95.
268
See Rajchman’s essay ‘Other Geometries’ in John Rajchman, Constructions.
269
See Bernard Cache, ‘Plea for Euclid’ Architettura Supereva Website. Retrieved 12.04.2007 at
<http://architettura.supereva.com/extended/19990501/index_en.htm>

204
Rajchman is interested in the relationship between the spatial geometries of what
he defines as the effective or affective.270 Affective is described by Rajchman as
creating ‘operative space’, describing the potential and unanticipated movement
and interaction of bodies. In the first, bodies are inserted into an existing spatial
structure, while the second allows for unexpected movement and interaction.
The former is the idea of static, dimensional space, while the latter encapsulates
‘the geometries of the living’.271 Rajchman sums up the importance of these two
geometries for architecture in the provocation: ‘Which is more important for the
geometries of building, Euclid or Virginia Woolf?’272 If one accepts the
importance of these other geometries that delineate experience and interaction,
how is possible to bring them into the architecture process?

Anexact geometry describes the way computers can now generate shapes
previously impossible in architecture. Husserl invented the term to describe a
type of geometry that was neither exact or inexact, but at the same time rigorous
in its conception.273 It was to be between precision and its opposite, something
that was not fixed. This geometry creates forms that cannot be flattened and
cannot be reduced to the points and dimensions of Cartesian space. Instead, it
is rather a three-dimensional form based on information. Lynn notes that the
distinctions between exact, inexact and anexact have become critical to the
rethinking of spatial design.274 This form is not constant, but one that is in
continual transformation. Data is fed into the computer, whose interplay shape
potential, unanticipated forms. It is the act of the architect to halt the
transformation process and choose a particular form. Using new software it has

270
See Rajchman’s essay ‘Other Geometries’ in Constructions.
271
John Rajchman, Constructions, p.99.
272
John Rajchman, ibid, p.101.
273
See Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. by John
P Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1989) and Giles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism And Schizophrenia.
274
See Greg Lynn, ‘Probable Geometries: The Architecture of Writing in Bodies’ Georgie Institute
of Technology Website. Retrieved 14.05.2007 at
<http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~xinwei/classes/readings/Lynn/LynnProbableGeometries.pdf>

205
become possible for computers to generate not only scaled models from virtual
images, as well as full scale building elements.

New design modeling programs are opening architecture up to unprecedented

geometric forms. Lynn claims that these alternative mathematics supply
architecture with the possibility to measure and therefore design and make using
strategies of amorphousness and indeterminacy.275 . The opportunities of
computational capabilities now available to designers was made apparent in the
continuing construction of Antonio Gaudi’s design of the Sagrada Familia in
Barcelona. Burry designed and utilized digital programs that could replicate and
continue the complex mathematical system that Gaudi had designed for the
cathedral.276

One argument against tampering with conventionally accepted architectural

notation systems regards its role as a source of accurate information between
designers, builders and engineers in the construction process. Although suitable
for theoretical projects, this issue of actuality becomes essential when dealing
with the complex building of a project. This is the sticking point for many digital
architects, whose end products, when rarely built, have been extremely
expensive and difficult to manufacture. Until recently they have rarely lead to an
impressive end product. With the inevitable computerization of the construction
process however, comes the generation of buildings directly from the digital
modelling program. Unlike earlier CAD programs, parametric and BIM design
allows a smooth transition from designing in virtual environments, into
construction and fabrication drawings. This fluidity of production, mirrored in the
surfaces and forms of these designs, is what has been termed Liquid
Architecture.

275
Greg Lynn, ‘Probable Geometries: The Architecture of Writing in Bodies’, ibid.
276
In the 1970s Marc Burry began working on Antonio Gaudi’s complex, compositional
geometries in order to continue the construction of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which
lacked Gaudi’s finished construction drawings.

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5.3.
New Spatial structures

Liquid architecture is an architecture that breathes, pulses, leaps from one

form and lands as another. Liquid architecture is an architecture whose
form is contingent on the interests of the beholder; it is an architecture that
opens to welcome me and closes to defend me; it is an architecture
without doors or hallways, where the next room is always where I need to
be it and what I need it to be. 277

This is how Marcus Novak described his use of the term in 1991. New design
processes are creating new spatial structures. These processes are sited in
spaces both virtual and actual, mediated and permeated by various technologies.
Novak describes this as ‘Liquid Architecture’, where the architectural form has
the fluidity and continuity of liquid. This image of liquidity encapsulates the
aesthetics of this kind of architecture. UN Studio directors, Ben van Berkel and
Caroline Bos describe the impact of digital design programs as turning
architectural design ‘into a wave-like process dealing with dynamic fields of
forces’.278 Space is conceived of radically different in this process as has been
conventionally in the representation and design of the built environment. A self-
proclaimed ‘Transarchitect’, Novak writes that cyberspace has created new
architectures, constructed in different environmental fields based on
programmable information.279 Both Perrella and Novak subscribe to a concept of
space and architecture as malleable surfaces instigated by new digital programs.

277
Novak, Marcos, ‘Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace’ (1991), April 23, 2003. The Artmuseum
Website. Retrieved 10.01.2007 at <http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Novak.html>
278
Noted by Kari Jormakka, Flying Dutchmen: Motion in Architecture (Birkhauser: Basel, 2002),
p.51.
279
Novak creates an architecture that exists only in the digital domain with no physical reality,
calling it ‘Transarchitectural’.

207
The term ‘blob’ has become a general and usually pejorative term to describe
digital architecture. It was however, initially used by Lynn to describe the idea of
continuous surfaces. This directly relates to generative CAD programs and the
ease in constructing these kinds of environments. But the term ‘Liquid
Architecture’ is not only descriptive of form, but of an architecture based on
experiences, movement and forces.

In Novak’s description ‘Liquid Architecture’ is itself animated and metamorphic. It

reacts to the body in new and innovative ways, unbound by traditional ideas of
form and function. The salient characteristics of this kind of architecture are
fluidity (as the name suggests), but also interactivity. In this malleable world, the
architecture transforms and responds to users. It is the antithesis to the
traditional idea of architecture as permanent and characterized by stability and
immobility – a stage set in front of whose façade the body moves. Lars
Spuybroek describes Liquid Architecture as the liquidizing of the traditional
solidity of architecture, through the infection of media.280 Media weaves and
penetrates through built spaces, which must now incorporate a growing
abundance of different media, from lighting and security through to interactive
sensors. In this way liquid architecture acknowledges that the bodies of today
are a hybrid of materiality and information. The way they move is very different
and the way they inhabit spaces is very different. Liquid architects argue that
virtual domains make possible new kinds of architecture, constructed in different
environmental fields based on programmable information. In this malleable
world, the architecture transforms and responds to users.

Novak is producing this kind of architecture solely within the digital realm, but
Perrella is exploring the possibilities of physical, interactive environments. In
doing so Perrella is brings this research directly into the contemporary practice of
architecture. Intelligent or Smart Design is insinuating itself into daily life, from

280
Referred to by Gabriella Gianacchi in ‘Performing through the Hypersurface’ in Virtual
Theatres: An Introduction (Routledge: UK,2004), p.99.

208
mobile phones to rooms that change temperature at each personal whim. This is
making the interface of these augmented technologies into an important fiscal as
well as design issue.

The possibilities for motion that these programs allow mean that architecture can
be designed in terms of animation rather than stasis. Unlike a stable drawing or
model, they are the first tools that allow architects to design a moving or
transforming object. Lynn has focused his theory of architecture on these
possibilities. He has been a distinguished proponent in architectural discourse
for the new possibilities that computer software programs open up for
architecture. Spuybroek follows a similar approach to Lynn, generating multiple
visual digital prototypes that are fed with information. He focuses specifically on
motion as a generate for built form. A key problem often articulated with his work
is that despite this interest in movement, the buildings don’t move. This is an
argument directed against ‘Blob Architecture’ as a whole. That once removed
from the digital domain, in the solid, gravity-based practicalities of architecture,
the design literally can’t stand up. Lynn answers this criticism by defining the
difference between what he calls static or stable states. Stable is the usual state
of architecture – unmoving. A static state, on the other hand, while still not
moving, holds the possibility of mutation, giving the sense of animation.281 Lynn
argues that the form encapsulates motion by way of the design process, however
what results in his work is another abstracted idea of movement. Here the
perception of movement is different from the experience of movement in space.
This process is still about the form of a building. In getting away from form, three
elements that Lynn acknowledges as integral to the contemporary design of
architecture are time, topology and parameters. By presenting itself both as a
design process and a conceptualization of space, topology could be seen as the
amalgamation of motion and space into form

281
See Greg Lynn, Animate Forms (Princeton Architectural Press: USA, 1999).

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5.4
Topological Architecture

The word topology comes from the Latin topos, which means place, implying a
grounding in physicality. The word logos, describes the logic of place. Despite
the logical relationship between design and place/landscape, in this case the
term is derived from its mathematical meaning, describing ‘a branch of
mathematics that investigates geometric configurations (as point set) that cannot
be altered if subjected to one-to-one transformations by shrinking or
enlargment’.282 The example often presented shows how a donut can digitally
transform into a coffee cup, without disrupting the continuous mesh of its form,
thereby making it, topologically speaking, the same object. What is important
topologically is this continuous, transformative ability. Rather than describing an
absolute and stable system, topology considers information as relative. To
design topologically, the form evolves from the design process, rather than being
transferred from the head of the architect into an image.

Architectural Design was one of the first architecture journals to rigorously

present the theory and practice of architectural topology, Guiseppa de Christina
describes it as follows:

Architectural topology means the dynamic variation of form facilitated by

computer based technologies, computer-assisted design and animation
software. The topologizing of architectural form according to dynamic and
complex configurations leads architectural design to a renewed and often
spectacular plasticity, in the wake of the baroque and of organic
expression.283

282
Peter Zellner, introduction to Hybrid Spaces: New Forms in Digital Architecture (Thames and
Hudson: UK, 1999), p.12.
283
Guiseppa De Christina, introduction to ‘Architecture and Science’, AD Profile (Wiley-
Academy: USA, 2001), p.8.

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Topology is a methodology for design that presents new opportunities for
architectures in the digital arena. But it is also a conceptual approach to seeing
environments. Deleuze and Guattari described space topologically in A
Thousand Plateaus, whereby the nomadic possibilities of flux and multiplicity
interweave with smooth and rough spatial structures. The philosopher Brian
Massumi also advocates for a topological approach in designing the built
environment. Following on from Husserl, Massumi proposes a detailed argument
against Euclidean space as a useful site for making architecture. Reinstating the
issue of indeterminacy, he argues that ‘to build in Euclidean space is to build in
predictability’.284 Massumi makes the point that no single system is able to fully
incorporate lived experience. In the manner of a co-dependant structure of
variant data, he suggests the need for a ‘super modulatory’ approach, which
operates between logics, interacting with various systems in order to reach a final
product.

The provocative centre of Massumi’s argument is the suggestion that people live
topologically. Massumi constructs a persuasive argument for the use of
topological systems in architectural design, arguing for the relationship between
qualitative and quantitative systems of orientation and spatialization to be
understood as topological movement. Rather than the separation of space and
time, topology, Massumi points out, presents them as co-dependant variables.
He writes: ‘The space of experience is really, literally, physically a topological
hyperspace of transformation’.285 Space is in flux and bodies are in continual
states of becoming. If concrete experience is understood as topological, whose
form is transformational and continuous, CAD programs using topological forms
become the most suitable design tools. What is not clarified in the description of
topology is how the living body interacts with this new environment.

284
Brian Massumi, ‘Strange Horizons: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic’ in Parables
for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Duke University
Press (April 2002), p.204.
285
Brian Massumi, ibid, p.184.

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5.5
Bodily interfaces

This thesis has specifically explored these digital design methodologies in terms
of the sensorial body and it is important to emphasize that this has not been
widely embraced by digital architects. The living body is as conspicuously absent
in digital projects as it has been in the mediaeval church or modernist apartment.
This thesis aims to explore the possibilities that these digital processes hold for
incorporating the contemporary, sensual body into new kinds of spaces and
environments. Where and how the body can relate to these porous, fluid
environments becomes a question of the interface. An interface is the boundary
of connection and communication between bodies and objects or places. This
relationship is not optically specified in the same way as the original computer
screen and abstracted keyboard and mouse, but one defined by inter- and trans-
action. The reciprocal movements of bodies between different media,
augmented through the everyday, make experience the key factor in this new
interface. As mobile, wireless and networked systems free the body from
conventional working environments, new kinds of architecture for these programs
are needed.

Everyday spaces can now be considered interactive, containing integrated

sensors and circuits, whose structure is interwoven with information and
communication, a new ‘electrotecture’. ‘Electrotecture’ is a term coined by Mark
Taylor in 1994, as an architectural reaction to the influx of virtual environments.286
In response to the virtualization of reality, Taylor aimed to theorize the electronic
in order to place architecture within the contemporary electronic age.
‘Electrotecture’ defined a built space between materiality and immateriality,
between the body and the mind, accepting the changes that digital media
presented regarding the perception of virtual worlds. It was an architecture

286
See Mark C. Taylor, (guest ed.), ‘Electrotecture: Architecture and the Electronic Future’ in
ANY, Nov./Dec. 1993. As a term ‘electrotecture’ failed to gain purchase in architectural discourse.

212
beyond the materiality of building or the laws of gravity, made possible by the
digital world.

A term that has become popular for this kind of interface is Perrella’s description
of the Hypersurface.287 Perrella writes that the body must now be seen as a
hybrid between the historic, material body, and the new body constructed through
information. Unlike Novak’s purely digital environments, Perrella is more
interested in working in corporeal space interwoven with digital networks. For
Perrella space is a web of interconnected variables.

Performance theorist Gabriella Gianacchi uses the hypersurface as a theory and

practice through which to discuss virtual performances, whereby viewers can
participate with artworks in this space between the real and representation,
physicality and media. She describes this connection as:

Within the hypersurface, the relationship between the world of information

and the real is subsequently exposed. When ‘performing’ the
hypersurface, the viewer always confronts materiality and representation,
inside and outside, information and fiction, to find that they also are always
part of both worlds. As a hypersurface, viewers can be both materiality
and representation, both inside and outside the work of art, transformed
into artistic information that changes in real time. Within the world of the
hypersurface, the viewer is both remediated and in the real; they are both
alive and live.288

While Gianacchi is describing virtual performances, this is very applicable to

quotidian relationship of bodies in the augmented spaces of today. The

287
Perrella is a professor at Columbia University, and founded Studio AEM (Architecture at the
End of Metaphysics). His work explores how individuals respond to new digital environments,
where the body’s role in the creation and dissemination of information is being constantly re-
constructed.
288
Gabriella Giannachi, Performing through the Hypersurface in Virtual Theatres; An
Introduction, p.103.

213
hypersurface can be seen as the skin between the actual and virtual. Like
human skin, it is responsive and reliant on both the interior and exterior,
demanding the co-presence of both. The hypersurface therefore designates a
space that incorporates both states of multiple virtualities as well as physical
actualities.

With these changes to spaces and their interface with bodies, arise the question
as to how bodies can now be brought into the design process. This issue comes
down to scale in the context of architecture. As previously discussed, scale has
traditionally been insisted upon in relation to the anatomical body. Scale
describes measurement. It is used as a comparative term to elucidate a
relationship between two objects or an object and a body. It’s definition as
measurement is also one of judgement and criterion. In this way it becomes a
structuring system for the relationship of the body and the built environment. In
architecture, scale typically describes how objects or environments relate in
measurement to the human form. It encapsulates the importance of sizing
spaces according to the body. The argument regularly pitted against digital
architectures is the loss of scale which working in virtual space brings. However,
the reality is that scale has been a problem throughout all architectural
processes, which has meant working in mediums at vastly different scales to the
finished objects.289 As previously discussed, previous methodologies that
endeavoured to do this have created static representations of figures such as the
Vitruvian Man. Since ancient Greece the form of the body became a tool of
measurement, abstracted in the drawing process to create ordering systems. In
the end though, the only way to understand true scale in architecture is to stand
in it.

This is where performance can be used as a method for bringing the living body
into the design process. The practise of performance scales not only the body,

289
As previously discussed in Chapter Two, see Robin Evan’s essay ‘Translations from Drawing
to Building’ in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays.

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but the animate, moving body. By integrating performative practices into the
design process, architects can rethink scale in terms of this body. Each of the
case studies in Chapter Six, from the heavily structured Holocaust memorial
designed by Peter Eisenman to the amorphous looking pavilion of NOX
architecture, have endeavoured to do this in different ways. Libeskind uses the
physical form to directly relate to the body on a phenomenological level, while
Eisenman used scale in a purposely disproportionate and ultimately confronting
way. Frederic Jameson sees Eisenman’s work as a critique of
anthropocentricism, because it refuses to accept a humanist reading of
architectural space. 290 Instead scale is read through the performance of bodies
through the built spaces. The manipulation of scale becomes a strategy in which
to refocus attention back onto the body in terms of immediate, lived experience.

In terms of digitally designed architecture, scale is also being transformed.

Rather than the figural or the informational movement diagram, the moving body
can be scaled into the design process itself using CAD programs. Rather than
an overlayed image or symbol, the body is integrated into the design, becoming a
critical element. Massumi defines this as a new kind of architecture, where rather
than designing simply for function, architects become ‘experience engineers’,
focusing on a bodily and neurological interaction of bodies and buildings.291 For
Massumi what is interesting is how the active emergence of form in digital
architecture can be carried over into embodied experience. He notes that
Spuybroek is leading the way by designing forces, rather than forms for
architecture. Spuybroek inputs the moving body into the matrix of the computer
drawing system, thereby exploring new ways in which the body can be scaled
into new architectures.

290
See Frederic Jameson, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity in Peter Eisenman’ in The Cities of
Artificial Excavation, The Work of Peter Eisenman 1978-1988.
291
Markussen Thomas & Birch, Thomas, ‘Transforming Digital Architecture from Virtual to
Neuro: An Interview with Brian Massumi’, Intelligent Agent, vol 5, no2. Intelligent Agent Website.
Retrieved 04.04.2007 at
<http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol5_No2_massumi_markussen+birch.htm>

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5.6
Emergent Design Paradigms

This chapter has presented the implications of the ideas explored through the
performative examples of Chapters Three and Four, in terms of architectural
practice. Looking at how new digital design tools are effecting the design
process, it has presented new formulations of the architectural drawing. What
followed was an examination of new spatial structures in terms of these
processes, showing how along with new design processes, they are
fundamentally changing not only how to design buildings, but also how they look.
The last section examined the interface between the body and digital spaces,
reflecting on the issue of scale in these changes. In setting the context for
contemporary architectural examples, I propose four paradigms in the design of
performative architecture: Destabilization, Flux Architecture, Improvisation and
Blurred Space. These four, salient areas, describe processes in which the body,
movement and buildings can be incorporated into the contemporary design
processes of architecture, within the contemporary context of technological
innovation. Expanding from the projects based on phenomenological readings of
the body and provocative analyses of spatial representations in the architecture
drawing, this section aims to connect those essentially spatially and bodily based
practises, into built environments.

5.6.1
Destabilisation

Destabilization is the art of imbalance. It is a strategy that highlights physical

engagement with spaces, inciting active participation by pedestrians and
inhabitants with their built environment. In this way it can be understood as a
physical provocation of the phenomenological. It instigates a personal emphasis
on the physical body.

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Destabilization, imbalance and disequilibrium are strategies that have become
prevalent in contemporary dance practises. Responding to the stable,
symmetrical structures in Classical Western Ballet, modern dancer Doris
Humphrey explored the possibilities of the fall and its recovery, while
understanding walking as falling became important for several choreographers
and performers from Laurie Anderson to Pina Bausch. As previously discussed,
William Forsythe uses destabilization as a choreographic tool, exploring how the
body ‘naturally’ and ‘unnaturally’ rights itself. Like Merleau-Ponty’s description of
the living body, choreographers examining the limits of proprioception,
understand it to be fundamentally connected to the body’s relationship with its
surrounding environment. The strategy of destabilization must be understood in
context of the growing passivity of the body toward the built environments. The
dislocation that occurs through virtual technologies has led to the desire of many
architects to highlight the actuality of the material body.

As a strategy, destabilization finds form in simply shifting the standard planes of

the built environment. This was first proposed in 1963 by ‘Architecture Principe’,
led by philosopher Paul Virilio and architect Claude Parent. ‘Architecture
Principe’ was both the name of the design firm and the magazine they used to
publish their manifesto of the oblique. 292 By tampering with the most basic of
architectural forms – the floor – the world becomes unstuck and the body must
work to realign itself. With this in mind they proposed ‘the function of the
Oblique’, a new architectural condition and urban order, around the typology of
the inclined plane. Reacting against the prevalence of Euclidean space, they
proclaimed the end of the vertical as the axis of elevation. Virilio and Parent
believed buildings had become barriers to movement, proposing sloping ground
planes that multiplied usable spaces and promoted continuous, fluid movement.

292
The collaboration between Parent and Virilio lasted only five years and generated only one
finished project, the striking Church of Saint Bernadette du Banlay, in France. At the time Virilio
was researching World War II German bunkers, whose massive, concrete aesthetics can be seen
in the church. The church is a mammoth concrete structure, whose curving, cantilevered ceiling
heightens the sensation of instability

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Virilio states the aim of their research as ‘to challenge outright the
anthropomorphic precepts of the classical era – the idea of the body as an
essentially static entity with an essentially static proprioception – in order to bring
the human habitat into a dynamic age of the body in movement.’293 Inspired by
Gestalt psychology and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, the
Oblique was a way of bringing architecture back into an experiential relationship
with the body. Far from simply another visionary 60s design, the oblique is
returning as a form well-suited to digitally produced tectonics.294 Destabilization
describes how the work creates an awareness of gravity, the tilted floors
continually forcing one to physically realign.

The Austrian artist turned architect Freidensriech Hundertwasser famously said,

‘the straight line is godless’ and pursued a dedication to undulating floor planes
and unevenly spaced fenestration.295 His belief was that orthogonal architecture
failed to connect spiritually with natural inhabitation. Without debating the
spiritual significance of Hundertwasser’s claims, his projects present the retrieval
of a specifically embodied focus when moving through built environments. As
previously discussed, more recently Vito Acconci folded an interior into itself at
the MAK centre, where the sense of environmental unsteadiness evoked the
uncanny. Unlike Hundertwasser’s aim to spiritual connectivity with the earth,
here the architecture acts against the body to provoke dis-ease. In this way the
designers took on the role of choreographers, where the visitors become
dancers. Whether they aim for the vertigo induced imbalance of Spuybroek’s
projects or the physical and resulting emotional disorientation of Libeskind’s, the
body is forced to deal very intimately with the architecture.

293
Pamela Johnston (ed.), The Function of the Oblique, AA Documents 3 (AA Publications: UK,
1996), p.13.
294
An example can be seen in ‘Fractal Techtonics: inhabiting Oblique Office Platforms’, program
at the AA DRL, in Steele, Brett (ed.) Corporate Fields: New Office Environments by the AA DRL,
(AA Pub: UK, 2005).
295
Austrian artist Freidensriech Hundertwasser was a popular artist during the 60’s and 70’s,
who developed a philosophy of art and design based on an environmental poetic that demanded
the rights of individuals to live in harmony and beauty with nature.

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5.6.2
Flux Architecture

Flux is about movement, where space and bodies are read as flows. The name is
reminiscent of the Fluxus group of artists, emphasizing the importance of
collaboration, intermediality and connections.296 Flux space sites itself in the
contemporary questioning of all things stable and fixed in the Information Age. It
has become popularised in media theory through the discourse of ‘mobilities’,
concerned with the new spatio-temporal world of flows.297 This research pairs
the term with architecture in order to emphasize the physicalizing of these issues
in the built environment. The digital design firm Asymptote called their first
monograph ‘Asymptote: Flux’, in recognition of its suitability in terms of
contemporary digital practice.298 In architectures dedicated to flux, fluidity
becomes a key quality of both virtual and corporeal kinds. In this sense it
embraces the hybrid body as a construction of both. Flux Architecture and
Blurred Space converge with the idea of dissolving the assumed stable and fixed
elements in a space.

While it is easy to assume that flux as a spatial characteristic has come from
virtual modelling programs, the notion of ‘continuous space’ appeared in the
1950s in the work of Frederick Kiesler.299 Kiesler is most renowned for his
biomorphic design of ‘The Endless House’ (1958-60). The house design was
reminiscent of giant bubbles or insects built up in plaster models. The egg or

296
Fluxus was an international network of artists, dedicated to international, intermedial
collaborations who worked in the intersections of different media. Their nomadic structure
privileged exchange and connection above making finished works.
297
Mobilities theory evolved out of urbanism, new media and sociology, describing the emerging
paradigm of mobility in understanding modern society. A leading proponent is John Urry, who
recently edited with Mimi Sheller, Mobile Technologies of the City, (Routledge: UK, 2006).
298
See Lisa Ann Couture & Hani Rashid, Asymptote: Flux (Phaidon: USA, 2002).
299
Kiesler was an Austrian architect who worked in a variety of fields from stage and exhibition
design to furniture and architecture. Despite designing the Abstract Gallery room of Peggy
Guggenheim’s Art of This Century art salon in 1942, and his various publications and manifestos,
Kiesler has only recently begun to be again considered, usually due to the relationship between
his theories of continuous form and contemporary digital architecture forms.

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womb-like forms maintained the structure without columns or framing, thereby
questioning the conventional need for the separation of floors, walls and ceiling.
Kiesler described it himself as follows:

The Endless House is not amorphous, not a free-for-all form. On the

contrary its construction has strict boundaries according to the scale of our
living, its shape and form are determined by inherent life forces, not be
building code standards or the vagaries of décor fads. Space in the
Endless House is continuous; all living areas can be unified into a single
continuum.300

While many still see in Kiesler’s work the mid 20th century futurist, architectural
aesthetic, Kiesler always specified that the spaces were generated through bodily
practise. Rather than looking to the future, Kiesler wanted to focus on the
immediate present. He disregarded prevailing traditions of orthogonal
architectural design, which he felt unnecessarily limited and divided space.
Continuous space meant architecture that reacted to bodily practice. Kiesler’s
designs were not purely spatial, but based on an overall conceptualisation of the
body and the world. He theorized an idea he termed ‘Design Correalism and
Biotechnique’, which, in contrast to the prevailing functionalism of the early 20th
century European architecture, focused on the correlation between human
beings and nature.301

The notion of flux can be seen in Piranesi’s etchings, representations of

environments that can morphe suddenly when one’s back is turned. It can also
be perceived in New Babylon’s interconnected platforms, creating passages and
plateaux for transition and temporary habitation. The previous example of Liquid
Architecture presents the formal characteristics of Flux Architecture. The present

300
Frederick Kiesler, The Endless House (Thames and Hudson: London, 1985).
301
These ideas have also been taken by digital architects interested in alternative, biological
based systems.

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infatuation with fluid design in architecture was articulated by Marcus Novak’s
‘Liquid Architecture’ in mid 90s, describing digital environments responding to the
new CAD programs. By privileging flux over stasis, this strategy produces new
kinds of built environments. This does not have to be in the curvaceous style
perpetuated by CAD programs, but as a basis for reconsidering the design
process in favour of fluid body movement and interaction.

Both flux space and improvisation is based on motion and interaction. The
difference is that the former relates to how those issues find form in architecture,
while the latter is based on how certain kinds of behaviour can be dictated and
made by the surrounding environment. Flux architecture presents physical forms
for architecture that incorporate the multiple, new kinds of spaces that permeate
the built environment.

5.6.3
Improvisation

From the theatrical script we can borrow the concept of improvisation in order to
rethink the way in which we move through built environments. The term
improvisation describes a state of acting and reacting in the moment to one’s
environment. Improvisation demands both self-awareness and a heightened
awareness of others. In this way it is not focused on the individual body as with
destabilization, but equally on the interaction between other bodies.
Improvisation demands creativity, it incites action. It has a similar goal to that of
destabilization, but where that strategy is directly focused on the living body,
improvisation bases itself in the more collective issues of interaction. In terms of
the built environment, improvisation is played out in the flexibility of scripting. It
relates most clearly to a performative reading of environments, where bodies
enact cultural and social ideologies in certain spaces.

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A tactic used to provoke improvisation is the glitch or the lag. These are
disruptions in the smooth running of action, corruptions or impairments that show
up the system as faulty. The result of the glitch or fault is improvisation; when the
unexpected occurs the normal scripts that one follows are made obsolete and
one must make one’s own way. Diller and Scofidio like to work in this space
between technological expectation and error, as if short-circuiting their own work.
In their interior of the Seagram building a series of televisions placed above the
bar showcase the people entering from the street level above. While this
appears to be in real time, it is actually captured several moments later, creating
a slight disjunction in experience and image. In the Blur Building, which will be
discussed in the following chapter, making a building out of the weather made
unpredictability unavoidable.

Performative spaces cannot be scripted only improvised. What is essential is

that the spaces propose possibilities, rather than define singular actions.
Indeterminate design practices can therefore be considered improvisational. The
following architectural examples explore how to do this based on blurring and
rearranging the assumed script. When people move through built spaces, they
are used to reading the script and acting accordingly. When we are in a
supermarket we understand moving up and down the rows of goods, the
collection in shopping carts, negotiating other and so on, as opposed to when we
enter a bank. We also know that we are meant to act in different ways, to
interact with others in different ways – the nightclub conversations in contrast to
the insurance agency. But when the script can no longer be easily read, we must
make our own way, write our own script and improvise. This does not mean that
people are forced to always follow prescribed actions in architectures that fulfil
the expectations of movement, but that it is much easier in these spaces to
simply follow expectations. When that is no longer possible, we are forced to
start actively engaging with the space and making our own way. We must be
creative. We must start thinking how to negotiate the space, how to navigate it
and how to interact with others in it. A wheelchair or a skateboarder may

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therefore negotiate a modernist apartment block with great difficulty but a building
like Spuybroek’s H2O pavilion with ease.

Drawing potentiality into architecture means releasing it from the dictates of the
designers, whether that is the architect, planner or governing body. The shaping
of body movement fundamentally describes how the built environment acts upon
bodies. In this way improvisational tactics are essentially political – they demand
freedom of access. Through the strategy of improvisation, the individual is
empowered to create their own performances through places. Like the dynamic
markings across the Situationist maps, bodies are given the opportunity to be
creative, to interpret the world around them and negotiate new interactions.

5.6.4
Blurred Space

To blur is to smudge the distinct. Rather than simply imprecision, it implies an

initial clarity followed by action. Indeterminacy, vagueness, unpredictability and
chance are all words situated in a state of in-between, whereby definitions
become blurred. This thesis designates blur in terms of location, where in this
liminal siting, new opportunities are made possible.

Two theories of blurring have appeared in architectural discourse in the last

decade. Diller and Scofidio use it to critique the process of seeing. Blurring
stands in opposition to what Elizabeth Diller describes as today’s ‘high definition’
culture, which places the act of ‘seeing’ above experience.302 Diller and Scofidio
enjoy the regression back to television static. It becomes a play on perception
and assumptions. In today’s age where ‘user control’ has become a consumerist
sales mantra, the ideal is provided in exchange for the illusion of choice. In

302
Noted by Edward Dimendberg, ‘Blurring Genres’ in Scanning: Aberrant Architectures, p.44.

223
contrast, blur is about purposely instigating the indistinct. It is no longer about
choice, but about potentiality.

Eisenman sees blurring as creating what he calls an ‘interstitial’ state, which

creates new opportunities for a new relationship between the body and
architecture. The Interstitial, as described in Chapter One, is a destabilizing
element that produces alternative modes of thinking and doing. This is a liminal
space, creating a site for new actions and interactions. For Eisenman it forms ‘a
condition where architecture is neither dependant on its former narratives nor
devoid of meaning but resides between the two, where other forms of meaning,
and meaningful situations, can occur’.303 Blurring is a strategy of dislocation,
breaking down the stability and solidity of architecture in favour of new and
ambiguous opportunities.

Unpredictability is becoming an important tactic in digital design modelling, where

systems are now premised on providing possibilities rather than answers. In this
process the designer’s role is now one of defining limits and halting that process.
This new ‘Post-heroic Architecture’ no longer relies purely on human creativity,
thereby allowing the possibility of entirely new, unexpected forms.

This can be seen in the example of Spuybroek’s design of the D Tower in

Doetchim, Holland. The building can be described as a multi-mediated,
permanent piece of art-architecture. The design started on computer with a
digital pulsating sphere, which alternated between inflating and deflating.
Spuybroek then used a technique, which Gaudi used in the Sagrada Familia,
which contends that that which hangs in tension, will also stand in compression,
an idea explored further by Frei Otto. To do this Spuybroek inverted the object
and with the use of a balloon and lots of tape a structure was formed. The bag
handles became the spindly legs, which after manifold experimentation made a

303
Peter Eisenman, introduction to Blurred Zones Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman
Architects 1988-1998, p.7.

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twisted tripod. This process was halted creating the design of a 12-meter high
structure. It has the look of bloody entrails or an alien creature. It’s form is
composed of computer-generated, moulded panels, which allow from a
continuous shaper, where the structure becomes surface.304

To bring blur into architectural form can be related to what Spuybroek calls
‘vague form’. It’s ‘vagueness’ points to an inability to clearly comprehend it, to
define it. The structural system looks like segments of dinosaur skeletons, vast
rigid structures around cavernous, curving spaces. This is reminiscent of Diller
and Scofidio’s ‘Blur Building’, an architecture of the indistinct, in direct contrast to
the clarity of form to which Modernism was dedicated. Spuybroek also uses the
phrase ‘plastically interactive’, because one cannot gather a complete
understanding of its form from a single angle. Even walking around its
peripheries it refuses to disclose its entire shape, yet on repeated turns it’s
continuous form becomes understandable as a structural object.

In the D Tower the ambiguity is not only in the shape, it is the form, the meaning
and the function. It sits in the urban landscape, a glowing alien that cannot be
entered physically, only virtually. The public can ‘enter’ the architecture through
the Internet. In collaboration with the artist Q.S Serefijn, it integrates a
questionnaire, website and urban scale structure. The people of the city log onto
the website and answer a questionnaire of their emotional state. The results are
transmitted to the structure sited in the middle of the city, whose entire colour
daily changes according to the answers of the questionnaire. The object of the D
Tower performs daily what people wish to be perceived as their cities emotional
state.

304
The D Tower is made of CNC-milled Styrofoam for the mould and hand-laid epoxy with a
glass fibre laminate. The curves have been derived from boat building, allowing for non-standard
elements of double curved surfaces. Epoxy panels are glued with flanges so it doesn’t need a
substructure to hold it up.

225
Blurred space endeavours to describe how certain architectures are breaking
away from the desire for clarity and authenticity, and embracing alternative,
performative-based practises. The results of doing so highlight an interactive and
pro-active relationship between bodies and the environments in which they move.

In this chapter I have aimed to provide an overview of the effects of new design
tools and processes on the way the living body is considered in architecture.
Understanding the workings of media on the conceptualization as well as the
experience of emerging architectural practice, it is essential to exploring how to
bring the sensorial body into contemporary built environments. In this context, it
is possible to consider the strategies that have become apparent in the
performative examples. These patterns of destabilization, flux architecture,
improvisation and blurred spaces, are all examples of how performativity can be
used to rethink the relationship between bodies and buildings. The following
chapter traces the emerging design paradigms in four very different examples of
contemporary architecture. Only the final project by NOX architects has been
generated through new digital processes. The aim is to show how new
technologies are shaping the thinking and experiencing of built environments.
Drawing on qualitative research of the chosen buildings, they are performatively
written in order to present a phenomenological and performative analysis of the
environment. Each propose new ways of bringing corporeal bodies and virtual
spaces into architectural practice. These results present an architecture that is
performative, open to new technologies and future inhabitations.

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 ChapterSIX
Performative Architecture

227
 Fig.15
Daniel Libeskind, Extension to the Jewish Museum, 2001.
Photograph by Ben Hewett.

228
6.0
Chapter Six introduces four architectural case studies that each incorporate the
performative practices outlined in the last chapter; destabilization, flux
architecture, improvisation and blurred spaces. Each study begins by describing
my personal approach and initial interpretation of the building. It follows with a
discussion of the design process taken by the architect and important aspects of
its location and context. The main body of each examination is presented as a
form of performative writing, in order to show how these different paradigms can
be physically understood throughout these different architectures.

6.1
case study Extension to the Jewish Museum, Berlin
Daniel Libeskind

Cycling around Kreuzburg on my first day in Berlin, reading maps upside down,
battling with cars on the wrong side of the road and only ever seeming to reach
the same street juncture. The summer light is a glare that blurs and rebounds in
lines around me. It comes as a complete surprise when I reach the museum. In
my mind I had imagined a barren plane from which this gleaming monolith would
pierce. Instead I almost cycle past its glittering geometry, cradled amongst the
landscaping and the shops and houses of the district. I cycle around it, but
nearly fall off my bicycle while staring upwards.

6.1.1
Design Process

When Daniel Libeskind won the design for the Jewish Museum in 1989, it was his
first large-scale commission. Libeskind had spent over twenty years teaching,
writing theoretical texts and producing very detailed, abstract, architectural

229
propositions. Libeskind generated the form of the museum through a rigorously
theorized and unique creative process that he developed over these decades. It
combined techniques of mapping, drawing and model making, in a poetic
examination of the place of Jewish bodies and history in the urban fabric of
Berlin.

To give an account of the design process of the museum is to describe

Libeskind’s philosophical examination of what a Jewish museum could mean in
this specific context of a reunified Berlin. He characterized the design as a
fourfold structure:

"The first is the invisible and irrationally connected star which shines with
absent light of individual address. The second is the cut-off of Act 2 of
Moses and Aaron which culminates with the not musical fulfilment of the
word. The third is the ever-present dimension of the deported and missing
Berliners; the fourth is Walter Benjamin's urban apocalypse along the One
Way Street.305

In order to begin a form making process that embraced these core issues of the
project Libeskind began with the drawing. He believed that the core issue was
the way Germans and Jews have related to each other across the time and
space of Germany. He began the design therefore with a series of urban
mappings that connected people who Libeskind viewed as significant figures in
Jewish history and general philosophy through the site of the museum. In this
way the museum would be a nodal point that connected the Germans and Jews
of Berlin. The result of combining these bodies was a matrix similar in
appearance to his drawings discussed in chapter two. This formed the blueprint
for the building, over which was unfurled the iconic Jewish image of the Star of
David.

305
Daniel Libeskind, Studio Daniel Libeskind Website. Retrieved 09.11.2007 at
<http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/projects/show-all/jewish-museum-berlin/>

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6.1.2
Site

The exterior shell of the museum is clad in polished grey zinc, which has slowly
begun to wear and oxidise. Incisions are cut across and through this metal skin,
angrily scarring the façade and punctuating it with broken crosses. Based on the
last memory of light that Jewish victims remember cutting through the boards of
the cattle trucks, Libeskind named the project Between the Lines. The ground
plan of the museum comes from a set of maps that Libeskind made of Berlin,
connecting unknown Jewish families with well-known Berlin philosophers and
artists across time and through the site of the existing museum. Over these
drawings he inserted a shattered Star of David, whose form can still be visually
untangled from the air above. Berlin is a city in which the urban landscape itself
is a kind of museum through which the average pedestrian negotiates the
country’s shattered history. In the museum it is through this fractured star that
visitors must negotiate the intertwined Jewish and German history.

Libeskind was a student and close colleague of John Hejduk. In many ways his
architecture captures the mysteries inscribed in Hejduk’s theatrical scores.
Walking through these spaces this absence, at times angry, sometimes
melancholy, pervades all movement. On a sensorial level the building is
constantly manipulating the emotions of visitors. The phenomenological body is
continually addressed: each part of the building focuses on a very intimate,
physical perspective. The spaces lift the body, slice it, press it down. Physical
sensation always occurs when a person moves through any built environment.
Libeskind’s strategy is to amplify the architecture and thereby the experience.
One feels the built environment actively participating in the spatial experience. It
demands to be heard and interacted with. Throughout the museum you are

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accosted with these sensory transactions, making it difficult to separate yourself
emotionally from the information you are given in the exhibition rooms.

To diagram the Jewish museum is to draw three axes: the Axis of Emigration, the
Axis of the Holocaust and the Axis of Continuity. Instead of a clear description of
linear movement through the museum, they end abruptly, forcing visitors to turn
and backtrack. In this diagram, it is not easy to place oneself, nor direct one’s
movements through the museum. Libeskind describes these axes as ‘voids’,
cutting lines through Jewish history.306 The visitor enters through the original
Jewish museum building, performing the interlinking of the new with the old. This
entry provides the typical grandeur expected of a museum: high ceilings, white
walls, ornamentation decorating the columns and along the cornices. After
moving through ticketing and security the passage leads you to a blackened
stairwell that plummets into the depths of the earth. Libeskind’s journey begins.

6.1.3
Absent Space/ Absent Bodies

Thirty percent of the building is empty void. In an age when floor ratios
determine funding for a new building, this amount of unusable space is
extraordinary. Twenty-meter high negative volumes, shaped in off-form concrete,
dissect the museum with shafts of light and shadow. It is however the intense
dark spaces that are so affective. Libeskind originally wanted to rub the internal
walls with black graphite to expel any possibility of light. He describes the voids
as ‘that which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history:
humanity reduced to ashes.’307 The void is a recurring theme in the museum. It

306
From a lecture by Daniel Libeskind at Hannover University, December 5, 1989 as quoted in
Freireiss, Kristin (ed.), Jewish Museum (Ernst & Sohn: Germany, 1992), p.3.
307
Daniel Libeskind, 2000, quoted by Reid, Susanna, ‘The Jewish Museum Berlin’ (review)
Virtual Library Museum Website. Retrieved 12.04.2007 at <http://www.vl-museen.de/aus-
rez/reid01-1.htm>

232
is reminiscent of the sense of loss, what has been erased and destroyed – the
lives, the words, the objects. These voids articulate the mammoth loss, not only
to the Jewish community, but to society as a whole, through the systematic
cultural and social destruction the Nazi regime inflicted. The result is absent
space, a void that speaks of what has been taken and what has been lost. 308

The strength of the museum is not its description of Events of the Holocaust;
there are few photos of the camps or images of the personal devastation that one
typically associates with this history. The strength of the museum is not in the
exhibition halls that are continually being publicly disparaged.309 Instead, the
museum takes the risky route down the experiential in order to convey the
message. In this way it could be argued that Libeskind employs the theatrical,
but not by creating stage sets in which to view events. He is creating spaces for
the personal performances of these events. The psychological intensity of the
museum is most palpable in the Holocaust Tower. It is winter when I walk into
the tower and the heavy door closes behind me. The heating of the museum
abruptly ends. I am not reading or seeing an image of how Jewish people felt in
the cattle trains or in the camps. I am experiencing a sense, a hint of what it
would have been like – the claustrophobic darkness, the hollow cold and only a
sliver of light slicing through the emptiness. I must perform this experience, allow
myself to fall into the feeling. To talk only creates uncanny echoes that multiply
and reverberate strangely.

308
Perhaps the most telling presentation of artifacts in the Jewish Museum can be heard in
Gallery of the Missing, a commissioned artwork by Via Lewandowsky. It is an installation of black
glass structures, with audio lists of possessions which were taken and lost or destroyed during
the Holocaust. This piece emotively presents the destruction of so many cultural artefacts during
the time of National Socialism.
309
The public debates over the exhibition halls have been ongoing ever since the museum
originally opened in 1999 as an empty shell. There is a marked difference in the spatial
experience of the museum as one leaves the main part of the building to enter the exhibition
halls, and then returns to the Libeskind-designed spaces.

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6.1.4
Keeping Upright

The event of the Holocaust Tower emphasizes the primary experience of the
museum – imbalance. From the initial sighting of the museum, craning my neck
in order to take in the jagged form, the impact of the architecture upon my body is
foremost. Despite the distinctive form of the building, it is the physical sensation
that endures after my visit, not what it looks like. Destabilization is a key strategy
throughout the museum, the art of catching the visitor unaware. It is as if when
the visitor is physically off guard, they are also emotionally off-guard. The
imbalances of the building disorientate and confuse, creating a feeling of being
lost and alone. This forces an affective response. In this state visitors are
compelled toward reflection. The architecture actively works against the body to
extract an emotional reaction. It does this through physical trans-actions,
moulding the body as it moves through the space, demanding responses.
Despite its angular forms, there is a fluidity that draws you through the museum,
created by the extended volumes and use of light. The body’s movement
through the building becomes a performance of history, where the program of the
museum is physically experienced rather than simply read or perceived.

On my first visit I walk initially to the end of the Axis of Emigration, where I reach
the Garden of Exiles. To enter the garden is to leave the building. I walk out of
the dark intensity of the interior and into the day. But this reprieve is very brief. I
have the sudden sensation that the building has been turned inside out, the solid
walls becoming open space. In fact the plan of the garden is a rigid grid
contrasting the complicated diagram of the museum building. Forty-nine
concrete columns are situated on a square grid, from which Oleaster plants are
abundantly sprouting. But I am finding it difficult to ascertain this, because of the

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ground, which is tilted twelve degrees, creating surprisingly intense waves of
nausea.

The form of the garden bares obvious resemblance to Eisenman’s design of the
Memorial. Libeskind, who was a student of Eisenmen’s, publicly noted the
suspicious similarities between the two works. Like the Holocaust Tower, the
garden evokes an intense, physical response. While the tower provides a space
in which to reflect upon this bodily reaction, the garden allows no respite from
vertiginous distress. Libeskind aimed to recreate the feeling of disorientation
experienced by Jews driven out of Germany. The visitor cannot know this
without reading the attached plaque. The physical agitation however is almost
impossible to ignore. The garden doesn’t allow for alternative thoughts. In
desperation to stay upright, I move mechanically up and down through the grid
and escape to the edges to breathe deeply.

6.1.5
Scripting

The script of the museum is the navigation of an ordering system. The museum
is a space through which the visitor physically negotiates a way of understanding
the world. Its classificatory structure has changed over history, from the three-
dimensional encyclopaedias of the Renaissance Wunderkammers, to the
Enlightenment storehouses of knowledge. In order to incite the passive visitor to
thought, the postmodern museum has sought to incorporate multi-media,
interaction and play. The question the museum presents is essentially a
performative one: How does one physically negotiate a taxonomy? The
classification systems of a museum are tied to the objects it contains. In the case
of the Jewish Museum, however, the objects have become secondary to the
building itself. In this unique situation, the Jewish Museum initially opened in
1999 and remained devoid of artefacts for nearly two years. In the first year over

235
three hundred thousand visitors came to see it, prompting calls for the building to
become a memorial and remain without objects. In the same way that the
horrors of the Holocaust is not an easy history to present or to learn, this is not an
easy building to navigate. The power of experiencing the space was extolled at
great length, as well as the many fears that it would be impossible to exhibit
within. As one journalist wrote, ‘with critics eager to see whether the building
would overpower the artefacts displayed with it…Or… whether Daniel Libeskind’s
deconstructivist building would deconstruct even the exhibition itself.’310

The opposition of the exhibition against the architecture has been a source of
regular criticism, as it has been in the case of other iconic buildings.311 The
exhibition areas in the Jewish Museum have continually proved difficult, resulting
in the main exhibition space being placed above ground and defining a linear
progress in contrast to Libeskind’s overall design.312 There is a strong focus on
presenting these ideas through different identities, which give a personal aspect
to the information. But what I notice most when moving through the narrow
galleries are the voids, many levelled empty spaces that take you out of the
consciousness of the typical museum and plunge you back into the visceral
experience of Libeskind’s space.

Historian Kevin Walsh describes the Postmodern condition of flux as enforcing

the memorialisation of the past.313 In this way the museum as a typology
becomes a stable site, fixed in time and space in contrast to the constant
transformation of history. But in contrast, because it is not yet (and possibly never

310
Susanna Reid, ‘The Jewish Museum Berlin’, review in Virtual Library Museum. Retrieved
12.04.2007 at <http://www.vl-museen.de/aus-rez/reid01-1.htm>
311
This kind of controversy is of course familiar, for example Frank Loyd Wright’s design for the
Guggenheim in New York in 1956, which created the original furor of impressive architectural
form over riding the functional requirements of specified buildings.
312
The galleries take you through chonologically from Beginnings, Religious Life, Families,
Middle Class Life, the Modern age and Urbanity, Completion and Collapse of Emancipation and
After 1945.
313
Kevin Walsh, The Represention of the Past: museums and heritage in the post-modern world
(Routledge; USA, 1992).

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will be) primarily about the objects within it, the Jewish Museum can base itself in
motion. Despite the monolithic nature of the museum’s form, movement shapes
the experience of the building.

In this example of flux architecture, the Jewish Museum focuses primarily on

stillness. It often feels as if Libeskind has considered the architecture primarily in
these moments, such as when pausing at the bottom of the Stairway of
Continuity, looking upward at the dramatic cuts of light splicing space or alone in
the Holocaust tower. But in order to pause there must be movement, and
stillness is often found when situated against its opposite. Though the layout
seems initially very irregular, with intersecting axes that cut across each other
and end abruptly, there is an undeniable pull with which the spaces draw you
through the building. Visitors tend to give up visualizing how the building works,
giving in to the spaces and allowing them to dictate movement. Although the
Jewish Museum does not initially appear to be based on ideas of continuous
space, with its jagged shapes in plan and elevation, experientially it is extremely
fluid. Long, extended walls pull you into claustrophobic corners, but these walls
also draw you up and outward. It is a building that proposes that perhaps the
spaces of the future need not be in the ‘Blob’ forms supported by CAD programs:
that curves are not necessarily more fluid that straight lines.314

Flux becomes a three-dimensional process. In contrast to the planimetry nature

of movement diagrams, the museum is more reminiscent of Schlemmer’s Slat
Dance, where prosthetic rods articulated the body’s geometries in space. Here
the fluid body creates oblique edges to the surrounding environment, dramatic
dissections and punctures of space, reminiscent of the harsh lines of the
museum. In both projects, the animate body is central to this creative act,
transforming the forms of space with each gesture and movement. In the Jewish

314
This can also be argued in reference to the architecture of Zaha Hadid. In the Phaeno
Science Centre and the BMW building, both in Germany, the spaces flow and sometime flood
from one area to the next, while remaining held in the angular aesthetics of Hadid’s drawings.

237
Museum the slats become not only delineations of invisible forces of intent and
action, but solidify into corporeal forms. Multiplying the oblique planes of
Architecture Principe, the museum engages with this condition relating to
different aspects of the body, the joints and edges of limbs delineate the body’s
rotations and turns, the curve and bend of a person’s vision.

6.1.6
Choice

When moving through the museum, I do not view the performance in these
spaces. This is not theatre. Nor can I choose to participate in the performances.
It is too late for participation. The body is already a part of the production,
playing out roles and acting out gestures prescribed by the spaces. The museum
is not a flexibly scripted space. Libeskind defines movement and interaction from
general directions to minute emotional responses. But Libeskind also insists on
engagement, and in this sense the museum enforces active perception implied
by the strategy of improvisation. The strategy of improvisation is thereby played
out in a different way in the museum. Rather than promoting flexibility of
movement, the Jewish museum provokes disorientation.

Disorientation occurs in the bodily sense of imbalance and in the macro form of a
central intersection dividing into three axes. The three axes present three
options for passage. The corridors are more like blades of white and black space
that thrust through the earth, cut with lines of fluorescent light. The walls of these
blades are embedded with display cases showing small personal items,
accompanied by short texts. This entire area of the museum is disconcertingly
underground. Directions in public spaces are typically very prescriptive, allowing
pedestrians to succumb to defined patterns of movement and action. Libeskind’s
design refuses such lethargy at every turn. It demands engagement. It is this
engagement which has been criticized, a kind of funhouse mentality,

238
‘disneyfication’, choose-your-own-adventure style that can be considered
specifically demeaning to both the audience and the subject matter. The
nomenclature used in several criticisms reference kitsch popularism, with its
relation to theme parks and funfairs. This is a key argument for performative
architecture. The line between active transaction with environments and simply
overly enforced interactions can be difficult to define. This is particularly relevant
in terms of such emotive programs as a Jewish museum or memorial. But I
argue that by focusing on the living body, that architecture can be both affective
and effective. In contrast to simply an over surplus of imagery and gadgets,
performative architecture emphasizes the body and its transactive relationship to
built environments.

The extension to the Jewish Museum emphasizes that history is most powerful
when it can be experienced. By creating a built environment that acts upon the
body, destabilizing its natural state, the affective impact on visitors are opened to
the ethical and emotional implications of the museum.

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 Fig.16
Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, 2005.
Photograph by Ben Hewett.

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6.2
case study The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin
Peter Eisenman

I cycle past the Memorial several times before venturing inside. I am interested
in how my understanding of the new Holocaust memorial is being built on glossy
publicity photos and an exterior viewpoint - flat, grey planes reflecting skies and
shadows. From this position the most striking aspect is the repetition of forms,
the mass of concrete geometry, impressive in its sheer quantity. It provides a
perfect photo opportunity for architecture students and mathematicians. The
metaphor of the graveyard is a lasting impression, the concrete blocks are a
perfect size for a reclining corpse. It comes as a surprise when I eventually
experience the memorial from the inside that it is not simply an architecture of
form. In my memory of this first visit, the architecture dissolves against a series
of thoughts and interactions, the lonely movement through interruptions of sound,
bodies and far away views. I realise this new memorial to the Holocaust by Peter
Eisenman is more than a game of geometry and volumes or the expected post
structuralist abstraction.

The program of the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe is dedicated to
the nebulous area of memory, rather than pragmatic issues of inhabitation or
function. Its austere form is reminiscent of a minimalist sculpture. It appears to
sit in the space between solid and insubstantial. In its role as a monument it
aims to conquer time, its foundations are firmly held in the earth. What it wills to
achieve is also a solid thing, the weight of the Holocaust felt in the spaces
between the stones. Despite the arresting form what endures is the feeling of
moving through the space - stillness is difficult, one is continuously drawn
through and around the blocks. The heaviness of the concrete blocks provokes
the sense of moving through a negative, a continuous winding of voids. It relies
on the performance of bodies in order to make its architecture.

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6.2.1
Design Process

The memorial is designed through the superimposition, warping and slippage of

two grided, topological surfaces.315 This slippage that occurs in the varying
relationships of changing pillar heights and shifting ground planes, create
indeterminate spaces unscripted by the architect. Eisenman purposely gave up
control of these spatial moments in order for the architecture itself to form them.
In this way the design process of the memorial arises from the manipulation of
formal elements.

Eisenman hasn’t designed this performative space from the position of the
phenomenological body. His approach is very unlike Tschumi’s examinations of
movement through mappings and choreography. But the result is never the less
an environment that affects the body in extreme ways. It has been greatly
publicized that Eisenman has said that the memorial has no specific meaning,
that it can be read in multiple ways and be sited in multiple places. But the
memorial is a not simply a context-less tabula rasa as was intimated in the media
with his statement. Understanding Eisenman’s previous work brings a different
level of appreciation to the Holocaust Memorial.

Eisenman’s early work during the late 70s and 80s, focused on the cube to
critique composition through what he termed ‘decomposition’. The emphasis was
not on the final product, but the process, which he explored through drawings
and models. These House designs purposely denied their given site. As
mentioned in respect to John Hejduk’s theatrical location of the masque, a
method Eisenman used was the ‘graft’, which he described as a genetic insertion

315
Peter Eisenman, Barfuss Auf Weiss Gluhenden Mauern/Barefoot on White-Hot Walls (Hatje
Cantz: Austria, 2005), p.156.

242
into an alien body.316 The graft was a way in which a building could free itself
from the bonds of context and therefore tradition. This early work was designed
on arbitrary or invented sites. This ‘nowhere’ is the somewhere of liminal space.
By demanding that the memorial’s form does not comply with its surrounding
context, places it into an inbetween site. As with Hejduk’s ‘Berlin Masque’
project, the site becomes problematized through the distinction of its program.
While the masque is dedicated to the performance of the theatrical, the memorial
is dedicated to the performance of memory. To script this performance, based
on individual histories, knowledge, thoughts, is impossible. Instead Eisenman
makes room for memory. He carves out space for the possibility of
remembrance in the memorial and instead of prescribing the experience,
Eisenman allows for personal improvisation. You are given the option to ignore
the program, to imagine history or reflect on entirely other issues.

6.2.2
Location

The memorial sits like a ruined city in the heart of Berlin, between the triumphant
sandstone of the Brandenburg Gate and the glass towers of the rebuilt
Postdammerplatz. The concrete blocks assume both an ancient, monolithic
quality, whilst also presenting the precise clarity of the new, rebuilt Berlin. The
location is both a tourist and political centre, around the corner from the
Reichstag, across the road from Tiergarten, next door to what will be the new US
Embassy. It is also situated across the road from the unmarked site of Hitler’s
bunker. Arguments were made against building what resembles a graveyard in
the centre of the city, but the program for this 19,000sqm site would always prove
controversial, bringing forward debates on public space as well as history and
commemoration.

316
Quotation by Jean-François Bédard introduction to The Cities of Artificial Excavation, The
Work of Peter Eisenman 1978-1988 ed. (Rizzoli International Pub.; Canada, 1994), p.14

243
The memorial is made up of 2711 pillars, which Eisenman calls stellae, after the
Greek name for grave markers. Each stellae is 950 by 2980 mm, varying in
height from 500 to 4700 mm high, of a steel frame and concrete construction.
The surface is smooth and glossy. Collectively the stellae create a wave
diagonally across the site, through differing heights and a slight, gradual tilt. The
precision in its construction is astounding when seen from aloft, a rippling sea of
concrete planes. But this can only be understood from the sky; on ground there
is only the incomprehensible and subtle tilting and variations of the stellae,
creating a feeling of slight disjunction, of unease. Despite the dense form, the
memorial therefore ripples and flows across the site, performing flux in concrete.
Like Libeskind’s angular forms, what initially appears to be strict orthogonal
geometry, is made fluid through movement and the subtle subversion of each tilt.
There is thus an interplay between its status as a solid form and the shifting
movement created by shadows, planes and bodies. The memorial is dedicated
to transition over inhabitation. At night, strips of fluorescents recessed into the
ground along the east to west axis provide the only light source, creating fluid
bands into the distance. The pathways between the blocks are just wide enough
to move through. The spaces between each stellae become pathways, alleys,
freeways, networks of motion. To stop is to create blockage, the possibility of
being hemmed in, of being caught. It was described by Luis Fernandez-Galiano
as;

Here, clothed bodies are invited to bare their symbolic skins by slipping
between concrete blocks that shape a maddening labyrinth of order, fluid
like a gridded field of cold Volcanic lava, and making their descent into a
clean, precise, and oppressive underworld.317

317
Luis Fernandez-Galiano, ‘Germania Remember: Berlin’s Memorial or Eisenman’s Danteum' in
Blurred Zones Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman Architects 1988-1998.

244
The memorial denies representation. The stellae have often been connected
with Jewish graveyards or simply tombs, but their repeated bleak forms repulse a
‘concrete’ definition. In this way, despite their striking appearance, the
architecture seems to disappear, allowing for multiple readings. Throughout
Eisenman’s work he has struggled against the idea of an absolute truth, aiming
toward freeing architecture from tradition and controversially in terms of this
memorial: history. To do this he has tried to push architecture to its most artificial
limits, aiming to erase authorial presence and paring his forms down to create
autonomous, Euclidean solids.

6.2.3
Experiencing Environments

Eisenman is not looking to the past for the basis of this memorial, but to the
present. The argument is that it is impossible to show people the horrors of what
it was like during the Holocaust. Like Libeskind’s extension of the Jewish
Museum, Eisenman looks to a present, physical and performative approach. The
basis of the project is not to be read or perceived, but to be experienced. Both
architects employ architectural form to directly act upon the body and emote a
reaction. Libeskind focuses on destabilizing the individual body, but Eisenman
presents the Holocaust by making space for improvised movement. It is an
essential ‘live’ and individual performance. This is similar to Maya Lin’s famous
Vietnam War memorial in Washington because Eisenman’s memorial also
demands personal interaction.318 Without the body weaving through the space, it
is simply a collection of concrete blocks. I watch other people enter the space
and literally disappear into it in the same way that so many Jews disappeared
from German streets. When I cease to be a voyeur on the outside of the

318
Maya Lin won the competition to design the Vietnam Memorial in Washington in 1981. As a
non-representational, sculptural memorial, it was highly controversial during its construction
process, described as a ‘black hole’ and a ‘scar’. Despite this initial reaction it has emerged as
one of the most popular memorials in America.

245
architecture and follow them, I am swallowed by it, both physically and
emotionally. Through this process I become part of the memorial.

Eisenman uses the grid to propose a basic principal of order. He then proceeds
to undermine that perception of order. The rationality of the grid becomes a
stage for the complete irrationality and incomprehensibility of the Holocaust.
Through this structure Eisenman manages to make the body perform a series of
disruptions. One of the ways that this is achieved is through the stark but gradual
changes in the ground level. These changes result in the viewer’s disorientation,
imbalance and unease. Walking into the memorial the first thing lost is a sense
of distance. I had seen it from the outside many times and cycled its length and
breadth. Walking down a chosen path, I quickly found myself immersed in the
structure. It is the depth that one cannot gauge from the outside, the fact that at
its deepest point the ground falls to over two metres below the surrounding
pavement level. The ground beneath my feet literally gave way.

Dread-locked backpackers lounge with ipods along one row, while opposite a
group of clean-cut army cadets smoke cigarettes in another. The memorial does
not prescribe behaviour and therefore children play and scream, people can
yawn and look at watches, while others daydream.

Readability is a central concern for a memorial, yet the Memorial for the
Murdered Jews is unashamedly mute. The absence of signage and explanatory
texts is a continuing source of criticism. A memorial always presents history from
a certain viewpoint and therefore always from a position of power. Within the
sensitive context of the Holocaust, clarity of memory is specifically controversial.
As James E. Young writes, ‘once we assign monumental form to memory, we
have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember’.319 By

319
James E. Young, ‘Memory, Counter-Memory, and End of the Monument: The Holocaust and
Historical Trauma in Contemporary Visual Culture’ 30.01.2000. Lunds University Website.
Retrieved 10.01.2007 at <http://www.arthist.lu.se/discontinuities/texts/young1.htm>

246
subverting the Memorial’s status as a monument, Eisenman denies single and
simple definitions. He specifically strips the memorial of any kinds of symbols,
signs, indications or clues to meaning. In doing so he endeavours to remove it
from this didactic position. In this way it may be argued that in the space that is
made between, is the opportunity for dissent and creativity.

When the solidity of architecture is allowed to blur and dissolve, people are given
the freedom to perform their own scripts. He allows the visitor to create their
own answers and questions. To do this, though is also to allow for acceptance
and denial of to entering into its discourse. While many have argued that the
memorial is overly dictatorial and austere, in fact its concrete blandness allows
for multiple interactions and performances. In this sense the usual script that
dictates how people move in a built space is given over to improvisation. The
allowance for a flexibility or variance of interpretation implies a flexibility of the
truth.

6.2.4
Scale

Scale has been a recurring issue in Eisenman’s projects, with many critics feeling
that he dehumanises the built space. K. Michael Hays writes that Eisenman has
been known for seeking a kind of architecture separate from the sensual and the
built.320 His dedication to diagrammatic abstraction has created environments
notably disinterested with the living body. To look purely at images of his
projects though is to miss the focus of Eisenman’s consideration of the body in
architecture. Eisenman uses scale in order to ‘subvert the notion of the human

320
K. Michael Hays, ‘Allegory unto Death, An Etiology of Eisenman’s Repetition’ in The Cities of
Artificial Excavation, The Work of Peter Eisenman 1978-1988, p.104.

247
body as the source-authority of scale’.321 By dislodging the body from its
centralized Virtruvian status, the emphasis can turn to the built environment.
Eisenman is not thereby denying the importance of the body; the issue becomes
one of scale, of measurement. Removing the body from this process is about
removing the figure of the body. The result is a focus on the relationship
between form and experience.

Hays writes that Eisenman’s early work has focused on ‘distancing,

defamiliarization, and deployment of alienation effects to reorient our
apprehension of architectural form away from standard perceptual
conventions’.322 Visitors are forced to reconsider their interactions with the built
environment because they cannot rely on what they already know. They are
forced to deal with the space in an immediate and sensorial way. The
soundscape that is created in the memorial is a source of disquiet. The concrete
stellae create an exaggerated acoustic space. Echoes bounce off the surface,
while the exterior world is muffled; footsteps, children’s cries, conversations,
mutterings. It creates the sense of being apart from the rest of society, separated
from both place and people, while in the centre of the city and potentially
surrounded by others.

Besides the usual group of children running through the memorial, my journey
through the memorial is necessarily solitary, because the distance between each
stellae is sized for single file. Conversation is therefore severely limited and
people tend to recoil into their own thoughts. Large groups dissipate, allowing
individuals to experience the space. Movement through the environment
becomes a private performance, where each person plays out his or her journey
through the monument. A key disruption is my inability to easily judge where
people are. The design denies seeing if someone is coming perpendicularly

321
Peter Eisenman ‘La Villette: Project for a Garden’ in The Cities of Artificial Excavation, The
Work of Peter Eisenman 1978-1988, p.187.
322
K. Michael Hays The Cities of Artificial Excavation, The Work of Peter Eisenman 1978-1988,
p.105.

248
toward me. Interactions become sudden and discomfortingly close, literally
colliding with people at the corners, or sudden close eye contact. When I do see
people it is always a single figure, framed, with the outside world a receding
backdrop behind them. Again I like to imagine the memorial from aloft again,
perhaps as seen from the hot air balloon in nearby Potsdammerplatz, watching
the movement of bodies, predicting the sudden collisions, the flow of children
swarming from one corner, a lone figure weeping in another.

The memorial is structured around the idea of how far the visitor is willing to go
emotionally in the site. This is their choice. The built environment creates an
atmosphere of loss and disorientation in which to ponder individual readings.
However both agendas are specific and bounded within certain parameters of
phenomenological performances. The performance of the Holocaust memorial,
like the performance of the Jewish Museum, is predicated on a single goal – the
memory of the Holocaust. Despite the desire of both architects to approach this
using improvisational tactics, it still means there is a specific affective focus.
While this is very successful in terms of the museum and memorial’s brief, the
question arises as to how these spaces can infect conventional architectures. In
this way Diller and Scofidio and NOX are opening spaces up, rather than limiting
them to varied spatial performances.

249
 Fig.19
Diller + Scofidio, Blur Building, Switzerland, 2002.
Diller, Elizabeth and Scofidio, Ricardo, Blur: The Making of Nothing, (Harry N. Abrams: New York,
2002) p. 371.

250
6.3
case study The Blur Building, Swiss Exposition, 2002.
Diller + Scofidio

The image of the Blur Building is a cloud hung low on the lake water’s edge. It is
as if someone had smudged the picturesque photo of a lakeside idyll and left a
trace of that action - an accident or trick of the light. The effect is produced by
over 30,000 tiny jets spraying water, enough to create a cumulous the size and
shape of a two-storey building. To enter the building the visitor leaves terra firma
across an open platform. Moving toward it, perception begins to blur as you
become engulfed in a fine mist. In this theatrical setting one’s interactions with
the environments and other visitors become uncanny. Not only sight becomes
indistinct, but one’s physical experience of space is also confounded.

The Blur Building needed to accommodate a wide range of visitors who would be
visiting the exposition. The astonishing form of the Blur Building and the potential
scripting written into it are not separate entities, but must be seen holistically as
integrated into the project. In this way the themes of blur, which can be viewed
in its form, are also performed in the experience of it. The themes of ambiguity
and formlessness are translated phenomenologically into disorientation and
anonymity.

In the World Exposition of 1853 in London, Joseph Paxton built the Crystal
Palace, a majestic feat of architectural innovation and materiality in steel and
glass. For the Swiss Exposition in 2002, Diller and Scofidio designed what they
called the Blur Building, a cloud floating on a large body of water; a construction
of weather. In doing so, Diller and Scofidio created an icon for the new
millennium. In response to an age saturated with high definition, precise and
novel technologies, capitalist consumption and media spectacle, the Blur Building
is a building made of nothing. Key terms from the onset of the project were

251
atmosphere, scotoma, nothing, disorientation, artificial, nature, formless, white,
noise, art, the sublime.323

The Blur Building is an exposition pavilion, which means that it is not held by
many of the usual building restrictions. It is more like a folly, from a distance it
appears as a sculptural object, but the experience of it is pure theatre. This
creates two performative modes, where the architecture is visually performative
and where the experience of the architecture is another kind of performance. In
the first performance, the image of it is constantly shifting like a series of
cinematic frames. At times it looks indeed like a fluffy cloud, at other times a fine
fog or mist hovering above the water, a translucent space ship about to land or
take off. In the second mode the performance is all about the experience of the
architecture, a process of trans-action with technology, others and one’s physical
body.

Diller and Scofido’s understanding of performance has been cultivated in

collaboration with various choreographers, writers and directors in the realm of
performance. Roselee Goldberg writes that ‘Diller and Scofidio’s diverse and
innovative theatre projects seemed not only as full-scale working models for their
ideas about architecture, they also provided a laboratory for the concepts that
would give their buildings their most distinctive qualities’.324 In this way the
boundaries between architecture and performance are also blurred.

6.3.1
Design Process

The process in which the Blur pavilion was designed presents a more
conventional architectural narrative. A key concept evolves and is shaped and

323
Diller and Scofidio, Blur: the making of nothing (Harry N.Abrahms: NY, 2002), p.33.
324
Roselee Goldberg ‘Dancing About Architecture’ in Scanning: Aberrant Architectures, p.45.

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re-shaped by factors such as client and colleague discussions, site conditions
and in this case the important challenges of available technology. The project
began as the collaboration between Dutch landscape architects West 8 and
Swiss architects Vehovar and Jauslin. The guiding concept was to create a
‘media landscape’, in which the architecture itself would disappear.325 The
publication of this process in Blur: The Making of Nothing, documents the
inherent difficulties in first designing and then building this paradoxical challenge.
Throughout its pages are reproductions of the typical architectural sketches on
napkins, and faxes to and from the group across the globe, showing how designs
slowly gain their reality through constant re-interpretations of spatial ideas. The
early explorations of a building in which the architecture is absent, included a
large tilted platform in the lake, whereby the water was shaped into an
architectural form. In the end the solution was developed by Diller and Scofidio
in conjunction with West 8, who fought for the importance of making a building
out of water and air. Instead of a metaphor for these ideas, they wanted the
concepts to be understood in the building itself, and through the experience of it.

6.3.2
Presence

The Blur building demands a shift in one’s perception of materiality. Walking

across the platform toward the building, the visitor enacts the gradual breakdown
in perception. Moving into this liminal space is an optical obfuscation, physically
destabilizing the body. Perception is no longer reliable, both through sight and
through the physical experience.

325
Diller and Scofidio, Blur: the making of nothing, p.14.

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Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio met at the Architecture School, Cooper
Union in the 1970s, forming the design firm ‘Diller and Scofidio in 1979.326 The
question of seeing recurs throughout Diller and Scofidio’s work.327 They use it as
a deliberate response to the growing reliance on the visual throughout the
twentieth century. Architecture’s role in the perpetuation of prevailing
governmentality is well known, but Diller and Scofidio see this as problematized
by the contemporary desire to be seen. They endeavour to refrain from
judgement in their excess of cameras and screens, tracking and exposing the
movements of visitors to their installations and environments. Implicit in their
usage of these technologies is the contemporary debate on social control, but
through the performance of bodies interacting with these technologies, they
instigate the seduction inherent in both states of watching and being watched. In
this mediated environment, perception is political.

6.3.2
Vague Materiality

What else is there to say about the materiality of the Blur Building, besides that it
is a cloud? It can be described by its technology, the thousands of tiny
waterspouts, the complex engineering and plumbing. For a period of five
months, the Blur Building was 100 meters wide by 65 meters deep, at a height of
25 metres. The tensegrity structure created a spatial network of steel rods, which
made an ovoid skeleton around which the cloud shape formed. What makes this
building interesting though, is the fact that it is not really there.

326
Their work incorporates exhibition design, installation, performances, public art, planning,
books, web projects and in the last five years, architecture. Since winning and completing the
Blur Building for the Swiss Exposition in 2003, they have won several important architecture
projects including the Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology in New York, the Lincoln Centre
for Performing Arts in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
327
Optical devices and materials pervade their early projects, from the surreal magnifying
apparatus in the performance the Rotary Notary Stripped Bare to the floating screen across the
façade of the Muscone Centre in San Francisco.

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To write about the materiality of this building is thus to write about absence. It is
built around the moment of encounter, of viewing the building from afar as a
cloud floating on the lake. As it is a temporary structure for an exposition, it’s
presence is now only in mediatised reproductions. The concept is (as the names
suggests) to blur, making it an obvious built reality of blurred space. Diller and
Scofidio describe it as ‘[f]eatureless, depthless, scaleless, spaceless, mass less,
surface less, and context less’.328 It is an architecture based on flux. At times it
was simply a series of naked platforms stripped of a membrane, the cloud having
completely moved elsewhere. In this state of flux, the architecture is animated,
as if the digital form was made real.

Like many of the great architectures of our time, the Blur Building is emblematic:
its image is unforgettable and unimaginable. What makes Diller and Scofidio’s
design so original is that unlike the fashionable forms that constitute our
understanding of such iconic buildings (such as the Gehry icons), the Blur
Building literally dissolves form - an architecture without walls. In the making of
monuments and icons, a building without recognisable shape tends to dissolve in
the memory. In an age when almost everything can be bought and consumed,
the Blur Building is pure performance. Never the less in the case of the Blur
Building this is somewhat paradoxical. The strength and clarity of the idea (in
this case a large cloud) has made it in fact extremely iconic as can be seen in the
plethora of consumable goods from matchboxes to T-shirts, branded with the
Blur Building image.

Diller and Scofidio refuse to accept either architecture or the body as passive,
proposing instead architecture that works against itself. Dissolving the building’s
solidity allows for the interactions of bodies within. The physical body is
highlighted and exaggerated by the surreal environment. In this theatrical

328
Diller and Scofidio quoted by Ashley Schafer ‘Designing Inefficiences’ in Scanning: Aberrant
Architectures, p.45

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setting, interaction with the environment and other visitors become uncanny.
This is emphasized by the ‘braincoat’ costumes (which will be later examined)
that draw the visitor into the building’s performance and produce unthought-of
improvisations.

6.3.3
Data Cloud

Uniting their plans was a conception of blur as an open set of experiences

admitting no privileged viewing position or single message, whose
employment of multiple media (architectural, visual images, landscape
design, literary narrative, sound art, and interactive digital technology)
suggests a post-modern revision of the nineteenth-century ideal of the
Gesamtkunstwerk for the digitised twenty-first century.329

For this all encapsulating total work of art, Diller and Scofidio wanted to create a
building that was itself a kind of static resonance, a ‘data cloud’, where virtual
networks connecting the Braincoats to the physical movements of bodies,
interweaving with LED (Light Emitting Diode) screens of text. Three-dimensional
chat-rooms on the website would allow communication across the globe
connecting to visitors to the international public through the Braincoats. These
networks combined to create what they called a ‘technological sublime’.

By creating a building of made of nothing, Diller and Scofidio refuse to abide by

the myth of technology as a productive force.330 They use new technologies not
to create romanticized visions of the future, but performatively, in order to critique
real-time situations. Throughout their projects, they have used technology and

329
Edward Dimendberg explores this issue in his essay ‘Blurring Genres’ in Scanning: Aberrant
Architectures, p.79
330
Edward Dimendberg ibid, p.209

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media as creative working principals, exploring the possibilities and implications
of their usage as they permeate the everyday.

6.3.5
Indeterminate Systems

By choosing to focus on weather and making a building out of water, Diller and
Scofidio risked the theme of unpredictability. Diller and Scofidio have used this
theme to create a sense of disjunction between expectation and reality. Ashley
Schafer points out that they implement technologies to deliberately institute
delay.331 Technology has focused on making that as easy and comfortable as
possible, whether through communication networks or through simply controlled
environments. The facilitation by technology of fluid transitions through spaces
and actions is reliant on the passivity of bodies to ‘go with the flow’. While
Situationist constructions of the ‘push and pull’ of urban forces was dependant on
people’s openness to their own personal and often aberrant desires in the
psychogeographic relationship, the ‘user control’ society is built on collective
dependence on technology. It is only when something breaks that people are
forced to reassess what they are doing. The idea of technology as smooth and
constant is subverted by the glitch, the impairment or the fault. Diller and
Scofidio like to work in this space between technological expectation and error.
In the Blur Building, unpredictability was unavoidable, but it was also seen as
essential to the project. Every eight minutes the Blur Building would monitor the
temperature conditions and adjust itself accordingly. Because the weather can
easily shift in that time, this was not fast enough to keep the cloud’s shape and
density. This created a failure of perfection, a fault that exposed the building to
uncontrollable change and movement.

331
Ashley Schafer in Diller & Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes, (Princeton Architectural
Press:1996), p.100.

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The disintegration of architecture’s solidity has resulted in buildings which in
themselves become performative. In contrast to the post-modern architecture of
layered representation, this building performs, changes, instigates and implicates
relationships with their inhabitants. By making an architecture without walls,
Diller and Scofidio have undone this principal of architecture. Having realised
this, they can focus on playing with the experiential element. The most curious
example of this is the interaction constructed between people.

6.3.6
Moving in Blurred Space

Walking into the Blur Building feels different. One walked from the Swiss
summer into a completely artificial environment of damp mist. The air
temperature drops as one walks toward and into the cloud, it is like stepping into
another world. Aaron Betsky describes Diller and Scofidio’s strategy of blurring
as ‘an ambition to use techniques of blur to make constructions in which one is
never quite sure what one is experiencing, where one is, or how one should
behave’.332 Blurring becomes an instigator for improvisation. In the same way
that Spuybroek reconfigures normative arrangements of interiors, by blurring both
the physical and metaphoric expectations, Diller and Scofidio provoke aberrant
interactions.

Diller and Scofidio are interested in how technology has changed the way people
interact. Their script for the Blur Building plays with ideas of technology, distance
and interaction. The ‘blur’ is an effect throughout the design, the blurring of
boundaries of inside and outside, but also the boundaries that people have

332
Aaron Betsky, ‘Display Engineers’ in Scanning: Aberrant Architectures, p.35.

258
between each other. In this way they play with the accepted parameters of public
and private space, literally and personally.

Beyond the visual wonder of its form, the interaction between blur and its users is
in constant play - from the actual experience of being in a cloud, to water vapour
on the skin. Diller and Scofidio focus on the body without resorting to figural
architectonics. Like Spuybroek, they refuse to dictate movement, instead
exploring and instigating potential choreographies. Instead, the ‘blur’ is used
against assumed scripts, presenting different pathways. The body itself in their
work is never stable, instead Diller and Scofidio describe its ‘new plasticity’ in
relation to technology and media.333 In the contemporary age of interactive multi-
media and cosmetic surgery, they see the body as attaining a new flexibility that
can be moulded, moved and transformed by other forces. Rather than debate
the ethics of this issue Diller and Scofidio explore what this means for
architecture.

Diller and Scofidio have said they were drawn to the two paradoxical elements of
weather: its mundaneness and its incontestable force. It’s inherent
unpredictability that has such an important effect on everyday life. Architecture
has typically set itself against elemental forces, aiming to create constant,
sheltered environments for human habitation. The Blur Building sits somewhere
between the natural and artificial, it provides elements of control that are never
absolute. Part of its very ordinariness is through the social nicety of talking about
the weather with strangers. In this way the weather, Diller and Scofidio point out,
brings people together.

333
Diller & Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes (Princeton Architectural Press:1996), p.38.

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6.3.7
Improvisational Apparel

The Braincoats originally devised for the Blur Building were unfortunately not
used during the expo, due to funding. For the purposes of this case study
though, it is useful to imagine how they may have worked. Entering the precinct
of the Blur building, the visitor is asked to fill out a questionnaire, the results of
which are programmed into the plastic raincoat you are given. Walking toward
the pavilion, the coat’s importance as a sheltering device is juxtaposed against it
own, as yet unknown agency. The act of getting into costume turns the
performative building into a personal performance, incorporating the visitor into
the scene. The problem is, one is not quite sure of the script. When things are
no longer clear, it’s possible to create new opportunities – to improvise. The
questionnaire creates a personal account, which relates emotionally to other
visitors. The results of this information is the coat’s glowing from green to red,
defining one’s compatibility to distaste, through the vicinity of other people’s data.

Having taken away the expected sensory tools for navigation, Diller and Scofidio
supply the visitor with new ones. Technology equips visitors with an alternative
in the form of the Braincoat, described by Diller and Scofidio as a sixth sense.
The Braincoat not only provided shelter from the water, it provoked interaction
between people. The anonymity of the strange, surroundings is also heightened
by everyone wearing the same kind of coat. The Braincoat therefore masks
identity while at the same time revealing individuality. In their first monograph
‘Flesh’, Diller and Scofidio described how the skin was a frontier of
communication with the exterior world. Blushing, perspiring and temperature
changes make the internal emotions sensually visible. Diller and Scofidio believe
that wireless technologies have changed the way we communicate. They take
this idea to the extreme by transmitting emotions using new technologies,
pointing the way to a new kind of ‘body language’. The society of relationships
through the internet are made both mobile and transparent. The Braincoats

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function as tracking devices, integrating each visitor into the larger system of the
Blur Building. By exposing one’s personal inclinations through the questionnaire,
it is as if technology is betraying ones secrets.

Technology equips the body with the ability to negotiate the existing environment.
Within the fog there is a notable lack of vision, so the coat takes over from the
eyes to create social interaction. It responds by literally blushing when close to a
like-minded person, becoming brighter the closer one gets. In this way the entire
building becomes a performance space, with the pedestrians acting roles as yet
unwritten. The script which the designer write is one of interaction, the coats re-
enforce it, whether you like it or not, taking it out of your hands. Once this
contract with the performance is accepted, it frees visitors into allowing the
technology to take you into new relationship with people, whether based on the
premise of compatibility or such visible incompatibility.

Seeing blurred space as a questioning of architectural form is physically realised

in how we must negotiate the space itself. Diller and Scofidio’s remove the
expected clues for the negotiation. One’s sight so blurred, it is difficult to
estimate distances and often impossible to see what is directly in front of you. In
the following case study, Spuybroek used the same techniques of removing the
horizon line and smoothing and curving the expected delineations between floor,
wall and ceiling. Diller and Scofidio do this and take it much further by diffusing
each vestige of traditional Cartesian space. As in the H2O pavilion this creates
disequilibrium, a need to refocus on your own body and hold yourself back from
vertigo. While Spuybroek wants you to rely on your other senses to do this, Diller
and Scofidio’s have other ideas. Acoustic clues are also masked by the sound
scape. Rather than creating an obviously disjunctive artwork, the sound artist
Christian MarClay, used dripping water, squeaking steel and hissing nozzles.
The result refuses to situate the visitor, ambiguously merging expectations and
art.

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In their reaction against the focus on spectacle ingrained in the architectural brief
of world expos, Diller and Scofidio created a piece of anti-architecture. The Blur
Building is one of the most exciting designs of the new millennium because it
encapsulates on a public scale, in built form, the cultural concerns of the age.
Diller and Scofidio have brought together their previous explorations of spatial
design and performance, utilizing the themes of mass media, surveillance,
consumption, disorientation and contemporary forms of interaction. It demands
an experiential rather than visual understanding, dissolving the built form into an
interactive, performative architecture.

262
 Figs.17 & 18
NOX Architecture H2O Pavilion, The Netherlands
Photographs by Toby Winton-Brown

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6.4
case study The H20 Pavilion, The Netherlands.
Lars Spuybroek

The H2O pavilion is situated in a water park in Northern Holland. As I drive along
the coastal road, the theme park emerges incongruously from a flat, sandy shore
and I can just make out the building – a glittering, slug-like form beached on the
North Sea. While novel architecture is so often presented in the media as
solitary forms framed dramatically by its environs, the reality is more often much
more subtle. It strikes me as I park the car how these new architectural forms will
change the built landscape, transforming even such already surreal places as a
theme park sited along an empty coastline.

The form of the pavilion is both extraordinarily unattractive and strangely

seductive. Though I have seen it reproduced in drawings, three-dimensional
models and photos, it only becomes comprehensible in the experience of it.
There are no horizontal planes, no right angles, each surface curves fluidly into
another. The concept is meant to be experienced – visitors move through the
building like water molecules, their motion taking on the property of H20. By
Dutch architect Lars Spuybroek of NOX Architects, the pavilion incorporates in
different ways, each of the strategies that have emerged from the performance
examples.

Spuybroek explores architecture from the position of technology and

movement.334 He has become a prominent figure in the innovative use of
architectural design programs, advocating a generative, systems theory
approach to design. Following on from Frederick Kiesler, Spuybroek aims to
create ‘an architecture that refrains from framing events through perspective and

334
Lars Spuybroek teaches at the University of Delft and the University of Atlanta, Georgia. He
has written several articles detailing his theoretical stance on technology and design. NOX
architects have designed many art projects, exhibition designs and hypothetical architectural
projects, as well as several small, built works.

264
tectonics in order to have a direct, unfiltered and intimate connection with smells,
bodies and images’.335 Spuybroek is insistent on the need for the practice of
architecture to change its very basis of design. By incorporating the tactile
relationship of the body as well as technology into architecture, Spuybroek is
perpetuating a new way of thinking it and making built environments.

Phenomenology and neurological studies provide the framework for Spuybroek’s

design process. ‘Motor Geometry’ is his way of bringing them into architecture,
which he describes as ‘the abstract movement in buildings, with its transformative
geometry, that relates directly to real movement of the body’.336 Rather then the
usual representational-based architecture systems, Spuybroek’s design
methodology is drawn from evolutionary theory. This methodology is ideally
suited for use in the computer, extending new technologies to their limits.
Movement animation programs are used to create systems that are in flux and
transformation, in order to create new notations and geometries. This is similar to
the work being done by other architects such as Greg Lynn and Winy Maas,
pioneers of what has become known as ‘Blob Architecture’ due to the resulting
globulus forms. What differentiates NOX from other digitally focused architecture
firms is their emphasis on bringing the information back into embodied
perception. Spuybroek uses digital technologies to engage with perception and
the body in new ways. He defines the difference as one of critical interaction
between information and form making.

6.4.1
Design Process

Spuybroek uses an iterative design process that develops form through multiple
replications of a given object, with slight variations at each stage. The form of the

335
Lars Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture (Thames & Hudson: UK 2004), p.46.
336
Lars Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture, p.36.

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H2O Pavilion began with a simple series of ellipses making a tubular volume. It
was then twisted by exterior forces and inserted into the ground. At the ground
plane it was then put through a series of deformations based on site and
programmatic considerations.

Spuybroek’s design process transposes movement into flexibility. He begins a

project by first building a matrix in his computer and collecting empirical data for
the specific project. This matrix has a set of relations, but the co-ordinates are
not fixed. When this diagrammatic system is constructed, Spuybroek inputs
information and generates form. Each co-ordinate is bound in a virtual whole,
creating repercussions throughout the matrix. The minute one object is tampered
with, all the coordinates shift. Therefore there is not an immediate end result but
a flexible system. This system can be manipulated in consideration of
phenomenological issues. In this way the information is continually looped back
through the system, and through other information threads, creating indefinite,
‘vague’ forms that are flexible enough to keep transforming with other
information.

Following the discussion of non-standard architectural processes in Chapter Five,

the H20 pavilion is one of the earliest examples of a building constructed from the
emerging digital CAD processes, processes based not only on representation or
construction, but on the generation of the design itself. As such, the way in which
the pavilion was designed is continuously interwoven with how it was made and
experienced.

6.4.2
Vertiginous Spaces

Spuybroek draws on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of the body-

subject, exploring the relationship between movement and perception. He

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regularly cites the kitten experiment carried out by Richard Held and Alan Hein in
1963. In this experiment two groups of kittens are raised in the dark. The first
group were allowed in the light only when pulling a basket with an immobile kitten
from the second group. After several weeks the kittens were released from their
bondage. The ones that had pulled the baskets behaved normally, having
continued the connection between perception and movement, but the kittens that
were unable to move properly, behaved as if they were blind. It was as if they
could not understand how the world was, having only perceived it without
physically moving through it.

Spuybroek uses this experiment to show the intrinsic relationship between how
people see the world and how their bodies move through it. The repercussions
for architecture in this experiment are that the traditional process of designing a
ground plane that is moved across and then extruding it upwards, is no longer
tenable. This continues Schlemmer’s argument of the disjunction between the
planimetry of the dance score with the stereometry of body movement. If
movement and perception are fluidly meshed together, the natural assumption is
that the spatial environment should relate in a likewise manner. Breaking from
the orthogonal plane means looking to the oblique. The H20 pavilion takes these
shifted planes, extended in Libeskind’s design of the Jewish Museum, to
incorporate walls and ceilings, and morphs them further in pursuit of an
architecture of flux. In the pavilion, continuity and fluidity combine to create
intensely destabilizing environments. The process generates curves and
torsions. There are no slopes of the same gradient. Lighting, unexpected shifting
in walls, ceiling and floors, the hypnotic sound scape, all combine to create an
immersive, interactive environment. Like walking through a cloud, as I enter the
pavilion, I can no longer trust what I see but must rely on the combination of my
other senses.

The result of destabilizing these constants is vertigo – the visitors to the pavilion
become the kittens in the Held and Heine experiment, physically struggling for

267
spatial orientation. I find myself continually pausing in order to re-orientate my
body in space. Spuybroek has described the pavilion as designed for the ‘wrong
foot’.337 In the confusion between walking and falling, visitors must engage with
their own bodies in order to negotiate the unfolding spaces. Rather than
designing environments for harmony and balance, Spuybroek focuses on the
opposite. It is a method of exploring and highlighting the way in which movement
and perception are conjoined. The coherence and co-ordination needed for the
body to navigate itself comfortably through space is over-turned in the pavilion.
Visitors have to rely on their motor balance skills simply to realign the most basic
of human actions – walking. As I move through the pavilion my interest is
continually directed by the surroundings and I am regularly surprised by
unexpected changes in floor levels that abruptly returns my focus to my body. I
must endeavour to constantly remain alert.

Because there are no windows in the H20 pavilion, there is no horizon to align
myself to. The horizon presents a perspective, which the body can use to orient
itself upright. Relating the body to the external world is about alignment. The
horizon creates a horizontal constant that the body can physically relate to
through optical perception – this is why the sailor tells the seasick passenger to
focus on the horizon line. Erasing the horizon means disengaging the interior
from the buildings external surroundings. In doing so, Spuybroek also brings the
built form closer to a virtual model. The building is therefore immersed in its own
interiority. This process of dislocation follows from Eisenman’s argument against
focusing on site.

337
Lars Spuybroek, ‘Motor Geometry’ 01.01.1997 – 31.12.1997. V2 Website. Retrieved
09.10.2007 at <http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/.xslt/nodenr-70081>

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6.4.3
Wet Architecture

The H2O pavilion is made up of the Freshwater Pavilion, designed by NOX

architects, which physically interlocks with the Seawater Pavilion designed by
another Dutch, digital architect Kas Oosterhuis. The concept behind both
buildings was that of a water experience pavilion, which would take the visitor
through a series of spaces exploring the differing properties of H20. It is an ideal
brief for a style of architecture that has become known as ‘Liquid Architecture’.
Moving through the pavilion I am struck by this fluidity, the seamless flow of
spaces instead of dedicated rooms. Water is literally all around me – real water,
‘fake’ water (in the forms of images and projections), mist sprays, frozen water,
deep pools.338

Spuybroek has said that he sees architecture and movement in terms of a

process of rhythms and flows. Continuity is essential, because when people
move, they perceive and understand space fluidly, as a combination of
continuous images and experiences. The spaces constructed by NOX draw on
fluid practises such as surfing and skateboarding, but also take account of
pragmatic issues like wheelchair access. These take the design process beyond
static representations of movement. This follows from Edmund Husserl’s
concept of kaleidoscopic space, where the fragmented images of the world are
made whole through the act of walking. The built environment actively supports
this process in the same way as Kiesler’s ‘Endless House’. Building elements
move fluidity into each other, rather than being designed and produced as
separate entities. It means bringing architecture in line with how we actually
move through space. This proposes the idea of ‘continuous space’. Continuous
space for Keisler was a fundamental element of his designs and indeed the form
of Keisler’s Endless House bares resemblance to many NOX projects. The

338
The original design incorporated a glacier tunnel of real ice and an illuminated well of
rainwater.

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walls, floors and ceilings are continuous and devoid of right angles. The
experience is one of transactive immersion, not simply presentation. There are
no windows to orient your movements. Visual projections cover the walls,
creating a virtual form within the material one. These images heighten the
shifting surface and what is perceived as flat or angled is manipulated further by
the wire frame.

The idea of continuous surfaces between ground, walls and ceiling is easy to
achieve on a computer screen. Using programs made for industrial design
means that morphing geometries in three-dimensions is easily done, allowing
vast spaces to be manipulated as if they were small objects. When these forms
are constructed, the suitability of such indistinct segregations between spaces
becomes questionable.

6.4.4
Movement and Potentiality

The integration of movement into the materiality of the building, is a key element
in NOX projects. The design of the pavilion is premised on change, on
movement. This information is ingrained into the solidity itself Spuybroek writes:
‘Movement must be viewed as information, as pure difference, because we all
know when ‘information’ does not cause any change it is superfluous.’339 The
result is an extraordinary shape, as if it had just arisen from the primordial slime.
The organic quality of the building captures the potential movement Spuybroek is
interested in throughout his projects. The H2O pavilion seems to pulsate and
breathe. This animated quality can be seen in NOX’s competition design for the
new world trade centre site, which looks like giant roots of a mangrove tree
inching its way toward the sky. In the V2 Lab, the interior seems about to slither

339
Lars Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture, p.355.

270
across the buildings surface, while the D Tower is like a long limbed creature,
ungainly and unsure, propped up on new supports and about to fall, turn or leap.
It creates a different status for the built form and the space around it from our
typically held assumptions of stability.

The pavilion is full of spatial illusions. Originally a wire frame structure was
projected onto the walls, which creates a virtual form that morphs separately from
the solid architecture. Through infrared sensors this structure ripples and
transforms, giving one the impression that you are literally shifting the structural
form, and that this form is more liquid than solid. This is another way of playing
with the relationship between what one sees and the ground upon which one
moves. The projections are not simply fluid images attached to an orthogonal
architecture, because the ground itself is also fluid so that it becomes almost
impossible to judge the gradients.

Movement in understood in these projects in terms of data. Spuybroek draws his

definition of spatiality from the writings of the Chilean biologists Francisco Varela
and Humberto Maturana.340 Varela and Maturama saw the space around bodies
and objects as unstructured information. This information would only gain
structure in the interaction of bodies, which was the space of true experience.
The world can thus never be considered simply objectively, there is no absolute,
pre-existing thing called space; rather, spaces are formed continuously through
the interior of the body. Spuybroek quotes Varela and Maturana: ‘there is no
structured information on the outside, it becomes only information by forming it

340
Varela and Maturama became famous in the 1970s for their term ‘autopoiesis’ which literally
means self-production. They saw living beings as structures that were constructed through their
interaction and connection with other structural systems. This becomes a process of continuous
self-production. This concept can be understood socially in the same way as phenomenology, as
experience being central to how we perceive the world. Their work has been drawn out of its
original biological world and into the human sciences and can be seen as a kind of a biological
phenomenology.

271
through my body, by transforming my body, which is called action.’341 This
intermeshed relationship between bodies and environments is embedded into the
design process. Understanding these issues in terms of information and
structure show its applicability to CAD processes.

The importance of motion in the relationship between bodies and buildings has
been explored in a variety of ways throughout this thesis. Tschumi used
cinematic techniques of framing, sequence and montage as central to his
proposed notational form. Spuybroek also has a new notational form, which uses
information and systems within a computerized space, rather than Tschumi’s
two-dimensional paperspace. What is important in order to truly integrate motion
into spatial design, is to go beyond simplistic representations of movement,
whose abstractions take the project too far from the basic principal of movement.
In order for it to be an essential part of the process of designing architecture,
Spuybroek believes that he solves this dilemma by starting with movement.

The movement of bodies is the premise of NOX projects, which are then
abstracted into the design system. Diagrams of motion information are
formulated into the design process. Other artists and architects have
traditionally used movement diagrams, seeing them as information around which
the solid walls are constructed. Spuybroek puts the information directly into the
system, so that it actually generates the form itself, rather than being a separate
addition to the design process. The movement is what comes from the ordering
system. Movement is related initially to order and then to structure. Movement
however is a very open concept, and this is the problem Tschumi ran into; whose
movement, and where to? Tschumi acknowledged the power relations that
architecture is a party to, how built spaces can instigate, sanction or muffle
ideologies and politics. That is the reason he chose such extreme events that

341
H. Maturana and F. Varela, "The Tree of Knowledge," Shambhala, 1987, Quoted by
Spuybroek in his essay ‘Motor Geometry’ chapter 7, last viewed 12.03.2007 at
http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/.xslt/nodenr-70081

272
ran against accepted norms. However when people simply want to walk the dog
in the Park de Villette or play soccer, these extremes becomes decidedly un-
useful.

The problem with using the event to bring movement into architecture is the
delineation of a specific and single moment. Modernism explored the
photographic frame and later the filmic frame by frame series of still and
animated moments. This meant freezing movement into moments, usually
creating representations of past movement, rather than focusing on the potential
movement of users. Spuybroek isn’t interested in a single event but an
architecture of flux, of continual flows of events, transforming and changing.
These do not become specified pathways of movement; they are used to
propose possibilities, and to be flexible to change. In contrast to Tschumi’s
Eventmental Architecture, Spuybroek is more interested in the idea of the
‘accident’, writing:

For too long architecture was a tool to control life by seeing Events as the
repetition of older Events, and every new Event was an ‘accident’,
something acting against the ‘substance’ of architecture. The new doesn’t
come from the future, it comes from the past, that is what potentiality is, it
is a mating of old existing Events patterning into tendencies, an unfolding
of Events.342

Seeing events in terms of action and buildings as stasis, describes what can be
controlled and what must be left to chance. The accident is the alternative to the
designated human habits and functional requirements that architecture typically
accommodates. In stark contrast to the ergonomic drawings of androgynous
figures at desks showing leg length to desk height, arm span to drawer level, the

342
Sik, Cho Im, ‘Diagramming; Lars Spuybroek’ interview, Sarai Reader 02, ‘The Cities of
Everyday LIfe’. Sarai Website. Retrieved 10.01.2007 at
<http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/02-the-cities-of-everyday-life/03diagramming.pdf>

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Event as accidence allows for multiple possible actions. It subverts the
conventions of solid form as stability and movement as accidence. Spuybroek
negotiates the difficulty in designing architecture based on patterns of actions
(thereby spatially defining how people should move) through the use of
potentiality. This allows for the unfolding of events, rather than the categorical
defining of them. Spuybroek defines events as that which can only be used
when related to potentiality, ‘to open up the concept of the possible’.343
Spuybroek wants to make clear that just because buildings don’t move, doesn’t
mean that architecture can’t.

Tracing the potentialities of the animate body becomes a core element of the
design process. Movement is not another idea to be conceptually explored and
then abstracted into a design. Spuybroek is against the traditional architectural
practise of extruding walls around pathways of hypothetical movement patterns.
Instead, these movement patterns directly generate the buildings. Spuybroek is
adamant about this: ‘There is always a direct relationship between the system of
motion and the internal mapping of the movements in the body’344 – that they are
completely enmeshed within the process of making the architecture, the
abstraction of movement is nothing but the building.345 Benjamin describes this
process as creating a relationship between architecture and bodies, which no
longer relies on analogy and metaphor.346 The singular, figural body is replaced
by multiple, changing, experiencing inhabitants. By having body movement as
an entity within the design process that literally forms the architecture, the
possibilities for the moving body are no longer separate from the design. The
translation from movement into structure is not literal, but transposed into the
paper model, which creates the form. Movement is first related to the system
using the diagram and from there into the structure itself.

343
Lars Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture, p.357.
344
Lars Spuybroek, ibid, p.357.
345
Introduction Lars Spuybroek, ibid, p.13.
346
Andrew Benjamin, ‘Notes on Surfacing of Walls: NOX, Kiesler, Semper’ in Lars Spuybroek,
NOX: Machining Architecture, p.349.

274
6.4.5
Flexible Scripts

The difference between flexibility and indeterminacy is the active desire for
multiple options and simply allowing for them. Flexibility in the H20 pavilion in
built into the script of the design and results in a flexibility of experiences.
Spuybroek uses flexibility as a translation for movement. In this way movement
becomes flexibility and visa versa. The more flexibility there is built into a design,
the more opportunity for movement. Flexibility means that there is no single
answer. It accepts that bodies interact with built environments in unpredictable
ways, from the mundane to extravagant. In this way flexibility means providing
for improvisation. The flexibility of a design is based on defining limits to that
flexibility. Spuybroek therefore addresses the difficulties in Tschumi’s
architecture of the Event, which is built on extreme Events such as the murder or
the fall. Spuybroek allows for shifts in judgement, the capricious changes in
directions that people have moving through space and seeks an architecture that
can accommodate that uncertainty.347 The resulting environments are not simply
open and empty spaces for any actions, but sculpted from the myriad of potential
movements.

Improvisation is the allowance to interact in different ways in built environments.

Buildings promote unusual interactions by creating unusual spaces – we act
according to prescribed scripts, and when those scripts can no longer be read we
are given the freedom to improvise. This does not mean we can’t freely act in
architecture that fulfils our expectations of movement, only that it is much easier
in these spaces simply to follow expectations. When that is simply no longer
possible, we are forced to start actively engaging with the environment. We must
start thinking about how to negotiate the space and how to navigate it. This is

347
Spuybroek argues that this process is far more direct conceptually from the traditional
abstractions. Where objects or ideas become representations and images that later are
translated into forms.

275
from simply looking at the floor because we’re afraid it might at any moment give
way, to contorting our bodies in order to look at artworks hung at changing and
difficult angles. This kind of improvisation takes on a different form from
Eisenman and Libeskind’s specifically emotive environments. That the H20
building was also the product of a programmatic brief for a water education
pavilion, allows this improvisational strategy to permeate the forms of its
architecture.

NOX projects are never easy to inhabit; Spuybroek makes you work for it. At
times it is simply carefully negotiation, such as walking across the shifting, wet (or
seemingly wet) floor of the H2O pavilion. In ‘WetGrid’, the exhibition design for
‘Vision Machines’ at the Musee des Beaux Arts, to view the artworks one must
bend, crane, turn, even sit or lie on the floor. The artworks are presented
following the flows of the walls, which follow their own force-generated system.
The built environment actively interacts with the body, sculpting it into a kind of
dance. The scripting is therefore not simply written into the plan, but three-
dimensionally. In their monograph NOX; Machining Architecture, Spuybroek
shows small sectional drawings of the exhibition space. These show various
physical positions that must be taken up in order to view the various artworks for
specific angles. The drawings present the plethora of poses taken up by visitors,
but not how the body deals with NOX’s notion of continuous flow. This shows the
difference between using movement in the design process as a series of still
frames. Spuybroek uses this idea of continuous flow to create fluid, dance like
scripts. The visitors see the works therefore not only with their eyes, but also
with their bodies.

Transaction means demanding that the body actively participate in the

construction of that space, that it must participate in order for the building to
become animated. Without bodily interaction, the architecture of the H20 pavilion
does not exist; it is simply a building’s shell, a representation of itself. While
interactivity can also be said to pervade the entire project in various ways,

276
Spuybroek uses it in a very direct way through technology. The interactive
system is made up of an interrelated combination of the wireframe, light,
movement and sound. The building is fully interactive, as people move through
it, lighting, projections and sound in various combinations continually change the
space.348 It is a completely interwoven system – a matrix, which Spuybroek
contends has so many possible combinations that it, is impossible to predict
results. Whether the visitors are actively or passively interacting with the system,
it uses their actions to continually reshape the space. The building becomes a
living organism, which feeds off the people who enter it, transforming and
changing.

The projects developed by NOX propose a radically new way of making

architecture, one where the body is brought back into architecture in provocative
and performative ways. It is not so much the resulting forms that are of interest
as the design process that integrates new technologies with the animate body in
order to re-imagine built space. For this reason these projects are unique
amongst the plethora of digitally-produced designs.

By focusing on embodied perception as essential to designing built spaces from

the very beginning of the design process, the body is made central to the thinking
and making of architecture. In addition to this, Spuybroek has developed a new
process of incorporating his theory of movement and perception. His work
utilizes the most innovative technology, but it is how he uses that technology that
is so unique. Evolutionary theory and systems design have become fashionable
phrases in architecture, but instead of using them to justify exotic, virtual forms,
Spuybroek is leading the way in bringing these ideas firmly back into built, felt
space. By opening up the design process to the unpredictable and the possible
of embodied interaction, he is opening architecture itself to future, undefined, but
interactive forms. NOX’s work is an acknowledgement of how space has

348
Unfortunately however, now the interactive elements are no longer active.

277
changed through technology and how the built environment can take on the
challenges which that brings.

278
ChapterCONCLUSION

279
 Fig.21
Phaeno Science Centre, Wolfsburg Germany
Photograph by Ben Hewett

Fig.22
Mercedes Museum, Stuttgart, Germany
Photograph by Ben Hewett

Fig.23
Digital image, World Millennium Tower, Busan Korea
<http://www.europaconcorsi.com>

280
As the research for this thesis has been completed, so too have several new
examples of radical, digitally generated architecture. An inspirational example is
the dynamic form of the recently completed Phaeno Science Centre in
Germany.349 (Fig. 21) Walking across the public square in front of the building,
the structure presents as visual blur, of motion set in concrete. Situated directly
against the tracks of the intercity train it is also designed to be seen in motion.
Entering the building’s scalloped underbelly, the ceiling is a pattern of space age
globes, a concrete weight that hovers and illuminates. I stop to watch two men
working on a construction platform. It is a scene from science fiction, the last
touches on the space ship to facilitate the return trip home. Upon an insect-like
machine, the workmen wield torches and spray guns to smooth the difficult curve
between formwork and ceiling. Despite the computational advances to
manufacturing and assembly that have made a building such as this possible,
there are still workmen up a ladder with tools, fixing details. The stark concrete
surfaces and vast open spaces in front and below the centre ask for new kinds of
bodily interactions. Whether this will be as successful as the building is visually
stimulating is yet to be seen.

The digital images of novel, tectonic forms are no longer visionary drawings, but
are appearing across the urban landscape – particularly in wealthy, developing
cities such as Dubai and Beijing. This research ended with the case study of the
H2O pavilion. This building presents not only the most novel form of
performative architecture, but also the most novel design process. I have argued
that developing projects through design systems based on chance and new
spatial structures, dramatically departs from the conventional use of the figural
body in architecture. In this way, the thesis can be read as the prologue for an
examination of living bodies specifically in the context of digital architecture.

349
The Phaeno Science Centre is an interactive science centre in Wolfsburg, Germany. The
international competition for the centre was won by Zaha Hadid and Mayer Bährle architects, and
was completed in 2006. Beside the radical form of the building, essential to the design is it’s
porosity, connecting the different parts of the city underneath and through the architecture.

281
Completed in 1999, the H20 pavilion is one of the earliest built examples of
architecture generated by these new computational processes. In 2006 however,
the extraordinary, fluid spaces of UN Studio’s design of the Mercedes Museum in
Stuttgart (Fig.22) were completed, along with Hadid’s design of the Phaeno
Centre. By next year, construction should be underway on Asymptote’s sensual,
glass curves for the Millennium World Business Tower in Busan, South Korea.
(Fig.23) These examples are only a few of the multiplying buildings demanding
attention in the quotidian landscape. Instead of temporary follies or theme park
pavilions, digitally generated architectures are now commercial projects,
expanding into urban complexes.

If a sense of urgency is pervasive in this thesis, it is due to this accelerating

transformation of our built environment. My argument has been that the greatest
risk in the innovative acrobatics of digital design processes is the loss of the living
body. The social changes that are taking place between bodies and spaces, and
in the digital technology of architectural drawing, will continue to transform the
built environment. In parallel to the development of architectural design
techniques and manufacturing, the key question is how to incorporate the living
body into these new digital and digitised spaces. This thesis has argued that to
understand the grounds for this question we must first come to an understanding
of how to relate the living body and the architecture drawing.

Chapter One sited this examination within the architectural condition. It traced
how the issues of motion, embodiment and performativity have been previously
examined and incorporated in the practice and discourse of architecture. It
aimed at revealing how the assumed ‘truths’ of spaces and bodies can be
unpicked to reveal their historically constructed systems. Clarifying the existing
field made the specificity of a theoretical framework to the thesis possible in the
following chapter.

282
To construct this framework, Chapter Two formulated the relations between two
key spatial principals of this research: bodies and drawings. The body was
conceived using Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception
combined with contemporary definitions of performativity. This created a
definition of the body as interconnected with the world through action and
experience.

In terms of architecture however, it is not enough to conceptualise the living body

but to examine how to bring these ideas into the design process. Chapter Two
showed how contemporary understandings of space have impacted on the
systems of architectural representation. In order to do this, it traced the
architecture drawing’s history from its inception in Renaissance Italy, showing
how this process is necessarily specific to a particular age and way of thinking.

The analysis of these two spatial states of the body and the drawing became the
basis for exploring the architectural performances and performative drawings in
the following two chapters.

Chapter Three examined architectural performances. The examples were

performances that innovatively explored architectural concerns. In these works,
phenomenological and performative practises became the impetus for building
spaces. The chapter traced the interdisciplinary nature of this exploration,
importing strategies from the fields of performance, cartography and fine art.
These examples provided alternative ways of thinking and making built spaces
that allow for the living body to take a key role in the design process.

I have argued that the body as a force that works interactively with it’s
surrounding environment, finds explicit, expressive form in dance and installation
art. These works proposed a shift in thinking from the figural toward new
possibilities for the body and architecture. The projects of Oskar Schlemmer and

283
Vito Acconci presented performances that exposed the spatial machinations of
this relationship between bodies and buildings.

By way of the drawing, Chapter Four brought the issues raised by the
architectural performances into the design process. Titled Performative
Drawings, it was dedicated to architectural drawings that incorporated
performative actions. This could be seen both in the drawings themselves and in
how they were viewed. This chapter argued that to integrate living bodies into
the design of architecture involves seeing the architectural drawing not as a fixed
representation of reality, but as a map, a musical score or a diagram. Bernard
Tschumi and John Hejduk’s re-interpretations of the drawing presented the
connection between spatial conceptions and the design process. By breaking
away from the conventional structure and format of the architecture drawing, this
chapter showed that alternative issues such as motion, improvisation and
potentiality could be incorporated. My argument was that it is through the
drawing that conceptions of space shape environments. This understanding
sheds light on new possibilities for designing architecture in a contemporary,
spatially diverse context.

The fifth chapter was where these ideas were brought into the practice of
architecture. It placed the performative and creative strategies presented in
chapters Three and Four into the contemporary context of innovative
architectural design. The architecture drawing was shown as infiltrated by new
geometries, new tools and new spaces. In this context, unprecedented spatial
forms based on information and fluidity emerge. This is where the impact of new
processes such as parametric design, and new technologies such as Catia
modelling become apparent on both the building and the design process. In
collating the spatial strategies uncovered in the architectural performances and
performative drawings, this chapter set the framework for examining built
projects. In order to provide a way of defining performative architecture in these

284
examples, a series of strategies were drawn from the preceding research:
destabilization, flux architecture, improvisation and blurred space.

The final chapter presented four case studies of performative architecture.

These were specific examples of buildings that utilize phenomenological and
performative strategies throughout the design process, tracing their similarities.
The Jewish Museum and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews both in Berlin, the
Blur Building at the Swiss Exposition and the H20 pavilion in the Netherlands,
provided a range of examples of performative architecture. In these case studies
the emergent paradigms were manifested in built forms. Destabilization, flux
architecture, improvisation and blurred space were shown to be recurring
strategies, sometimes consciously applied by the architects, but more importantly
enacted by visitors. These case studies were presented through the
performance of my own body, presenting a personal analysis of how new building
forms can include and incorporate living bodies.

The Case Studies

There is no specific solution or ultimate built example that achieves the aim of
bringing the living body into the design of contemporary architecture. Instead,
this thesis has aimed at clarifying why the body as an active, creative entity is so
important to the design of architecture and how performative practises provide
strategies that bring that body into the design process. The paradigms, from
destabilization through to blurred space are not definitive. They emerge from the
research as strategies through which contemporary performative architecture
may be designed.

The architectural case studies were not generalized to encapsulate specific

paradigms, but showed how several of these strategies weave through each
project. These examples are embedded with the original examinations of

285
contemporary spatial relations and living bodies in the first two chapters. For
example the thesis began by questioning the new relationships between bodies
and spaces that have been instigated by technology. The Blur Building presents
a response to this physical environment that explores these new relationships
between bodies and media. Rather than seeing the permeation of media through
everyday experiences as making architecture obsolete, the answers may be
considered as simply ‘blurred’. This allows architecture the freedom to take on
atypical roles. Inhabitations based on flux have become a common condition in
the everyday life of the Information Age. These new lifestyles propose new ways
of understanding built environments. In contrast to the traditionally fixed state of
architecture, these spaces are concerned with motion and transformation. Flux
architecture may find logical form in the liquid walls of the H20 pavilion, but it is
also experienced in the extreme, angular push and pull of the Jewish Museum.

By understanding how the sensorial body has become dislocated from its
surrounding environment, whether through capitalism as expressed by the
Situationists, or technology as constructed by Oskar Schlemmer’s ballets,
destabilization becomes a key process in highlighting physical awareness. The
examples of the Jewish Museum and the Memorial show the affective potential of
environments on bodies. Rather than specifying a particular form for buildings to
emulate, they showed how the performance of bodies could be powerfully
instructive in the design process. They show how architecture is not finished
after construction is completed, but is continually created through the bodies that
move through it. This process of transformation is palpable in the fluid curves of
the H2O pavilion and the fog of the Blur Building, which resists conventional
definitions of behaviour and program. This provision for improvisation means an
active relationship between bodies and buildings. By provoking alternative public
performances, whether quiet reflection or ludic play, these environments describe
architecture for individual, active bodies. They suggest that the built environment
can be innovative and exciting, both to look at and to experience.

286
The idea of multiple public spaces acting upon the pedestrian body in the
aggressive manner of the Jewish museum is a disconcerting thought. Constant
Nieuwenhuis’s design of New Babylon looks like fun for a weekend, but being
forced into continual nomadic negotiation, clambering up ladders and constant
play, could easily become tedious in the long term. However this would misread
their purpose. They are not the encapsulations of a performative manifesto in
which to design future architectures. Instead, they are proposals for how
contemporary embodiment can be brought into new forms of architecture.

The case studies each deal with this new condition of bodies and spaces in
different ways, focusing on the corporeal and affective, as with the Museum and
Memorial, or the multi-mediated space between, like the two pavilions. Through
their basis in the performance of bodies, rather than the form of buildings,
performative architecture proposes future environments of myriad shapes and
sizes, freed from the dictates of conventional design and manufacturing.

Alternative Approaches to Performative Architecture

This thesis risked becoming too broad, incorporating too many of the different
aspects of the expansive topic of living bodies and contemporary spaces. For
this reason it has continually referred back to it’s aim of providing a
conceptualization of performative architecture and proposing strategies for its
design. There are therefore a number of related areas of research that could not
finally be contained within the scope of this thesis. Two such areas are the way
the body has changed through technology and the performative architecture of
the city.

The hybrid element of new bodies was referred to in my initial formulation of the
contemporary body in the Information Age. This dual status of material flesh and
virtual mobility is an area that could be further expanded into case studies.

287
Accepting the changes that innovations in technology have made to
contemporary bodies and spaces, emphasizes the need to look more closely at
how the body has been reshaped by these technologies. This would mean
expanding Chapter Three to investigate the performance of bodies in the
interface with digital technologies. The examples could incorporate the varied
prosthetics of the cyborg body: Stelarc’s amplified bodyworks, Krzysztof
Wodiczko nomadic structures and Acconci’s Exoskeleton. From these machinic
appendages, could follow the performances situated between the realms of real
time and the virtual, connecting across physical distances and cyber ones.
These might include the interactive, large-scale performances of Japanese group
‘Dumb Type’, the spatial investigations of Danish company ‘Hotel Proforma’ and
the telematic explorations by such dance groups as ‘Company in Space’.

The approach that was taken by this thesis is dedicated to the physical, living
body. Using such strategies as destabilization or working with the possibilities of
improvisation in architecture is not defined by the technology used, though it is
changed by it. For this reason the emphasis of the initial research on
architectural performances was on physical bodies, leaving this further research
to another study.

Another area of this analysis not yet addressed is the implication on an urban
scale for a performative reading of architecture. Having understood flux
architecture as indicative not simply of curvaceous shapes, but as a strategy of
movement and flexibility, lends itself well to the design of the metropolis. Here,
the impact is not only on new buildings generated by these technologies and
thinking, but new kinds of transportation flows, public and private spatial
delineations and security and surveillance boundaries. These bodies must be
understood in terms of the individual and the collective. The hypersurface
between virtual and actual is now commonplace in the public realm and growing
denser as digital networks and systems connect and divide the corporeal and
digital hybrids of today’s bodies. Performances groups such as Dutch group

288
Waag would constitute interesting case studies with this approach.350 Waag
utilize communication technologies such as global positioning systems and
mobiles phones to critique geography, communication and civic mobilities. The
discourse of cities has become an extensive area of research, which for this
reason takes it beyond the scope of this thesis. It would mean a more in depth
analysis of the political ramifications between bodies and environments. This
area of architecture is currently being analysized very effectively by Iain Borden
and the ‘Strangely Familiar’ group of theorists.

As the surrounding environment transforms around us, both physically and

virtually, the opportunities for architecture are becoming more varied and
complex. The new building forms that can now be experienced across the world
are testament to this changing state. This thesis is premised on the belief that
phenomenological readings of the body can, and need, to be brought into the
new design processes being developed in architecture. As the tools and systems
for these processes change, it is here that performative practises can instigate
built environments that are innovative and exciting, both to look at, and to
experience. The extreme changes in the design and construction of buildings are
resulting in extraordinary forms, the challenge is for these forms to impact and
connect to living bodies, as well as to the images on the screen.

350
See their performance project ‘Diary and Traces’ set in Amsterdam at ‘Amsterdam Realtime’
Waag Society Website. Retrieved 05.06.2007 at <http://project.waag.org/realtime/en_frame.html>

289
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