Images of the Body in Architecture

Images of the Body in Architecture PDF Author: Kirsten Wagner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783803007315
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The essays collected in this volume are intended to stimulate research in the anthropology of architecture on the basis of a critical history of the body and its cultural constructions. The analogy between architecture and the human body is rooted in the fundamental impact the latter has on ordering, symbolising, and interpreting the world. Correspondingly, the metaphorical conceptualisation of the built environment in terms of the human body was already practiced in early cultures and has determined architectural theory since antiquity. While the architectural treatises of early modern times vividly imagine anthropomorphic and anthropometric figures, they seem to be overcome by an architectural theory that is based on purely rational as well as mechanical laws. However, these figures were never totally abandoned, and Le Corbusier's Modulor is only one, if not the most prominent example, for their ongoing reception and transformation in modern times.The human sciences of the 19th century played a significant role in this process. Physiology and psychology brought about not only new experimental devices for analysing the human body and its physiological functions, but also new images of the body that directly went into aesthetics, art history, and architectural theory. This new understanding of the body had a large impact on the production and reception of modern architecture. Due to this background the arts eventually became anthropologically grounded. The book includes contributions from: Tobias Cheung, Scott Drake, Günter Feuerstein, Tanja Jankowiak, Eckhard Leuschner, Harry Francis Mallgrave, Indra Kagis McEwen, Irene Nierhaus, Philipp Osten, Heleni Porfyriou, Paolo Sanvito, Christoph Schnoor, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Frank Zöllner, Beatrix Zug-Rosenblatt, and others.

Images of the Body in Architecture

Images of the Body in Architecture PDF Author: Kirsten Wagner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783803007315
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The essays collected in this volume are intended to stimulate research in the anthropology of architecture on the basis of a critical history of the body and its cultural constructions. The analogy between architecture and the human body is rooted in the fundamental impact the latter has on ordering, symbolising, and interpreting the world. Correspondingly, the metaphorical conceptualisation of the built environment in terms of the human body was already practiced in early cultures and has determined architectural theory since antiquity. While the architectural treatises of early modern times vividly imagine anthropomorphic and anthropometric figures, they seem to be overcome by an architectural theory that is based on purely rational as well as mechanical laws. However, these figures were never totally abandoned, and Le Corbusier's Modulor is only one, if not the most prominent example, for their ongoing reception and transformation in modern times.The human sciences of the 19th century played a significant role in this process. Physiology and psychology brought about not only new experimental devices for analysing the human body and its physiological functions, but also new images of the body that directly went into aesthetics, art history, and architectural theory. This new understanding of the body had a large impact on the production and reception of modern architecture. Due to this background the arts eventually became anthropologically grounded. The book includes contributions from: Tobias Cheung, Scott Drake, Günter Feuerstein, Tanja Jankowiak, Eckhard Leuschner, Harry Francis Mallgrave, Indra Kagis McEwen, Irene Nierhaus, Philipp Osten, Heleni Porfyriou, Paolo Sanvito, Christoph Schnoor, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Frank Zöllner, Beatrix Zug-Rosenblatt, and others.

Body, Memory, and Architecture

Body, Memory, and Architecture PDF Author: Kent C. Bloomer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300021429
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Traces the significance of the human body in architecture from its early place as the divine organizing principle to its present near elimination

The Architecture of Bathing

The Architecture of Bathing PDF Author: Christie Pearson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262044218
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
A celebration of communal bathing—swimming pools, saunas, beaches, ritual baths, sweat lodges, and more—viewed through the lens of architecture and landscape. We enter the public pool, the sauna, or the beach with a heightened awareness of our bodies and the bodies of others. The phenomenology of bathing opens all of our senses toward the physical world entwined with the social, while the history of bathing is one of shared space, in both natural and built environments. In The Architecture of Bathing, Christie Pearson offers a unique examination of communal bathing and its history from the perspective of architecture and landscape. Engagingly written and richly illustrated, with more than 260 illustrations, many in color, The Architecture of Bathing offers a celebration of spaces in which public and private, sacred and profane, ritual and habitual, pure and impure, nature and culture commingle. Pearson takes a wide-ranging view of her subject, drawing on architecture, art, and literary works. Each chapter is structured around an architectural typology and explores an accompanying theme—for example, tub, sensuality; river, flow; waterfall, rejuvenation; and banya, immersion. Offering examples, introducing relevant theory, and recounting personal experiences, Pearson effortlessly combines a practitioner's zest with astonishing erudition. As she examines these forms, we see that they are inextricable from landscapes, bodily practices, and cultural production. Looking more closely, we experience architecture itself as an immersive material and social space, embedded inthe interdependent environmental and cultural fabric of our world.

Ideals of the Body

Ideals of the Body PDF Author: Sun-Young Park
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 082298606X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these well-known developments in public health built on a previous moment of anxiety about the hygiene of modern city dwellers. Amid fears of national decline that accompanied the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, efforts to modernize Paris between 1800 and 1850 focused not on grand and comprehensive structural reforms, but rather on improving the bodily and mental fitness of the individual citizen. These forgotten efforts to renew and reform the physical and moral health of the urban subject found expression in the built environment of the city—in the gymnasiums, swimming pools, and green spaces of private and public institutions, from the pedagogical to the recreational. Sun-Young Park reveals how these anxieties about health and social order, which manifested in emerging ideals of the body, created a uniquely spatial and urban experience of modernity in the postrevolutionary capital, one profoundly impacted by hygiene, mobility, productivity, leisure, spectacle, and technology.

Vitruvius

Vitruvius PDF Author: Indra Kagis McEwen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262633062
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
A historical study of Vitruvius's De architectura, showing that his purpose in writing "the whole body of architecture" was shaped by the imperial Roman project of world domination. Vitruvius's De architectura is the only major work on architecture to survive from classical antiquity, and until the eighteenth century it was the text to which all other architectural treatises referred. While European classicists have focused on the factual truth of the text itself, English-speaking architects and architectural theorists have viewed it as a timeless source of valuable metaphors. Departing from both perspectives, Indra Kagis McEwen examines the work's meaning and significance in its own time. Vitruvius dedicated De architectura to his patron Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, whose rise to power inspired its composition near the end of the first century B.C. McEwen argues that the imperial project of world dominion shaped Vitruvius's purpose in writing what he calls "the whole body of architecture." Specifically, Vitruvius's aim was to present his discipline as the means for making the emperor's body congruent with the imagined body of the world he would rule. Each of the book's four chapters treats a different Vitruvian "body." Chapter 1, "The Angelic Body," deals with the book as a book, in terms of contemporary events and thought, particularly Stoicism and Stoic theories of language. Chapter 2, "The Herculean Body," addresses the book's and its author's relation to Augustus, whose double Vitruvius means the architect to be. Chapter 3, "The Body Beautiful," discusses the relation of proportion and geometry to architectural beauty and the role of beauty in forging the new world order. Finally, Chapter 4, "The Body of the King," explores the nature and unprecedented extent of Augustan building programs. Included is an examination of the famous statue of Augustus from Prima Porta, sculpted soon after the appearance of De architectura.

The Embodied Image

The Embodied Image PDF Author: Juhani Pallasmaa
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470711906
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
The Embodied Image The Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery in Architecture Juhani Pallasmaa All artistic and architectural effects are evoked, mediated and experienced through poeticised images. These images are embodied and lived experiences that take place in ‘the flesh of the world’, becoming part of us, at the same time that we unconsciously project aspects of ourselves on to a conceived space, object or event. Artistic images have a life and reality of their own and they develop through unexpected associations rather than rational and causal logic. Images are usually thought of as retinal pictures but profound poetic images are multi-sensory and they address us in an embodied and emotive manner. Architecture is usually analysed and taught as a discipline that articulates space and geometry, but the mental impact of architecture arises significantly from its image quality that integrates the various aspects and dimensions of experience into a singular, internalised and remembered entity. The material reality is fused with our mental and imaginative realm. The book is organised into five main parts that look at in turn: the image in contemporary culture; language, thought and the image; the many faces of the image; the poetic image; and finally the architectural image. The Embodied Image is illustrated with over sixty images in pairs, which are diverse in subject. They range from scientific images to historic artistic and architectural masterpieces. Artworks span Michelangelo and Vermeer to Gordon Matta- Clark and architecture takes in Modern Masters such as Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto, as well as significant contemporary works by Steven Holl and Daniel Libeskind.

Body and Building

Body and Building PDF Author: George Dodds
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262041959
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Essays on the changing relationship of the human body and architecture.

The Image of the City

The Image of the City PDF Author: Kevin Lynch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262620017
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

X-Ray Architecture

X-Ray Architecture PDF Author: Beatriz Colomina
Publisher: Lars Muller Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
X-Ray Architecture explores the enormous impact of medical discourse and imaging technologies on the formation, representation and reception of twentieth-century architecture. It challenges the normal understanding of modern architecture by proposing that it was shaped by the dominant medical obsession of its time: tuberculosis and its primary diagnostic tool, the X-ray. Modern architecture and the X-ray were born around the same time and evolved in parallel. While the X-ray exposed the inside of the body to the public eye, the modern building unveiled its interior, dramatically inverting the relationship between private and public. Architects presented their buildings as a kind of medical instrument for protecting and enhancing the body and psyche. Beatriz Colomina traces the psychopathologies of twentieth-century architecture--from the trauma of tuberculosis to more recent disorders such as burn-out syndrome and ADHD--and the huge transformations of privacy and publicity instigated by diagnostic tools from X-Rays to MRIs and beyond. She suggests that if we want to talk about the state of architecture today, we should look to the dominant obsessions with illness and the latest techniques of imaging the body--and ask what effects they have on the way we conceive architecture. --Publisher's website.

The Embodied Image

The Embodied Image PDF Author: Juhani Pallasmaa
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470711914
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
The Embodied Image The Embodied Image: Imagination and Imagery in Architecture Juhani Pallasmaa All artistic and architectural effects are evoked, mediated and experienced through poeticised images. These images are embodied and lived experiences that take place in ‘the flesh of the world’, becoming part of us, at the same time that we unconsciously project aspects of ourselves on to a conceived space, object or event. Artistic images have a life and reality of their own and they develop through unexpected associations rather than rational and causal logic. Images are usually thought of as retinal pictures but profound poetic images are multi-sensory and they address us in an embodied and emotive manner. Architecture is usually analysed and taught as a discipline that articulates space and geometry, but the mental impact of architecture arises significantly from its image quality that integrates the various aspects and dimensions of experience into a singular, internalised and remembered entity. The material reality is fused with our mental and imaginative realm. The book is organised into five main parts that look at in turn: the image in contemporary culture; language, thought and the image; the many faces of the image; the poetic image; and finally the architectural image. The Embodied Image is illustrated with over sixty images in pairs, which are diverse in subject. They range from scientific images to historic artistic and architectural masterpieces. Artworks span Michelangelo and Vermeer to Gordon Matta- Clark and architecture takes in Modern Masters such as Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto, as well as significant contemporary works by Steven Holl and Daniel Libeskind.