Experiments With Body Agent Architecture

Experiments with Body Agent Architecture

Experiments with Body Agent Architecture puts forward the notion of body agents: non-ideal, animate and highly specific figures integrated with design to enact particular notions of embodied subjectivity in architecture. Body agents present opportunities for architects to increase imaginative and empathic qualities in their designs, particularly amidst a posthuman condition. Beginning with narrative writing from the viewpoint of a body agent, an estranged ‘quattrocento spiritello’ who finds himself uncomfortably inhabiting a digital milieu (or, as the spiritello calls it, ‘Il Regno Digitale’), the book combines speculative historical fiction and original design experiments. It focuses on the process of creating the multi-media design experiments, moving from the design of the body itself as an original prosthetic to architectural proposals emanating from the body. A fragmented history of the figure in architecture is charted and woven into the designs, with chapters examining Michelangelo’s enigmatic figures in his drawings for the New Sacristy in the early sixteenth century, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s physically ephemeral ‘putti’ adorning chapels and churches in the seventeenth century, and Austrian artist-architect Walter Pichler’s personal and prescient figures of the twentieth century.

Experiments with Body Agent Architecture

Finishing in Architecture

Finishing in Architecture: Polishing, Completing, Ending explores the topic of finishing and the fascinating physical and metaphysical implications of its various conceptions in architecture. Finishing is essential to all human practices and concepts of time, yet simultaneously it is largely impossible to identify an entirely finished state of being. As mortals, we organize our worlds into beginnings and endings, starts and finishes. Architecture’s temporality, however, may contain something of both the mortal and immortal within it – a desire for permanence combined with lamentation over its impossibility. While many approaches to finishing construct two opposed ontological conditions (the finished and the unfinished), this dualistic ploy neglects the complexity of architectural practice, cultural reception, and historiographic shifts in semiotics during the lifetime of a building. More nuanced approaches are examined in this collection of 38 essays and creative works from a diverse group of scholars, architects, and artists who conceptualize finishing not simply as a final outcome, but as an extended action, a mood that presumes an end is near, all the while working continuously toward (but never achieving) completion. It is here that the concept of finishing is not a state of being but a state of becoming, as an active thickening of time when the end is thought to be imminent but not yet attained. Finishing, more than a final endpoint, is a void state that is extended through efforts framing its territory, while never quite containing it. From the material to the procedural and the conceptual, this volume explores the practices of finishing in architecture within three currents: surfaces, projects, and most broadly, architectural times. It will be of interest to students and instructors of architecture and design, architectural historians, and other scholars.