Our body Our Architecture

 

Our Bodies Our Architecture

According to Elizabeth Diller in her article about how body’s understood and used in different movements in and what we expect from our bodies from a social point of view in a social life! And, talking about housewives and household, by considering science and technology and combining different skill we could create ideal order and space “the maintenance of the idealized female body (…) became a project of devotion equal to that of maintenance of idealized domestic space” (E. Diller p. 81). Moreover, how can systems and the way of using thing effect on efficiency, aesthetic and economic so as an example there is the instructions and rules of the ironing…

What is the relation with architecture? Architecture is based on standards, functionality, economy, culture and social structure, politics and so on. Where do standards come? It all back to our bodies and how we feel comfortable physically and/or mentally.  Architecture affects the movement of our bodies It creates function and dysfunction, comfort and discomfort “perhaps the effect of ironing could more aptly represent the positional body by trading the large of the functional for that of the dysfunctional” (E. Diller p.85). Sometimes people are forced to move, walk, live… in a specific way because of the design or shape of the space. I like the way Elizabeth describes the fold in her article “The fold has been useful metaphor for the discourse of poststructuralist architecture (…) if something Can be folded; it can be unfolded and refolded” (E. Diller p92). Science, a specific design will not work in all contexts, in different complexities, different cultures and places there always have to be the possibility to shape, unshaped and reshape it. The important is to create the “affective space”  and let each body use it in its own way and transform it in its own way.

In response to:

Elizabeth Diller, ‘Bad Press’ in Francesca Hughes, ed. The Architect Reconstructing her Practice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, pp. 74-95.

Ninel Niazi

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