Architecture And The Body Science And Culture

The relationship of architecture to the human body is a centuries-long and complex one, but not always symmetrical. This book opens a space for historians of the visual arts, archaeologists, architects, and digital humanities professionals to reflect upon embodiment, spatiality, science, and architecture in premodern and modern cultural contexts. Architecture and the Body, Science and Culture poses one overarching question: How does a period’s understanding of bodies as objects of science impinge upon architectural thought and design? The answers are sophisticated, interdisciplinary explorations of theory, technology, symbolism, medicine, violence, psychology, deformity, and salvation, and they have unexpected and fascinating implications for architectural design and history. The new research published in this volume reinvigorates the Western survey-style trajectory from Archaic Greece to post‐war Europe with scientifically‐framed, body‐centred provocations. By adding the third factor—science—to the architecture and body equation, this book presents a nuanced appreciation for architectural creativity and its embeddedness in other sets of social, institutional and political relationships. In so doing, it spatializes body theory and ties it to the experience of the built environment in ways that disturb traditional boundaries between the architectural container and the corporeally contained.

Harry Francis Mallgrave combines a history of ideas about architectural experience with the latest insights from the fields of neuroscience, cognitive science and evolutionary biology to make a powerful argument about the nature and future of architectural design. Today, the sciences have granted us the tools to help us understand better than ever before the precise ways in which the built environment can affect the building user's individual experience. Through an understanding of these tools, architects should be able to become better designers, prioritizing the experience of space - the emotional and aesthetic responses, and the sense of homeostatic well-being, of those who will occupy any designed environment. In From Object to Experience, Mallgrave goes further, arguing that it should also be possible to build an effective new cultural ethos for architectural practice. Drawing upon a range of humanistic and biological sources, and emphasizing the far-reaching implications of new neuroscientific discoveries and models, this book brings up-to-date insights and theoretical clarity to a position that was once considered revolutionary but is fast becoming accepted in architecture.

A collection of essays, exhibitions, and projects by noted artists, architects, and theoreticians that addresses the continually shifting values of the body as it both affects and is affected by built form. The book suggests that although discourse about the body is grossly under-represented in the practice and pedagogy of architecture, it is absolutely vital for the reestablishment of a meaningful built culture. Illustrated. No index. No bibliography. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Exploring the ambiguities of how we define the word ‘culture’ in our global society, this book identifies its imprint on architectural ideas. It examines the historical role of the cultural in architectural production and expression, looking at meaning and communication, tracing the formations of cultural identities. Chapters written by international academics in history, theory and philosophy of architecture, examine how different modes of representation throughout history have drawn profound meanings from cultural practices and beliefs. These are as diverse as the designs they inspire and include religious, mythic, poetic, political, and philosophical references.

Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body brings together cutting-edge scholarship examining the myriad ways that architects, urban planners, medical practitioners, and everyday people have applied modern ideas about health and the body to the spaces in which they live, work, and heal. The book’s contributors explore North American and European understandings of the relationship between physical movement, bodily health, technological innovation, medical concepts, natural environments, and architectural settings from the nineteenth century through the heyday of modernist architectural experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s and onward into the 1970s. Not only does the book focus on how professionals have engaged with the architecture of healing and the body, it also explores how urban dwellers have strategized and modified their living environments themselves to create a kind of vernacular modernist architecture of health in their homes, gardens, and backyards. This new work builds upon a growing interdisciplinary field incorporating the urban humanities, geography, architectural history, the history of medicine, and critical visual studies that reflects our current preoccupation with the body and its corresponding therapeutic culture.

The human body has been used as both a model and metaphor in architecture since antiquity. This book explores how it has been an inspiration for the exterior form of architectural colossi through the years. It considers the body as a source of architectural and artistic representation and in doing so explores the results of such practices in colossal sculptures and architectural praxis within a philosophical discourse of space, time and media. Architectural Colossi and the Human Body discusses the role of Platonic and Cartesian philosophy and how philosophers such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and theoreticians such as Frascari and Pallasmaa, have seen, described and analysed the human body and the role of architecture and perception. Drawing upon three key case studies and by employing theoretical ideas of Venturi and others, this book will provide an understanding of the role of anthromorphism and the relation and use of the human body with reference to selected architects and artists.

A society’s culture is a contributing factor to the structure and design of its architecture. As contemporary globalism brings about the evolution of the world, architectural style evolves along with it, which can be observed on an international scale. Cultural Influences on Architecture is a pivotal reference source for the latest research on the impact of culture on architecture through the aspects of planning and production, and highlights the importance of communicative dimension in design. Featuring exhaustive coverage on a variety of relevant perspectives and topics, such as the evolution of construction systems, benefits of nature-based architecture, and fundamentals of social capital, this publication is ideally designed for researchers, scholars, and students seeking current research on the connection between culture and architecture on a global level.

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