ARQU-ARQU 1229A Architecture, Body and Perception
TYPE-A CBU COURSE – ARTS AND HUMANITIES
Throughout history, mankind has had a constant and ancestral relationship between architecture and his body. Humans have built their edifices putting in practice daring social experiments that connect the human body with architecture, relating scale and proportion to anatomy. Such associations were established in an analogical way through metaphors, understanding architecture itself as a “body”.
Architecture has built the world we inhabit by means of the connections between the magical, religious and philosophical perceptions on our bodies and the spaces we inhabit. The link between architecture and the complexity of corporeality has always had a privileged position in the history of western culture. This is especially clear in all the tradition built from Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture, in which the human body is directly compared to the ‘body of the edifice’. With this analogy, a need to explain architecture through the importance of proportion, symmetry and harmony is borne. Nevertheless, it introduces us into a phenomenological problem. The spatial relations have determined, up to good measure, the manner in which people react to others, in their way of speaking and listening, but above all in the perception of the world and the space that surrounds their senses.
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