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Scenarios & Sketches

Architecture Principe

Claude Parent & Paul Virilio - The Oblique Function

Lawrence Halprin - Lovejoy Fountain Plaza

Modified Social Benches - Jeppe Hein (2008)

The modified urban furniture joyfully alters the ubiquitous park bench to become an object of social interaction. "Due to their alterations, the benches end up somewhere between a dysfunctional object and a functional piece of furniture, and therefore demonstrate the contradiction between artwork and functional object."

#precedent #urban furniture #social interaction #post-optimal

Early Works - Trisha Brown (1970/71)

Trisha Brown's provocative, elegant and simple piece Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970) rotates the elemental form of movement - the walk. By re-contextualizing the mundane action of walking from the planar to the vertical, the street to the building, the piece achieves a magical component of defying gravity, architecture and the horizon. The public stage, Lower Manhattan in the early 70s (shortly after the lunar landing and human conquest of gravity), adds to the mise en scene.

The performance Walking on the Wall was designed to be carried out at the Whitney Museum in 1971. The idea of walking perpendicular to gravity is transported into an exhibition setting and adds a layer of sociality and dynamic; multiple walkers circle around the space and perform vis a vis to the visitors.

#precedent #walking #body #performance

A maze - Yoko Ono (1971)

The piece, which is rooted in the spirit of Fluxus, reflects upon life's obstacles and one's surmounting thereof. After winding one's way through the glass maze a wide grey column containing water awaits at the center. The piece is concluded with one's dazed reflection in the water and the slow return.

#precedent #Walk #body #perception

Invisible Labyrinth, Jeppe Hein (2005)

The piece sends visitors through a visually imperceptible maze of 'virtual walls', cast down onto the space by a grid of ceiling-mounted infrared emitters. The interaction is mediated through headphones which vibrate and sound an alarm when the intangible walls are transgressed. The visitor is thus reliant on an additional (6th?) sense, in order to navigate through the maze without violating its barriers. The realm of one's body to the field is sensitized and subtly addressed.

#precedent #installation #Walk #Immaterials

Luce Tempo Luogo - Light Time Place by DGT Architects and Nobuhiro Fushiya.from the Milan Salone 2011.

The interactive installation by DGT Architects alters the perception of body movement through barely noticeable pulsating light emissions. The hazy atmosphere created through water droplets adds to the effect of visual delay.

#precedent #installation #body #movement

Rossi, William A., D.P.M. - “Why Shoes Make ‘Normal’ Gait Impossible - How flaws in footwear affect this complex human function.” Online Article. Podiatry Management (2001). www.podiatrymgt.com

Dr. William Rossi explores the influence that fashion has had and continues to have foot health.

He is a strong advocate of using less shoes, or if possible abandoning them all at once. Gait complexity and natural, evolutionary physiognomy of foot propulsion is denied by these devices, no matter how well they may be engineered. He remarks that soles and tips of the toes hold among the highest amount of nerve endings in our entire body (200,000) and thus constitute highly refined sensory inputs.

The orthopedist Philip Lewin remarks, "The foot is the vital link between the person and the earth, the vital reality of his day-to-day existence." City College of New York anatomists Todd R. Olson and Michael E. Seidel write, "Because the sole is so abundantly supplied with tactile sensory nerve endings, we use our feet to furnish the brain with considerable information about our immediate environment."

#bibliography #gait #shoes #wearable sensing

Braham, William W. “Upright or Flexible? Exercising Posture in Modern Architecture”, Essay from Body and Building. MIT Press (2002). Print.

Braham observes correlations between societal ideals of physical health and an architectural expression thereof. The robust towers of high modernism played the architectural counterpart to the ideal of masculine wide shoulders and a straight posture; a type of clean, white athletic aesthetic.

Shifts in corporal perception over time thus also reflect back on architectural ideals: the early 20th century idealized the body as a fortress of health and hygiene, repelling the constant invasion of germs from the ‘outside’ world. Nowadays the body is understood more holistically, as an adaptive (immune) system, which is in constant, dynamic exchange of particles with the ‘outside’ world. The body is a microcosm within a larger ecology, constantly in motion and thus confronted with perpetual novelty. The channeling of these forces into form is where blob-architecture draws its momentum from. "Truly flexible building forms strives to become more like clothing or cosmetics and its preferred means of adaption would be its furnishings and the finishings of its visible surfaces." (following Deleuze, Guattari: Body without Organs).

#bibliography #body #verticality #posture

Architectural theorist and blogger Leopold Lambert muses upon the weaponizing affect that architecture causes on the body. Here he talks about the steep stairs of Mayan pyramids which represent a transcendent rise when heading up and a violent weapon when stumbling (or being pushed) down. The stair as a trivialized, mundane architectural element is far from innocent and is able to inflict tremendous pain on the clumsy, weak or suspended body. This I experienced once in my childhood, an unlucky fall, and since then suffer a mild form of 'Climacophobia' - a fear of stairs or of climbing or falling down stairs. I will recognize a beautifully crafted staircase for what it is but would prefer a world of ramps and inclinations. Elevators deserve their own contemplation in regard to weaponized architectural paraphernalia.

#bibliography #stairs #body

Arakawa & Gins - Ubiquitous Site

Architecture of Reversible Destiny

The philosophy of the artist-duo Arakawa and Madeleine Gins finds expression in an architecture of reversible destiny, which fundamentally roots the body in a challenging dialogue with space. Through perpetual challenging of the body through intricate layouts of objects and surfaces a mood- and life-enhancing affect on the body can be achieved. Their atypical designs for dwellings and landscapes are intended to constantly amaze and surprise its inhabitants through varying materiality, inclined surfaces and a joyful arrangement of furnishings.

#precedent #bibliography #oblique #body

Rain Room is a hundred square metre field of falling water through which it is possible to walk.

Bodies carve out spheres of dryness through a volume of falling water. Motion tracking and real-time actuation allow the visitor to walk freely and unsolicited by the raindrops. Then again, the environment denies visitors the experience to step into the rain and 'get wet'.

#precedent #installation #motion capture #rain #responsive environment

#precedent #bibliography #obliques #geometry #floors

Excerpt from: "Walking and Mapping - Artists as Cartographers", Karen O'Rourke. MIT Press (2013).

So Near, So Far In most of the projects, the walk itself rearranges the landscape and shows us things that from force of habit we have forgotten how to see. Space travel revealed to us our blue planet. Marina Abramovic and Ulay implicitly claim this reading of their work to describe their project with a pair of quotes spanning two millenia: “The earth is small and blue. I am a small crevice in it.” -Huang Xian, Confessions of the Great Wall, 2nd Century. “From up here, the earth looks small and blue.” - Juri Gagarin, 1961

#precedent #bibliography #dromology #ecology #walk

Richard Long - “A Line Made By Walking”

“A Line Made By Walking” (1971-72) was composed of a series of walks concluded repeatedly by Long throughout Dartmoor, England. The accompaning documentation consisted of a series of audio recordings of riverstreams and natural sounds encountered along the way. The conversation between the artist’s internal voice and the external soundscape lies at the core of the piece.

#land art #soundscape #documentation #walk

Responsive Public Space (RPS) is a performative spatial environment integrating audio-visual composition responsive to the engagement of participants among themselves.&

This installation seeks to engage with the forming and dissolving of social spheres underneath it. It responds to group activity and social dynamic by shifting luminosity and color throughout its 'field', reflecting upon the public how 'successful' its current social dynamic is. It is responsive to the audience, in that it reacts to the sensed input (movement/sociality) with gradients of output (color/luminosity). Communication is mainly one-way.

#precedent #public installation #responsive environment

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